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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botrytis

I remember in the first months that GW1 was out, there was a healer protest at Thunderhead Keep because people just didn't get how crucial Healers were to that mission nor how ridiculous other players were. One instance, one warrior, by being so far away from me, that no healing was possible (and yet they would say, 'Kick the Healer, I died').

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.

srbenga23

Ive been a healer since 1999 and say what, im the one who decides who win or who loses, i'm the difference, i'm the enemies disadvantage, i'm the ruler, if u suck alot, my skills will make you better, if you are good, i'll make u a god. That's how stuff works.

Ungood

Been playing healer roles since EQ, way back in the day. 

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.

Scot

It would have been nice if the article had referenced real MMOs about healers more, but I always like an article about classes. The one thing missed though, the elephant in the room really, is that healers are the class that has been the most hit by the changes in more modern MMOs. They often cannot be found as a class as every class has healing abilities. I think the raw deal healers got with arcade style combat and new versions of tab targeting is worse even than what happened to tanks.

cameltosis

I'm a former guild leader and raid leader and I've played most roles at endgame.

In my experience, healers have the least impact on the outcome of a fight. They are also pretty easy to play (usually). Controversial I know, but let me explain.

In a typical group fight, the healer basically doesn't interact with the fight or the environment at all. They stand in a predetermined spot away from AoE, then look at health bars and keep people alive.

Most healing classes have less than 50% of their skills dedicated towards healing (they need some damaging skills for soloing ofc), so in a group fight they simply don't have to worry about most of their capabilities, just the healing ones.

In my experience, the difference between a great healer and a crap healer is the number of mistakes the rest of the group / raid can make. With a truly amazing healer, everyone else can make more mistakes, and with a crap healer, everyone else needs to be perfect. But, the outcome of the fight is still firmly in the hands of everyone else and not the healer.

This is just generalities ofc. Some games do better at designing and implementing healers than others, and some do better at designing content to make healers more engaging.

Po_gg

xD_Gaming said:

I like healing , Templest of Set, Bear Shaman , Priest of Mitra , Rune Keeper, Minstrel , but for some reason when I play L2, I want to tank, no idea why. 

My selected role is healer (even though the new forum engine doesn't display it under your name...) and I too have all those classes on my roster. 

AoC and LotRO are great games for healers....

I preferred the original, pre-Orion minstrel more, it was a real healer in the "traditional MMORPG" sense, the current minstrel is a dps powerhouse, with heals too.

As for the topic, HL covered the healer lifestyle in the past (he was present on the site for a while) https://youtu.be/2DxS7eT_ky4 

Rule of thumb, it's YOUR fault. Every time. 

WBadger

Ungood said:

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.

Wrong.  Tanks get shat on just as much as a healer.  There's a reason Tankxiety exists as a MMO thing.  If you're playing a role with responsibilities, you are just as likely to have people to jump down your throat.  And nobody pisses on the DPS because typically it's the DPS pissing on everyone else.  Those with the least responsibilities will see themselves as the least reason for why something failed.  Even if it's some dickhole DPS who is aggroing everything and killing himself.   The more players their were in a game that relied on the trinity, the more likely that anybody in a support role is going to get the blame for anything that went wrong.

(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.)

ShankTheTank

I’m just going to put this here >> https://clips.twitch.tv/TiredStylishMangoLitFam

Po_gg

Nyctelios said:

...And more often than not people think a healer is able to fully restore your HP bar instantly so they just sit there eating damage.

Different approaches and design mindsets... Hp restore could be valid if the game is built with that mindset. Though you too said "In certain games", and not as general...

I agree it can taint some players. When Neverwinter launched it was kinda fun to watch how reckless dps died left and right - because its design had a different approach, where DC (Cleric) was only there to help, not to save. If you stood in the red circle, you died, that's why had every class a dodge (or mitigate) skill.

The traditional games have a different approach, where health restore is necessary, or in many cases even crucial.

Agree on the support part, traditionally healing was just a sub-type of support, among many others, buffer/debuffer, cleanse, crowd control, etc.

Over time those were faded out, and now healing is en route to extinction, dps zerging is the modern way sadly...

Amathe

There sre four people I try not to anger. My boss, my wife, my mom, and my group's healer.

silentfury007

razor247 said:

An mmo article that references a non mmo game in a totally unrelated article to actual mmo game play of a group. Wow grats on the advertisement witcher...

.............. what?

nycplayboy78

xD_Gaming said:

I like healing , Templest of Set, Bear Shaman , Priest of Mitra , Rune Keeper, Minstrel , but for some reason when I play L2, I want to tank, no idea why.



Age of Conan I was pretty good healer in Mini games, but 1vs1 I usually lost if the player had tier 2 pvp gear.

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

Shaigh

I got a lot of appreciation as a healer, people wanting me to join their groups, people giving me mana potions and if I could keep people alive even if people got us adds I definitely got positive feedbacks.

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.

Ungood

WBadger said:

Ungood said:

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.

