The akashic healer was designed as a way to improve some of the secondary healing abilities to make them more viable options in the game. This Specialist Class uses akashic magic, because that’s personally one of my favorite subsystems. It’s also a good system for balancing and limiting game options while still giving the player a significant amount of flexibility.
Designing the Akashic Healer
As mentioned above, the purpose of the akashic healer class is to improve the most common secondary healing abilities, specifically those that grant a static amount of daily healing based on class level, such as a paladin’s lay on hands and a monk’s wholeness of body.
For entry requirements, it has Heal 3 ranks as a minimum level gate, but it also requires one or more of the aforementioned healing abilities. This last prerequisite requires Paladin 2, Monk 7, taking the Healing Akasha feat, or some other similar ability. So, actual entry level is pretty varied based on your other build decisions. The earliest entry is going to be something like Paladin 3.
This is not what I would consider a powerful class, but it combines well with a character who already has one or more of these healing abilities who decides that they want to heal with that ability a bit better. Because of the way that the abilities work for this class (and the way essence capacity works), its benefits scale with overall character level fairly decently, giving it some growth scaling even with a limited number of actual class levels.
Because it’s a fairly niche class with limited benefits, I gave it 6 skill points/level and two good saves to make it a bit more attractive. For a class like paladin, akashic healer improves lay on hands while also helping to improve the paladin’s limited skills and giving an extra good save. It may slow down a paladin’s ability to deal damage, but it makes the paladin a more rounded character who is still able to hold his own on the front lines.
Essence
Akashic healer grants 3 essence over 3 class levels. This is pretty good for an veilweaver, as it means they probably aren’t losing essence for multiclassing, though it does delay chakra binds. It’s great for someone using the Healing Akasha feat for entry, as it means that they’ll have extra essence to use in the feat. Essence can also be invested into the Spirit Healing class ability (see below), giving a character some level of decision making on how to invest their essence.
Practiced Healer
Basically, this is +3 class levels to all qualifying class features. A paladin 2/monk 8/akashic healer 3 will have lay on hands as a 5th-level paladin and wholeness of body as an 11th-level monk. It also grants a +6 insight bonus on Heal skill checks.
This is slightly overpowered in that it’s effectively dual progression that applies to any and all classes; however, the fact that it’s only progressing a fairly limited ability to provide healing reins that in to acceptable levels. If you have more than one qualifying ability and want to go about increasing them, this is really good. When you consider that most ways to grab multiple qualifying healing abilities requires several levels of multiclassing, this class mostly just gets you back some of those lost levels.
Spirit Healing
As with most specialist classes, akashic healer grants its “signature ability” at 2nd level. First off, it grants the ability to use a self-only ability (e.g. wholeness of body) to heal others—a simple but useful ability.
Secondly, you can bind essence into it 1/day. This increases the relative ability modifier for your healing ability. For example, a paladin 3/akashic healer 3 with 14 Charisma could invest 2 essence into this ability and heal for 24 points of healing per day [level (3+3) × ability (2+2) = 6 × 4 = 24]. For things like Healing Akasha that don’t use an ability modifier, this increases the non-level number.
This is a nice boost, but it most benefits a character with multiple healing abilities, because it applies to all of them the same way that Practiced Healer does.
Soul Cleansing
The capstone gives the akashic healer flexibility with their healing abilities, allowing you to spend points to remove certain negative conditions and to heal ability damage and drain. Not much to say about this one, as the benefits are fairly straightforward. Better benefits cost more points of healing to cast.