Friar Flavious Character Spotlight
“Assume the position!”
Commonwealth, as many of us know, is generally the Faction of bluntness in a fight.
Opponent hitting you? Be tougher. Opponent tough? Hit harder. As for healing? Well, if you ask Friar Flavious, one of the Commonwealth’s first healers, he'd say to try hitting them more. An atypical response for a healer, to be sure, but very typical for a Commonwealth character!
Healing-ish
Since he's a healer, he naturally has the ubiquitous 'Healing' ability: X+1 Wds restored with any blue as usual. However, this is complemented by a below-average arcane stat of three, not exactly reliable from someone you'd expect to keep you alive. So does he have another arcane ability to help with this? No, but he does have a boatload of passive abilities to help him in combat, as most Commonwealth characters do!
Wait, why are we talking about combat and melee again? “I thought you said this guy is a healer,” I hear you cry! To which I'd say, this is a web article; I can't hear you. But to get back on topic, I'd say that is because he likes to do his healing in the most Commonwealth way possible. By making melee attacks and using his ability, 'Rub It Better'.
He’ll ‘Rub It Better’
As for his capabilities in melee, the Friar has a great melee stat of 4, 2" of range, and both deals bonus damage and reduces damage suffered on impact. The damage reduction is also particularly good at a whopping -2. Coupled with 9 total wounds, Flavious can take a substantial amount of punishment before he finally goes down. This isn't even accounting for his Signature, which has the end step effect of healing a wound. With a 3x crit, this can be 3 wounds healed, then with 'Rub It Better' a potential 4 wounds; that's nearly half his health!
This, of course, is just one use for 'Rub It Better' using it as if it were 'Spiteful'. Unlike 'Spiteful' though, instead of just restoring wounds to the user, the generous Friar can also restore wounds to his fellow Humans and Clerics. This is what makes Flavious so unique: being able to heal friendly Humans and Clerics who are also stuck in the thick of combat alongside him. The main stipulation here is that he must cause wounds in order to heal his friends, something which isn't too difficult for a Commonwealth fighter such as himself.
“The Friar is on his way? I’ll put the sheets down and fetch that bottle of high-proof green stuff.”
As this requires dealing some wounds, anything that will help the Friar in this endeavour is incredibly useful. Therefore, a bonus to melee stat from a character like Gertrude can be a Godsend for the Friar, allowing him to more reliably land a wounding strike on enemies and heal his friends.
Something even better than this is additional energy. As the heal is only limited to 1 wound, it means with his 3 energy, only 3 wounds can potentially be restored. Now if Agatha were to offer him a drink and chuck him a couple more points of energy, that could be potentially 5 attacks and 5 wounds restored!
‘Divine Intervention’
And there's one last trick the Friar has up his sleeve (what sleeves he has, anyway!). Not exactly healing, but more damage prevention in the form of 'Divine Intervention'. So long as Flavious is the target or within 4" of someone using an Arcane ability, say someone using a crossbow to fire at one of his friends, he can reveal 2 catastrophes from his resist hand. If he does, then not only does the attack stop and automatically fail, it also suffers the Catastrophe effects. Not exactly healing, but an act of Gary* causing an enemy crossbow to break and saving the Friar’s troupe from its damage has to count as some sort of backwards healing, right?!
*For those new to Moonstone, Gary is the name of the god Flavious and other Sons of the Sun worship
