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Giving The Healer Their Due - A Look At One Of The Major Roles In Keeping Your MMO Group Alive
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Giving The Healer Their Due - A Look At One Of The Major Roles In Keeping Your MMO Group Alive
Something has been mulling around in my mind since late March - and that's how little love healers tend to get compared the ire they draw if a group wipes. Players should be more eager to "toss a proverbial coin" to their healers, to steal a still popular meme, than they currently are.
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I do miss healers, sometimes, then I look back at the screen caps from that time in GW1 and say, yeah, totally not worth it.
This article strikes home with me, because of how little respect many of us got.
Sure, we could literally walk into any content and get an instant invite. Que for a raid, and just get accepted, and we didn't need to link gear like DPS players, or cite stats like a Tank, and for the most part, as long as we kept people alive, no one cared what we did.
But.. if the raid or dungeon failed, no one pissed on the DPS or the Tank, they all pissed on the healer. Equally so, if we won.. no one praised the healer. In fact the smoother the run less we were acknowledged at all, but ideally, our job was to make the run go smoothly.
This was very prevalent in DDO, where I ended up playing mainly a Tank, now in DDO, since we could literally make almost anything we wanted if we picked the right class combos and had the right gear, so I mained a self healing/buffing tank that didn't need a healer to stay alive.
I really feel in love with the idea of self sufficiency in game from there on out. The idea of roles like Healer, DPS, Tank, seemed so limited, very lacking in design and ability. Why not play characters that can DPS and do other things. My DPS Thief, had maxed out UMD in DDO, so I could use scrolls to cast pretty much any spell needed, from a Lighting Bolt to a Raise Dead, and I kept a stock of various scrolls on hand just for those situations.
Then I played GW2, and it was like "Oh yah, this is way MMO's should be!" we could all heal, cover our own buffs, and on top of that, buff and heal each other. This was brilliance and beautiful game design.
... lo and behold.. everyone crying about needing roles.
like every step forward a game company tries to make, players seek to push them back 2.
(A good example is I was tanking a boss with a cleave mechanic and a moronic DPS walked right infront of the boss and was one-shotted by the cleave. The boss was facing the corner of a room with only me there, yet that DPS immediately started yelling "Hold the fucking aggro!" when he died. That's the level of stupidity tanks get to deal with on the other side of the coin.)
EQ1, EQ2, SWG, SWTOR, GW, GW2 CoH, CoV, FFXI, WoW, CO, War,TSW and a slew of free trials and beta tests
OMG I LOVE YOU!!! My first MMO was AoC and I played all the healers exclusively. I miss that game so much. I play healers in MMOs exclusively if they have them in the game if not then I simply pass on that game...I am so glad to have found someone who played AoC as well
Its a lot more annoying playing as tank, people not respecting aggro and basically acting like total shitheads. I felt like strangling melee dps for playing like idiots and they made tanking a living hell.
This is why rpg elements in a shooter are a joke.
If you tried to hold healing on a tank non stop,you would draw aggro and as a healer in a well designed game you would die quickly.One of the reasons i also didn't like the EQ idea of giving a healer class plate.
Also i can totally relate to the "understanding aggro"part.I don't often like to tank but i have on many occasions and nothing bothered me more than seeing the mob running around all over the place because different players were drawing hate.
I am going to put this out there right now,it is almost NEVER the tanks fault,short of making a vital mistake of course.No player can say stupid things like "your a lousy tank,you can't hold hate".
There are a LOT of layers to the problem in mmorpg game design but one is GEAR grinding,it takes the player thinking out of the game.You should NEVER be able to free willy it with dps,the design should be that players have to think and take control of their actions and not just spam dps to show off with.Like i said several layers i can't write down everyone of them but an example would be if your going to use some spike dmg then you should be timing it with the Tanks best hate control ability.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
I mean no dis to you or your raid group or leading abilities, in fact I am not even sure what game you are referring to, but in the few games I did raid in, mainly EQ and DDO, I know this, if healers were not an absolute necessity for success, no one would wait on them, just like no one waits on the DPS to show up.
We would all take whatever we have, whatever that may be, and just go.
And, I am sure, we both know after many years of MMO playing, That does not work.
That is also why my raid guild in DDO required all senior members to have a raid ready cleric, so that we would never need to wait for one.
Ironically, none of us were required to make a raid ready DPS.
So.. yah.. I mean.. I think we both know that it is the healers that make the raids possible at all, so it does them a disservice to say they have the least impact.
in EQ, you didn't GO in a dungeon unless you had SOME kind of healer... be it a cleric, a druid, or a shaman... it was a bit of a toss up in DDO, but that's just because as the game aged, the prevalence of being self sufficient thru multi-classing, UMD, scrolls, wands, potions, and even hirelings cut down or eliminate the need for a dedicated "healer" for day to day dungeon running, but some groups, and most raids, still waited for a dedicated healing able class to join before entering... and the only time a raid was attempted without a "healer" class, there was either some alternate (clerics and favored souls were the healing classes in DDO, but a properly specced and equipped bard could make a surprisingly good healer in a pinch... but because it was a bit rare, no one usually expected a bard to provide good heals a la a cleric/fvs), or you were EXPECTED to be completely self sufficient to the point that you, even as a non healer, could possibly even heal someone else.
