Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Quick Links
Healers - How do you view them? How should healers be designed?
Eronakis
Member UncommonPosts: 2,249
This is a post to not argue if healing should be in mmos or how a healing class is not needed. - - - Anyways, this has been on my mind. From the verities of different type of healers from EQ to WoW to AoC, we can see a substantial difference of the role of the healer.
For an example, in EQ, healers were a “heal bot” with a secondary role of support. In WoW, we can see that healers are hybrids in the sense that, it does not matter what “spec” you are, you still have the healing ability. As for AoC, healers are not heal buts, but healing is their second nature in which they can defend themselves quite well.
So my question to this mmo community is this, how do you view a healer class? Should a healer be a strictly heal bot? Should a healer have a balance between “dps” survivability and healing? How do you think a healer class should be implemented and why?
From my experience, some of the crowd enjoys the healing bot aspect and others want more dynamic healing features. I would really like to know what would make healing fun? What would you attract you to play a healer? Usually I find that healers are in low abundance in PVE games.
Healers in my opinion should be 50% healing and 35% support and 15% dps survivability. I would like to make healing more in-depth with choices rather than timing heals by spamming them. What if you could combo your heals to react in certain situations and reap rewards on how you combo’d those heals? I personally think healing should be more dynamic and the other aspects could be more linear in a sense.
Comments
I think a healer should be able to defend itself and be a capable member of a group, more like a combat medic than a doctor.
A character that heals and rezes when needed, which shouldn't be all the time and not while the character is being hit either and is fighting the rest of the time.
So I don't think the continously heal while fighting tactic should be viable or needed, healers should be combat characters that can heal incase they or their team members get hurt, not a character that heals over and over to keep team members alive under a constant barrage of damage and without which the group falls apart.
Don't you worry little buddy. You're dealing with a man of honor. However, honor requires a higher percentage of profit
IN the end, its not as much about desiging the healer class as it is about designing how much healing is needed. Using WoW as an example, healing was so important in every encounter that no matter what class...they all had to be primary healers. Worse, they were expected to be primary healers. Everyone always got upset at some druid who wanted to DPS ...like somehow that player had broken one of the 10 MMO commandments or something. Only when there was an abundance of healers (which didnt occur very often) could a healer have some diversity and do something else. I worry that the majority of players feel if there is a class with the ability to heal ...that class MUST heal above all else.
Torrential: DAOC (Pendragon)
Awned: World of Warcraft (Lothar)
Torren: Warhammer Online (Praag)
The % you outlined seems decent, a good mech could be to allow them more solo DPS at the cost of self healing and then grouped diminish their DPS and allow greater healing.
PIRATE LORDS
I don't think healer should exist at all as another person to bring with you while you are fighting.
The act of a person refilling blood while another spills it during a fight is silly to me and breaks immersion in a game.
I think that combat medicine should be taken care of with bandages, first aid kits, shots, pain potions/pills, etc. Every class should have some medicine proficiency and some could be more proficient as chosen skill.
Doctors/Healers/Medics should be a crafting profession that creates first aid items to sell or administers them prior to a fight or right after a fight. Never during a fight.
I see what your saying here, but I must ask, did you even read the first paragraph?
I like the healing in Dungeons and Dragons. I do not think DnD translates well into real time play like a lot games have tried to do though. I would prefer the developers just take some from DnD classes more than they do. Anyone play a Cleric in DnD pen and paper? It is a lot of fun.
Interesting. Are you speaking of a game design where the strategy comes in to play with avoidance tactics rather than heal tactics? I would enjoy more of that type of play as well. Well timed blocks, short lasting elemental resistance spells, group synergy spells etc. Would be interesting if a developer could make this work. It would have to be done right or the combat would just become a dps fest. I would still like to see healing required as well but maybe if a group is really on the ball and perform well with avoidance it would be less required?
I think they should be healers that rely on others to kill for them, while those who kill rely on them to keep them alive.
That way it makes grouping more of a necessity, tired of these shit solo based clones the mmo market has been pumping out lately.
I enjoy the games you speak of as well but I am afraid we are low in numbers that want one of these games. : ( If they did a force grouping game today, after playing Warhammer I have seen a structure that would make this design work. In Warhammer they have public quest that anyone that strolls by can take part in. I would like to see a pure PvE game with force grouping take complete advantage of this concept with multiple group quest setup through all zones at all levels. People would know exactly where to go with indications of the map where groups meet up and complete these public quest.
I doubt anyone but you, I and a maybe a couple thousand others would go for this design. If it happened I would love it though and subscribe. : D
Well apart from the MANY different designs for a healer,i strongly feel the yshoudl have VERY little DPS.I also feel they should be wearing very weak armour not this plated armour i see in many of the MMOS.I think the healers shoudld also have beneficial buffs but no enfeebs.I liked the idea that FFXI gave healers the teleports because if yo uare going to take away 50% of the other gameplay from them,you need to give them something back that is unique to the other classes/jobs.
This is why the class system,if done right is so important to MMOS.It gives each class a deffinite role, a set place in the game and a true identity for each player.
Depending on the depth of other classes and how many different classes a game has,would determine how many other abilities or spells the healer should have.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
I am with you Wizardry. : ) I wish I would have played Final Fantasy when it was new. I did play EQ and I liked each class being unique in what they offer the group. It wasn't perfect but it sure was immersive. : ) Unfortunately you can't go back to older MMOs and play them. They always end up imploding after many expansions. We have none of these MMOs left that you speak of. I haven't looked into Final Fantasy but I am sure it imploded somewhere along the way already as well like EQ did.
I have yet to see a game where full-time support classes are popular. Few people are happy to be the guys in the back making sure the guys in the front can make all the baddies dead.
