A healer’s kit has 10 uses, weighs 3 lb. and costs 5 gp; therefore, each use weighs 0.3 lb. and costs 5 sp. Normally, it allows a player to do the following:
As an action, you can expend one use of the kit to stabilize a creature that has 0 hit points, without needing to make a Wisdom (Medicine) check.
The Healer feat grants the following benefits (PHB, p. 167):
- When you use a healer’s kit to stabilize a dying creature, that creature also regains 1 hit point.
- As an action, you can spend one use of a healer’s kit to tend to a creature and restore 1d6 + 4 hit points to it, plus additional hit points equal to the creature’s maximum number of Hit Dice. The creature can’t regain hit points from this feat again until it finishes a short or long rest.
As such, this gives the party what is essentially a potion of healing that costs 100 times less than the normal potion of healing. Even with the fact that it can only be used once per rest, this seems rather overpowered.
Is the Healer feat overpowered? Or have I misunderstood the feat?
No, it’s not overpowered
Healing in the game isn’t expensive. In fact, most of the time, it’s entirely free – a long rest will completely restore all your lost hit points, a short rest will usually restore quite a few, and any cleric or druid can cast several healing spells a day for no gold pieces whatsoever. You’ve got the cost analysis backwards – it’s not that healer’s kits are incredibly cheap, it’s that potions of healing are incredibly expensive!
Healing potions provide a reliable means of healing some hit points without requiring any investment of character resources besides money. Anyone can use a healing potion – or feed a healing potion to someone else – without needing to spend a feat to be able to do it, or be a spellcaster that can cast and has prepared the appropriate spells, or have taken the class levels to get some other class feature that provides healing, or have attuned to a magical item that grants them the ability to do it. The tradeoff is that they are relatively expensive, so they’re usually a backup option for when other, more renewable sources of healing aren’t available or can’t get there in time.
A character with the Healer feat has invested a significant resource – you don’t get very many ASIs to spend – to be able to provide a quite limited amount of daily healing to their party. It’s fine that it doesn’t cost very much to take advantage of that ability, given that most character options that allow plentiful healing don’t cost anything at all.