for example... i participated in 3 different "all rogue" shroud raids. led one of them. rogues get UMD as a class skill, so we all healed ourselves and each other through the tough fights using potions, wands, and scrolls.
tank anxiety IS a thing... but healers get the most hate when they suck. you'll let a tank into your raid again, you just won't let him tank, you have someone else tank... but you blacklist a healer who can't or won't do at least a passable job of keeping the group alive.
i had a tank and a DPS in EQ. i had a tank, 2 healers, DPS, and support classes in DDO. i ended up making a "healer" (a druid) when they introduced raids in GW2. then i decided that HoT, and raids in GW2 in general, sucked and were a really bad decision on anet's part to make, and respecced her into a tanky af condi-regen ranger to piss people off in WvW with.
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?”
― CD PROJEKT RED
If you are successful the tank and dps get all the praise for doing a good job, but if things go wrong the healer will always get the blame.
In solo, I appreciated classes with the ability to heal themselves, with the potential to help out team members if they had to be in a group. (FFXI had Dancer, and I was hoping for a chemist, since I NEVER play mages - I have a thing against magic - but they never made that classic class.)
The whole tank/dps/healer thing was annoying from the start for me, so if an MMO enforces that style of play, you probably won't see me playing it. The only reason I played FFXI was because it was a Final Fantasy game. Games that have advanced from that horrible system are what I look for.
The strict party role system may have worked when MMOs had huge populations and guilds had a stranglehold on your prospects for getting any good gear worth having... forcing people into playing roles they hated, or waiting for HOURS (literal hours) to just find a party to go get experience... not even raiding... just getting experience... yeah, those were the dark ages of MMOs in my opinion, and if a game still holds to that system, it's stuck in the dark ages.
Forcing people to play a role they hate, just because it's the only way to play with others (can't find a group as a damage dealer), leads to the game becoming more of a job, and builds resentment in players against the game company/devs, and if other players are forcing them into the role from a guild, it builds resentment between players who should just be playing to have fun, not work a 2nd job.
I noped out of that whole situation a long time ago. I feel sorry for tanks and healers.
I have always enjoyed healing type classes, my army of Druids and Clerics in EQ, and a Legion of Clerics mixes in DDO are testament to this. I like the art of healing and augmenting the group. It is something I find fun (with the right group of course)
I am sure people who play Tanks want to play that bunker, that ability to pull agro, and control mobs, and allow their team to take things down. This is what they enjoy.
Those players make the best tanks and healers in any game. They are also the same people that when they go to new game, look for how to build their playstyle, now, in DDO, I spent a lot of time building Cleric Tanks, if you are not sure what that is, it is when you mix Cleric with other classes to give them a huge boost to their ability to withstand damage and control agro, often it's a mix of Monk and Fighter with the cleric levels, which makes for a durable near unkillable bunker tank. But, they are of course, very skill and gear dependent. The gear being a huge thing in DDO, so that really made or broke your build.
Anyway, so these players then find a new game like GW2, that is all about self sufficiency, but they are going to build what they know best. What they enjoyed in their other previous games. Like for example, when I moved from EQ to DaoC, the Healing class for Alibon was close enough to a cleric that it felt like an EQ cleric, but the way healing worked was just off enough that it screwed me up because I had 6 years of memory muscle playing a cleric in EQ. I had to move off to Hibernia, where the healers were different enough that I could learn a whole new method.
Anyway, it is not that people do not like playing Tanks and Healer, the real problem is a huge subset of other players that just want to kill shit, and expect the Clerics and Tanks to enable them to be sloppy and stupid about it.
I heal not because it's easier to find groups but because I enjoy stepping back and playing more strategically, reacting to situations and making choices as needed.
I actually prefer to do it in chaotic PvP fights where I'm healing my group mates but also anyone near me who needs it. That's much more unpredictable and fun. PvE that feels like those PvP fights in open world events is where development brain power should be going. Things that do justice to the massively multiplayer part of MMOs.
I've grown to intensely dislike the same-every-time choreography of small group instances or raids. That's just boring and a sad state of affairs when that's what anyone these days thinks about when they think of healing.
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?”
― CD PROJEKT RED
Remember reading a story from Everquest how Cleric(main healer) had turned down a raid and it got cancelled and they scorned the poor guy on their guild forums for not being there, he had some real life issues to deal with, like you know having kids and such, not to mention the raid was only for a dps the cleric would get nothing but stress out of it. So in EQ many clerics did burn out because of the constant demand on them always being there, while they where not a class that could solo to gain some xp on the side or grind AA but when they needed help, no one was around.
I have as a cleric myself been in groups back in the day in Everquest when Planes of power expansion was new, and we had an SK(shadow knight) tank in Plane of nightmare, i was like 50-51 and i had to spam heal the guy so i ran out of mana pretty much on each mob, the tank was just not cutting it, but did he get the blame? nope of course not it was me being a bad healer, i felt good that i kept the guy alive.