Wrong.  Tanks get shat on just as much as a healer.  There's a reason Tankxiety exists as a MMO thing.  If you're playing a role with responsibilities, you are just as likely to have people to jump down your throat.  And nobody pisses on the DPS because typically it's the DPS pissing on everyone else.  Those with the least responsibilities will see themselves as the least reason for why something failed.  Even if it's some dickhole DPS who is aggroing everything and killing himself.   The more players their were in a game that relied on the trinity, the more likely that anybody in a support role is going to get the blame for anything that went wrong.

(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.)

Yah.. but if it took two hits, they would have screamed "Fucking heal me!"

Wizardry

@poster above ...

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.

Ungood

cameltosis said:

I'm a former guild leader and raid leader and I've played most roles at endgame.

In my experience, healers have the least impact on the outcome of a fight. They are also pretty easy to play (usually). Controversial I know, but let me explain.

In a typical group fight, the healer basically doesn't interact with the fight or the environment at all. They stand in a predetermined spot away from AoE, then look at health bars and keep people alive.

Most healing classes have less than 50% of their skills dedicated towards healing (they need some damaging skills for soloing ofc), so in a group fight they simply don't have to worry about most of their capabilities, just the healing ones.

In my experience, the difference between a great healer and a crap healer is the number of mistakes the rest of the group / raid can make. With a truly amazing healer, everyone else can make more mistakes, and with a crap healer, everyone else needs to be perfect. But, the outcome of the fight is still firmly in the hands of everyone else and not the healer.

This is just generalities ofc. Some games do better at designing and implementing healers than others, and some do better at designing content to make healers more engaging.

We will disagree, and I am sure as a fellow raider, you know why we disagree.

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.

katzklaw

healers seem to have a bit less of a role in daily grouping and playing situations in more modern games... but they were definitely a strong component in EQ and DDO, two of the games that, besides GW2, i've played the most of. 

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.

Iselin

If you like healing in MMOs (I do) you better learn quickly to be satisfied with knowing you did a good job without anyone else praising you because the DPS kittens and Leroy the tank don't have the mental capacity to appreciate your role

ickyspot

As a main support player in mmos its quite interesting to play healer. Most of the time it seems to be a thankless job especially when dds and tanks seem to pat each other on the back for a job well done. Don't forget your healers.

evolgrinz

Life as a healer in short.

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.

Po_gg

xD_Gaming said:

they did that imho because Minstrels were getting owned by "creeps". So they juiced them up for the smaller Freep groups against the larger creep group.

I believe the dps powerhouse part was just a consequence of the trait trees, the initial stat revamp, and the minor tweaks over the years, but mainly I wasn't pointing at it - I admit my usage of "current minstrel" wasn't the most precise...

Orion mini, we used to use that term as a separator and it refers back to Isengard. So when I said "current minstrel" I actually meant the last 9 years of minstrel   which is indeed a dps powerhouse in the recent few years.

And I don't remember the change was backed up with creep issues, actually I think it never was backed up with anything... maybe Orion simply liked the warden's style, who knows?

A quick history recap: pre-Orion, the first 4 years of minstrel was a conditional or reaction-based class, similar to guard/hunter/captain's block/parry/enemy defeat responses. Through that could you build up your more powerful moves. It was slower, needed more attention, and was a bit more difficult to play, so it was the least played class for a while.

(add to that it was a "pure" healer, with only the bare minimum of solo capabilities)

But those who've played, loved it.

Then with Moria arrived the rune-keeper (and the warden). More action-based healer, more "fun to play" (for some, at least), and also a full dps class as well, two bundled in one. Great for solo, can heal too, but if there's a healer in the fellowship already, it can compete for the top dps spot instead.

Minstrel was still a better healer and necessary for endgame, but its numbers dwindled even more. It was a similar era Ungood mentioned above in regards of EQ:

Ungood said:

Sure, we could literally walk into any content and get an instant invite. Que for a raid, and just get accepted,

Then Isengard has risen, and with it Orion changed the minstrel into the warden-like gameplay it has today. 3 ballads working as the 3 warden gambits, quick toggles closed with a "finisher", switching it to the action side instead of reaction.

(also took away the medium armour option, but compensated it with higher dps)

So, when you see complaints about the "new" minstrel it ain't about the numbers (higher heals and damage), but about the class itself. That revamp changed entirely how the class was played and behaved, the post-Orion mini feels like an entirely new class.

(but it was so long ago, to be honest I had to dig up old screenshots about the skills, etc.)

Ayin

I've almost always played entirely solo, unless there was content in an MMO that required a group. In those cases, I only played with a friend and their friends.

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.

Ungood

Ayin said:

I've almost always played entirely solo, unless there was content in an MMO that required a group. In those cases, I only played with a friend and their friends.

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.

The thing is, a lot of people who play tanks and healers.. LIKE to play Tanks and Healers. That is where their mind is at and what they enjoy doing.

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.

Iselin

Ayin said:

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.

The problem is in the formulaic group play style that has slowly become virtually the only kind of grouping in themepark MMO PvE since anything else is designed to be soloed.

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.

Sweede

Yeah being a healer is a not always, as in most of the time very ungrateful.
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.