I always wondered how fun a healer class would be if it was less active healing players and more about pulling the wounded to safety. The skills that effected players would be more limited and would require healing to take place away from the action. Healers could still take part in the middle of battle, but they would have skills that would protect them, the wounded, and other skills to help navigate battles.
Hear hear.
I like the idea of dragging characters to safety and healing them out of the melee of battle.
Add in:
1. Characters take damage during fights and slowly lose effectiveness (instead of being perfectly effective unti ldeath). When they've taken more damage than they're willing to tolerate, they get out of melee and get a healer to patch them up. Or they get dragged out if they've overstayed their welcome.
2. Healing takes time commensurate with the severity and complexity of the injuries.
3. Healing ideally takes simple player skill to perform. Shattered limbs require putting all the bits of bone back into alignment before tapping it with magic wand or the Heal-o-Ray or whatever.
With that, a healer has some judgment calls to make. Fix everything, or just the essentials? What does this character absolutely need working in order to be effective? How long will it take me to fix this problem vs that problem? Do I have time to fix stuff where I am? And so on.
As for medics during battle, I think they should just stay out of it.
If combat has any complexity to it, they can work as an extra pair of eyes to keep track of the dynamics of battle. "Reinforcements coming from the south!" "Sniper in the trees!" Heck, they've got to watch the health of the combatants because they may not appreciate the tradeoffs of getting healed - or notice that they've been injured. "You dummy, your shield arm's shattered. I need to fix that before you bleed to death of internal injuries."
Yes, I know that combatants should be told of the severity of their own injuries. But if the healer class has the job of watching injuries, then the notification mechanism for combatants should be weak. That leaves fighters wondering how long they've been fighting with a deep cut on their sword arm. They truly depend on others to keep an eye on their health. A healer's senses would be appropriately enhanced.
My idea for healing is to cut its power down drastically. Originally I thought "Get rid of it entirely" but the idea of a Support class is fun.
Characters have "Wounds"
0 (Health) - Fully ready for action. 1 (Hurt) - Nicked, still healthy and ready for action. 2 (Wounded) - Hurt. Player should start to be careful, but still can fight. 3 (Severely Wounded) - About to fall down, needs to think of escape. 4 (Down) - Unable to move or act, but can be rescued. 5 (Dead) - Dead. Gone. No longer a part of the battle.
A character has a total of Hit Points * 4. Hit Points = 100, then they have 100 for Healthy, 100 for Hurt, etc.
The Support roles can different abilities which can heal their allies, within that wound rank. So a healer can bring a 1 HP (0: Healthy) player back to 100% HP (0: Healthy) max health. They have an actual total of 500 HP before death, and 400 HP before incapacitated.
Once a Player is wounded, they cannot be healed of that wound easily, rarely in combat, and certainly not quickly. So a Player who has lost 200 HP total would have been wounded twice, and would be at 100HP (2: Wounded). A player cannot heal them past 100 HP (2: Wounded). So their remaining HP until DOWN is 200, and if they lose more than 300HP they will die.
Once a player is "Down" they can be healed to 1 HP (Severely Wounded) which means they can walk again and act, but cannot be healed out of 1 HP. This is like 3.99 Wound Rank, where the player is technically Down, and ANY hit will bring them down, BUT they can move as if they're just Severely Wounded.
This "locks" a player into 25% of their health. Once a player loses 25% of their health, they cannot be healed of that 25%. Once they lose all of their health, they can suffer 25% more until death.
The role of the Tank is to protect players once they're wounded, get Severely Wounded players to safety, and to rescue Down players and carry them to a healer or safe point.
Alternatively, players begin to suffer debuggs once Wounded and Severely Wounded. The role of Support is to cancel these Debuffs. So a Severely Wounded player attacks slower, damages less, and moves with a limp. The Support role can heal those debuffs making the player attack, damage, and move as if Healthy, even if they're still Severely Wounded.
Wow oh wow. You on something or something? I was lost barely into the second paragragh. And if you think all healers are broken then I am sorry that you have never found anyone that could heal properly by taking people's names out of the raid tab or target them and so on. That is really too bad but no not all heaers are broken hate to tell you.
Wow oh wow. You on something or something? I was lost barely into the second paragragh. And if you think all healers are broken then I am sorry that you have never found anyone that could heal properly by taking people's names out of the raid tab or target them and so on. That is really too bad but no not all heaers are broken hate to tell you.
Not saying all healers are broken. I personally love healers and we've seen some pretty cool and inventive healers in games.
I however do think that healers could use some serious improvement.
Take the VG Blood Mage for example. A lot of people, me included, think that it's a really good example of a much more interesting and engaging healer class. Yet if we take at healers in MMOs in general it's quite rare to see classes like that. I think that there are simply too many healer classes out there who's optimal rotation is still basically spamming "Greater Heal" over and over again. Not all of them are like that, and some good players can even turn classes like that into something more. But there's a reason terms like healbotting are still often used while I've yet to hear about Tankbots and DPSbots.
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More complicated isnt automatically better. Its easy to make a character with tons of abilities that only work on special circumstances - and nobody ever uses those abilities, because in the heat of battle, you simply dont have the time to think that much.
Lets see the initial list was:
- direct heal
- heal over time
- group heal
- damage shield
It misses these things I've already seen in existing games:
- percentage heals (heals that restore a percentage of health, not a specific number of hitpoints), for example in Lineage 2 and Blood Mage/Vanguard
- vampire drain (buff on players that heals them from their own damage), for example Shillien Elder in Lineage 2
- reactive heal (heal that goes off if player gets hit), from Shaman in Vanguard
- healing guard (heal that goes off if player gets below a certain health barrier), from Dragon Age
- healing aura (healing pulse for near allies), from Dragon Age
- redirect heal (spell that deals damage and redirects the damage dealt to ally for healing; this needs an offensive and defensive target as seen in Vanguard: Saga of Heroes; other games will have a hard time implementing this)
- damage ward (part of the damage dealt is instead dealt on the healer, from Blood Mage in Vanguard)
- damage reflect (part of the damage dealt is reflected on the attacker, seen in Oblivion)
- conditional healing (such as the heal from Guild Wars that gets better if the player health is low)
- healing crits (a really stupid idea added in the late Vanguard, when any serious game designer probably already left the dev team - only available in the endgame and completely pointless, as its very rare and it will be an overheal most of the time)
Now lets look at the suggestions:
- Heal that can only be used on players that got a crit. Now the problem with this is, if players get crits in the game at all, either healing is super easy (players got tons of hitpoints) or we'll see lots of instant deaths (say three mobs hit the tank, each successful hit takes 20% of the tank health. The tank got 66% evasion so he only gets 20% health loss every round on average, no problem for the healer. But in one moment, all three mobs attack successfully and crit. Instant death - from full health. Obviously, to avoid this problem, players would need a much larger hitpoint pool to still give healers a chance to keep up) . In neither case anyone will use a special skill for healing crits. Its a typical spell thats overcomplicated.
- A heal that only works well on stunned players. Now thats a typical "wtf who needs that crap" ability. It only works well under very specific and rare circumstances - unless your game has players stunned all the time, the average player will simply have forgotten about this ability when an ally actually gets stunned. As with the previous spell, I am under the impression we talk about a typical Guild Wars ability.
- Heals getting better if a counter raises, and the counter being useable for free heals, that has already been done on the Blood Mage and the Disciple in Vanguard.
- A combined buff and heal with sideeffects on the healer sounds like an interesting concept. Of course, the moment you have to move your healer around, which is anything but rare - that spell is completely useless.
- Healing pet is nothing really special, I think Lineage 2 had it already (the Elven tank got such a summon), and SW plus why would that make healers more interesting to play ?
- A combined heal and debuff on close enemies of the target is again an interesting concept for an emergency ability, albeit I like the Vanguard Shaman emergency heal better - instant heal with a short duration damage shield that took away a percentage of all damage on the target.
- A heal that also stuns the next attacker on the target sounds good.
- As said, a healing guard that goes off if a player goes below a certain health percentage has already been seen. However, as suggested, the thing would be not very useful and probably be forgotten. The version of Dragon Age was pretty cheap, which made it useful.
- Delayed healing spells are never a good idea. Unless the players get outrageous hitpoint reserves and healing is a walk in the park anyway, healers wont gamble with the virtual life of the players like that.
