Healing Word vs Cure Wounds 5E – Which is Better?

Healing in 5th edition D&D is a series of contrasts. It’s a thankless job – until it isn’t. It isn’t a role anyone wants to play – until it’s needed. It’s not the way a player character (PC) wants to spend their turn – until doing so makes or breaks a battle.

Since dedicated healing is a role relatively few players want to take on for the length of a campaign, the odds of having multiple healers are very low.

Because of this, every healing spell you prepare as a healer is incredibly important, as your choices can be the difference between life and death for your party while engaging enemies.

As 1st level spells, Healing Word and Cure Wounds directly compete with each other from the start of an adventuring campaign for bards, druids, clerics, and Divine Soul sorcerers, and they will continue to do so as you level through the ability to scale up their healing at higher level spell slots.

When you’re only allowed to know or prepare a fixed number of spells each day, you aren’t always going to be in a position to choose both spells, often forcing you to choose what spells you prepare without complete knowledge of what you need.

So which is truly the better healing spell and why? Let’s have a look at both spells, compare what they bring to the table, and showcase where they bring the most to a battle.

Healing Word and Cure Wounds Comparison

We’ve done deep dives on Healing Word and Cure Wounds that showcase what they’re capable of within the realm of healing spells, but as a quick refresher, here are their full spell descriptions:

Now that the full spell descriptions have been reviewed, let’s compare the benefits each spell brings to a PC who is thinking about preparing them:

Cure Wounds is available to a very wide selection of classes and archetypes – far more than those of Healing Word. So unless you’re looking to learn Healing Word from the Magic Initiate feat, this choice has already been made for paladins, rangers, and warlocks who are choosing between these healing spells.

If you’re a Magic Initiate or an artificer, bard, cleric, druid, or Divine Soul sorcerer, this is where you get to choose which healing spell is right for the job, or in the case of the spellcasting classes, whether taking both is actually the optimal option.

For Magic Initiates and half casters like the artificer, especially those whose spell levels scale slowly or not at all, Healing Word is going to be the superior pick. Its ability to help an ally ay 0 HP regain consciousness from up to 60 feet away doesn’t require higher level spell slots, and both 1d4 and 1d8 (even with 5 added on) are negligible healing at higher levels.

Casting Healing Word as a bonus action will also permit you to cast one of your other cantrips (including those learned from Magic Initiate) as an action within the same turn, allowing you to optimize your action economy from anywhere on most battlefields.

If you’d rather not cast a cantrip after using Healing Word, you can elect to perform any other action, such as attacking, using many magical items, or drinking a potion instead. This flexibility allows you to perform passable or even good healing at very low levels, stabilize dying allies at higher levels, and continue your battle plans as needed at any level.

Healers have a more difficult choice to make when considering these spells. At low level, the average difference between 1d4 and 1d8 is going to be 2 points of healing, assuming all numbers on each die roll equally over many rolls.

While that really isn’t a big shift in the grand scheme of things, it can be a sizable percentage of a hit point total at level 1 or 2. This frequently makes Healing Word the better choice from levels 1-3 for its superior action economy, but Cure Wounds is the better choice if you want that extra bit of healing to help you survive to see higher levels.

As you start to reach higher levels in bard, cleric, druid, or sorcerer, this answer gradually becomes more complicated, becoming dependent on other factors like your available spell list, your class features, your archetype, and your available magic items.

Bard

Between light armor and no access to shields, many bards generally don’t want to be in the thick of any combat situation, even with a high Dexterity score.

Their strengths tend to lie in managing the battlefield a safe distance from enemy combatants or performing skills and diplomacy off the battlefield.

Healing Word is generally going to fit like a glove for this style of gameplay, as it provides the ability to bolster an ally or get them back on their feet from a distance.

Some bards, like those pursing the College of Valor or College of Swords, do perform a more active role in combat. These bards can actually benefit from both Cure Wounds and Healing Word, as the former will do a far superior job of healing themselves or another front line ally at higher spell slots, leaving the latter available for emergencies.

Long term, these combat-oriented bards will benefit more from the d8s offered by Cure Wounds, as Mass Healing Word was added to the bard’s 3rd level spell options in Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything and does a far superior job of filling the same role as Healing Word at higher levels.

Cleric

Clerics are more easily able to wade into melee combat than other spellcasting classes, especially since many domains grant them heavy armor proficiency to pair with a shield. This makes both Healing Word and Cure Wounds quite attractive as 1st level healing spells, particularly at lower levels.

Clerics also have multiple ways to take advantage of the larger hit dice from Cure Wounds at higher levels like the Life Domain, Grave Domain, and the Beacon of Hope spell.

Both of these also benefit Healing Word, but as you gain more levels in a campaign, Mass Healing Word again becomes a better long-term option if you need to heal someone at range in an emergency.

Druid

Druids can make surprisingly good healers. Circle of Dreams, Circle of the Shepherd, and Circle of Stars are able to do an excellent job of supplementing a druid’s healing, with the latter 2 providing additional restoration to healing spells that use spell slots.

Healing Word tends to be a poor choice except at level 1 or 2 for Druids because of their access to the 2nd level spell Healing Spirit.

For the price of concentration, you can heal as a bonus action for 1d6 on your cast of the spell, can move the spirit up to 30 feet as a bonus action, and the spirit will heal anyone that moves into the spirit’s space for up to 1 minute.

Druids also don’t get access to Mass Healing Word, so having a spell that does a reasonable impression over the course of a round as early as 3rd level means that Healing Word has to compete with Cure Wounds right away, a spell that heals a lot more than Healing Word shortly after, and Mass Cure Wounds at 9th level.

TL:DR; Take Cure Wounds as a druid. Healing Spirit does Healing Word’s job better than Healing Word ever could.

