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The need for massive healing during a fight creates a situation where or more people must provide that healing. Its not dynamic, its not responsive, its whackamole with hp bars.
Now...if you switched things a bit and still had the possibility of people receiving that much damage but gave healers mitigation abilities, directional shielding, blocking, etc, etc then the healer is fighting what the monster is doing instead of fighting what the hitpoint bars are doing.
The healing role has been turned into a health battery more than anything else. You fill people up. If you were to change it so they protected people from going down in a dynamic and fun way then you would be doing well.
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This is precisely what is wrong with the entire design of MMO games at this point. Massive amounts of damage and massive amounts of healing required.
It's the whole reason "tanks" are even needed.
All these games have taken the perverted forms of EQ Classes and just made them worse and worse over time. Rather than all classes having some survivability they've taken it to the extreme and basically neutered them into the narrowest roles possible. The protection warrior as the default warrior template is the biggest joke of all.
D&D models for games have always been among the most fun where you can enter encounters with different setups and still be viable. All the classes had reasonably high survivability given the proper preparation. Rogues avoided getting hit, clerics and fighters had armor, mages had spells that absorbed dmg. They ALL did dmg as well.
Instead now we get games where you have damage dealers, healers and survivors (tanks) and thats pretty much ALL you do when you play that class. It sucks, and its why hybrids are generally poorly conceived.
All this is a result of crap AI more than anything. "Threat" needs to go. Its an utterly insane way of programming targetting and everything else that is broken and unfun about MMOs is a result of this. Rather than figuring out how to code AI that is really meaningful we get tank and spank and all the perverted derivations. I mean seriously, who goes to battle and thinks to themselves "wait, maybe I shouldn't kill as fast because then I might attract attention"
Fix the AI so we dont need to tank and heal. And then the classes might fix themselves.
