I have played a lot of Fifth Edition. An unhealthy amount, if I'm being honest. I've played and run games excessively both before and after Xanathar's, and I've seen games with excessive healing spirit conga-lining and without it. So I do understand why people didn't like healing spirit. With that said, in my opinion the nerf of healing spirit was a wild overcorrection. A "oh no, I'm drifting into the wrong lane, I'm going to jerk the steering wheel so hard I fly off a cliff" level overcorrection. I also believe a lot of the hate of healing spirit was people hopping on a bandwagon rather than actually having the spell adversely impact their game. Not all, mind, but a lot. Sometimes the community gets an idea in mind like "rangers suck" or "healing spirit is broken" and these ideas just stick, regardless of their truth or falsity.

First, I'm going to give my best steel man of the position to demonstrate I understand why people disliked healing spirit. Then I am going to explain my problems with this commonly-held position, why I think healing spirit as it was did not "break" the game, and why I think nerfing it into the ground has had an adverse impact on the game. Including, might I add, in ways that harm the very style of play that those who argue against healing spirit hold up as ideal.

Anti-Healing Spirit Steel Man: D&D is a game built upon attrition. You are supposed to fight 6-8 encounters in an adventuring day, and while none of the encounters on its own should be dangerous, the encounters should slowly wear down the resources of the party such that by the end, if they used resources unwisely, the party should regret that decision and feel worn, battered, and naughty word. Healing spirit removes this element from the intended style of play entirely. Rather than restoring health inefficiently and at great cost in spell slots (or just pushing forward while missing hp), healing spirit allows a party to fully reset hit points at the cost of a single low level slot.

Healing spirit is wildly out of sync with the rest of the healing options in the game and ensures the party will never suffer attrition due to their health bars being lowered. Even if everyone in the party loses half their health, boom, healing spirit lifts all the bars like it's World of Warcraft. Compare healing spirit to prayer of healing, which is a spell solely used for healing out of combat. It heals like ten times more, at least! Clearly healing spirit is a broken, unbalanced mess if it is so dramatically outperforming the dedicated 'out of combat' healing option. That's not to mention how badly it outperforms cure wounds, healing word, etcetera, etcetera. How could anyone not see it's broken?

My Response: Okay, that's my best effort putting forth a good approximation of the general arguments against healing spirit. If you think I got that wrong, please feel free to explain what I missed below. I'll try to break my disagreements with this general sentiment into a few key points:

1. Healing spirit did not harm the attrition of the game, it just changed it.

At level 3, when a druid first gets healing spirit (and 5 for a ranger), a level 2 slot is not a trivial expense. If your party gets messed up in a fight and you use healing spirit to fully heal everyone, that second level slot is something you will miss having. If you can, it's wiser to use hit dice as a resource before a spell slot. A short rest returns hit points and other important features. Further, most of the healing is wasted by over healing. Let's assume the party is a bit higher, level 9. At this point, sure, a level 2 slot doesn't mean a whole lot. You can use healing spirit to top everyone up and skip a short rest at a low cost. But is that a problem, at this level? By level 9 you should have enough gold to buy piles of healing potions. If you had access to healing spirit, we can also assume you have a druid or ranger, who can use yesterdays spell slots to provide goodberries to the entire party for 70hp at virtually no cost. How much damage is the party realistically taking in?

I argue that the true attrition in D&D is not hit points, it's the other resources. Spells, action surge, and other rest abilities are what will stop a party from moving forward. Those are the resources they should be careful with. Nothing about healing spirit changes the fact that in a long dungeon delve, if the wizard has used every spell slot, you are going to have a harder time at the bottom. Healing spirit just means that the wizard will start the fight with full health before doing nothing but throwing cantrips.

Also, I can't speak for everyone, but for myself: I almost never see 6-8 encounters a day. That just does not seem to me to be the norm for D&D these days.

