Limitless? No. Nor have I ever argued for limitless restoratives.
What I have, however, argued against is the sole ability to fix death being relegated to a 9th level Earth-only Spell, making it inherently more important than Doom and Earth Storm. There are multiple sources of crowd-control, damage, and healing; there is a -single- fix to Dead.
And Earth Caster players will be the ones who will be expected to make it so that other people can have fun. This design enables that mindset.
Having a production-based life effect is considered game-ruining for some reason. And that’s super disappointing.
I think it's a tension between different ends of a spectrum on expectations. At one end is "All characters should expect to be able to get a Life effect quickly and easily if they die." At the other end is "The Life effect is a rare and powerful thing; characters should not generally expect to get a Life if they pass their Bleed Out count." Andy is closer to the latter end; you're closer to the former.
My
personal opinion is that the extreme overprevalence of per-day Magic Items during 1.2 and 1.3 swung the pendulum too far towards "everyone should expect to get a Life Spell if they reach the Dead state". I think there's a good medium between the two ends of the spectrum, but I do believe that it should be a little farther from the "expectation that everyone can easily get a Life spell every time they reach Dead" that there is in many or most 1.3 games currently. I don't think we should go back to when there was only one Life spell in town each day and if you died after that spell was used you went to res; at the same time, I don't think the game is better when there are more Life spells on a given mod (due to Magic Items) than there is healing spells.
The rules are written pretty clearly to encourage a "hierarchy" of character damage and recovery:
(1) Basic damage puts you to "bleeding out". Healing is fairly cheap and easy - both Alchemists and Earth casters can produce it, and anyone can carry and administer it.
(2) Many effects will "take out" a character, but the majority of those "take outs" just make it easier to put someone into "bleeding out".
(3) There are a few effects (Death in 1.3; Doom and Corrupt in 2.0; Killing Blow / bleeding out in both) that can put someone to Dead, but
far, far fewer than things that put you down to "bleeding out". At the same time, just as it's harder to become Dead than it is Bleeding Out, it's intended to be harder to recover from Dead than Bleeding Out.
If we had to assign numbers, we expect someone to go to Bleeding Out maybe 10x as often as they are expected to go to Dead. In return, we expect it to be at least 10x easier to get someone up from Bleeding Out than it is from Dead.
In the last 5 or so years, I've been in many town fights and/or mods where those proportions are way out of the intended balance. It's not uncommon to have as many Life spells as there are Healing spells in memory in 1.3 - due to Healing not being available at every level for Earth casters, and due to how very very many Life spells are in items right now. That ratio is way out of whack, and has fostered an expectation that Life should be as easy and plentiful as healing. Because of this, fights have turned around and scaling has widely increased the quantities of straight-to-Dead effects (generally Death). This has an unpleasant side effect of making Bleeding Out one of the rarer ways to reach Dead, when it
should be the primary way people reach Dead.
Or, to put it another way, when you have a 1:1 ratio of Healing to Life, you quickly see Plot putting out a 1:1 ratio of Damage to Death effects. In that environment, it makes perfect sense for them to do so.
2.0 attempts to "reset" the ratio between Healing and Life to something closer to the game's original intentions. Healing is cheap and plentiful, from being available at every level in spells to Channeling that's easy for almost
any character to pick up compared to a significant Earth tree. At the same time, straight-to-Death effects have been hugely scaled back in the Monster DB. But we're left with a set of 1.3 expectations that runs counter to these intentions - and the best way to deal with those is to playtest, let Plot teams learn the new scaling guidelines, let the PCs learn how cheap and plentiful Healing is - and how bad Death is - and change those expectations over time.
So, to get back to the original point: In 2.0, you shouldn't
need an "easier" source of Life, because people should be dying more from Bleeding Out than they do from straight-to-Death effects, and it should be much easier to recover from Bleeding Out than it is from Dead. The intent of this (which you may or may not agree with) is to make Earth casters more important and more "revered" (for lack of a better word), instead of being entirely replaceable through a handful of potions and/or magic items like they are now. Flex Casting and the Spell Swap Ritual are both in place to enable Earth casters to memorize things other than Healing without being unable to do so if they find the need to do so. Sorcerous Triage and post-death rituals like Sacrifice, Safe Passage, and Cheat Death are in place to allow characters to not take as severe an effect if they *do* die and there's not a Life around.
I do feel (and again, this is my
personal opinion only) that making the Life effect more plentiful - via potions, Magic Items, or lowering its level - will lead us down the same path that 1.3 has gone to, where they are *too* plentiful for them to be
meaningful. When a common response to "how do I fix this person?" is "Just kill them and Life them" because Life is so prevalant and cheap, something has gone horribly wrong with the entire system.
-Bryan