by Webhead123
There is no reason to believe that healing ray applies to everyone. Healing ray allows you to use your heart dice to heal other monsters, not all monsters. So, instead of using your heart to heal yourself, you can give it up to heal a different monster by 1 point.
Yes, I was a bit befuddled because the above comments kept reading to me as suggesting that Healing Ray heals all other monsters at the same time, which it does not. I don't have the card in front of me but I've played with it several times and I recall it effectively saying that you may use the heart results on your dice to heal other monsters (not
all other monsters) instead of yourself, on a one-for-one basis, just like normal heart results.
The card says that they must pay you 2E for each damage that you heal. If they are at max health, you didn't heal a damage, the same way that you don't heal damage if you roll hearts for yourself at max health.
Correct. The rules for the heart dice results says:
"Each [heart] allows a Monster to regain one Lost Life [heart].
A Monster can't go above 10 [heart]."
If a Monster has 10 Life, he does not have any "Lost Life" to be regained and thus cannot apply heart results. So, just as you cannot use heart results on yourself beyond 10 Life, you cannot use Shrink Ray to apply hearts beyond 10 for other monsters.
Whether you can use heal ray as the king is less clear, but in my games I would allow it - the rulebook says you can't use heart dice, but the card says you can. Since this is a rules conflict, I go with the golden rule of "specific beats general", and thus the rule written on the card overrides (unless the rulebook specifically overrides the cards). Since this is Richard Garfield, I'd say it's fairly safe to, in general, obey this principal.
Prior to Garfield's response, I had always interpreted the rules as saying that the Monster in Tokyo cannot use heart results at all (effectively treating them like "blanks"). However, his comments seem to clarify the situation properly, offering that they cannot use hearts to "Heal" their Life Points but they can use them for other effects...like Healing Ray.
Healing Ray is a pretty good card...really only useful for preventing other players from stockpiling energy or helping you stockpile yourself. That said, you're trading energy for longevity of your opponents (giving them Life Points) and yourself (spending hearts on other Monsters instead of your own). That said, I consider it far from "broken" and actually one of those cards that is a good "backup plan" but will not win too many games on its own.
