What are the games that make healer interesting?

What are the games that make healer interesting with out other than just cure1 spam or dps healer or healer spam 11111

Honestly Wow- Everquest- ffxi- a few free to play mmos that are dead anymore like Last chaos- aura kingdom its fun in mabinogi Tbh there are tons of games where healer is extremely fun because you spend most your time healing and if and only if your great/god tier can you dps. Dark souls cleric build is fun for alot of people ( i just dont like it cuz all holy light based more of a hex/pyro user)

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Originally Posted by Graveyardprincess

Honestly Wow- Everquest- ffxi- a few free to play mmos that are dead anymore like Last chaos- aura kingdom its fun in mabinogi Tbh there are tons of games where healer is extremely fun because you spend most your time healing and if and only if your great/god tier can you dps. Dark souls cleric build is fun for alot of people ( i just dont like it cuz all holy light based more of a hex/pyro user)

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I always have fun playing paladin type of class that is healer first tank second most game that play like this are dead but I like how power creep it get

Wow will keep you busy if you're set on healing. The toxicity hasn't improved, so expect to be blamed when careless DPS fail to press a defensive.

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Originally Posted by Keldion

Wow will keep you busy if you're set on healing. The toxicity hasn't improved, so expect to be blamed when careless DPS fail to press a defensive.

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Making healer is 100% healer and dps is 100% dps is bad design for me

I like the idea that the burden of healing or mitigation is split 50% healer and 50% dps or tank and give healer other strategic role to play

Wow healing is more engaging but far harder to pick up. Ironically even though wow has adapted to the DPS healer balancing act it takes far more commitment to full heal someone opposed to the xiv healbot design.

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Originally Posted by Tunda

What are the games that make healer interesting with out other than just cure1 spam or dps healer or healer spam 11111

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The model for White Mage is always the DnD type Cleric, so any game that expressly "needs" the cleric is probably a better design, however it really depends if you are talking about a TTRPG, CRPG or some other type of game (eg RPG mods for Minecraft or GTAV)

To which no MMO can really have good healer design since games are either hard turn based like WoW/SWTOR/Archeage (basically you end up standing in one spot pressing buttons) , or more action based with usually just one or two "DPS" buttons because you spend a good portion of your time just dodging things, or trying to cheese things by standing out of the enemy's range, but making using of casting range.

Like I can't actually think of a single player or multiplayer game that really made a healer a "useful" member of the party and weren't just a squishy buff character. Maybe Wizardry Online had the right idea though, where the Cleric Gnome was actually more of a tank-healer that only used the their magic to heal, but otherwise was usually better to tank. Unfortunately most of the players in that game, due to it's PvP element would rather play the melee roles because they could 1-shot the sorcerer pretty easily, and tanking other players was absolutely useless. You would KO before you ever got a heal off.

Tactical RPG's tend to do the DPS/Tank/Healer/Support roles better, even FF1-6 did, but only by removing the players choice. Like FF1, FF3 and FF5 have you pick jobs, FF1 locks you in, FF3 and FF5 do not, but because you are not locked in, usually a 4-fighters or a 4-red mages is good enough to finish the game, nothing in the game is truely punishing enough to want to fill a party slot with a healer if you could replace it with a DPS.

Usually what I've seen is the "stronger adherance to DnD (particuarly DnD/ADnD or 2nd edition)" the more strictly the class is enforced. Take something like "Dungeon of Naheulbeuk" which has the classes, but many of the skill trees do have a Heal cast on them. But there is an optional, dedicated healer character you could pick up too. Clearly the game isn't designed to require a healer, but how you deal with that may depend on your willingness to buy consumables.

I kinda liked to play the character named Raine in Tales of Symphonia when playing this game with my friends in local co-op.

You spend most of the time managing your different healing spells and MP (like do I start casting a quick spell, or do I cast a long one with the risk to be interupted), but when your teammates become good at avoiding damage, you can start blasting things with the most powerful damaging spell in the game ! (but watch your MP...)

(God I miss my old Miracle spell in FFXIV...)

