More powerful heal needed

I agree on that.  Also some love for the rejuve spells too.  I found myself researching into spell levels 4, 5 and 6 and not finding anything.  While I found a spell that can flat out damage something for 30 points! 

IMO you should have healing just as powerful as the damaging or almost par.  But the OP makes a good point here and I agree.

Why can't empires get some sort of heal spell also?

Either an energy drain spell, vampiric enchant (gain int% of damage delivered in HP back), or something along those lines.

This is especially true now that you can only cast one spell per turn... it is yet another useless spell.  You are almost always better off attacking than healing with your turn.

On another note, the natural healing that happens while units are in a city is MUCH better now than it used to be.

A better solution than making many powered up versions would be to merely make Heal an Intelligence-based spell. Healing = Int / 2

Would anyone be interested in the code for the heal spell that Cruxador described?

I described it too! and I would!

Haha, sorry, just the last one that I saw. Ok! So the easiest way to do this is to open the Elemental/data/English/CoreSpells_LIFE_Strategic.xml. Copy the following code and paste it over the Heal Spell (the one at the very top).

  <!-- *************** -->
  <!-- ** L1 - Heal ** -->
  <!-- *************** -->
  <SpellDef InternalName="HealSpell">
    <DisplayName>Heal</DisplayName>
    <UsefulInMP>0</UsefulInMP>
    <Description>Heals target unit by [2 + (Int/2)].</Description>
    <Image>BG_MassHeal.png</Image>
    <IconFG>Heal_Icon.png</IconFG>
    <IconBG>Heal_Icon_BG.png</IconBG>
    <IconColor>174,255,59</IconColor>
    <Range>3</Range>
    <SpellLevel>1</SpellLevel>
    <RequiredStat>UnitStat_Intelligence, 10</RequiredStat>
    <SoundFX>Spell_Heal_01</SoundFX>
   
    <SpellType>Tactical</SpellType>
    <SpellClass>Defensive</SpellClass>
    <SpellTargetType>FriendlyUnit</SpellTargetType>

    <CastTime>1</CastTime>
    <SpellResourceCost>
      <Resource>Mana</Resource>
      <Amount>8</Amount>
    </SpellResourceCost>
   
    <SpellDefEffect>
      <EffectName>Restoration</EffectName>
      <LocalPosition>0,0,0</LocalPosition>
      <EffectScale>.75</EffectScale>
      <EffectDelay>0.0</EffectDelay>
      <SnapToTerrain>1</SnapToTerrain>
    </SpellDefEffect>

   <GameModifier InternalName="HPModifier">
      <ModType>Unit</ModType>
      <Attribute>CurHealth</Attribute>
     
      <Calculate InternalName="ExtraHealFromIntelligence" ValueOwner="CastingUnit">
        <Expression><![CDATA[[UnitStat_Intelligence]/2]]></Expression>
      </Calculate>

      <Calculate InternalName="Value">
        <Expression><![CDATA[[ExtraHealFromIntelligence] + 2]]></Expression>
      </Calculate>

    </GameModifier>

  </SpellDef>

And that should do it! You can use this code to create a mod, too, but there might be an issue with the game modifiers stacking. Anyway, this will heal for [2 + (Int/2)].

In my opinion, so long as the Empires have no form of magical in-battle healing available to them, the Heal spell is too strong early on IF you end up fighting an Empire early enough that you and your enemy are using single soldier units in battles and doing only a few points of damage to one another with each attack - after all, 6 points is about half of the health of a unit early game.

That being said, almost any spell that doesn't scale with intelligence is really only useful at certain stages of the game. As soon as you get out groups with more than ~10 armor, Heal does become a bit of a worthless spell whose only use is to heal up a tank group or champion that has started to wear out. Even then, it can be just as good to send it back to a city for a few turns because it would usually be better to have your army kill whatever you fight quickly rather than waste your mana and your time casting heal spells that cannot keep up with the potential damage output of even relatively early monsters unless you have two or three casters in the army. I also think that a heal spell that restores 0.5*Int (or something similar - perhaps something like 3 + 0.3*Int) would be a better heal spell than what we have.

You could also have a few heal spells that have variable int requirements and which might only become efficient beyond a certain level of intelligence or for healing certain ranges of damage - for instance 3 heals as follows:

1. Heal 1 - 3 + 0.3*Int damage restored for 10 mana, requires 8 Int to cast, healing amounts rounded up to nearest whole number
2. Heal 2 - 1 + 0.5*Int damage restored for 12 mana, requires 14 Int to cast, healing amounts rounded down to nearest whole number
3. Heal 3 - 0 + 0.8*Int damage restored for 15 mana, requires 25 Int to cast, healing amounts rounded down to nearest whole number

All of these heals scale with intelligence, and are useful in varying situations. Heal 2 should be at some spell level above Heal 1 and below Heal 3. Heal 1 would be relatively useful just to provide armies lead by warrior champions with access to healing without much (if any) commitment to increasing int on that champion, whereas Heal 3 would require a fair amount of specialization in magic by the caster before it became available and very useful.

Note that these numbers are random, better/more balanced numbers, or numbers that give more of a trade-off, could be used instead.

On a general point of view, while there should be stronger heal spells, I think it's okay if some of the lower level spells become less useful as time goes by.

There is no reason why every spell should scale, otherwise you just need ot research level 1 spells and be done.

I think healing staffs or some sort of healing item should be makable by using crystals, or via spell (costs 50 mana for a cure light staff)

This way you could have medic troops and stuff.

A while ago I outlined another Healing system because the current one doesn't scale well with the military tree.

Even adding something like a Heal 1 / 2 / 3 would only be a bandaid without fixing the actual problem.

@LightofAbraxas

Thanks for the code. I will run it up and check the overall impact.

I run a pretty basic starting SoV build so the scaling should be apparent as he progresses. I will report back if I remember.

Question: What do I need to do, if I  don't want to replace but add new spell as outlined in the code above?

Next thought, more healy items.  Salted pork is good but gimme some leg of mutton!