MMOs would be far better without a dedicated healer role. Forcing a group of players to play a minigame of keeping green bars topped off while occasionally looking at the actual game requires concessions to be made to actually get people to do it, such as dumbing down the role or otherwise making it easy for some of the worst players in the game to play it, just so they can technically do content that everyone else works harder to complete.
Even on the rare chance that someone's at the other end of the spectrum and incredibly good at the role, they simply create a bigger problem for themselves -- by being an amazing healer, you're covering up mistakes of the group and failing to make them improve. On the inverse, as players improve, the healer role is needed less and less, until eventually a DPS job with a heal could do the healer's job, while still contributing to the group in other ways.
The only way to go forward is to recognize that continuous healing in MMOs needs to go away, and the only heals that should exist are ones on medium-long cooldowns to patch up rare damage spikes, such as tankbusters, raidwide AoEs, or the rare occasional mistake. Groups should be able to fail by stressing the healer by making too many mistakes, rather than be able to be pulled out of the fire, so to speak, by someone acting as a baby sitter.
are you arguing that classes should have built in sustain mechanics? cause if so then i agree entirely and they should have a buffing and debuffing comeback as a role.
Andrew Wright
The best MMOs are the ones where healers don't always have a button to press to save someone, where they have to manage all their abilities like cooldowns instead of just mashing out back to back greater heal and then drinking a potion.
Jason Hall
>tanks make player stats remain as they are >healers make player stats go up >damage dealers make enemy stats go down
why are healers a problem again, what's intrinsically less interesting about that option?
Logan Phillips
Pvp games would be better without healers.
Grayson Nguyen
Cause that worked so well for GW2 right
Jackson Harris
MMOs are a fag genre and you need a fag role to appeal to the fags that play MMOs
Brayden Powell
Classes should have a varying amount of self-sustain. Generally, a class should be balanced based on its damage output, durability, self-sustain, utility, and support capability. As a class increases in one aspect, the others must fall.
A class that leans very heavily on the support aspect might have a targeted or group heal, but it's not their entire function; instead, it's an aspect of the class, a reason one might be useful, but not an absolute requirement. Indeed, all classes would have enough sustain to keep themselves alive, and by having less sustain, you have less room for error. Thus, more supportive or sustaining classes are great in content where flawless execution is not certain.
Daniel Scott
Whatever you say Morello
Josiah Thompson
this, fuck fags and fuck healers
Blake Martin
How about this Make healer roles more realistic. As in you have to pay the healer for every heal.
Support need to be more than just green numbers on a screen. Shields, buffs, debuffs, crowd control options. Provide support with tools to destroy the enemy or raise up your party that doesnt rely on reacting to enemy damage
Jaxon Walker
you're just rattling off GW2 talking points and acting like you're a genius when you're a fucking idiot
Alexander Murphy
>Canadian Healer >heals are free but cooldowns are multiplied by 10
Cameron Brooks
>Mad healer detected
Ethan Richardson
I miss CoH's Controllers and (non-healing) Defenders.
John Davis
no. Dont fuck with the trinity instead of making healer constantly fill up bars make him throw buffs and debuffs, dps a little and only occasionally throwing some costly heals
Julian Fisher
Based fucking retards. Your shit theories have been tested in gw2 and they were complete fucking failures.
What MMOs need is more fucking roles that existed before wow came along and pruned everything.
Cooper Carter
what other roles? I assure you that pulling and crowd control never existed.
Bentley Watson
ill admit im not as knowledgeable on this topic as i could be can you gives me some example of roles WOW killed?
Luke Thomas
Dedicated support roles like traditional bards. Or Astrologician from ff14 before they pruned that shit into oblivion.
Cameron Parker
the reason they failed is cause gw2 is shit.
This is very doable in CoH,a MMO untouched by WoW faggotry.
My favorite healer of all time is Dancer from FFXI. That's how you make a proper healer.
Alexander Thompson
Redpill me on EQ Bards.