- I cant think of any reason to have such a phantom heal - unless you plan to kill the target without any other player noticing what you did, because when the phantom hitpoints get away, it will look like the target had been hit. It would be OK if this phantom heal would actually raise the hitpoint maximum of the target by 75% as well, so the phantom heal would create some temporary hitpoint reserves for a player who is currently under massive attack.
- When exactly would one want a heal that combines with a double damage curse ? Again an ability thats too complicated.
- Melee heals, healing rage, what now ?!? Thats a class of its own, and not a general healer.
- Now isnt that the kind of spell every healer would want to have ? As said, heals that change with health status of the target are already known from Guild Wars.
- What this with HoTs that heal at the end of the spell ? I can see very little usefulness in that spell.
- I think that having to turn to the healing target wont make the game more interesting. Its impossible to use on the tank, and it means the healer would have to stand right behind the tank.
- Heals on mobs are insanely much stronger than heals on players, even worse for raid bosses - so such a link would heal a tank from near death to full three times over all the time.
- Sounds more like an ability for tanks really. Healers do NOT want to be hit.
- A "I bet you die in the next 10 sec" mana gaining ability ? That sounds like something people would try to use.
- Desparation heal. Hmm. If I'm desparate, I am probably already low on mana and dont want to burn it all in an instant.
- Perfection heal sounds stupid to me. Either the situation is easy, then I can just use normal heals. Or its dangerous, then I do NOT want a heal that (a) takes ages to cast (b) will hurt me if I overheal.
- Err, a healer killing itself ? Why is that a good idea ?
- Hmm yeah ok damage shield with root of opponents afterwards sounds nice.
- Again, crits on players are a bad idea.
- Why would any sane healer waste a large chunk of their mana to deal damage ?
- Hmm heal followed up with damage on everyone around them if they arent at full health. Sounds interesting if its only on a cooldown and not more expensive manawise than the standard heal. Otherwise no, I'm a healer, not a damage dealer.
I think we're coming from diffirent backgrounds here.
Personally I'm thinking from a more PvP orientated background.
In PvP players get frequently critically hit. And, in semi-balanced games, it doesn't lead to one-shots. A crit simply does 150% damage. A low damage ability will still deal lowish damage on a crit. Critical hits on players are present in basically every single game. Many games even have special stats to reduce the damage of critical hits and the chance fo being critically hit.
In PvP sometimes, during spikes, players take more damage then you can heal. As such having access to a fast casting very strong heal that has horrible mana efficiency is a great tool. In GW when air spike teams were popular all decent Monks brought Infuse Health to serious PvP. The spell was expensive and took half your own HP but it was the only way to save someone getting spiked. It made for interesting choices. Do I sacrfice half my own HP and double the energy to be certain I save my ally or do only use half the energy and risk my heal arriving too late and/or not healing enough?
In PvP most of the time death will eventually come. Both to the healer and his allies. As such having tools that react to healers taking serious damage as well as allies dying can add a lot of tactical depth.
In PvP stuns and such are very common and are usually followed by heavy damage. Having heals that take advantage of this can be used to reward healers that aren't just looking at their party screen but also watching what's really happening to ttheir allies.
In PvP positioning is king. As such having heals that require positioning and/or short ranges can put the healer in interesting situations. Do I potentially put myself in a dangerous position to gain increasing healing and efficiency or do I stay in a safe spot but suffer running out of mana and/or not healing enough?
And more complicated certainly isn't always better. I'm not suggesting a single class be given all these abilities. They're merely ideas of what could, potentially, make healers more interesting.
Besides, 75% of your examples of other types of heals are from single player RPGs and CORPGs. The only MMO with more is basically Vanguard and a little bit from L2, which I think is a problem. More MMOs should offer interesting healers.
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Overall I think the OP is full of interesting ideas, but he totally lacks the sense for what healing is about:
1. Healing is instant. You see the health of someone go down, you basically throw them a healing spell.
2. A healer wants to be able to react all the time. Therefore long time cast spells arent popular in the first place.
3. Healing is a mana management issue. Healers will always seek the least mana intense way to keep their allies alife.
4. You dont gamble with the life of the player. Abilities that require the health of the player to fall below 25% are absurd. Spells that heal for a large amount, but only after a delay, are absurd. Thats not what you will do.
5. Healers do NOT care about damage. Giving them abilities that cost mana for a little damage is pointless.
Overall I think the OP is full of interesting ideas, but he totally lacks the sense for what healing is about:
1. Healing is instant. You see the health of someone go down, you basically throw them a healing spell.
Which is what a lot of people refer to as whack-a-mole and playing the party screen. I think that if you want to make a more popular healing class then you're going to have to get rid of this. You're going to have to make healing more dynamic. Make healers react not just to the HP bar but also to when, for example, an ally gets stunned. Maybe implement one of the injury systems suggested by others so that healers must also react to injuries. A broken sword arm may be a huge problem for a warrior and you'd be better off curing his injury then making his HP bar go up. On a mage however that broken sword arm isn't that bad and he'll benefit more from a direct heal, but a minor concussion would be a diffirent story.
2. A healer wants to be able to react all the time. Therefore long time cast spells arent popular in the first place.
Exactly. Present healers with interesting choices. Do I go for quick reactions or mana efficiency? Can I currently predict what'll be happening in the next 2-3 seconds or is the battle too chaotic. 10 second cast times are, of course, not viable. Making healers choose between instant casts, 1 second casts and 2,5 second casts is a viable choice though.
3. Healing is a mana management issue. Healers will always seek the least mana intense way to keep their allies alife.
Again spot on. So you need to put healers into situations where those 2 goals are at odds. Because this creates interesting gameplay. You've got your mana efficiency and you've got your healing amount. You could come into a situation where an ally of yours is taking very heavy damage. Your most efficient spells aren't fast or strong enough to save him. Do you use less efficient but faster/stronger spells and risk running out of mana thereby causing your entire party to die or do you let that single ally die so you can be sure to have enough mana left so that the rest of your party will surive and win the fight.
4. You dont gamble with the life of the player. Abilities that require the health of the player to fall below 25% are absurd. Spells that heal for a large amount, but only after a delay, are absurd. Thats not what you will do.
It's all about putting healers into more interesting situations. Do I use an inefficient healing spell right now and risk running out of mana before the fight is over and thus wiping or do I wait for my efficient spell which only works below 25% hp but risk having a single player die? Do I use an inefficient healing spell that works right away and is sure to save my ally but leaves me with a lot less mana or do I use an efficient spell which only kicks in after 3 seconds to ensure that during the entire fight I'll have enough mana.
5. Healers do NOT care about damage. Giving them abilities that cost mana for a little damage is pointless.
Explaining the huge enthusiasm seen over classes like the VG Blood Mage, WAR warrior priest, AoC Tempest of Set etc. Healers want to do more then just use a single efficient fast casting healing spell. I think that healers need choices as to what spell to use on what moment. Ally surrounded by lots of weaker enemies? Use a heal that also does PBAoE damage on him. Ally being backstabbed by a rogue? Use a heal which stuns the next attacker. Your tank barely holding on? Use a heal that also debuffs all nearby enemies.
Personally, I think you're lacking the sense of what triage is about. I recommend you try healing as a GW Monk in HA or a WAR Shaman in RvR. Neither of these experiences are perfect but they do show that dedicated healing can get your adrenaline flowing and engage healers in gameplay that is more then "Cast Heal", "Cast Heal" and "Cast Heal".
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Some of the abilities mentioned in OP actually WERE in Guild Wars. Like my Dervish's main heal-other spell was an enchantment that if the player dips below a certain amount of hp, the enchantment is broken. If the enchantment is broken, it heals for a certain amount. (This means people could make the spell go off by cancelling the enchantment, too)
There's some interesting types of healing in D&D4e. It's almost designed more like an MMO than a P&P RPG.
I'll throw out a few different ideas, in no particular order. I've got the 'Meowhead is kind of a dick' idea, an idea I came up with after reading the OP, an idea based off a precursor-to-MMOs I played a long time ago, an idea based off of a comic book, and an idea based off of an MMO design I had. Bonus points if you can tell which is which. LOTS of bonus points if you can identify the comic book.