Healing in Killing Floor 2 has always been very interesting to me because while the game is technically playable without a medic, the healing it provides is so powerful that you really want to have a medic on the team. The class also gets some fairly powerful and varied options for guns. With shotgun, AR, SMG , starting pistol and healing grenade you have surprisingly varied lineup within your medic weapons to fight against the zombies of the game. A bit of a jack of all trades in terms of guns with much higher healing than other classes and a very powerful buff on top.

I absolutely adored RIFT's Chloromancer. It was extremely proactive with an involved rotation. Very fun.

EverQuest Cleric - 1999-2004 (so much interdependence on other players couldn't even solo much of anything)
EQ2 Cleric - 2004-2009
Aion Cleric - 2009-2017 off and on

All of these were super fun to me and most of the focus was on healing.

I tanked in Tera, so can't comment on healing there. Rare game I liked tanking due to real time shield blocking.
Chose Paladin in Lost Ark, but didn't play long enough to comment either.
ESO has a lot of focus on buffing and support through heals - but a lot of comment they aren't needed like here.

I enjoyed playing Resto Druid and Shaman in WoW, Mercy in Overwatch, Soraka in League, Malfurion and Anduin in HotS, Healer Warden in ESO. Healing leveling parties in FFXI was stressful, but in a fun way. There is something that speaks to me when i play healers and supports in all those games, and same feeling was in FFXIV during ARR-HW. At least for me.

tbh ffxiv healer issue can be fixed in 1 easy step ADD AND GIVE ONLY HEALERS 1MIN buff abilitys, like protect/shell bravery/faith there, healers have interactive game play and bring something to the table noone else can and grant bosses the ability to dispell a benfitinal buff on players.


Like ast is about the only fun healer or was in stormblood since you had cards to constantly use and buff ppl

Can't really comment on most mmos or games since i only really healed in FFxiv for the most part, WoW felt like a mixed bag of wrath of the lich king being a horrible experience to try level one due to how toxic the community is.. Legion got a bit better but holy priest just felt like a more spammy white mage, all i did in dungeons were throw out heals with no real care for mana with the occasional damage spells when i felt i could safely do that.
But can say for an fps overwatch in it's early days felt pretty fun depending on character you picked, some had to really be on top of things to keep the others safe but you could be boring too and just healbot the tanks.
Did play a healer in dragon age: origins and had fun with that as a mix of CC, heals and buffs, but it is a more tactical game where you can pause combat to make sure you and the npcs do the right stuff.
It may be a me thing but i don't like to always be stressfully casting heals at all times or the rest of the group goes splat ^^" Give me utility like crowd control and buffs to mix in too to help.. Gosh i miss the old rng astrologian cards..

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Originally Posted by KisaiTenshi

The model for White Mage is always the DnD type Cleric, so any game that expressly "needs" the cleric is probably a better design, however it really depends if you are talking about a TTRPG, CRPG or some other type of game (eg RPG mods for Minecraft or GTAV)

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Oddly enough, I've played a lot of Clerics over the years in D&D 5e. None of them have been "healers". What little I've played in Baldur's Gate 3 as a Cleric indicates that rings true in video games as well as TTRPG. A Cleric is a DPS with some fairly spectacular (but seldom necessary) heals. Clerics rely on cantrips for the majority of their damage. So, yeah, White Mage.

Note: Cantrips do not use up spell slots, which are highly coveted by Clerics for doing, well, actual healing. When necessary. Bringing back some poor player from near death is generally when spell slots are useful.

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Originally Posted by DPZ2

Oddly enough, I've played a lot of Clerics over the years in D&D 5e. None of them have been "healers". What little I've played in Baldur's Gate 3 as a Cleric indicates that rings true in video games as well as TTRPG. A Cleric is a DPS with some fairly spectacular (but seldom necessary) heals. Clerics rely on cantrips for the majority of their damage. So, yeah, White Mage.

Note: Cantrips do not use up spell slots, which are highly coveted by Clerics for doing, well, actual healing. When necessary. Bringing back some poor player from near death is generally when spell slots are useful.

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My clerics in BG3 just rely on hula-hopping Spirit Guardians and running around.

