A summary of healer issues

[Kabooa]

There's a reason why most of the most successful healer designs in games over the years had healing as a secondary function with something else taking the front.

You know, I'm pretty curious. Mind citing some specific examples here? I don't go perusing the landscape these days as much as I used to.

You know why players are opting to buy healing wands?.

Because a wand of Cure Light wounds has 35-50 uses of the spell and costs less than the applicable potion, weighs less than the applicable potion, doesn't consume your spell slots, almost everyone can use it, and it's basically as effective out of combat as a level 20 cleric because of the ways spells in that system cap out.

You don't take Wand of Cure Light Wounds because slotting Cure Light Wounds is boring (Clerics have spontaneous conversion - they always have access to healing spells). You take it because it's extremely efficient healing when out of combat. It's not a question of "Is this fun or not", it's a question of players having access to a resource, and whether the game should be balanced around that. You cannot buy the cleric more spell slots, but you can buy wands, and effectively infinite healing destroys the idea of attrition, which is what makes dungeon crawling in table tops dangerous, and by extension, interesting.