Idea 1:
A kind of healer with a drastically huger health pool than usual. They can either drain injuries from party members ('Remove' 100 points of damage from friend, give 125 points of damage to self), or drain HP from enemies to regenerate. Since they lose more hp than they recover on friends, it's actually more efficient to kill the other party members, rather than them, creating a built in 'defense' in PvP.
Idea 2:
Everybody is able to regenerate and heal by eating. The better the quality of the food, the fresher the dish, and the better the ingredients appeal to your character's personal tastes, the bigger the heal you get.
Basically, you eat most of the things you kill, or scavenge ingredients like plants. If you have a professional cook (Another class) with you, they can prepare dishes on the spot, or even tell you the optimal way to kill an enemy (Now you need to use some sort of slashing attack on its head!) to bring out the best flavor or to keep from damaging the tastiest parts.
Going through dungeons is basically a test to see how efficiently you can keep up your calories and health, and how much nutrition you can get from enemies. If you're losing it faster than you're recovering it, and end up too low, you might have to leave the dungeon and restart again another time.
Idea 3:
You're the traditional hammer-wielding cleric. During a fight, you can go into healing mode and have an out of body experience. Rather than representing health by green bars, you see a wide grey field that you stand in the middle of, with a hammer. As your friends get hurt, they start to raise through the ground and up into the realm of death, which is where you are. You have to hit them on the head with the hammer to push them back into the normal world, giving their life energy back. Try not to hit the enemies on the head when they pop up, because nobody likes a healer who heals the enemies.
The more they're hurt, the faster they pop up, and if they appear too many times without being hammered, they'll die.
Idea 4:
Healing is a team effort, and requires multiple people to pull it off efficiently. First off, the melee class has a variable level of magic resistance that the player can set. While high magic resistance is good in a fight, it also protects them from heals as well. So they have to find a way to stop being attacked if they want to heal without getting hurt even more.
Some people can see auras, and the type of magic and adjust them. If an enemy is doing fire attacks, you can adjust somebody's aura to fire, and allow them to be healed by the enemy's attack.
Some people can see ley lines, and the flow of magic, and control it. If an attack is going towards a friend who is weak to that kind of attack, you can adjust the attack to go towards somebody who would benefit from it instead.
Idea 5:
You're an alchemist, and you have a gun that allows you to do a constant, practically free, really low grade heals, basically firing healing shots at people. If you want to do better heals, or ones that have specific effects like healing from a stun, or granting bonus damage resistance to a kind of damage along with the heal, you need to craft specific bullets for your gun. You can only hold... 6-10 bullets or so, so it helps to have just the right kind of bullets for the situation. If you run out of good bullets, you can try to muscle through with the low grade spam heal, or you can take a quick break to craft new bullets, perhaps crafted to the specific situation you're in. This would work best with some kind of really fast crafting mini-game, like EQ2 on crack or something. Well, a minigame that CAN be done fast, if you know what you're doing, which means less skillful healers would take longer to do good heals.
i played Defense of the Ancients (DotA) for quite awhile. mostly i played tanks and supports. having that control over your teammates and them screaming 'OMFG THANK YOU' i just rewarding play.
so i finished playing DotA and started playing League of Legends 1.5 year ago, because really - how long can you play one game?
so yeah LoL also had supports, but... whats the problem?
most support is revolved around healing. since there are many abilities in the game that can reduce healing by 50% thats obviously the problem. but are those healing reduction spells the real problem?
why did i enjoy supports in DotA more than i did in LoL?
there is more to support than healing and DotA did that perfectly. shielding, buffing allies, debuffing, cursing your enemies etc.
in theory in LoL you can just put those healing reduction spells on your target and just proceed to mindlessly killing your target, ignoring the healer completely. who wants to be ignored?
basically in League of Legends most support champions are healers, while in DotA supporters are more like actual supporters. same in real mmos also. world of warcraft was more about healers, guild wars 1 had much more support mechanics going, simple blant healing didnt really work. just look at what capabilities mesmers or elementalists had.
the games shouldnt be about damage and healing. preventing damage in the first place doesnt require healing does it?
my point is, the 'healer' name should just go away completely and be replaced by support.
supporter becomes boring unpopular class, just because all you can really do is exactly - HEALING.
Wow oh wow. You on something or something? I was lost barely into the second paragragh. And if you think all healers are broken then I am sorry that you have never found anyone that could heal properly by taking people's names out of the raid tab or target them and so on. That is really too bad but no not all heaers are broken hate to tell you.
Not saying all healers are broken. I personally love healers and we've seen some pretty cool and inventive healers in games.
I however do think that healers could use some serious improvement.
Take the VG Blood Mage for example. A lot of people, me included, think that it's a really good example of a much more interesting and engaging healer class. Yet if we take at healers in MMOs in general it's quite rare to see classes like that. I think that there are simply too many healer classes out there who's optimal rotation is still basically spamming "Greater Heal" over and over again. Not all of them are like that, and some good players can even turn classes like that into something more. But there's a reason terms like healbotting are still often used while I've yet to hear about Tankbots and DPSbots.
lol there has are dps and tanking addons just a lot of people don't usually know it. Druids have never needed a healbot to be honest, infact I knew one that refused to use one and could heal in a raid like there was no tomorrow. However I do agree I get tired of the rotation thing. All classes in some games however use rotations. Shoot they have been teasing about dps paladins in WoW for years about it is a 4 bottun rotation and the pally tanks as well.
If any class plays their class right they end up using rotations no matter what their class is because that is what seems to work for them. Just like a warrior tank on any game learns which rotation gets them the aggro the fastest so that when dps do damage too early they can still try to manage to hold aggro because the dps are trigger happy. Dps classes first use their bleed before anything else because that is how their dps comes up and if people don't l isten to other peoples suggestions than no one can help them. I have seen cases where someone might have said that class is broken for dps because all they saw for a long time was someone playing that cxlass who could not figure out a rotation to get the damage in that they needed.
I have seen many healer, dps, and tanks that no matter how many suggestions you give them still do things the way they want to do them so ultimately it becomes player demise not the way the class themselves is made. So it is all in the players hands as to whether or not they can learn to play that class properly. IMO if more people would take suggestions from nice people who are actually nice enough to try and help someone having trouble that that personmight want to listen even if it hurts their pride.
I remember the very first raid I was in. I had pretty much no idea what the heck I was really doing and about 2 bosses in the raid leader was nice and whispered me and said I don't know if your ready for this then a bit later said I don't think you are and my response was, "you're right" I willingly left the raid and went about learning to play my class to it's max potential and was not getting in another raid until I did. I ran heroics everyday and practiced on dummies and everything else I could to properly learn and by the time I was done was raiding with some of the best raiders in that game.
After every patch I read class changes adn everything else so I knew exactly what had changed so that I knew how to make changes accordingly, as well as when a HUGE tree change came out I had taken a break I turned my account back on and read everything their was to know on how to know my new tree what stats I needed and because I did that went into the next expansion and dungeons with no problems. However I saw a lot of other people have a really hard time adjusting. Maybe in all truthfulness they need to take out the complexity of the classes instead of just saying they need a new class because that is what I have seen in people who just don't take the time to learn how to pley their class is the problem not the class itself.
I'd kinda like healing to turn into a bit of a game or puzzle on it's own. Yes you can still have the direct heals and heals over time but what if in addition to that healers had ways to cure symptoms fever, sweats, dehydration...
Then the game can offer random sicknesses. Someone comes up to you his life is draining slowly. He has pusty boils, a fever, is delirious, with dry mouth. How would you heal him?
The healer would have to come up with a treatment based on the symptoms or based on the symptoms would have to pick the spell/cure from whatever list they are given.
This would only work in downtime type play of course and not the instant fast action of a boss run or something.
Venge
Just because you don't like it doesn't mean it is bad.
if they could take the warhammer archmage/shaman class system and make it work right, I'd love it. Heals boost damage, and damage boosts heals essentially, the more you cast one side of the contrast the stronger the other becomes, just put in decent leech nukes that heal your target and win win
I'd kinda like healing to turn into a bit of a game or puzzle on it's own. Yes you can still have the direct heals and heals over time but what if in addition to that healers had ways to cure symptoms fever, sweats, dehydration...
Then the game can offer random sicknesses. Someone comes up to you his life is draining slowly. He has pusty boils, a fever, is delirious, with dry mouth. How would you heal him?
