A summary of healer issues

[Hazama999]

Healers... kinda feel like an afterthought, and that makes me sad.

[Mesarthim]

Healers... kinda feel like an afterthought, and that makes me sad.

Well if AST on 5.0 release was anything to go by, that's because to SE they are. But only time will tell what they did for the job changes.

I'd keep expectations low until actual results.

[Dearche]

Healers... kinda feel like an afterthought, and that makes me sad.

I think healers IS an afterthought.

SE's been real keen to keep the holy trinity alive, as it's an easy to understand system that everyone knows about. But healers honestly have never really had a good place in it even from the beginning. Healing isn't a full time job. It's part-time. No matter what happens, you don't need healing all the time. It's almost impossible to make it that way unlike the other two main roles.

If it was made into a full time job, then either the damage output would be so high that moment there was a lapse in healing there was a wipe, or the healing output would be so pidlingly small that you'd be forced to constantly be healing to keep everyone alive. The first is a design nightmare, and the latter makes healers feel insignificant. Not to mention that we'd be relegated as the old heal-bots, the fastest way to make healers the #1 in demand role by far due to low supply.

There's a reason why most of the most successful healer designs in games over the years had healing as a secondary function with something else taking the front.

[Deceptus]

There's a reason why most of the most successful healer designs in games over the years had healing as a secondary function with something else taking the front.

Simply rename Healers to "Support" and it becomes infinitely easier to balance.

Tanks are nothing more than DPS with damage mitigation cooldowns

Support becomes nothing more than DPS with damage healing cooldowns and buffing cooldowns.

[Kabooa]

There's a reason why most of the most successful healer designs in games over the years had healing as a secondary function with something else taking the front.

You know, I'm pretty curious. Mind citing some specific examples here? I don't go perusing the landscape these days as much as I used to.

You know why players are opting to buy healing wands?.

Because a wand of Cure Light wounds has 35-50 uses of the spell and costs less than the applicable potion, weighs less than the applicable potion, doesn't consume your spell slots, almost everyone can use it, and it's basically as effective out of combat as a level 20 cleric because of the ways spells in that system cap out.

You don't take Wand of Cure Light Wounds because slotting Cure Light Wounds is boring (Clerics have spontaneous conversion - they always have access to healing spells). You take it because it's extremely efficient healing when out of combat. It's not a question of "Is this fun or not", it's a question of players having access to a resource, and whether the game should be balanced around that. You cannot buy the cleric more spell slots, but you can buy wands, and effectively infinite healing destroys the idea of attrition, which is what makes dungeon crawling in table tops dangerous, and by extension, interesting.

[Semirhage]

Because a wand of Cure Light wounds has 35-50 uses of the spell and costs less than the applicable potion, weighs less than the applicable potion, doesn't consume your spell slots, almost everyone can use it, and it's basically as effective out of combat as a level 20 cleric because of the ways spells in that system cap out.

You don't take Wand of Cure Light Wounds because slotting Cure Light Wounds is boring (Clerics have spontaneous conversion - they always have access to healing spells). You take it because it's extremely efficient healing when out of combat. It's not a question of "Is this fun or not", it's a question of players having access to a resource, and whether the game should be balanced around that. You cannot buy the cleric more spell slots, but you can buy wands, and effectively infinite healing destroys the idea of attrition, which is what makes dungeon crawling in table tops dangerous, and by extension, interesting.

And I think spontaneous conversion is one of the best choices the transition between second and third ed D&D made with regards to cleric design, CoDzilla notwithstanding. If you didn't spend all your slots on healing spells, then your party might die if they need healing. Spontaneous conversion neatly solves this problem, giving clerics something interesting to do while maintaining the access to healing spells. Spamming Cure and nothing else on people is a boring thankless chore for most people. Designing healers that aren't just health batteries works better, and has been tacitly acknowledged by game design across RPGs for decades. Now, XIV's healers are far from that, but I've seen design put less emphasis on interesting downtime activity, and more on dull spam spam spam every expansion. Which I think is the wrong direction.

Off-topic tangent, I also liked the discussion that board had about the dungeon crawler problem of The Final Boss, and how it creates the infamous Narcoleptic Party. Basically, unless you keep the pressure on your party to whittle down their resources, they'll rest and recuperate whenever possible. Outside coming up with reasons to stop the party from sleeping all the time, the problem seems endemic to the genre, and must be consistently designed around since you can't really remove it. So long as RPG convention basically guarantees that the final confrontation in a dungeon will also be the hardest one, players will correctly assume that it'll also likely consume more of their resources than prior encounters. It's the one they're going to *most* want to enter fresh-faced and full of daily abilities/spells/HP.

[Dearche]

You know, I'm pretty curious. Mind citing some specific examples here? I don't go perusing the landscape these days as much as I used to.

They're a bit unconventional, but sure.
The first and most obvious is DnD. The healers are all dual purpose roles. Paladin and Cleric are both tank/healer hybrids, and the tanks are just DPS that happen to have high HP pools, since you have to make some sort of concession for rogues. Any other healer is a healer/DPS hybrid as well. Healing exists to either keep people on their feet after a hard turn, or to prevent a death. Both things only come up a handful of times per dungeon, as healing in between fights is a hell of a lot more sensible. It's better to just kill the thing than waste a turn or two undoing the damage the bads just did. One takes a lot more resources than the other, both in spell slots and in turns.

Another is most JRPGs. There's no such thing as a dedicated healer. Everyone has to fight, or else be relegated to the bench. It's always more economical to just kill the bad quickly with more DPS than to be forced to fight longer just because you're able to heal more.

A third is Monster Hunter. Over there, there's no specialized roles. Everyone's a DPS, tank, and self healer. Though some people do take a healer role, they still actively take part in the others as well. They just pull back a bit more often than others to keep others healthy. Maybe this is cheating though.

But Overwatch definitely isn't. At least back when I used to play that game, Lucio was by far the most popular healer. Ana was difficult to play, and Mercy was just plain boring. But Lucio, he could heal passively while doing actually fun stuff. In the end, I think most Mercy players were either forced into that position and played her despite not liking her, or didn't actually want to play a shooter and was content sitting in the back, avoiding interacting with the actual game as much as possible.

Obviously, they're not 100%, as there's always exceptions. Some people enjoy being a healbot. But the scarcity of them in games where it's particularly obvious that's how you're supposed to play is quite telling, especially in the endgame. I know that most beginner healers play that way even in FF, but that style tends to adapt to something more aggressive as the players get used to the role. I almost never see the heal-bot style in FF's endgame, and the reason is that it's a pretty boring style of play unless if the game is designed around it.

Healing is boring as contrary to popular belief, it's not very adaptive. There's not much more you can do than spam one or two buttons until everyone's at max HP or dead. The fact that there's almost no synergy between each of our healing abilities is quite telling. Everyone else gets a rotation, but healers? Just a grab bag of skills that each do their own thing.