Agreed, however, most games, wounds, even one that put the character close to death, are often fixed within weeks with normal healing, and within days or even minutes with magic.
And if you have access to Creo or Corpus Vis, you can do it in Ars Magica as well, with a ritual spell.
Ars is not most games. Particularly, Ars does not assume that conflict resolution defaults to "I attack with my sword". Part (but not the only) reason for that is that combat has high stakes, and wounds take time (or significant resources) to heal.
Healing being (relatively) difficult in Ars is not a bug, is a feature. Please don't try to "fix" it.
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I appreciate healing being difficult is a logical extension of creating being difficult or expensive (choose the term that resonates best with you).
I appreciate healing being difficult makes people really think about getting in to a fight, which is a feature.
Look at the original post.
It is suggesting nerfing magic healing, by making a healer who wants to deal with injuries and diseases need 2 spells when the core rules was one spell.
That is the only reason I am arguing healing sucks. I have no interest in buffing healing. I think healing, arguably the weakest magic in Ars majica when compared to nearly any other game, does not need nerfing.
What I'm arguing is that the mindset of "healing in Ars is hard, while in other games healing it is easy" is looking at it in the wrong way. Just that.
Translating that to the original post: saying "A&A is wrong because healing in Ars is already hard and in other games it is easy, we shouldn't make healing harder" is a bad argument. Saying "A&A is wrong because healing in Ars is already hard and we shouldn't make it harder" (without comparing with other games) is a proper argument.
To the discussion itself I'd also add the following: no one bats an eye when the Flambeau invents 30 different ways to incinerate a target, but we can't expect a healer to know a handfull of different spells according to the thing he wants to heal?
Notice that with this I'm not necessarily supporting the view of "A&A is right", because the argument of "healing requires too many spells" from which this turn in the discussion spun off is there even if we ignore A&A.
But I'd argue that: if you are measuring healing in Ars against healing on standard sword and sorcery RPGs, I'd be very surprised if you found it to be anything else but weak, boring, and demanding. And I'm not talking just about healing spells, I'm talking about healing on it's entirety. Taking into account all of the healing rules. And also all the ways healing can be spun into a story in Ars (something that is way harder to do in other games).
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A&A might have made life for a healer a bit harder, but it also gave them the oh so missing rego corpus surgery rules, and rules about delivering babies.
In my opinions this allowed Corpus-focused magi more of a variety, as someone could decide to focus on just a subset of those, and be known throughout the Order for his skills.
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