I tend to be very, very wary of using magic in my RP if I'm playing a healer/doctor/medic. So far, I've only played this type of role twice (and both cases are very recent, so I don't have a ton of experience on this front at all).
I had an evil character in TERA who was a Priestess. A large majority of actual healing RP I did with her was magic-inclined, but she never tackled any extreme injuries. Her thing was conning people into paying big-time coin for her mediocre services. In that particular scenario, I felt it was okay to have her healing come from magic a majority of the time. She wasn't a 'dedicated' healer, and when she did use her spells, they would actually be pretty darn weak ICly.
Now, in GW2, I still (somewhat) currently play a Necromancer who is a doctor. This character has a very strict idea about how she feels magic should be used, and that's sparingly. She primarily uses blood magic to heal others, which is a great sacrifice on her part. I decided to treat this with an "eye for an eye" philosophy. If your character was stabbed in the leg and needed it healed right now, my character could use her blood magic to completely remove the stab wound -- at the price of transferring the wound to herself. This is inconvenient and obviously painful, so about 80% of her work consists of the use of organic, home-made medicines/salves. For poisons, I ask the afflicted player how they want it handled. My character will attempt to create an antidote and the results from that point onward are up to them (or me, should that be what they desire, in which case I will roll on it).
The latter character is a lot of fun to RP (not just because of how she handles her magic, but mainly because of her personality paired with a stalwart aversion to heavy reliance upon magic), and I think that is the approach I want to continue to use while RPing healers in the future. I will use naturally-made medicine and tend to injuries in the way anyone would in an old-world setting where magic is absent, but save magic for extreme emergencies. Depending on how extreme the injury is, I will compensate by having my character hurt/exerted pretty significantly in the process. I'm also partial to the healing in particular not being capable of 'insta-cure'. The end result will usually be the wound barely closing and leaving a scar, light/temporary alleviation of pain, slightly speeding up the rate at which a bone fracture repairs itself, etc.
I do all of this while keeping an open dialogue with the player of the character being treated, doing my best to keep the experience as interesting for them as possible and catering to their interests/preferences.
I had an evil character in TERA who was a Priestess. A large majority of actual healing RP I did with her was magic-inclined, but she never tackled any extreme injuries. Her thing was conning people into paying big-time coin for her mediocre services. In that particular scenario, I felt it was okay to have her healing come from magic a majority of the time. She wasn't a 'dedicated' healer, and when she did use her spells, they would actually be pretty darn weak ICly.
Now, in GW2, I still (somewhat) currently play a Necromancer who is a doctor. This character has a very strict idea about how she feels magic should be used, and that's sparingly. She primarily uses blood magic to heal others, which is a great sacrifice on her part. I decided to treat this with an "eye for an eye" philosophy. If your character was stabbed in the leg and needed it healed right now, my character could use her blood magic to completely remove the stab wound -- at the price of transferring the wound to herself. This is inconvenient and obviously painful, so about 80% of her work consists of the use of organic, home-made medicines/salves. For poisons, I ask the afflicted player how they want it handled. My character will attempt to create an antidote and the results from that point onward are up to them (or me, should that be what they desire, in which case I will roll on it).
The latter character is a lot of fun to RP (not just because of how she handles her magic, but mainly because of her personality paired with a stalwart aversion to heavy reliance upon magic), and I think that is the approach I want to continue to use while RPing healers in the future. I will use naturally-made medicine and tend to injuries in the way anyone would in an old-world setting where magic is absent, but save magic for extreme emergencies. Depending on how extreme the injury is, I will compensate by having my character hurt/exerted pretty significantly in the process. I'm also partial to the healing in particular not being capable of 'insta-cure'. The end result will usually be the wound barely closing and leaving a scar, light/temporary alleviation of pain, slightly speeding up the rate at which a bone fracture repairs itself, etc.
I do all of this while keeping an open dialogue with the player of the character being treated, doing my best to keep the experience as interesting for them as possible and catering to their interests/preferences.