The healer would have to come up with a treatment based on the symptoms or based on the symptoms would have to pick the spell/cure from whatever list they are given.
This would only work in downtime type play of course and not the instant fast action of a boss run or something.
I doubt that would work with player characters. I think it would require a pretty serious roleplayer to want his character to be afflicted with a disease that he both wanted to get rid of and that required some sleuthing by another player to remove.
However, I could see that working with NPCs. If players run towns and such that are populated by NPCs and those NPCs get ill from time to time, then healers would have tasks to keep them busy, just like an adventurer. Finding the right plant and animal components for medicines and even magic to both sleuth out the problem and then deal with it. Everyone would want the NPCs healthy because they provide services and generally keep the player-run towns functioning. If a family of farmers dies of a disease, that farm isn't going to produce anything.
Taking that same healer character into the field to support the player characters that are fighting would be a natural thing to do. Visiting a town could provide the adventurers some tasks such as dealing with menacing monsters, but it could also provide tasks such as providing blacksmithing work, curing some of the village sick, and other things that traditionally translate to quests. Healing a prominent member of the NPC community could involve a rather involved quest into dangerous areas.
Taking that same healer character into the field to support the player characters that are fighting would be a natural thing to do. Visiting a town could provide the adventurers some tasks such as dealing with menacing monsters, but it could also provide tasks such as providing blacksmithing work, curing some of the village sick, and other things that traditionally translate to quests. Healing a prominent member of the NPC community could involve a rather involved quest into dangerous areas.
I always thought it would be an interesting design choice to make it where some characters have a decidedly suboptimal combat role, but are just so damn USEFUL to have along, or allow you to enter new kinds content/experience new things... or both.
I did mention in my (Sadly completely ignored, possibly due to my usage of the best whack-a-mole healer design EVER) list of possible healer types, the idea of having a chef class that is absolutely tops at either crafting dishes on the spot (While you're killing that monster, I'm going to cook up some food using these absolutely DELICIOUS looking wild herbs I found over there, combined with the corpse of the last monster you killed! Hope you enjoy the massive HP recover you get when you finally get around to eating it! Maybe the smell will encourage you to fight harder.) or analyzing enemies to figure out the TASTIEST way to kill them.
Mmmm. Bludgeon that enemy to death, he could use a good tenderizing before I throw him in my stew pot!
I always thought it would be an interesting design choice to make it where some characters have a decidedly suboptimal combat role, but are just so damn USEFUL to have along, or allow you to enter new kinds content/experience new things... or both.
They'd only be useful if the game had those new kinds of content and experiences and such. Bringing an archer along is only useful if he's got something to shoot at. Bringing a lockpick along is only useful if he's got locks to pick. That's why so many early attempts at creating interesting classes fell flat; the classes existed, but the problems did not. So they just backed off, turned every class into a combat class, put a bunch of monsters out there and let them have at it.
People talk about innovation and next generation games and such. In my opinion, the next generation of MMOs will be games with many different experiences in them. EVE Online is an example of how that can work. If somebody adapted it to a fantasy game I think they'd have a hit. With or without PvP.
They'd only be useful if the game had those new kinds of content and experiences and such. Bringing an archer along is only useful if he's got something to shoot at. Bringing a lockpick along is only useful if he's got locks to pick. That's why so many early attempts at creating interesting classes fell flat; the classes existed, but the problems did not. So they just backed off, turned every class into a combat class, put a bunch of monsters out there and let them have at it.
People talk about innovation and next generation games and such. In my opinion, the next generation of MMOs will be games with many different experiences in them. EVE Online is an example of how that can work. If somebody adapted it to a fantasy game I think they'd have a hit. With or without PvP.
Well, obviously the whole idea with the cook only would be really interesting if the cooking experience and ingredient analyzing experience was as riveting and fun for enough people as combat is.
The whole game would be based around cooking and ingredients though. Since I shamelessly lifted the idea from a comic where people live in a place called the Gourmet World, where gourmet eating has become the center of a world's economy and lifestyles. A world where monsters roam the earth, but they are made out of tasty ingredients.
Specialized hunters gather them for ingredients, getting huge bounties at restaurants or from chefs, while evil gourmet people try to monopolize ingredients for themselves... and some people work to preserve the environment, protecting endangered species from being hunted to extinction.
In this game almost EVERY monster would be multiple ingredients of some types, all the flora? Ingredients. Trees? Not just random landscaping, that's ingredients. Cooking would be as important as combat, though probably NPC cooks would do a lot of the cooking if for some reason you couldn't get enough players interested in playing the roles of cooks and making the economy go 'round.
... but I was fascinated by the comic, since it is SO focused and revolved around the idea of a gourmet world. People go exploring for new ingredients, fight their way through horrible environments and hundreds of monsters just to find some rare fruit.
People become more powerful by eating ingredients or dishes that sync up with their cellular structure, they regenerate with enough calories, and calories are expended in combat as a sort of tasty mana.
It's such a cohesive idea built around a single focused concept, I was fascinated by the idea of how that could apply to an MMORPG. It's also totally sandbox as a comic, with people hunting all sorts of things, everywhere, just taking whatever jobs that supply other people with ingredients. ... and lots of crafting. Not just the cooks, but there's all sorts of survival devices involved, and they spent several chapters just dealing with a knife sharpener/blade maker. Because y'know... super important to chefs, having a great cooking knife. (... or to people who use katanas, but who really cares about them?)
The whole game would be based around cooking and ingredients though. Since I shamelessly lifted the idea from a comic where people live in a place called the Gourmet World, where gourmet eating has become the center of a world's economy and lifestyles. A world where monsters roam the earth, but they are made out of tasty ingredients.
[snip]
In this game almost EVERY monster would be multiple ingredients of some types, all the flora? Ingredients. Trees? Not just random landscaping, that's ingredients. Cooking would be as important as combat, though probably NPC cooks would do a lot of the cooking if for some reason you couldn't get enough players interested in playing the roles of cooks and making the economy go 'round.
My biggest gripe about MMOs is that they are too myopic in their gameplay design. Right now, combat is everything, and all other activities are mere shadows of their potential, including healers.
I agree that monsters should work thoroughly into the cooking activity. They should also work thoroughly into fletching, blacksmithing, shipbuilding and every other activity in the game. The same should be true of all flora and fauna, rocks, waters, vapors, etc. But a separate game is not needed for each activity just so a given activity can be thoroughly explored.
Where I'm going with this is that cooking is something that players could get seriously involved with in a game that also allows players to get seriously involved with combat. And seriously involved with trade. And seriously involved with stamp collecting. A major stumbling block on the path to that sort of game is that current MMOs overemphasize achievement. It is the cornerstone of the genre. Until that changes, healers - and cooking and stamp collecting - will be relegated to mere marketing check boxes, if they are included at all.
The fact that having a dozen in-depth activities in a single MMO would be prohibitive to develop might have something to do with it too. But somebody is eventually going to come up with a formula that makes it happen. It will probably start out as multiple loosely-integrated games. For example, what would happen if a cooking game could trade with the monster-killing game and vice-versa? Their economies would be tied, but the game would otherwise be completely separate.
Heck, you could even create a Healer's World, which is where combatants go when they need some rest and recuperation. Park a character there and go fight with a backup or some such thing. The people playing in Healer's World would then get to work fixing the character's health.
Heck, you could even create a Healer's World, which is where combatants go when they need some rest and recuperation. Park a character there and go fight with a backup or some such thing. The people playing in Healer's World would then get to work fixing the character's health.
Well, while there were other kinds of crafting in Gourmet world, the cooking is what was REALLY emphasized. Even just having two activities so intimately tied together, yet having seperate uses, would be interesting. I mean, games have crafting, but they're not right there with the fighters, helping them out, each benefiting each other on the spot.
Also, the healing world?
That sounds like Trauma Center the MMO. That would be awesome.
I'd play it. Might need anonymous patients though. Either that or just live with the whole societal pressure it puts on the game.
'Sorry about the hairline fractures still on your ribs. ... and the fragment I left in your lungs. ... but you probably shouldn't have ganked me on my other character.'
This thread already contains lots of great (and a few mediocre) suggestions on how to make the classical healer gameplay fun and more entertaining than casting Spell X every 2 seconds. Good examples are e.g. the Vanguard classes, which benefits from the game's inherent dual-targetting system.