So I don't personally think a new MMO should have the trinity model and require full-time healers, or full-time tanks for that matter. I like the way Diablo did it best, actually. You had a lot of various synergies between the classes that impacted how you played, but you never got stuck going 'Well, we've got a good party going, but we still need a tank/healer'
The "Monk" class from Guild Wars is what every healer should be. Its the only game ive played where the healer is popular because its fun.
You crank out a Sh_t load of healing, buffs and HoTs. Depending on how you spec lets you do some better than others. The class also has a spec that instead of healing damage you PREVENT it outright which is genius.
Preventing damage is amazing, especially when people try to zerg the healer only to be cut down by his team-mates.
The monk is also able to do some dps. If specced dps you can still heal very well but now you can do some decent nuke damage that wont kill someone, but enough to make them want to run away.
Alas Guild Wars is old and dated and considered by some not a true MMO (which it isnt), lacks meaniful pve and wont be played by quite a few. The MONK still sets a precedent on what other Healer classes should try to emulate
Like in Vanguard: Saga of Heroes.
There healers rock - they are among the best solists, and they really have to be actively played, not just stand in the background and sit down to regenerate mana (in fact, sitting down in Vanguard is possible, but has no effect at all on mana regeneration or anything else).
Healers should not exist at all in a next gen MMO; they are a thing of the past, along with tanks and other designations. No one wants to play as someone's heal-bitch, sitting in the back of the room playing Whac-A-Mole with healthbars.
If you're going to have healing/damage negation in a game, the key is to give every class (or player if the game has no classes) access to certain abilities, or make it something born from the dynamics and synergies of group makeup. Someone brought up Diablo which is a good example of this.
i agree with this. not just sitting around in corner and heal everyhting watching only health bars instead of enjoying whats happening around you
WoW killed all other class based games for me because they got the classes so right that other games I play you you really notice how good of a job Blizzard did with WoW. I mean play WAR and most of their classes are watered down two sides o the same coin and they just arn't any fun and nore is the combat. However in WoW you can play 3 different roles, the classes are so diverse and really fun to play. I love how they said why have 4 priests in a archetype? Just have one priest and give that priest all the abilities other priests would have split over 4 types. Then you have all the hybrids that can heal abit too and I dunno it's hard to explain but normally I can't find a class I like in an mmorpg but in WoW i found every class fun to play.
I think healers should have to actively except the damage and react before groupmembers take it, and be able to help group with some debuffs when healing isn't needed. Just watching the health bars isn't fun, but having to watch the battle and estimate when you can debuff and dps a bit, or having react when mage is about to cast huge AoE and take aggro, is fun.
I think the biggest problem with healers isn't their dps, armor, or other abilities, but the problem is HOW they heal. Staring at a list of health bars playing whack-a-mole with targeted heal spells is an awful idea. Its not only boring, but its immersion breaking as well. Would you rather be staring at a list of health bars or throwing fireballs at the bad guys?
The solution is to get the healer's focus back in the game world and away from the interface. This can be done with AOE and positional heals more like they had in Tabula Rasa. Keep the health bars on the players instead of the interface. To do this there would have to be the proper balance in healing as it would definitely be slower and less accurate, but at the same time it would keep the player immersed in the game world rather than the interface.
If game designers still insist on using the tired old tank-dps-healer model, this is what they should think about when they design a game. I enjoy having healing abilities when I play solo but I hate group healing. I find it extremely boring spending the entire dungeon looking at health bars casting heals whenever they are needed. If it was up to me I'd make everybody responsible for their own healing and design group/raid encounters to facilitate this. Lets face it, it's far easier to find groups that are all DPS rather than having to find a tank and/or healer.
Please tell me how WoW's classes are superior to others? Because I simply don't see it at all. I don't want to write a novel of my rant about how WoW's classes are badly designed but I'd just like your answer here...
I agree with you and the AoE healing idea does seem feasible. But I think I have a better idea. Like I said in the OP, what if heals can combo each other? Lets say that heals will combo off the type of healing school it was placed beforehand. Example: you cast a holy heal, it will heal what ever the healing spell is, then you cast a water type of heal. Lets say that the water heal will allow that holy heal to use its full ability and then turn that holy heal into a HoT. Maybe a healer would combo a holy + water heal for long term battles. Maybe a healer would cast a holy heal + forest heal because when the forest heal is reactant with the holy, that forest heal will cost no mana and as a healer your running out of mana. I really think this system here will attract players to try a healer because you have many choices of what to do on many diverse situations. It's like instead of DPS'n you are HPS'n (Healing per second). Lol, yeah that was bad hah.
Healers should have a huge upside when soloing, either dps or some other game mechanic, and heal / buff bots for parties. They just need to be designed so that its impossible to continuously use both aspects at the same time while in a party. The only 2 games that I have played and have the healer role right is Rappelz and FFXI.
If game designers still insist on using the tired old tank-dps-healer model, this is what they should think about when they design a game. I enjoy having healing abilities when I play solo but I hate group healing. I find it extremely boring spending the entire dungeon looking at health bars casting heals whenever they are needed. If it was up to me I'd make everybody responsible for their own healing and design group/raid encounters to facilitate this. Lets face it, it's far easier to find groups that are all DPS rather than having to find a tank and/or healer.
For a class based system, you wont find designers shying away from the trinity. Why? Because if they make something different, its a large risk, it could bomb very easily. I think for now, until someone does that that risk and is successful, all designers can do is perfect those roles and make them more fun and interesting.
Vanguard did it perfectly. 4 Healer Classes with distinct differences, all capable of doing regular soloing etc., and all interesting to play.
The era of DPS-class favoritism must end.