Alexander Jackson
The issue isn't about the roles, the issue is with the content, if you have a trinity system, and then a bunch of different flavors of each, but the content doesn't require anything but the most simple mechanics you get roles like rogue who don't get to use stealth during complex encounters, or druids that don't need to shapeshift, paladins that don't require to abuse their 5 health bars, warlocks that need to dot and fear a bunch of mobs etc. All you get is powercreep, next tier of content deals 30-50% more damage and you need to autismo min max the maximum avoidance to negate that damage, but all you are doing is relying on numerical additions and substractions and reductions to RNG so you have control over the fight, so you only alienate diverse roles even more and require everyone to specialize in mitigating the most damage possible, dealing the most damage possible, and healing the most damage possible and leaving no room for alternative strategies that allow diverse functionality to approach the encounter. Instead of bringing 20 fury warriors in BiS because they deal the most damage, have mechanics that can be circumvented if you have niche specs or classes that aren't optimal and have seemingly useless mechanics but can shine on those specific scenarios regardless of the power creeped content.
Christopher Sullivan
I always thought it was shit due to its PvP system, one of the more touted points of the game, being shit.
Christopher Gonzalez
>dude reinvent the wheel lmao
Andrew Price
fuck you i can do anything i want*: the official class * - kiteable zones only comes loaded with DoTs, auras, heals, mana regen, melee, ranged, highest move speed in the game and big fucking egos
Juan Morgan
nobody's going to play that shit, that's what wow proved
Jaxon Edwards
all heals should be heal over time. no instant bar filling. replace instant heals with barriers.
David Hernandez
Healing either has to be heavily gated or shouldn't exist in pvp. It always turns games into cancer when left unchecked
Easton Kelly
>Wow proved that no one's going to play a popular role by not letting anyone play it ? Okay
Aiden Gutierrez
I'm glad someone else out there realizes the current prevelance of the trinity is due to poor encounter design over anything else. No one cares about what your class can do if it doesn't help them clear the fight marginally faster, which means class DPS is king in any raid situation.
If an encounter was designed such that bringing one or two classes that could CC would make it easier, modern raiders would simply complain that the devs are forcing a meta and messing up their raid group by requiring someone to switch classes to effectively do it. Doesn't matter if it's WoW where that's an actual hardship or FFXIV where you can switch jobs at the click of a button and keep all of your gear. This is why the most deviation we can have in the game is the three roles, and everyone must be homogenized beyond that point to ensure "people can complete content with any group they make."
If we're going this route, just remove the need for any specific jobs, tune encounter design to work based on what you've brought. If a group brings nothing but DPS jobs, make the boss not hit very hard but have more HP and more avoid or die mechanics.
Brody Young
I played a Paladin in WoW because I enjoyed a class that could technically do anything on the fly, even if they weren't the best at it. Once TBC dropped though, gear got too specialized for that to be a thing, so I could no longer stand in as a tank in the middle of combat or cast more than two or three heals before running out of mana due to the Illumination nerf from 100% mana returned on crits to 60%.
Gavin Sanchez
Holy Trinity really did kill any potential MMOs had.
Wyatt Evans
In an age where warrior was literally >autoattack >kick >taunt Bard had songs. Songs last 18 seconds and have a 3 second cast time. If you simply hit the spell gem and let it go, you'll sing forever, but by casting the song and canceling it then singing a different song you can have 3 effects going at a time. Bards can dual wield and wear plate armor. They can also use instruments to enhance their songs. Bard songs cover nearly every effect in the game. Their mana bar is used for their charm and mesmerize songs. They get a new song every level. Probably the most iconic bard song is Selo's Accelerando, which makes you run at sanic speeds at high levels (and with a good drum). In addition to all that, bards have some ability in Tracking (basically lets you find monsters in the zone) and lockpicking. One thing bards became famous for (with better computers) is swarm kiting. Bards have a zero mana cost AOE DoT and can run fast. They'd gather up massive swarms of enemies -I'm talking like everything in the zone - and because monsters in EQ never leash, they could slowly run in a circle while alternating between their speed song and DoT to kill 50+ mobs at the same time and level insanely quickly. Despite all this, Enchanter is by far the more based and redpilled class.
Thomas Ross
Healers should just have low damage and little in the way of survivability or sustain. Also healers should just be healers. They don't need a bunch of support abilities that could go to create more interesting dedicated support classes.
Carson Davis
OP literally said what he argued for instead. Heals should exist but be incredibly limited, 'sustain' shouldn't be a thing. The ideal design is to have the game designed on durability rather than infinite heal sustainability. A warrior should gradually get drained over prolonged combat, and heals should only provide limited amounts, and never be able to top health off indefinitely.