And in my opinion, games that base the healing on the classic healing (single-targetting, hots and casts), can not really do much more than vary the mechanics of what spell X does. VG came along way introducing both dual-targetting and interesting dynamics.
1. My biggest problem when playing a healer is that I have to focus on bars instead of what we are fighting. Thus my suggestion is to use aim-targetted healing, possibly in conjunction with a dual-target system.
What I mean by this is that you have both heals that you aim in a certain direction (with a cursor), and possibly you have a defensive target that you can use to cast a little bit more directed spells, like the traditional shield. I'm thinking in the lines of a variant of Vanguard meets Tera.
An example how this would play out in a party boss fight would be something like:
-The healer must continuously position himself so that he/she can reach friendlies with the aimed heals such as frontal cone based heals OR simple pbaoes.
-The healer keeps her attention on the "boss" so that when the boss raises his huge hammer slowly, this is a visual cue that the healer should put an (expensive) shield on the defensive target.
-Preferably, this works the best if collision detection is in place and properly causes a very fluid combat with a lot of movement.
2. Healing people must be very visual and/or noticable, be it nice healing numbers or great animations in line with or exceeding combat ditos.
3. Give healer classes support and dps elements that are integrated with their healing (so that it is not only used while soloing).
I suppose this does seem quite abit like Tera's system though from what I've seen it doesn't come all the way. (Granted I have not played it myself)
I'd just be happy in a MMO doing something other than combat.... there is far too much focus on combat to let even the sliver of Roleplaying alive in these MMO's. You go from area to area, quest to quest, and it always involves in killing stuff... Your either killing things to gather something, to explore some point, or just for the sake of killing something.. what happened to non combat quests?
Why can't i support the local towns people by cooking, gathering, crafting, healing etc? It would certainly put a much needed breathe of fresh air in quests today. People complain that questing is all the same and its true because when it boils down to it, its always combat related.
I'd just be happy in a MMO doing something other than combat.... there is far too much focus on combat to let even the sliver of Roleplaying alive in these MMO's. You go from area to area, quest to quest, and it always involves in killing stuff... Your either killing things to gather something, to explore some point, or just for the sake of killing something.. what happened to non combat quests?
Why can't i support the local towns people by cooking, gathering, crafting, healing etc? It would certainly put a much needed breathe of fresh air in quests today. People complain that questing is all the same and its true because when it boils down to it, its always combat related.
I keep telling people this, but the Japanese comic Toriko would make an AMAZING MMO, if somebody did it up as a sandbox.
The adventures of the main characters revolves all around finding ingredients... for themselves, for the government, for cooks... to improve themselves, or just to protect them from badguy chefs (DARN those evil chefs!)
While there's a fair amount of combat, it's not just all combat. Sometimes the problem is the environment itself, sometimes the ingredients are plants, and you have to get them in a certain way to harvest them.
Sometimes monsters/animals need to be subdued, rather than killed.
They spent a couple issues just trying to figure out how to catch a kind of exotic blowfish and then remove the poison gland without spoiling the food and making it poisonous.
Quests like that, and the interactions and abilities to make them work, would make a game a lot more robust and interesting. Exploration, fighting against the environment LITERALLY (Surviving in really cold/hot/windy areas or whatever), fighting monsters.... harvesting ingredients, everything has huge importance and an underlying thread running through it.
An MMO with that level of attention and cohesive design on just the basic concepts would be amazing and genre changing. If somebody could pull it off. :P
Comments
Hear hear.
I like the idea of dragging characters to safety and healing them out of the melee of battle.
Add in:
1. Characters take damage during fights and slowly lose effectiveness (instead of being perfectly effective unti ldeath). When they've taken more damage than they're willing to tolerate, they get out of melee and get a healer to patch them up. Or they get dragged out if they've overstayed their welcome.
2. Healing takes time commensurate with the severity and complexity of the injuries.
3. Healing ideally takes simple player skill to perform. Shattered limbs require putting all the bits of bone back into alignment before tapping it with magic wand or the Heal-o-Ray or whatever.
With that, a healer has some judgment calls to make. Fix everything, or just the essentials? What does this character absolutely need working in order to be effective? How long will it take me to fix this problem vs that problem? Do I have time to fix stuff where I am? And so on.
As for medics during battle, I think they should just stay out of it.
If combat has any complexity to it, they can work as an extra pair of eyes to keep track of the dynamics of battle. "Reinforcements coming from the south!" "Sniper in the trees!" Heck, they've got to watch the health of the combatants because they may not appreciate the tradeoffs of getting healed - or notice that they've been injured. "You dummy, your shield arm's shattered. I need to fix that before you bleed to death of internal injuries."
Yes, I know that combatants should be told of the severity of their own injuries. But if the healer class has the job of watching injuries, then the notification mechanism for combatants should be weak. That leaves fighters wondering how long they've been fighting with a deep cut on their sword arm. They truly depend on others to keep an eye on their health. A healer's senses would be appropriately enhanced.
Characters have "Wounds"
0 (Health) - Fully ready for action.
1 (Hurt) - Nicked, still healthy and ready for action.
2 (Wounded) - Hurt. Player should start to be careful, but still can fight.
3 (Severely Wounded) - About to fall down, needs to think of escape.
4 (Down) - Unable to move or act, but can be rescued.
5 (Dead) - Dead. Gone. No longer a part of the battle.
A character has a total of Hit Points * 4.
Hit Points = 100, then they have 100 for Healthy, 100 for Hurt, etc.
The Support roles can different abilities which can heal their allies, within that wound rank. So a healer can bring a 1 HP (0: Healthy) player back to 100% HP (0: Healthy) max health. They have an actual total of 500 HP before death, and 400 HP before incapacitated.
Once a Player is wounded, they cannot be healed of that wound easily, rarely in combat, and certainly not quickly. So a Player who has lost 200 HP total would have been wounded twice, and would be at 100HP (2: Wounded). A player cannot heal them past 100 HP (2: Wounded). So their remaining HP until DOWN is 200, and if they lose more than 300HP they will die.
Once a player is "Down" they can be healed to 1 HP (Severely Wounded) which means they can walk again and act, but cannot be healed out of 1 HP. This is like 3.99 Wound Rank, where the player is technically Down, and ANY hit will bring them down, BUT they can move as if they're just Severely Wounded.
This "locks" a player into 25% of their health. Once a player loses 25% of their health, they cannot be healed of that 25%. Once they lose all of their health, they can suffer 25% more until death.
The role of the Tank is to protect players once they're wounded, get Severely Wounded players to safety, and to rescue Down players and carry them to a healer or safe point.
Alternatively, players begin to suffer debuggs once Wounded and Severely Wounded. The role of Support is to cancel these Debuffs. So a Severely Wounded player attacks slower, damages less, and moves with a limp. The Support role can heal those debuffs making the player attack, damage, and move as if Healthy, even if they're still Severely Wounded.
Wow oh wow. You on something or something? I was lost barely into the second paragragh. And if you think all healers are broken then I am sorry that you have never found anyone that could heal properly by taking people's names out of the raid tab or target them and so on. That is really too bad but no not all heaers are broken hate to tell you.
Not saying all healers are broken. I personally love healers and we've seen some pretty cool and inventive healers in games.
I however do think that healers could use some serious improvement.
Take the VG Blood Mage for example. A lot of people, me included, think that it's a really good example of a much more interesting and engaging healer class. Yet if we take at healers in MMOs in general it's quite rare to see classes like that. I think that there are simply too many healer classes out there who's optimal rotation is still basically spamming "Greater Heal" over and over again. Not all of them are like that, and some good players can even turn classes like that into something more. But there's a reason terms like healbotting are still often used while I've yet to hear about Tankbots and DPSbots.
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Meh.
More complicated isnt automatically better. Its easy to make a character with tons of abilities that only work on special circumstances - and nobody ever uses those abilities, because in the heat of battle, you simply dont have the time to think that much.