The Disciple of Kaine in return of Reckoning (a private server Warhammer MMO from the one called reckoning)
Fun thing with this class, it's a melee healer capable of healing and buffing allies while attacking, really cool concept.
(the gameplay of classes in this game is really great)

Healing in Tera was so good that even after the game shut down and private servers popped up, the actual queue time as a healer was longer than it was as a dps because people were actively queuing as healer since it was just that enjoyable. Your responsibilities included buffing the group, debuffing the boss, managing the group's MP, cleansing debuffs, ressing the dead, and occasional dps among some other stuff I'm likely forgetting. Since it was an action game, the snappiness was very satisfying; for example, you could actually pull off some seriously clutch heals without a janky "server tick" deciding that your heal actually didn't go off in time to save that one guy who can't stop getting hit. Or you could do that game's esuna equivalent but so quickly that it would be like the debuff had never even occurred if you timed it right.

There were 2 healers if I'm remembering right. One of them had a skill that made the party attack faster and on a reduced cooldown; another of the healers increased the entire group's critical hit rate just by existing. Both applied (iirc) debilitation debuffs on bosses. In other words, unlike XIV, going into an encounter with no healer -- even if your team were skilled enough to never take damage -- was often a detriment because you would attack slower, or crit less, or run out of mana, or take longer to down the boss because no debuffs, etc. In some cases it was fun and very quick to take both types of healers because of the benefits they provided. Really skilled healers could let their parties ignore certain mechanics because their team would just trust them to heal through it reliably. There were different forms of skill expression and people felt proud when they mastered it. Likewise, a group noticed quickly when their healer was new, because they'd run out of MP during their burst or the debuffs would expire on the boss or the team buffs would never go out, etc. Tanking was really good too. You could actually block incoming damage if you could read the boss well enough, and you had loads of support options for your team. Aggro was maintained through raw force; you had shouts you could use as a crutch, and you could apply augments to your skills (called glyphs) to boost aggro if you were still new, but those were like training wheels. If you were good enough, you'd hold aggro against your team by being really aggressive or by outgearing them. It was a lot more engaging than tanking in this game, where you just turn on your stance and fall asleep. I fear if we ever got a similar gameplay setup in 2024, modern MMO gamers would hate it because they don't want to be dependent on anyone. Everybody wants to be an island. Never mind the fact that there are thousands of single player games these people could play. No, they have to ruin this.

In a just world, Tera would not have been mismanaged by idiots. The combat in that game was so good that it kept it alive despite the constant stupid developer decisions. They would release a dungeon and then remove it from the game a few months later. They only ever wanted to have 3 dungeons in the game at a time. Then they'd limit how many times you could run it per day and that number would be like 1-2 times a day. These people were absolute morons. They had lightning in a bottle and they sucked on the bottle like cavemen until it broke.

Being priest in TERA was so enjoyable. Bouncing around healing 2/3 people and casting debuffs/buffs was exactly what i wanted in an action gameplay. Then having mystic where you drop motes with more emphasis on doing damage and debuffing was peak. What a shame its gone when I finally get a good computer.
Making scholar fairy drop healing/shielding orbs where the fairy is put at would be godly.

I have fond memories of ARR. Keeping the tank alive, responding as-needed to AoE's and other damaging mechanics, and using Esuna to keep my party free of debuffs was a genuinely fun triage experience.

In theory FF14 could still get back to that kind of experience someday; they just need to better balance the capabilities of healers versus the rate of problems they're actively asked to solve.

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Originally Posted by KisaiTenshi

The model for White Mage is always the DnD type Cleric, so any game that expressly "needs" the cleric is probably a better design

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Sorry, this ain't true. In no edition of DnD was it wise to healbot or single ability spam as a cleric.

1st Ed: Clerics had a slightly restricted spell list compared to MUs, but had melee capabilities close to fighters. Turn Undead was a big feature. They also didn't rely on a spell book. Most of thier classic spells (Bless, Protection fom X, Command, Sanctuary) mitigated damage directly, detection, or were crowd control. Healing was a last resort, because in 1e if you hit 0hp...you died. That's it. Avoiding damage was the name if the game.

2nd Ed ADnD - Once again clerics were heavy armor spellcasting frontliners with HP and AC to match. Thier spell list was based on the Sphere of Domain for thier god, but again they focused heavily on Buffs and control. 2nd ed is also where summoning really started, and quite a few clerics were proficient at doing it.