Jayden Foster
or what if the other way around - the healer and the support are the same class? all heals instead cause a variety of buffs if the target doesn't need healing or allow the target to inflict debuffs on the healer's behalf
I think "healers" or, more broardly, dedicated supports, are pretty much unavoidable in a game that offers a sufficient degree of character customization. After all, that's the nature of min/maxing: if every player foregoes support abilities after picking the economical low-hanging fruit, they get more mileage out by stacking combat factors on top of each other. A "tank" who already has high survivability and tools to control enemies gets more effective health out of %-based damage mitigation, say, than a player who hasn't invested their stat budget on more health. Unless the customization options of the game are highly limited, which I think would be a strike against the game, you're going to get more total supporting power by spending the global support-ability budget of the group on one player. And healing, I think, is more involved than simply being a buffing/CC machine, so healer builds shouldn't be discouraged in favor of pure utility supports.
Dominic Jenkins
That just further establishes healers as a necessary and irreplaceable part of any fight. They should just be another class.
Xavier Parker
>go into velks as enchanter >root and charm a mob >deal 5x the dps of any other class from this alone
Now, this sort of reasoning doesn't apply to games that have inherently very restrictive specialization systems if they have specialization systems at all. For that I'd just point out that your premise is faulty.
Firstly, there ARE people who like healing or have no preference against it and removing the role makes the game worse for them. Note that games can be balanced such that content requires a similar ratio of healers as there are players who like to heal.
Secondly, when you are doing content that could be considered "relevant", healer ISN'T a baby sitter role that allows retards to stand in fire. For that not to be the case would be analogous to DPS requirements being so low a tank (and healer) could handle them on their own. Does that mean damage-dealer role shouldn't exist? Indeed, cutting a healer is the single greatest optimization to party's damage you could possibly do, so capable healers are a lynchpin to any encounter that has higher demands of throughput. Hardly a role where you automatically place your lowest individual skill players to.
Jason Perez
My bruddah >get bored of soloing, join a group >charm rogue mob to do more dps than the entire rest of the group combined >keeping huge pulls completely locked down >buffing everyone in the party >even covering slows for the lazy fag shaman >get bored and leave because the exp is worse than soloing Why is Karnor's such shit exp
Angel Nelson
How to fix the overreliance on healers in MMOs: Taking excessive damage lowers how much of your health can be fully recovered, like in Dragon's Dogma. Only rests/potions can recover this damaged maximum health.
>shit guys, gotta put the raid on hold for an hour, the tank needs to rest up his max HP That sounds horrifying.
Isaiah Sanders
and then you run out of mana
Aaron Hall
if I'm covering slows I just downrank. Mez is only 20 mana since you use the level 4 spell on everything. I think Tash caps out at like 30 mana as well.
Liam Wood
Obviously you can't simply slap this design into existing MMOs, they're too specialized in holy trinity, which has a backbone relying on constant healing. A good MMO would design the raids as a battle of attrition, which would be more true to the name 'raid'. It's kind of silly how holy trinity raids are designed as 95% filler that doesn't matter and 5% hair-pulling bossfights where retards who don't understand the arbitrary mechanics throw the entire raid for everyone.
that'd be kinda cool if it was designed for you to set up camp during raids. Make it sort of like an adventure, a dedicated effort to achieve something rather than a 1-3 hour instance. Imagine if WoW made you actually set up siege camps for the server events rather than have everyone dogpile into the area and rush to kill x enemies in a short timeframe.
Colton Allen
>It's kind of silly how holy trinity raids are designed as 95% filler that doesn't matter and 5% hair-pulling bossfights your ratio is way out of whack for since about as far back as cata, if you're referring to WoW nu-wow raids are nothing but bossfights and maybe one or two sprinklings of trash sometimes
Anthony Martinez
Well that's good. At least they're focusing on the better parts of the holy trinity now, when I still played MMOs I always hated how pointless everything in between bosses were.
Charles Green
Well, it doesn't really work with legacy WoW either where trash actually is a relevant part of the game. In vanilla/TBC content trash in 5-mans is usually the more involved bit and this is sometimes the case for raids as well (e.g. Void Reaver). Certainly, it's not a pushover that might as well not exist but somewhat in line with the challenge presented by most bosses. It's really just Wrath where trash becomes something you chainpull without having to worry about their abilities (then again, all T7 and T9 bosses are basically irrelevant as well).