Lets see the initial list was:
- direct heal
- heal over time
- group heal
- damage shield
It misses these things I've already seen in existing games:
- percentage heals (heals that restore a percentage of health, not a specific number of hitpoints), for example in Lineage 2 and Blood Mage/Vanguard
- vampire drain (buff on players that heals them from their own damage), for example Shillien Elder in Lineage 2
- reactive heal (heal that goes off if player gets hit), from Shaman in Vanguard
- healing guard (heal that goes off if player gets below a certain health barrier), from Dragon Age
- healing aura (healing pulse for near allies), from Dragon Age
- redirect heal (spell that deals damage and redirects the damage dealt to ally for healing; this needs an offensive and defensive target as seen in Vanguard: Saga of Heroes; other games will have a hard time implementing this)
- damage ward (part of the damage dealt is instead dealt on the healer, from Blood Mage in Vanguard)
- damage reflect (part of the damage dealt is reflected on the attacker, seen in Oblivion)
- conditional healing (such as the heal from Guild Wars that gets better if the player health is low)
- healing crits (a really stupid idea added in the late Vanguard, when any serious game designer probably already left the dev team - only available in the endgame and completely pointless, as its very rare and it will be an overheal most of the time)
Now lets look at the suggestions:
- Heal that can only be used on players that got a crit. Now the problem with this is, if players get crits in the game at all, either healing is super easy (players got tons of hitpoints) or we'll see lots of instant deaths (say three mobs hit the tank, each successful hit takes 20% of the tank health. The tank got 66% evasion so he only gets 20% health loss every round on average, no problem for the healer. But in one moment, all three mobs attack successfully and crit. Instant death - from full health. Obviously, to avoid this problem, players would need a much larger hitpoint pool to still give healers a chance to keep up) . In neither case anyone will use a special skill for healing crits. Its a typical spell thats overcomplicated.
- A heal that only works well on stunned players. Now thats a typical "wtf who needs that crap" ability. It only works well under very specific and rare circumstances - unless your game has players stunned all the time, the average player will simply have forgotten about this ability when an ally actually gets stunned. As with the previous spell, I am under the impression we talk about a typical Guild Wars ability.
- Heals getting better if a counter raises, and the counter being useable for free heals, that has already been done on the Blood Mage and the Disciple in Vanguard.
- A combined buff and heal with sideeffects on the healer sounds like an interesting concept. Of course, the moment you have to move your healer around, which is anything but rare - that spell is completely useless.
- Healing pet is nothing really special, I think Lineage 2 had it already (the Elven tank got such a summon), and SW plus why would that make healers more interesting to play ?
- A combined heal and debuff on close enemies of the target is again an interesting concept for an emergency ability, albeit I like the Vanguard Shaman emergency heal better - instant heal with a short duration damage shield that took away a percentage of all damage on the target.
- A heal that also stuns the next attacker on the target sounds good.
- As said, a healing guard that goes off if a player goes below a certain health percentage has already been seen. However, as suggested, the thing would be not very useful and probably be forgotten. The version of Dragon Age was pretty cheap, which made it useful.
- Delayed healing spells are never a good idea. Unless the players get outrageous hitpoint reserves and healing is a walk in the park anyway, healers wont gamble with the virtual life of the players like that.
- I cant think of any reason to have such a phantom heal - unless you plan to kill the target without any other player noticing what you did, because when the phantom hitpoints get away, it will look like the target had been hit. It would be OK if this phantom heal would actually raise the hitpoint maximum of the target by 75% as well, so the phantom heal would create some temporary hitpoint reserves for a player who is currently under massive attack.
- When exactly would one want a heal that combines with a double damage curse ? Again an ability thats too complicated.
- Melee heals, healing rage, what now ?!? Thats a class of its own, and not a general healer.
- Now isnt that the kind of spell every healer would want to have ? As said, heals that change with health status of the target are already known from Guild Wars.
- What this with HoTs that heal at the end of the spell ? I can see very little usefulness in that spell.
- I think that having to turn to the healing target wont make the game more interesting. Its impossible to use on the tank, and it means the healer would have to stand right behind the tank.
- Heals on mobs are insanely much stronger than heals on players, even worse for raid bosses - so such a link would heal a tank from near death to full three times over all the time.
- Sounds more like an ability for tanks really. Healers do NOT want to be hit.
- A "I bet you die in the next 10 sec" mana gaining ability ? That sounds like something people would try to use.
- Desparation heal. Hmm. If I'm desparate, I am probably already low on mana and dont want to burn it all in an instant.
- Perfection heal sounds stupid to me. Either the situation is easy, then I can just use normal heals. Or its dangerous, then I do NOT want a heal that (a) takes ages to cast (b) will hurt me if I overheal.
- Err, a healer killing itself ? Why is that a good idea ?
- Hmm yeah ok damage shield with root of opponents afterwards sounds nice.
- Again, crits on players are a bad idea.
- Why would any sane healer waste a large chunk of their mana to deal damage ?
- Hmm heal followed up with damage on everyone around them if they arent at full health. Sounds interesting if its only on a cooldown and not more expensive manawise than the standard heal. Otherwise no, I'm a healer, not a damage dealer.
I think we're coming from diffirent backgrounds here.
Personally I'm thinking from a more PvP orientated background.
In PvP players get frequently critically hit. And, in semi-balanced games, it doesn't lead to one-shots. A crit simply does 150% damage. A low damage ability will still deal lowish damage on a crit. Critical hits on players are present in basically every single game. Many games even have special stats to reduce the damage of critical hits and the chance fo being critically hit.
In PvP sometimes, during spikes, players take more damage then you can heal. As such having access to a fast casting very strong heal that has horrible mana efficiency is a great tool. In GW when air spike teams were popular all decent Monks brought Infuse Health to serious PvP. The spell was expensive and took half your own HP but it was the only way to save someone getting spiked. It made for interesting choices. Do I sacrfice half my own HP and double the energy to be certain I save my ally or do only use half the energy and risk my heal arriving too late and/or not healing enough?
In PvP most of the time death will eventually come. Both to the healer and his allies. As such having tools that react to healers taking serious damage as well as allies dying can add a lot of tactical depth.
In PvP stuns and such are very common and are usually followed by heavy damage. Having heals that take advantage of this can be used to reward healers that aren't just looking at their party screen but also watching what's really happening to ttheir allies.
In PvP positioning is king. As such having heals that require positioning and/or short ranges can put the healer in interesting situations. Do I potentially put myself in a dangerous position to gain increasing healing and efficiency or do I stay in a safe spot but suffer running out of mana and/or not healing enough?
And more complicated certainly isn't always better. I'm not suggesting a single class be given all these abilities. They're merely ideas of what could, potentially, make healers more interesting.
Besides, 75% of your examples of other types of heals are from single player RPGs and CORPGs. The only MMO with more is basically Vanguard and a little bit from L2, which I think is a problem. More MMOs should offer interesting healers.
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Overall I think the OP is full of interesting ideas, but he totally lacks the sense for what healing is about:
1. Healing is instant. You see the health of someone go down, you basically throw them a healing spell.
2. A healer wants to be able to react all the time. Therefore long time cast spells arent popular in the first place.
3. Healing is a mana management issue. Healers will always seek the least mana intense way to keep their allies alife.
4. You dont gamble with the life of the player. Abilities that require the health of the player to fall below 25% are absurd. Spells that heal for a large amount, but only after a delay, are absurd. Thats not what you will do.
5. Healers do NOT care about damage. Giving them abilities that cost mana for a little damage is pointless.
That explains why so many of your suggestions remind me of Guild Wars.
Personally, I think you're lacking the sense of what triage is about. I recommend you try healing as a GW Monk in HA or a WAR Shaman in RvR. Neither of these experiences are perfect but they do show that dedicated healing can get your adrenaline flowing and engage healers in gameplay that is more then "Cast Heal", "Cast Heal" and "Cast Heal".
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Two words..
Disciple & BloodMage.
One word.. Vanguard.
Disciple http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/59436
BloodMage http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/59448
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Some of the abilities mentioned in OP actually WERE in Guild Wars. Like my Dervish's main heal-other spell was an enchantment that if the player dips below a certain amount of hp, the enchantment is broken. If the enchantment is broken, it heals for a certain amount. (This means people could make the spell go off by cancelling the enchantment, too)
There's some interesting types of healing in D&D4e. It's almost designed more like an MMO than a P&P RPG.
I'll throw out a few different ideas, in no particular order. I've got the 'Meowhead is kind of a dick' idea, an idea I came up with after reading the OP, an idea based off a precursor-to-MMOs I played a long time ago, an idea based off of a comic book, and an idea based off of an MMO design I had. Bonus points if you can tell which is which.