3e: Clerics had a 3/4th attack progression, full casting, a plethora of offensive spells (Flame Stike, Inflict Wounds, Harm) plus all thier old buffs and detection. Frankly they were (still are) all around better than other magic classes except arguably Druid. Offensively an A-team (made of A-men from various Dieties of different domains) were not only a viable squad, but actually exceptional. Summoning magic was super prevalent in 3e as it was insanely potent to not need to fight something yourself.

4e: Clerics were a 'leader' class in 4th ed, and probably the most MMO styled healer in all versions. Even so they were *still* hravy armor frontliners capable of smiting the heck out of infidels, while maybe holding back a healing word or two for emergencies. Once again control spells were the name of the game. Killing a target is the best CC, and making them unable to act normally saves more health than any heal you can cast.

5th Edition: Clerics are near the top of DPR charts after two rounds of combat. Spirit guardians is insane damage around you, Spiritual Weapon is autonomous and doesn't require concentration, you can easily get heavy armor and and a shield if you want to frontline, and spells like Banishment are massive gane changers. If you cast any healing at all in combat, someone git focused OR you are misplaying. Plus to pick up an ally you need all of....one bonus action. Nuts I know!


FFXIV healers are nothing like DnD clerics. If they were the class would be both beloved and likely called massively OP, since healers would easily be out damaging tanks (and probably many dos players to boot!)

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Originally Posted by Keldion

Wow will keep you busy if you're set on healing. The toxicity hasn't improved, so expect to be blamed when careless DPS fail to press a defensive.

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Pandæmonium: Abyssos had tanks and dps blaming healers for "lack of healing" because the dps and tanks didn't know how to push their mitigations.

I'd take WoW's sweaty toxicity over FFXIV's.

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Originally Posted by Jamini

Sorry, this ain't true. In no edition of DnD was it wise to healbot or single ability spam as a cleric.

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The concept of a "healbot" is a strictly PvE MMORPG thing. The first three versions of DnD came out before CRPG's were much of a thing, but essentially every version of the the Cleric or White Mage in Final Fantasy, Wizardry, and every Japanese RPG is based on this DnD version. Cantrips and spells you use once and then have to purchase or learn again. The very concept of "MP" replaces the logic of having levels to magic, separate from character progression levels. Can't cast level 9 armageddeon-end-all-life-on-the-planet when it requires 9999 MP when you are at level 1, even if you can buy it (this is a reference to Ultima, in which you can quite literately acquire the ends-all-life-in-britannia spell and it literately does kill everyone except you and LB.)

Anyway, you can see this in Wizardy Online. The wiki's for the MMO still exist online despite the game being dead for years. For the sake of not taking screenshots to explain things, here's the wiki page: https://wizardryonline.fandom.com/wiki/Priest

The 4 base classes are exactly the same as FF1, because, again, common ancestor being the 1975 version of DnD.

Note exactly how many offensive skills there are relative to the amount of buff and healing. It's skill tree is literately "Heal" and "Shield (Tank)"
There is one Melee strike at level 4 that causes a stun, Holy magic at level 11, elemental attack at 20, and everything else is a shield. So 3 of 39 skills are "DPS"

Meanwhile the Fighter's skill tree is split between "DPS" and "Guard(Tank)", of which there is a single self-heal under the Guard skill set out of 34 skills.

Wizardry and FF1 also uses what was later called Prestige classes that came out later with ADnD 3rd edition.

Without getting into specifics, THAT is what the cross-classing was intended to be in FFXIV V1.0 and ARR. In 1.20 they decided to make the classic FF1 jobs the prestige class rather than the "Wizard" or "Sage" of the FF1. That leads us to where all this lackluster healing skills started. If it would have been possible to prestige the conjurer to a white mage or a black mage, that would have made a heck of a lot more sense, and you could have picked which DPS skills you wanted to keep. Or you could prestige Thaumaturge to black mage or maybe summoner and take the various Debuff casts like Slow and Gravity. Conjurer would have Air, Thunder, Ice, Water, Earth, Fire, and prestige to White Mage would have added Holy. To get all the DPS skills from Conjurer and Thaumaturge, you'd have to level both, and then the DPS spells from both could be added to your black mage, but not Holy. What we actually got in 2.0 was a further culling of this.

