I'm making this thread in the hopes that I might have missed a game that has what I want.
Essentially, I'm looking for an MMO that has a healer (or support) class that is not so spam-oriented. The best example I could think of is the White Mage or Scholar from FFXIV, but I'm slightly burned out on that game so I'm looking for an alternative. In most MMOs I just seem to constantly spam various healing spells with very little concern for strategies. That's been my issue with RIFT and WoW for example, I feel like a heal-bot stuck on pressing 1-4 keys over and over again and occasionally pressing a different one because someone decided it'd be fun to have a picnic in a pool of lava. Whereas in FFXIV, healing seems a bit more calculated so to speak, perhaps due to the longer Global Cooldown, I feel like a player rather than a bot.
Right now I'm getting my Healer-fix from MOBAs, but it's not exactly my preferred genre.
Comments
Bumped for you.
--John Ruskin
- It has direct healers - your usual refill health with a spell.
- It also has over time healers - you need to make sure your healing effects are on the right people, then it keeps them alive through passive healing.
- I played a mystic - a healer working with shields. The idea there is to prevent damage as much as possible, heal what is left to go through.
- There are also several supportive classes - replenishing mana, buffing mages and physical classes. Some reduce cooldowns. These were all actually very viable in endgame, which is not something common in recent games.
Each type also always comes in 2-3 different classes. The shielding healer came in two classes (mystic/defiler). Mystic was more about group shielding and buffs, while defiler was more about debuffing the enemy. So the variety really is unprecedented.I played it "competetively" about 4 years ago, running the very end game content. The main thing I loved about the game was that with a 5-person group, you really wanted to consider which classes to take with you.
It definitely wasn't the case of "let's get 5 dps and faceroll it". Healers were extremely viable and I sometimes even preferred 1 tank, 2 heals, 2 dps. Or you could do 1 tank, 1 heal, 1 support, 2 dps.
If the community is still somewhat decent, I can greatly recommend it.
I've tried it two or three times since it went F2P, but I could never get into it. It's a little too old and there wasn't too many people around either ("everyone is already at end-game" issue that plagues MMOs). Thanks for the suggestion anyway, I'll have to keep looking.