2. Comparing healing spirit to prayer of healing is silly.

Prayer of healing is a horrible spell. It was horrible before healing spirit arrived to do the job it was supposed to do correctly, continued to be when healing spirit arrived, and still is now that healing spirit has been shanked. I won't claim I've never seen prayer of healing used, but it is extremely rare. There is almost always a better option. It's a ten minute cast, aside from the low healing it does, so it's competing pretty directly with short rests, which are just better, and does not perform its role well enough to waste a spell slot. Optimizers do not prepare this spell, and for good reason. Comparing healing spirit to prayer of healing is a bit like comparing a good damage spell (fireball) to something horrible (circle of death) and arguing that because circle of death does so badly, fireball needs to be dragged down to its level.

3. Healing spirit is not "broken."

It was over-tuned, yes, but not "broken." On my view for something to be "broken," it needs to trivialize difficult encounters in different contexts regularly. For example, summoning pixies and turning everyone into a t-rex is something I would classify as "broken."
If you are a level 5 party facing off against a group of ornery giants, healing spirit is not going to save you. It will ensure you have full health going into the fight, and then you'll get turned into jam and jarred for later consumption by the giants. Is the spike growth spell broken because in this same encounter, it can slow the giants down enough for you to escape, and potentially even let you kite the giants around and poke them with arrows while they shred their feet on your brambles? I would contend that it is not, it simply performs its function well. Spells have niches. Healing spirit was a very strong out of combat recovering option, and I actually agree it should have been scaled down a bit. But "a bit too strong" does not mean that the spell needed to be disemboweled.

4. Healing spirit helped prevent frustrating player retreats.

Let's assume the players are in The Temple of Nasty Things, delving away into the dungeon, and they don't have a ticking clock*. The players don't have healing spirit, or goodberries, or healing potions, or someone with aura of vitality, or any other way to recover lost hit points effectively. They get a third of the way through and wastefully spam cure wounds to top up their hp. Then they realize they're kind of spent on spell slots and decide to turn right around, leave The Temple of Nasty Things, put up a Leomund's Tiny Hut and get a nice, long nap.

I don't find that particularly satisfying as a player or as a dungeon master. You can discourage this behavior, give the players emotional stakes in the dungeon, but sometimes they are going to get tapped on resources and bail. From experience, I saw a lot of this before healing spirit was put into the game, and less of it afterwards. Healing spirit allows the party to spend a resource to keep the adventure flowing. It makes the ranger feel useful. It stops me from trying to think of things in the forest that can break into Leomund's Hut. It does this all while not actually helping the players all that much during combat itself.

*You can't always have a princess in the dungeon slowly being lowered into lava. Realistically, sometimes the players are going to have time.

5. Opportunity costs and book changes. Was this really necessary?

The designers goofed a bit and put in a spell that was more effective than they intended. It wasn't broken, but it was stronger than they thought when it was printed and caused a hostile (and, I argue, irrational) community reaction... so as an "errata" they go back and completely change the nature of the spell. There are now two versions of the spell. Errata is meant to be for clarifying wording and intent, not for nerfing spells. This is not an MMO where the nerf comes in and everyone gets it, some people who don't keep up with errata are going to walk into a session and find that one of the spells in the book they paid for has been changed. It isn't that the wording was unclear and they fixed it to make it clear, they dramatically changed the function of a spell due to community sentiment.

Now I'm not saying they shouldn't give people what they want, but one must consider that this does cause older books to have a spell that is no longer usable. Is this sort of thing something they should do? And if so, was healing spirit really the most broken spell in the game? Should they go in and do a balance patch and fix all of the things that are a bit out of whack? I'm of the opinion they should leave hard reworks like that to optional rules or a new edition. I am, for example, pleased they gave beast master rangers a pet fix. They did that without having to render previously printed, already purchased books out of date.

Conclusion

Look, I know healing spirit was a bit overtuned. I do. But considering that the base game has greatberry (life cleric+goodberry), aura of vitality, cheap healing potions, hit dice, and more, it wasn't so out of whack that it justified coming at the spell with a cleaver. I could understand them making a hard change that outright adjusts a printed rule/spell for something like a simulacrum chain, something truly game-breaking, but a more effective out of combat heal? One that is almost always going to do more than you really needed, anyway? I do not believe that it was justified, and it certainly not "errata," which is an error in print.

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