Healers have a reduced chance to engrave a given character in the dust correctly, because of the stereotype about doctors having terrible handwriting.

Apples (may) cure illness when eaten when blessed. However, their doctor-repelling power is increased to the point that Healers take damage when eating them or suffer some other negative effects, and hitting a Healer player monster with an apple scares them.

Healers can use a stethoscope on a corpse to usually find out what its cause of death was.

A new take on a Bard role, generally themed around leading a party of other adventurers through the dungeon, with some other additional ideas:

• The bard and healer cannot both be focused around petmongering, so one of them would have to change. Most likely the healer, as the bard’s traditional abilities are only good on pets.
• Instead of the standard little dog or kitten, the bard starts with a “party” of 3-4 player monsters, who are randomly chosen from other roles.
  • This would make the primary strategy focused on having the party do the fighting for you, letting them level up, providing them with weapons and equipment, and not letting them die.
  • Healers and archeologists, and possibly tourists, don’t make very good additions to the party, and so should perhaps be ineligible.
  • Party roles could be randomly chosen from distinct sets of “strong melee fighter” (Bar or Cav or Kni or Val), “ranged combat” (Ran or Rog or Sam or possibly Tou), and “spellcaster/cleric” (possibly Hea or Mon or Pri or Wiz). These could also just be hardcoded.
  • The party will not start with the full starting inventory of their respective roles. They will generally have the same weapons and armor, but will probably not have any of the scrolls, rings, wands they normally start with, and starting spellbooks should be either eliminated or unrandomized. In other words, you shouldn’t be incentivized to slaughter your allies for their stuff.
• Healer strategy should shift away from petmongering - the easiest way to do this is change the protection formula in such a way that the protection racket doesn’t exist; so that the player isn’t incentivized to keep XL as low as possible until they can buy protection.
• Difficult for Healers to find a new niche. (Avoidance of combat is an option, but dtsund’s Class Overhaul Proposal calls for Archeologists to fill that niche). Perhaps something that focuses on pacifying monsters by healing them, but this has issues: you shouldn’t be able to ‘‘tame’’ by healing since that turns Healers back in the direction of acquiring lots of pets, and most monsters start at full HP and don’t need any healing.
• Bards (and probably all players) should be able to equip their pets by #looting them, or a similar mechanism. (This would also apply to mounts.) Intelligent monsters will prefer player-given items above all others and will never willingly replace them for other gear. Possibly make this behavior dependent on options, because some players may want their pets to be pragmatic in their gear choices.
• Player monster pets should perhaps not be able to detect curses.
• Songbooks, + class items which contain a song that the bard can learn.
  • Balancing the songbook generation rate against spellbooks might be tricky, because although bards can still cast spells and other roles can play songs, each is not very likely to have that much use for the other set of books. Hardcoding different probabilities based on whether the character is a bard or not doesn’t seem very clean.
  • Possibly the bard should be able to discover songs by trial and error, although simple brute forcing is definitely not the way to do it. Maybe all spellbooks start identified.
  • The bard could need to practice the song by using the songbook in order to restore “song memory”. Song memory does not work quite like spell memory, it works essentially like direct success rate. There might be some mandatory delay between practices, meaning you can’t take an unlearned song and practice it up to 100% immediately. Or there could be a possible failure of practice, maybe a dexterity penalty (“Dumb move! You strain your fingers.”) to serve to prevent practice-spam. Playing a song would serve to
  • Songbooks do not eventually go blank, and can be used for practice indefinitely.
  • Or to keep it realistic with learning actual songs, you need to have the songbook on hand early on when you want to play it, but as you play it more and gain practice, you can eventually play the song without it anymore.
• The bard should possibly be able to sing some of their songs without requiring an instrument.

See also: Bard implementations.

Healers, who can see monster injury status, should see the injured status of a monster when it is healed from any source. E.g. instead of “The foo looks better” print “The bruised foo looks better.”

Either guarantee that the potion of healing will be smoky for Healers, or guarantee that it will never be smoky. Guaranteeing them to be smoky is basically an open invitation to startscum them, though.

You can use booze potions to clean off your wounds, helping you recover faster. Poison wounds, specifically, though this is debatable because 1) the game doesn’t track wounds you got from poison and 2) alcohol can help treat infections, whereas poison isn’t an infection.

Healers should probably be able to do this more successfully than other roles.

Healers start with a very high Constitution score.

Give Healers at least Basic skill cap in enchantment spells, maybe Skilled.

Healers receive an alignment penalty from using poisoned weapons.

Boost healers’ starting Dexterity; they should be better at delicate surgical procedures than the minimum Dx:7 implies.

Healers heal monsters when meleeing with no wielded weapon or worn gloves, sort of like nurses.

Healers can use an uncursed unicorn horn as if it’s blessed. They could also get the unicorn applied passively every turn as long as it’s wielded (with or without gloves on).

Healers start with higher Intelligence (perhaps at the cost of their high starting Charisma, which they don’t need as much). Priests could stand to have guaranteed a bit more Int and monks a bit more Wisdom, as well.

Healers get a Basic skill cap in divination spells.

Add a mechanic like applying a scalpel to a monster to cure its ills to give healers a way to heal monsters that isn’t tied to magic.

Add herblore (possibly as a non-combat skill). This allows you to brew various potions using herbs and potions of water. Healers are quite good at it, and their quest contains many herbs. Requires actually implementing herbs, which cannot be planted or grown like in ADOM.

Attempting to move healers out of the petmastering role: they now have skilled medical knowledge that enables them to hit monsters in melee with a scalpel or knife to inflict a “bleeding” status effect which will cause the monster to lose HP continuously. Any role is able to do this with a scalpel, but the effect is much more limited than it is for Healers. This means that for a Healer, combat now consists of hitting a monster to make it bleed, then disengaging and keeping away from it in the hope that it dies on its own. The Staff of Aesculapius no longer drains, instead it heals the damage it would have dealt (unless the Cyclops has it, in which case it drains life like normal.)

Additionally, the Staff of Aesculapius no longer has level-draining powers. Instead it has a drain HP attack that heals the wielder.

Some roles get food appraisal as a permanent intrinsic. Caveman at level 6, Tourist at level 10, maybe Healers at level 1 but they already get poison resistance so maybe not.