Since health doesn’t passively regenerate for you and your pawns, managing HP becomes crucial in Dragon’s Dogma 2 while exploring. There are several ways to heal, and I wanted to compile all of them in one place for you. Here’s how to heal in Dragon’s Dogma 2.
How to Heal Yourself and Pawns in Dragon’s Dogma 2
You’ll notice that after a fight, the damage you and your pawns take doesn’t regenerate, so you’ll have to heal manually through food, potions, resting, healing magic, and other means. I found the most effective way to heal in Dragon’s Dogma 2 is through healing consumables and Mage pawns.
Healing items can even be transferred to pawns so they can heal in battle as well. That said, let’s list and talk about all available healing methods. Here’s a quick overview of all methods and topics:
- Food and Edible Plants
- Health Potions
- The Mage Pawn
- Camping
- Resting at Inns
- How to Upgrade Health Potions in Dragon’s Dogma 2
- Why Can’t I Heal in Dragon’s Dogma 2?
Food and Edible Plants
The most basic way to heal is to consume plants, fruits, and meat you find while exploring. I recommend looking around the forest and rivers as you explore since you can commonly find Greenwarish plants and catch fish in river ripple pools. Fruit like grapes and apples are also everywhere.
Just make sure to use them before they spoil since there is a passage of time mechanic. You’ll see fruits and meats turn ripe which increases their effectiveness but means that they’ll spoil and turn useless soon if unused.
While eating food and plants is a quick way to heal, I wouldn’t recommend consuming these items by themselves. It’s much better to combine them to make more effective healing items, which is covered in the next point.
Health Potions
If you go to your Items section and press the Combine key on PC or Square on PS5, you’ll enter the crafting menu. There, you can craft healing potions called Salubrious Draughts or Fruit Roborants by combining:
- Greenwarish + Any Fruit = Salubrious Draughts.
- Syrupwroth Leaf + Any Fruit = Salubrious Draughts.
This is why I highly recommend keeping an eye out for plants, fruits, and salvageable materials since they are crucial for crafting various healing items. These are drastically more effective at restoring health than their base ingredients. You can even transfer them to pawns so they can heal as well.
Note: You can also buy healing items like Salubrious Draughts or Fruit Roborants from merchants in town. While the price is steep in the first few hours, later on, you’ll have much more gold, so the price becomes negligible.
The Mage Pawn
I highly recommend making either your main pawn a Mage or hiring side Mage pawns. This is the only class in Dragon’s Dogma 2, besides the advanced Sorcerer, which has access to healing magic. The skill in question is called Anodyne, and it creates an AOE healing dome around the caster. When you see a pawn cast this in combat, rush inside of its AOE to receive a potent health regeneration effect. I can tell you right now that Mage pawns will be one of the most hired, so I’d consider making your main pawn a Mage.
Camping
Outside of consumables and healing magic, you can also camp to restore HP. You’ll find campfires scattered throughout the world which you can approach, interact with, and start a camp. To do so, you’ll need a Camping Kit, which you can:
- Buy in town.
- Find in the world (You’ll find your first one through a Melve side quest where you look for an NPC’s missing brother).
- Get it from another player by completing their pawn’s quest.
Camping Kits come in various shapes and sizes, and they don’t get consumed when you camp. To restore HP when camping, simply approach the tent and rest until morning or nightfall. I’d check whether there are nearby monster camps before camping since they can attack you during the night and destroy your camping kit. This is the only way to lose it besides just selling it. In Vernworth, you can buy sturdier ones. Camping kits also allow you to cook meat for stat upgrades.
Resting at Inns
Lastly, the most straightforward and most costly way to heal is to sleep at an inn in town. I wouldn’t recommend this method as the price of staying at an inn is a steep 1500 to 2000 gold. I prefer resting in a camp or keeping my HP up with a Mage pawn. That said, you’ll eventually have to rest due to the loss gauge, discussed in the next point.
How to Upgrade Health Potions in Dragon’s Dogma 2
The base health potion you can craft with Greenwarish and Syrupwroth Leaf and any fruit or buy from a merchant is called the Salubrious Daught. While it restores a fair amount of HP early game, there are greater healing potions that restore more HP like Roborants made from different materials. Here are some upgraded healing items you can craft:
- Dried Fruit (Any two ripened fruit items) + Greenwarish or Morningtide = Fruit Roborant.
- Dried Fish (Any two aged fish items) + Greenwarish or Morningtide + = Roe Roborant.
- Dried Meat (Any two aged meat items) + Greenwarish or Morningtide = Mincemeat Roborant.
- Roe, Fruit, or Mincemeat Roborant + Cinnamon Bark = Mighty Roborant.
There are also Exquisite or Fine versions of healing items that have the same recipe but are made with higher-quality or aged ingredients. Healing materials usually upgrade to a better quality if they’re aged or ripen over time, but I would check back often since you don’t want them to spoil or rot.
Why Can’t I Heal in Dragon’s Dogma 2?
The loss gauge is a mechanic that temporarily reduces your max health until you rest at a camp or inn and prevents healing past that point. When you take damage, you’ll lose green health, but there will also be a light gray bar showing your max health, which goes down. That’s the loss gauge, and it will remain active even after a battle. Make sure to rest after a session of exploring if you’ve accumulated a lot of loss gauge, as you won’t be able to heal past that point.
That concludes my guide on how to heal in Dragon’s Dogma 2. Check out our Dragon’s Dogma 2 library for more guides, including how to increase inventory size.