LOTS of bonus points if you can identify the comic book.
Idea 1:
A kind of healer with a drastically huger health pool than usual. They can either drain injuries from party members ('Remove' 100 points of damage from friend, give 125 points of damage to self), or drain HP from enemies to regenerate. Since they lose more hp than they recover on friends, it's actually more efficient to kill the other party members, rather than them, creating a built in 'defense' in PvP.
Idea 2:
Everybody is able to regenerate and heal by eating. The better the quality of the food, the fresher the dish, and the better the ingredients appeal to your character's personal tastes, the bigger the heal you get.
Basically, you eat most of the things you kill, or scavenge ingredients like plants. If you have a professional cook (Another class) with you, they can prepare dishes on the spot, or even tell you the optimal way to kill an enemy (Now you need to use some sort of slashing attack on its head!) to bring out the best flavor or to keep from damaging the tastiest parts.
Going through dungeons is basically a test to see how efficiently you can keep up your calories and health, and how much nutrition you can get from enemies. If you're losing it faster than you're recovering it, and end up too low, you might have to leave the dungeon and restart again another time.
Idea 3:
You're the traditional hammer-wielding cleric. During a fight, you can go into healing mode and have an out of body experience. Rather than representing health by green bars, you see a wide grey field that you stand in the middle of, with a hammer. As your friends get hurt, they start to raise through the ground and up into the realm of death, which is where you are. You have to hit them on the head with the hammer to push them back into the normal world, giving their life energy back. Try not to hit the enemies on the head when they pop up, because nobody likes a healer who heals the enemies.
The more they're hurt, the faster they pop up, and if they appear too many times without being hammered, they'll die.
Idea 4:
Healing is a team effort, and requires multiple people to pull it off efficiently. First off, the melee class has a variable level of magic resistance that the player can set. While high magic resistance is good in a fight, it also protects them from heals as well. So they have to find a way to stop being attacked if they want to heal without getting hurt even more.
Some people can see auras, and the type of magic and adjust them. If an enemy is doing fire attacks, you can adjust somebody's aura to fire, and allow them to be healed by the enemy's attack.
Some people can see ley lines, and the flow of magic, and control it. If an attack is going towards a friend who is weak to that kind of attack, you can adjust the attack to go towards somebody who would benefit from it instead.
Idea 5:
You're an alchemist, and you have a gun that allows you to do a constant, practically free, really low grade heals, basically firing healing shots at people. If you want to do better heals, or ones that have specific effects like healing from a stun, or granting bonus damage resistance to a kind of damage along with the heal, you need to craft specific bullets for your gun. You can only hold... 6-10 bullets or so, so it helps to have just the right kind of bullets for the situation. If you run out of good bullets, you can try to muscle through with the low grade spam heal, or you can take a quick break to craft new bullets, perhaps crafted to the specific situation you're in. This would work best with some kind of really fast crafting mini-game, like EQ2 on crack or something. Well, a minigame that CAN be done fast, if you know what you're doing, which means less skillful healers would take longer to do good heals.
i played Defense of the Ancients (DotA) for quite awhile. mostly i played tanks and supports. having that control over your teammates and them screaming 'OMFG THANK YOU' i just rewarding play.
so i finished playing DotA and started playing League of Legends 1.5 year ago, because really - how long can you play one game?
so yeah LoL also had supports, but... whats the problem?
most support is revolved around healing. since there are many abilities in the game that can reduce healing by 50% thats obviously the problem. but are those healing reduction spells the real problem?
why did i enjoy supports in DotA more than i did in LoL?
there is more to support than healing and DotA did that perfectly. shielding, buffing allies, debuffing, cursing your enemies etc.
in theory in LoL you can just put those healing reduction spells on your target and just proceed to mindlessly killing your target, ignoring the healer completely. who wants to be ignored?
basically in League of Legends most support champions are healers, while in DotA supporters are more like actual supporters. same in real mmos also. world of warcraft was more about healers, guild wars 1 had much more support mechanics going, simple blant healing didnt really work. just look at what capabilities mesmers or elementalists had.
the games shouldnt be about damage and healing. preventing damage in the first place doesnt require healing does it?
my point is, the 'healer' name should just go away completely and be replaced by support.
supporter becomes boring unpopular class, just because all you can really do is exactly - HEALING.
who wants to be healbot? not me.
lol there has are dps and tanking addons just a lot of people don't usually know it. Druids have never needed a healbot to be honest, infact I knew one that refused to use one and could heal in a raid like there was no tomorrow. However I do agree I get tired of the rotation thing. All classes in some games however use rotations. Shoot they have been teasing about dps paladins in WoW for years about it is a 4 bottun rotation and the pally tanks as well.
If any class plays their class right they end up using rotations no matter what their class is because that is what seems to work for them. Just like a warrior tank on any game learns which rotation gets them the aggro the fastest so that when dps do damage too early they can still try to manage to hold aggro because the dps are trigger happy. Dps classes first use their bleed before anything else because that is how their dps comes up and if people don't l isten to other peoples suggestions than no one can help them. I have seen cases where someone might have said that class is broken for dps because all they saw for a long time was someone playing that cxlass who could not figure out a rotation to get the damage in that they needed.
I have seen many healer, dps, and tanks that no matter how many suggestions you give them still do things the way they want to do them so ultimately it becomes player demise not the way the class themselves is made. So it is all in the players hands as to whether or not they can learn to play that class properly. IMO if more people would take suggestions from nice people who are actually nice enough to try and help someone having trouble that that personmight want to listen even if it hurts their pride.
I remember the very first raid I was in. I had pretty much no idea what the heck I was really doing and about 2 bosses in the raid leader was nice and whispered me and said I don't know if your ready for this then a bit later said I don't think you are and my response was, "you're right" I willingly left the raid and went about learning to play my class to it's max potential and was not getting in another raid until I did. I ran heroics everyday and practiced on dummies and everything else I could to properly learn and by the time I was done was raiding with some of the best raiders in that game.
After every patch I read class changes adn everything else so I knew exactly what had changed so that I knew how to make changes accordingly, as well as when a HUGE tree change came out I had taken a break I turned my account back on and read everything their was to know on how to know my new tree what stats I needed and because I did that went into the next expansion and dungeons with no problems. However I saw a lot of other people have a really hard time adjusting. Maybe in all truthfulness they need to take out the complexity of the classes instead of just saying they need a new class because that is what I have seen in people who just don't take the time to learn how to pley their class is the problem not the class itself.
healing rotations? tanking? dps rotations?
those should only exist in a classic tank and spank game without any dynamids in combat and very simple enemy AI.
I'd kinda like healing to turn into a bit of a game or puzzle on it's own. Yes you can still have the direct heals and heals over time but what if in addition to that healers had ways to cure symptoms fever, sweats, dehydration...
Then the game can offer random sicknesses. Someone comes up to you his life is draining slowly. He has pusty boils, a fever, is delirious, with dry mouth. How would you heal him?
The healer would have to come up with a treatment based on the symptoms or based on the symptoms would have to pick the spell/cure from whatever list they are given.
This would only work in downtime type play of course and not the instant fast action of a boss run or something.
Venge
if they could take the warhammer archmage/shaman class system and make it work right, I'd love it. Heals boost damage, and damage boosts heals essentially, the more you cast one side of the contrast the stronger the other becomes, just put in decent leech nukes that heal your target and win win
I doubt that would work with player characters. I think it would require a pretty serious roleplayer to want his character to be afflicted with a disease that he both wanted to get rid of and that required some sleuthing by another player to remove.
However, I could see that working with NPCs. If players run towns and such that are populated by NPCs and those NPCs get ill from time to time, then healers would have tasks to keep them busy, just like an adventurer. Finding the right plant and animal components for medicines and even magic to both sleuth out the problem and then deal with it. Everyone would want the NPCs healthy because they provide services and generally keep the player-run towns functioning. If a family of farmers dies of a disease, that farm isn't going to produce anything.
Taking that same healer character into the field to support the player characters that are fighting would be a natural thing to do. Visiting a town could provide the adventurers some tasks such as dealing with menacing monsters, but it could also provide tasks such as providing blacksmithing work, curing some of the village sick, and other things that traditionally translate to quests. Healing a prominent member of the NPC community could involve a rather involved quest into dangerous areas.