Connor Jenkins
The issue with trash that's a threat is that all it does is slow progress down. You never got wiped by a trash pull unless you attacked a bad target and pulled way more than you could handle, or a fleeing enemy pulled a new group before you were ready. With the Holy Trinity there is no attrition so it really is just a waste of time. Holy Trinity is geared for boss rushes and not really meant for traditional dungeons.
Caleb Carter
I know older RPGs had the idea that "trash" (Random encounters) were there to drain your resources such as MP or spells per day for the vancian systems and make it difficult to complete a dungeon because of that. Basically, the bosses were easier throughout, and the big challenge was reaching them with most of your party intact and in good enough shape to complete them.
I doubt you could adapt any modern MMO to do that (Though Baldesien Arsenal in XIV was kind of that way since dead people couldn't be resurrected by traditional means inside the instance), but it might be pretty neat for a newer MMO to try the concept again (No wounds heal out of combat except with a limited amount of consumables, damage in fights is low but requires MP to heal, MP doesn't regenerate on its own).
Michael Moore
See GW2. It was a fucking disaster.
Ayden Hernandez
this is why FFXI was such a good MMO. It perfected healer/off-healer/support roles in a party or alliance. White Mage was the big daddy healer but didn't have much staying power. Need the tank to go from 100hp back up to 1700hp in one spell? WHM. Need debuffs removed? WHM. Need 40hp/tick regen? WHM. But it was less effective in non-endgame/boss situations where you're fighting say, never-ending series of weaker mobs in exp, farming stuff with a couple of people or doing missions, because it needed to stop and rest.
This is where off-healer jobs came along in XI. Red mage and Scholar in particular. Even Summoner, Bard, Dancer or Puppetmaster in a pinch. They couldn't do as big heals as White mage and couldn't remove debuffs as effectively but their various abilities let them keep healing and healing and healing with quick n easy 300hp heals over and over without hardly ever needing to take a break. They also generally had debuffs they could use on the target to indirectly heal or mitigate damage the party took, either by Bard halving enemy attack speed, Red Mage having tier 2 slow/blind/paralyze etc etc.
Playing any healer, off-healer or support in XI actually required skill because the game has long cooldowns and high MP costs compared to most other MMOs. In easy WoW clones like Rift for example you could main heal a group in a raid by straight up spamming your spells every 2sec and never ever have to worry about running into issues. In XI, Cure 3 costs 46 mana and only heals 200-300hp (depending on gear and skills). You'll likely only have 800mp. That means you can only fill the tank's HP bar maybe twice before you're out of MP. That's not even considering enmity issues, pulling hate from the tank.
tl;dr XI did it right, pity the game died though Mostly because XI didn't stick do Holy Trinity and required input from a large variety of classes to get anything done.
Justin Perry
Lootshoters are mmo without healer role Now kys
Jacob Carter
-Tank >(Good Tank) positioning the mobs and being quick on suprise adds, marking prio targets and order >(bad tanks) goes dps tank, no shield, not tabing between mobs, and not holding the ones the dps are hitting
-healer >(Good Healer) for the ones that like a fast and stressfull role, if its a good team, then its the easiest role, with some Hots here and there >bad healers, stop healing to do dps, letting the tank die, letting the non moron dps die to common swipes and dots, not manaing when they have down time, keeping the tank at 100%+ when they can quick mana for faster run
-DPS >(Good DPS) midmaxing numbers and rotation roll, far more then tank and healers >bad DPS, easierst roll to make up for, so 95% of the morons that cant play at an average level goes dps, cant watch where they are going, cant watch where they are standing, dont read tactics or boss next move. they also try to go tank or healer if they can so they get into groups faster
on a side note. i want there to be spesific rolls for the team, there is nothing more boring then everyone can do everything
The problem with healer and tank classes is that they're made by DPSfags that don't know how to make fun healers and tanks.
Brandon Thomas
Have you thanked your healers today?
Chase Stewart
This. DPSfags love the holy trinity because Healers and Tanks allow them to mindlessly spam their rotations. They're number junkies who get dopamine rushes from smashing buttons when they're off cooldown, no thought involved.
