How to heal heroes after battle?

[rolypoly]

Is there no way to heal? Like I know I can eat food for +2 health, but that's hardly anything, I can't heal a hero with just that. Plus if I don't have food they will then starve when the food event comes. And there was this hero I had that you could give +1 health, but it was only in battle.

[Weaselly]

From what I know, you can't other than food or camping. Of course, you should learn to heal in battle as best as you can. Vestals are excellent here, although a lot of classes do have healing abilities as well, either for themselves or others.

[Barry Bee Benson]

One way to heal after battle is with the flagellant's healing ability that restores health over time. These heals do not disappear after the battle is finished, though it would be more effective to just heal in battle with the vestal instead.

[Skinny Pete]

Each character can eat as much as 4 food to heal after each battle. Actually maxing this will run you out of food and starve you. To stretch this, use a skill like ARB's Battlefield Bandage at the end of the fight, which buffs healing received. Or use a trinket like the Recovery Charm (although you probably have better trinkets to use), and move it from one character to another before using food to heal.

And there's also camping but you should mostly be using it for stress relief and to add buffs. Still, it's available in an emergency.

In general, you should be reserving the last round or two of the fight for recovery. Obviously, sometimes, you take a nice fat crit right before you're done. Use stuns to avoid this.

[Just Hitting My Stride]

You can also use some curios which could heal your characters.

[Barry Bee Benson]

Originally posted by Just Hitting My Stride:

You can also use some curios which could heal your characters.

exactly this. Curios in the form of shrines can do stuff like that, depending on how you interact with it.

[rolypoly]

It's not always random what you get from curios? Mostly I just cursed or poisoned or it was trapped or lowers my sanity. I skip most of them ...

[Dr. Uncredible]

Originally posted by Lumpty Dumpty:

It's not always random what you get from curios? Mostly I just cursed or poisoned or it was trapped or lowers my sanity. I skip most of them ...

Ah, thing is, you can use items on curios to get one, predictable effect, for example: *Using Holy water on religious symbols will give you a buff or de-stress you (different effects for different symbols), a torch on the alchemist table will always give you Max Torchlight, medicinal herbs on almost any kind of meat or food will give food and/or a bit of loot and so on.
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If you´re uncertain, avoid curios unless your team is doing very well, most of them are quite random and have a high chance of giving you a bad effect if used without an item.

[Skinny Pete]

Holy/Pristine Fountains, Altar of Light and the Suit of Armor are always good with or without Holy Water (but the first three better with). Bone Altar and Ancient Coffin and Ship's Figurehead are also always good.

Every other normal curio outside the Farmstead has at least a chance of a negative result. In the Farmstead, every curio is positive.

[RopeDrink]

Healing can be done by stalling combat and using a healer to top people up before a fight ends.

You can also eat food for 2 points each (which is also effected by quirks or +healing buffs, like 'bandage' from an ARB/MUS hero).

You can heal by camping. If you have food to spare, eating the maximum food at camp will provide both health and stress-healing to the party. There are also various camping skills to heal party members. All heroes have access to a default bandage skill (except Flagellant), but others (like ARB/MUS) have camping skills which heal for far more.

In the grand scheme of things, the best source of healing is to take as little damage as possible (and to top-up any damage taken whenever possible, usually via a combat healer). As you get more experience with the game and/or play a certain way, it's very easy to end all fights with full health and low (or no) stress intake.

Until you get that experience, be sure to buy all the food you can for missions. Using food to heal between battles is a perfectly fine strategy so long as you have a general idea of how much food is needed for hunger checks. All dungeons (based on their size) start with a set amount of food-checks - and there's no guarantee you'll walk into ALL of them unless the dungeon only has one path from A to B. The only way this can go wrong is via backtracking (which can randomly spawn an extra hunger tile in that corridor).

Lastly, certain curios can also provide healing, stress-healing or additional food. You just have to learn which curios do what, and what items provide those bonuses. The vast majority of curios require the use of an item to bring out their positive effects, but not all of them. If you decide not to research the curios, pay attention to your items -- whenever an item has been successfully used in a curio, there will be an icon on those items whenever you use that curio again to remind you of what the item does.

[Gargamel]

I don't think the game is designed in a way that the designers want you to save people. You level the stagecoach, so you get higher level characters, and as soon as a character is weak, has bad quirks, or is problematic in general, send them packing and get fresh recruits.

Now, late game when you have plenty of coin to toss around, maybe saving characters is a good idea (i'm not that far yet), but at least until you get max level recruits via the stage coach, screw everyone and dismiss them.

Saving everyone seems way too expensive. Get out of the mindset that this is a Final Fantasy style game where you stick with a party till the end, and become attached to them. It's a brutal unforgiving world, and you yourself, must be brutal and unforgiving.

[Team Orchid]

Originally posted by Gargamel:

I don't think the game is designed in a way that the designers want you to save people. You level the stagecoach, so you get higher level characters, and as soon as a character is weak, has bad quirks, or is problematic in general, send them packing and get fresh recruits.

Personally I like to ensure that there's a replacement waiting before throwing out a hero, hell some classes I'd prefer 3 of before axing a problem child.

Sure if there's a Hellion in the stagecoach not too far behind the one I have and she's packing something like Musical while the other's loaded on stress and has Curious I'm willing to make the trade, but if there's no Hellion at all in there I'm willing to endure a hit to the wallet to patch up the one I have.