I always thought it would be an interesting design choice to make it where some characters have a decidedly suboptimal combat role, but are just so damn USEFUL to have along, or allow you to enter new kinds content/experience new things... or both.
I did mention in my (Sadly completely ignored, possibly due to my usage of the best whack-a-mole healer design EVER) list of possible healer types, the idea of having a chef class that is absolutely tops at either crafting dishes on the spot (While you're killing that monster, I'm going to cook up some food using these absolutely DELICIOUS looking wild herbs I found over there, combined with the corpse of the last monster you killed! Hope you enjoy the massive HP recover you get when you finally get around to eating it! Maybe the smell will encourage you to fight harder.) or analyzing enemies to figure out the TASTIEST way to kill them.
Mmmm. Bludgeon that enemy to death, he could use a good tenderizing before I throw him in my stew pot!
They'd only be useful if the game had those new kinds of content and experiences and such. Bringing an archer along is only useful if he's got something to shoot at. Bringing a lockpick along is only useful if he's got locks to pick. That's why so many early attempts at creating interesting classes fell flat; the classes existed, but the problems did not. So they just backed off, turned every class into a combat class, put a bunch of monsters out there and let them have at it.
People talk about innovation and next generation games and such. In my opinion, the next generation of MMOs will be games with many different experiences in them. EVE Online is an example of how that can work. If somebody adapted it to a fantasy game I think they'd have a hit. With or without PvP.
Well, obviously the whole idea with the cook only would be really interesting if the cooking experience and ingredient analyzing experience was as riveting and fun for enough people as combat is.
The whole game would be based around cooking and ingredients though. Since I shamelessly lifted the idea from a comic where people live in a place called the Gourmet World, where gourmet eating has become the center of a world's economy and lifestyles. A world where monsters roam the earth, but they are made out of tasty ingredients.
Specialized hunters gather them for ingredients, getting huge bounties at restaurants or from chefs, while evil gourmet people try to monopolize ingredients for themselves... and some people work to preserve the environment, protecting endangered species from being hunted to extinction.
In this game almost EVERY monster would be multiple ingredients of some types, all the flora? Ingredients. Trees? Not just random landscaping, that's ingredients. Cooking would be as important as combat, though probably NPC cooks would do a lot of the cooking if for some reason you couldn't get enough players interested in playing the roles of cooks and making the economy go 'round.
... but I was fascinated by the comic, since it is SO focused and revolved around the idea of a gourmet world. People go exploring for new ingredients, fight their way through horrible environments and hundreds of monsters just to find some rare fruit.
People become more powerful by eating ingredients or dishes that sync up with their cellular structure, they regenerate with enough calories, and calories are expended in combat as a sort of tasty mana.
It's such a cohesive idea built around a single focused concept, I was fascinated by the idea of how that could apply to an MMORPG. It's also totally sandbox as a comic, with people hunting all sorts of things, everywhere, just taking whatever jobs that supply other people with ingredients. ... and lots of crafting. Not just the cooks, but there's all sorts of survival devices involved, and they spent several chapters just dealing with a knife sharpener/blade maker. Because y'know... super important to chefs, having a great cooking knife.
(... or to people who use katanas, but who really cares about them?)
My biggest gripe about MMOs is that they are too myopic in their gameplay design. Right now, combat is everything, and all other activities are mere shadows of their potential, including healers.
I agree that monsters should work thoroughly into the cooking activity. They should also work thoroughly into fletching, blacksmithing, shipbuilding and every other activity in the game. The same should be true of all flora and fauna, rocks, waters, vapors, etc. But a separate game is not needed for each activity just so a given activity can be thoroughly explored.
Where I'm going with this is that cooking is something that players could get seriously involved with in a game that also allows players to get seriously involved with combat. And seriously involved with trade. And seriously involved with stamp collecting. A major stumbling block on the path to that sort of game is that current MMOs overemphasize achievement. It is the cornerstone of the genre. Until that changes, healers - and cooking and stamp collecting - will be relegated to mere marketing check boxes, if they are included at all.
The fact that having a dozen in-depth activities in a single MMO would be prohibitive to develop might have something to do with it too. But somebody is eventually going to come up with a formula that makes it happen. It will probably start out as multiple loosely-integrated games. For example, what would happen if a cooking game could trade with the monster-killing game and vice-versa? Their economies would be tied, but the game would otherwise be completely separate.
Heck, you could even create a Healer's World, which is where combatants go when they need some rest and recuperation. Park a character there and go fight with a backup or some such thing. The people playing in Healer's World would then get to work fixing the character's health.
Well, while there were other kinds of crafting in Gourmet world, the cooking is what was REALLY emphasized. Even just having two activities so intimately tied together, yet having seperate uses, would be interesting. I mean, games have crafting, but they're not right there with the fighters, helping them out, each benefiting each other on the spot.
Also, the healing world?
That sounds like Trauma Center the MMO. That would be awesome.
I'd play it. Might need anonymous patients though. Either that or just live with the whole societal pressure it puts on the game.
'Sorry about the hairline fractures still on your ribs. ... and the fragment I left in your lungs. ... but you probably shouldn't have ganked me on my other character.'
This thread already contains lots of great (and a few mediocre) suggestions on how to make the classical healer gameplay fun and more entertaining than casting Spell X every 2 seconds. Good examples are e.g. the Vanguard classes, which benefits from the game's inherent dual-targetting system.
And in my opinion, games that base the healing on the classic healing (single-targetting, hots and casts), can not really do much more than vary the mechanics of what spell X does. VG came along way introducing both dual-targetting and interesting dynamics.
1. My biggest problem when playing a healer is that I have to focus on bars instead of what we are fighting. Thus my suggestion is to use aim-targetted healing, possibly in conjunction with a dual-target system.
What I mean by this is that you have both heals that you aim in a certain direction (with a cursor), and possibly you have a defensive target that you can use to cast a little bit more directed spells, like the traditional shield. I'm thinking in the lines of a variant of Vanguard meets Tera.
An example how this would play out in a party boss fight would be something like:
-The healer must continuously position himself so that he/she can reach friendlies with the aimed heals such as frontal cone based heals OR simple pbaoes.
-The healer keeps her attention on the "boss" so that when the boss raises his huge hammer slowly, this is a visual cue that the healer should put an (expensive) shield on the defensive target.
-Preferably, this works the best if collision detection is in place and properly causes a very fluid combat with a lot of movement.
2. Healing people must be very visual and/or noticable, be it nice healing numbers or great animations in line with or exceeding combat ditos.
3. Give healer classes support and dps elements that are integrated with their healing (so that it is not only used while soloing).
I suppose this does seem quite abit like Tera's system though from what I've seen it doesn't come all the way. (Granted I have not played it myself)
I'd just be happy in a MMO doing something other than combat.... there is far too much focus on combat to let even the sliver of Roleplaying alive in these MMO's. You go from area to area, quest to quest, and it always involves in killing stuff... Your either killing things to gather something, to explore some point, or just for the sake of killing something.. what happened to non combat quests?
Why can't i support the local towns people by cooking, gathering, crafting, healing etc? It would certainly put a much needed breathe of fresh air in quests today. People complain that questing is all the same and its true because when it boils down to it, its always combat related.
I keep telling people this, but the Japanese comic Toriko would make an AMAZING MMO, if somebody did it up as a sandbox.
The adventures of the main characters revolves all around finding ingredients... for themselves, for the government, for cooks... to improve themselves, or just to protect them from badguy chefs (DARN those evil chefs!)
While there's a fair amount of combat, it's not just all combat. Sometimes the problem is the environment itself, sometimes the ingredients are plants, and you have to get them in a certain way to harvest them.
Sometimes monsters/animals need to be subdued, rather than killed.
They spent a couple issues just trying to figure out how to catch a kind of exotic blowfish and then remove the poison gland without spoiling the food and making it poisonous.
Quests like that, and the interactions and abilities to make them work, would make a game a lot more robust and interesting. Exploration, fighting against the environment LITERALLY (Surviving in really cold/hot/windy areas or whatever), fighting monsters.... harvesting ingredients, everything has huge importance and an underlying thread running through it.
An MMO with that level of attention and cohesive design on just the basic concepts would be amazing and genre changing. If somebody could pull it off. :P