A summary of healer issues

[Shurrikhan]

For the record, the role in Overwatch is explicitly and solely called Support, not Healer.

The difference is that while virtually all heroes in Overwatch have something that can be leveraged as support (a sniper, if otherwise uncontested, denies potentially the largest amount of space in the whole game which can then split or funnel the enemy to the advantage of flankers/divers/CQB heroes, and even when removing the hugely synergetic value of damage profiles... there's CC, ally-affectable healing, shared sight, barriers, etc., etc.), the Supports offer the least amount of value by themselves / are generally the most dependent upon others to exploit their full potential.

(Arguably tanks are just is bad in encountering a team capable of countering them, but, there's no more reason for a tank to 1v5 without some compensatory advantage than for Lucio to specifically hunt down a Tracer, etc.)

I.e., over there, every difference in profile actually matters, because TTK is tight enough, the undermechanics are many and varied enough, and the environmental contexts are significant. That's your biggest part of allowing for support (varied value based on coordination) in a general sense.

Of course, a healer in such a place --who taps into those allowances significantly-- especially when deaths are possible, as to allow for decisions of "Keep up A, over B", is pretty much bound to become a Support, not just a healer /heal-bot, if exploiting their kit to full effect.

But, that's also a PvP game. Having player-versus-player levels of available depth is PvE is... not easy.



Sidenote: I wish we could kind of scrap the clear-cut role breaks in FFXIV in favor of more of a spectrum, or at least allow greater divergence and versatile spread from those starting points.

Sure, every tank pair ought to be able to survive whatever tankbusters are thrown at it with, at most, a non-CD-gated barrier or a preemptive heal (landing after TB but before the AA immediately following it).

But, is there anything wrong with a Summoner being able to half-tank or half-heal by spending more time in and resource on Titan or Phoenix, respectively? A Monk rushing the CD on an empowered Mantra to allow for solo-healing? A healer with minimal 'free' healing being truly able to pump during raidbuff damage windows? Is there anything wrong with having a Stagger system (in the sense of suppression, not likely XIII/XVI damage multipliers) that could allow physical and magical damage each to suppress the enemy's physical movement or magical capacities, so that even Ifrit and Garuda, Drill vs. Empyreal Arrow, would feel different from each other, in a greater sense than just their relative potency?

[ForsakenRoe]

Oh now I see my confusion, there was a 'subrole' of heroes called 'Healer', but the actual role was called 'Support'. but everyone and their mother referred to them as 'the healers' because the heroes that were supports, were also healers, the two 'categories' were identical in terms of who was in them. Shoutout to the OW fandom for just refusing to use the official terms



Well, they took the last one away from us when SCH lost Virus, but I'd say we're 3/4 on 'doing support stuff in raids' here in FF14 land (AST actually had all four in HW, including a way to disable enemies literally called Disable), so can we stop trying to argue that 'because the role is called healer, it must be pigeonholed into having more healing tools than it needs', the two terms are basically interchangeable. The only thing that would be an issue if they renamed our healers to 'Support' is that we'd have to come up with a new term to mean 'tanks and healers' for callouts, ie if 'tanks and healers have a debuff to resolve' we say 'supports'

edit: wait scratch that, we actually do have all four still, because Repose still exists. It never gets used on bosses, but it exists

the small bit

This was the original plan I think in 1.0, since DRG and MNK could crossclass weird things like Savage Blade (the second step of the PLD aggro combo) and SkullSunder (same but WAR). A random uncombo'd Aggro generator skill seems very out of place, but I think the idea was that if the tank died, the melee would be able to pick the boss up and pseudo-tank it for a couple of GCDs to restabilize the tank HP. That got thrown out because A: it's kinda silly, B: there's no way you'd predict that the tank would die in the first place, so using it proactively to make sure you're 3rd on aggro wasn't really a good idea (it's a big damage loss), and C: boss autos clonk a DPS way too hard to survive. Maybe they were lower back then, or could survive easier because Keen Flurry existed, but it seems like just a relic of a bygone age of design, before Jobs became a thing

[Shurrikhan]

This was the original plan I think in 1.0

Kinda, yeah.

Sorry for the likely TMI, but back then, there weren't really class-set roles... period. There were... roles insofar as a thing people would do, but usually in rotation, as to maximally exploit their kits. Instead, there were simply... threads, for lack of a better term, with different components of each of what you'd usually expect to go into a tank, DPS, healer, etc -- never having all of them, and always extending in some pretty organic fashion into domains we'd usually consider a side-role.

