Jester is even worse off, relying mostly on bleeds which require time to become competitive with raw damage attacks and having no other defense besides murder.

Vestal has some of the lowest damage in the game and her stun doesn't have any trinkets that can support it barring her CC set.

Vestal and Jester combined can recover from anything that doesn't instantly kill them, but their options for preventative defense are terrible so they happen to be quite vulnerable to dying instantly. And since there's no chance to react, there's nothing Vestal can do to save them the only real way to defend against this is to deny enemies the chance to hit your heroes in such a way preemptively (by removing their actions with a stun or by killing them, or wasting their actions with a guard, or some other preventative defense). You'll find that usually (unless your party is bad) you end up losing heroes to a rapid string of bad luck-several enemies critting or hitting a single hero so that they die before you get a chance to react. A Vestal+Jester backline is great at recovering from pretty much anything, but Vestal and Jester are relatively passive (particularly the former) there's not a whole lot they can do to stop enemies from doing bad things to your party. In contrast Hound master is more versatile in my opinion with an AOE stress heal, comparable camp skills and better team synergy. His CC trinket set is also pretty gimmicky, there's only a few items that buff his stress heal and nothing boosts friendly buffs. But there's not a lot of fights where it's ideal to spam battle ballad, he's squishy as hell, and his own mobility disrupts less-mobile allies. He can do well in a 'dancing' team and his way of building up Finale is unique and fun. He also has the best camp skills overall in my opinion. Jester has great single target stress healing. While his heal is single target and swingy, he has other synergy in backline AOE, set ups for Mark teams and has the speed+damage to help knock out annoying targets. However, taking another hero in her stead isn't a handicap, as many veteran players will take an Occultist in lieu of a Vestal. It cumulatively heals more than divine blessing too so generally I use it most of the time unless only one target is wounded. Divine Comfort is super useful and there's plenty fights you can just spam it the whole time. Judgment is one of the few 'lifesteal' skills in the game, and being able to top off her hp while finishing off an enemy is great turn economy (don't risk this on deaths door though). Vestal is a great healer, no doubt about that.

Darkest dungeon how to use jester