Ethan Howard
min maxers and raiding killed mmos
Julian Bailey
That's certainly the stereotype (there's a reason it's called "trash") and the stereotype didn't come out of nowhere, but I was talking specifically about vanilla and TBC and in this case I just can't agree.
For starters, pulling, managing stragglers etc. is a part of clearing the trash so a low-health mob running and pulling another pack is wiping to trash just as much as wiping to trash in any other way. However, more importantly, especially in TBC, trash is the part where you DO wipe. Hell, heroic trash mobs, even "small" ones rather than single pull minibosses, consistently hit harder than almost any of the bosses. For example, Bonechewer Ravener that patrols to the entrance of Hellfire Ramparts hits for up to 10k unmitigated, dual wields (with bad avoidance RNG that's a straight 50% buff to damage) and stuns the tank (no avoidance). There are better sources but they're not "obviously" trustworthy so let's run with anecdotes from Wowhead like wowhead.com/npc=17264/bonechewer-ravener#comments:id=49385:reply=43302 - if you consider the armor mitigation, you end up with upper damage range of 8k+. Conversely, the final boss hits for 2-3k unmitigated (take a look at youtube.com/watch?v=BTaO5W59BS8 for example, mitigated damage numbers of white hits are
Michael Rivera
>we will never get MMORPGs that include the RPG part >you will never be a rogue who goes ahead of the raid and play a stealth minigame to poison the barbarian warlord's ale >you will never be in a sub-party of druids who temper nature to fight back against the enemy with thorn and spore >you will never watch as your bard seduces the quest giver into providing your raiding party with a battalion of NPC soldiers >priests will never be able to establish mobile holy grounds, shielding your party from demonic forces >sorcerers will never open a portal to hell in the enemy base, unleashing a horde of demons that attack both you and the enemy >instead you will always be locked out of raiding if you don't use the class, spec, gear, and rotation with highest numbers It's not fair, why do people get suckered into mindless skinner boxes so easily and why are there so many of them in gaming?
Anthony Jackson
sounds like you just want to play D&D. these things sounds interesting but how would you set them up in the game and what happens when someone fails?
Cooper Hill
Then play CoH then?
Liam Flores
Alright, poorly worded. I meant more "I'd love to see this done elsewhere", I already played the shit out of CoH in its heyday.
Alexander Hughes
>how would you set them up in the game It'd require a lot of thought and possibly experimenting since it's not really something that's been done before. I can imagine that a time incentive or limit could balance all these options though. >the longer a raid takes, the harder it gets. Enemy's may get reinforcements, complete their magic ritual, finish executing their captive, etc >certain tasks like sending druids to command nature, bards to seduce NPCs, etc, takes time and resources >sending too few or low-skilled people to do it opens the possibility of failure, making spreading out too thin a dangerous gamble that could doom the raid For instance, for the rogue scenario >rogue needs to reach the warlord before he drinks his ceremonial pre-battle ale >beginning the attack too soon will alert the soldiers, making the rogue's task harder or even impossible, but still allow other tasks such as sabotaging the gates/setting off explosive caches >not attacking at all until the rogue does his task could cause certain scripts to occur, like not-Odin bestowing the warlord a new hammer that makes him incredibly stronger, but makes it a possible loot drop >if this happens and the rogue also poisoned the ale, the warlord turns into an incredibly dangerous, unpredictable intoxicated boss The replayability and experimentation sounds great in my head, and mixing in loot incentives for certain paths adds much needed incentive for replaying without needing to rely on .5% drop chances.
Adrian Barnes
user mmos are literally skinner boxes the genre. You want something more like crpgs with coop try divinity games
Justin Wilson
at this point there's no reason those game's cant be MMOs. Diablo and its clones are evidence of that.
Ayden Miller
diablo is not an mmo
Bentley Gray
I know, but they easily could be. They all have online functionality and they're not too far off conceptually.
Samuel Harris
>It's a hurr durr healers shouldn't DPS retard episode.
I've played MMOs since I was 12 and I've never played one that required healers as a role. Look more games OP.
Hudson Evans
>push buttons vs a static enemy
>harder than a healer having to push buttons and juggle a resource efficiently vs a myriad of situations that have to be constantly monitored due to randomized variables such as incompetent morons fucking up forcing you to be a babysitter
MMOs would be far better without a dedicated damage dealer role. Forcing a group of players to play a minigame of reducing red bars while occasionally looking at the actual game [...]