Sorcerer

Since Divine Soul sorcerers can draw their spells from the cleric spell list, they enjoy the same wide access to healing spells and can fully take advantage of Beacon of Hope to maximize healing dice, making Cure Wounds a generally better pick in terms of healing.

Unlike clerics, however, sorcerers don’t have access to armor, making touch spells considerably more dangerous in battle.

While Empowered Healing and Metamagic options make a good case for taking on such risk, sometimes you’re just going to be better off healing from the rear guard with Healing Word instead of the front lines with Cure Wounds.

Mass Healing Word vs Mass Cure Wounds in 5E

Healing Word and Cure Wounds each have their place in 5th edition. Healing Word keeps very low level allies up from a distance, or can help someone get back on their feet when they’re down. Cure Wounds offers much more powerful healing, especially if you can get higher values from your d8s.

Both of these spells have an upgraded “mass” version, however, tailored to healing up to 6 creatures (except undead and constructs) simultaneously. There are a few other differences to consider with these upgraded spells, however, so let’s check the spell descriptions and stat sheet to see where these more powerful spells fit in.

At first glance, both Mass Healing Word and Mass Cure Wounds bear some of the same strengths and weaknesses as their predecessors.

Mass Healing Word still casts as a bonus action and requires the ability to see all your targets, and Cure Wounds still casts as an action and requires somatic components. Both also still scale at the rate of 1 extra die per level.

That said, neither of these upgrades enjoys quite the same level of availability to classes, as they are too high a spell level to be learned by feats and appear on fewer spell lists.

This makes some sense in the case of Mass Cure Wounds, as a 5th level spell slot isn’t going to be available to half casters until 17th level, when 3d8 + up to 5 is going to be a drop in the bucket when things go south in a fight.

Mass Healing Word is an incredibly powerful spell to receive at 3rd level, as you get the emergency benefits of Healing Word, but can cover your whole party at once. While it is weird that the druid can’t learn it, it also makes sense that the 5e designers wouldn’t give this spell to other classes that don’t normally learn Healing Word.

What doesn’t make sense is why you receive Mass Healing Word and Mass Cure Wounds at different levels. Mathematically, their dice scale at the same rate, despite being a 3rd and a 5th level spell, so the 2 spells effectively compare in a very similar way to their less powerful counterparts.

So what exactly makes Mass Cure Wounds so much better that healers are barred from it for 4 extra character levels? My guess is that it has to be the range.

Being able to choose a point of origin for a 30 foot radius sphere effectively gives Mass Cure Wounds a reach of up to 90 feet vs the 60 of Mass Healing Word, allowing you to lend aid to allies who are far away on both the ground and in the air.

While this is undoubtedly useful, losing the ability to cast Mass Cure Wounds at lower spell levels feels like a poor tradeoff. The total amount of healing this spell generates is very appreciable, but on a per person basis it needs a little help manipulating the dice to really shine at any level.

This brings me to the next issue with the Mass healing spells – the healing dice you receive. Dropping from 1 die/spell level to 1 die -2/spell level really hurts the healing ability of these high level spells.

Neither is going to sufficiently counter a well placed Fireball or Lightning Bolt, and while you can make the case that Mass Healing Word shouldn’t, as it is tailored toward emergencies, Mass Cure Wounds being unable to give 4d8 or 5d8 + spellcasting ability modifier to your team for base healing is inexcusable.

This is especially frustrating when comparing Mass Cure Wounds to the 6th level Heal spell – ranged healing that just gives out 70 HP, whereas a 6th level Mass Cure Wounds caps out at 37 per person (up to 6). Realistically, you’ll average around 23 per person on the fly, assuming a spellcasting stat of 20, but you could end up as low as 9.

That’s a lot of variance for a higher level spell.

Most parties average 4 people, however, so if you multiply 23 by 4, you get 92 points of total healing. While this is more net healing than Heal, a Fireball that deals 35+ points of damage to your whole party is still putting in more work than your healer is often able to fix with a spell slot that is 2-3 levels higher!

If Mass Cure Wounds multiplied your spellcasting ability modifier by your healing dice to reward getting your casting stat to 20, added an extra die or two to your healing numbers, or had just given you a flat additional bonus to ensure a consistently reasonable amount of healing, it would have been serviceable.

Unfortunately, unless you use Beacon of Hope or a class feature like the Life Domain’s Supreme Healing to maximize it, or a feature like the Circle of the Shepherd’s Unicorn Spirit to bolster it, Mass Cure Wounds just doesn’t always keep up well with sources that deal mass damage to your party, often failing to properly fulfill a key role it was designed for.

Naturally, this makes Mass Healing Word the better designed spell of these two spells, because it fulfills the same role as its base spell (low, but ranged healing that can be fit in around other actions), expands on it, and is available in a lower spell slot. If your character can learn it, I highly recommend doing so.

Despite its shortcomings, Mass Cure Wounds is by far the better healing spell when compared to Mass Healing Word, and can even be pretty good if you set up for it, but I’d argue you shouldn’t have to jump through so many hoops to heal your allies when area of effect damage spells so frequently outpace healing to begin with.

Other DnD Articles You Might Enjoy

• 5E Cure Wounds Spell Guide
• 5E Healing Word Spell Guide
• Is the Artificer Initiate Feat Worth It?
• Is the Healer 5e Feat Worth It?
• Is the Magic Initiate Feat Worth It?

Braden Gardner

Braden is a founder of Assorted Meeples and has been a gamer & writer with a vivid imagination all his life. Don’t believe us? Check out his excitement when meeting Goosebumps author R.L. Stine as a kid! An avid Magic: The Gathering spellslinger for over 15 years, you can always convince him to shuffle up for a game (or three!) of Commander.