For instance, GLD had... pretty shitty threat generation, but had the best counterattack damage. Taunt... was a Pugilist ability, and both PGL and GLD were built to some extent around tag-teaming (with GLD having more benefit on the swap-in and being more able to reliably and burstily soak damage, but with PGL having more of the snap threat and sustained mitigation).

Your sustained raid heals? They were arguably best on Lancer (via Life Surge who had an effect similar to WoW Paladin's Judgment of Light - healing for a flat amount per attack against the enemy), though that was on a shared cooldown with suppressing enemy TP (generated, at different modifiers per enemy, off of damage dealt, taken, and certain other factors -- similar to our LB gauge now).

What we'd think of today as "healers" were just "casters" with versatile kits, and practically each playing their own Challenge Mode of the game: one an all-elements elementalist (CNJ), and the other probably the craziest class XIV design has ever seen and would today look more like a whacky base-holding PvP build out of RIFT -- the selectively stat-stealing, HP/MP-stealing, HP-spending, debuff-shifting, CC-heavy, void-blasting Thaumaturge (think a Shadow Priest + Affliction Warlock with the optional ability to nuke heal).

Your 'pure' DPS? There kind of... weren't any, since the non-DPS value they brought to the table was always significant enough for those classes not to be interchangeable, and that everyone could pump, within their ideal circumstances.

A tank? Which kind? Dodge-tank, especially able to specialize against Earth, Wind, or Fire? Able to just soak up damage of any kind when that damage isn't yet predictable? To take big hits? To simply harass and keep in check the enemy while easing the job of everyone else? A kiting tank able also to interrupt casters and bind adds? A caster-juggernaut that fed off the most recent add wave to bolster stats to ridiculous levels? A stoneclad elementalist that can just keep drawing enemies in with mass heals and then repeatedly Flood them back? Pick your poison. There were some who could anchor that position easier than others, but the game seemed content to let every class carry a useful niche.

*Obviously, little of this got fleshed out to quite the point I may make it seem here, as the game basically lacked any significantly capable physics engine, even, but that the kits definitely show a tendency towards Classes first, with roles an afterthought left to the community to figure out (which... would mostly come down to wasting those class's potential in order to reduce gameplay/"stress", much like anyone asking that a Paladin in SB waste Sentinel and Rampart from the OT position just to get a slightly stronger Intervention).

[vetch]

Sorry for the likely TMI, but back then, there weren't really class-set roles... period. There were... roles insofar as a thing people would do, but usually in rotation, as to maximally exploit their kits. Instead, there were simply... threads, for lack of a better term, with different components of each of what you'd usually expect to go into a tank, DPS, healer, etc -- never having all of them, and always extending in some pretty organic fashion into domains we'd usually consider a side-role.

For instance, GLD had... pretty shitty threat generation, but had the best counterattack damage. Taunt... was a Pugilist ability, and both PGL and GLD were built to some extent around tag-teaming (with GLD having more benefit on the swap-in and being more able to reliably and burstily soak damage, but with PGL having more of the snap threat and sustained mitigation).

Your sustained raid heals? They were arguably best on Lancer (via Life Surge who had an effect similar to WoW Paladin's Judgment of Light - healing for a flat amount per attack against the enemy), though that was on a shared cooldown with suppressing enemy TP (generated, at different modifiers per enemy, off of damage dealt, taken, and certain other factors -- similar to our LB gauge now).

What we'd think of today as "healers" were just "casters" with versatile kits, and practically each playing their own Challenge Mode of the game: one an all-elements elementalist (CNJ), and the other probably the craziest class XIV design has ever seen and would today look more like a whacky base-holding PvP build out of RIFT -- the selectively stat-stealing, HP/MP-stealing, HP-spending, debuff-shifting, CC-heavy, void-blasting Thaumaturge (think a Shadow Priest + Affliction Warlock with the optional ability to nuke heal).

Your 'pure' DPS? There kind of... weren't any, since the non-DPS value they brought to the table was always significant enough for those classes not to be interchangeable, and that everyone could pump, within their ideal circumstances.

A tank? Which kind? Dodge-tank, especially able to specialize against Earth, Wind, or Fire? Able to just soak up damage of any kind when that damage isn't yet predictable? To take big hits? To simply harass and keep in check the enemy while easing the job of everyone else? A kiting tank able also to interrupt casters and bind adds? A caster-juggernaut that fed off the most recent add wave to bolster stats to ridiculous levels? A stoneclad elementalist that can just keep drawing enemies in with mass heals and then repeatedly Flood them back? Pick your poison. There were some who could anchor that position easier than others, but the game seemed content to let every class carry a useful niche.

This smells like Guild Wars 1 with aggro management sprinkled in.