Instead of having a pile of skills that you could pick and choose based on ability points, and resulting in everyone playing the same meta, we have a focus on choreography (avoiding taking damage in the first place) which is half of what healers toolbox is for. This comes from how people originally played these games. You didn't "move to avoid AOE" you just had to roll to see if you were going to be hit or not, characters would move within attack range before actually trying to attack. The idea that you could just scoot over an inch to avoid being killed was not a thing.

Fixing "healers" in FFXIV is a unique problem that you can't just look at another game and go "oh they did it better", because every game has to balance around it's core mechanic. As I said with Wizardy Online, most players just forgo trying to be the healer and take consumables. Magic is just too expensive to use, better to take fighters into the dungeon, or try to cheese things with the thief by laying dozens of traps on the floor and just kiting the enemies over them while avoiding tripping your own traps. But the important detail missing here is that the enemies don't self-heal either. If you die, someone has to haul your body back to the shrine, and you have to sacrifice some loot to be revived. Avoiding death was VERY important because it was permadeath if you didn't have enough loot to avoid the RNG deciding against reviving you.

With Yoshi-P casually dropping the idea of ability points, it brings back these nightmare skill trees and awful meta's that make party play next to impossible, because you can't rely on anyone to have the skills needed to complete the content "quickly", since we're not dealing with 3 hour dungeons, but 20 minute ones. There is one thing that I would like to see in XIV, and that would be the "3 hour exploration dungeon", and I don't mean literately 3 hours, but a dungeon that persists your progress like in Wizardry, but also carries the puzzle solving (Unfortunately Wizardy was more like a quiz so it didn't gate keep anyone who watched a video)

At any rate, Cleric in "DnD" was about destroying undead, because their "healing" magic destroys undead. Final Fantasy actually retains this in FF1-10, where using cure or life on undead damages or one-shot kills them. If FFXIV had retained it's "elemental" attributes, then the healer would be the ONLY ONE who could instant-kill undead mobs, everyone else would have to slow-burn them. Outside if this very specific, but also very-common dungeon trope, the cleric would be more buffs than straight healing. But you also have to realize that the encounter design in all but XIV (I don't know about XI since I didn't play XI) has a very logical progressions where you could either Melee DPS the target from the front row, Ranged from the back row, Cast from the back row, and heal from the back row. This concept of "front row" and "back row" is where positioning in other RPG's happens. Contrast with Chrono Trigger and, oh, Super Mario RPG. CT had no positioning but did use party-combos, the only other game I've seen "party combos" from that era in is a Sailor Moon SFC RPG game. Once you figure out what is the best combo to use on a boss, you don't use anything else and spam consumables to keep the DPS up.

But even when I play CT, I would usually have one character do the actual healing (Marle) rather than try to use consumables. My entire play style is "I'm cheap and won't buy consumables" so I will leverage as much healing I can get from the characters who have healing abilities. In every game. Super Mario RPG is one of those cases where Peach is pretty obviously the intended healer since she has the only party heal. So I would always leave Peach in the party once I had the chance to. Staying at the inn to recover magic was generally cheaper than buying consumables.

Which back to the OP, I can't think of another MMORPG where there was a specific healer class that is anything like XIV's that even floating the idea of being similar. Other MMORPG's tend to be way too mechanic light and don't really require "dedicated healing" since consumables are readily available. Having the ability to do content gated behind peoples willingness to sell healing pots seems like a good way to make the game P2W rather than accessible. All the current generations of Gacha mobile RPG games do this. Want a specific character? Pay money for a chance to win them. And then pay a lot more money to prestige them by winning them in the gacha 100 more times. If a specific dungeon requires a "thunder" character to do any damage, and you don't have one, you are gatekept until you spend money. Now imagine if there was no healing character in the game because the game is designed around having it's hands on your wallet. No consumables, no self-healing, HP and MP doesn't automatically recover except at inns and campfires (which means you sit around and do nothing for an hour.) I weep for what kind of content is being passed off as "RPG" in the mobile space.