Green Monster Games (Curt Schilling)

[Ninajrr]

For those of you in favor of tanking but not of healing, what is it about the whack-a-mole game of healing health bars that is so terrible compared to the build-up-threat game of watching threat meters?

Not meant to be pedantic, just trying to instill creativity to theft from one and add to the other.

[Zehn - Vhex]

Originally Posted by Palum

I always thought healing could be made a bit more interesting if healers had to respond to specific circumstances and injuries

You mean like cure disease, cure poison and dispel magic?

It's gonna be whack-a-mole regardless.

Your best bet is to just move away from healing altogether. The best heals are the ones you don't have to manage/babysit. You want to know my favorite heal as a paladin? Judgement of Light. I cast it once, it heals the entire raid for 20 seconds, done. I can do other shit while it works it's magic.

I don't have to spam the MT with a cancel-cast macro, I don't have to keep my eyes glued to 25 little squares on my screen. I can play the fucking game.

So let's roll with that instead eh? How about I drop a barrier somewhere on the battlefield and anybody standing between it and the mob takes less damage for the remainder of the fight or unless I move it? I cast a buff on the MT that absorbs 20% of the damage he takes until i cancel it or cast it on somebody else.

Anyways...

There's your basis for a non-healing game as well. Just a bunch of "absorbs 20% of damge" buffs and the like for your support-classes. Nearly all positional. Fire and forget and unless you have to change where your buffs or who your buffs are placed on you spend the rest of the fight dodging void zones and killing the mob.

[Grave]

I don't see why healing has to be removed altogether to achieve what you're looking for there Zehn. You'd be one of the people that would want to roll the combat-oriented healer who heals by DPSing or whatever without having to directly manage the heals much. One class could even have the Wards you bring up tied in with that, like the EQ2 Mystic. But why get rid of targeted heals when some people enjoy healing like that?

[Zehn - Vhex]

Because some people also enjoy grinding AA's for 8 hours a day to get a 1% bump in dps. Why? Because fuck those people. That's why.

Alternative post:

Because that would defeat the point? If you're looking to remove targeted heals, which was the point of my post....you can't achieve removing target heals by leaving targeted heals in.

[Araxen]

Fuck healing classes. They need to go. I was one of the first to post that they need to go away a couple weeks ago and basically got laughed at. MMO's need to do what Diablo did and let people take care of their own healing. I'm sick of every mmo relying on a class that few people like to play and it needs to change.

[Grave]

Originally Posted by Zehn - Vhex

Because that would defeat the point? If you're looking to remove targeted heals, which was the point of my post....you can't achieve removing target heals by leaving targeted heals in.

I get that was the point of your post, but I'm simply curious as to why you and others think moving away from healing is at all necessary.

The only people advocating it here seem to be the people that personally do not like healing in the traditional sense. You fit this description perfectly based on what you said in your post, you don't want to think about healing while you do it and want to do other things. The perfect solution to this is to give you a class that heals while DPSing or tanking. It makes no sense to attack a core element of MMOs just because certain people don't like to do it when it's just as easy (easier, really) to simply offer them an alternative to achieving the same goal.

Edit:

Originally Posted by Araxen

Fuck healing classes. They need to go. I was one of the first to post that they need to go away a couple weeks ago and basically got laughed at. MMO's need to do what Diablo did and let people take care of their own healing. I'm sick of every mmo relying on a class that few people like to play and it needs to change.

Fewer people like to play them because usually the mechanics are not fun and there is often less glory involved in healing than there is tanking or dpsing. If you hybridize the classes more this becomes less of a problem. What if Holy Paladins in WoW healed by DPSing like Ret, procing crazy group heals and rune-like damage absorbing buffs? Maybe some cool extra healing effects when they crit with an offensive attack? You'd have a lot more people playing healing Paladins then, without the need to restructure the entire game because you removed healing altogether.

[Camerous]

I think the best way to do healing is like this.. make healers DPS classes and make it so their heals are group wide. As they do damage they also heal their groups. This way you can concentrate on fighting a mob while at the same time healing your group. The more damage you do the more your group gets healed.

[Grave]

Originally Posted by Camerous

I think the best way to do healing is like this.. make healers DPS classes and make it so their heals are group wide. As they do damage they also heal their groups. This way you can concentrate on fighting a mob while at the same time healing your group. The more damage you do the more your group gets healed.

lol. Grats on skipping like the past 2 pages.

But yes.

[ToeMissile]

Anyone that hasn't, should get the Vanguard trial just to play a Bloodmage.
Vanguard - Trial Download

[Azrayne]

Originally Posted by ToeMissile

Anyone that hasn't, should get the Vanguard trial just to play a Bloodmage.
Vanguard - Trial Download

Which is (part of) what I was getting at before I had two pages of people yelling at me for unoriginal discussion (yet apparently suggesting we remove healers is perfectly ok).

[ToeMissile]

Originally Posted by Azrayne

Which is (part of) what I was getting at before I had two pages of people yelling at me for unoriginal discussion (yet apparently suggesting we remove healers is perfectly ok).

*shrug* Such is life.

[Draegan]

All Bloodmages did was let you cast healing and damage spells at the same time. It was a pretty cool concept. There are multiple ways of setting up such a class.

The root of the healer problem is that healers by nature support others. Supporting themselves doesn't get them anywhere when they are playing alone (PVE or PVP). So no one enjoys playing them most of the time.

However Bloodmages, healing etc have been rehashed a 100 times already. There are many ways to disguise healing and put it into a game, but if you have a fantasy DIKU game, you'll never get rid of it.

[Bizanich]

I am hoping they just support the game, lore wise, as well as Eve does with the videos they put out every so often.

EVE Online | EVE Insider | Forums
CCP let a player come in and use their equipment to make a CG movie for one of the background stories they have to flesh out their world.

The movie is awesome and really helps (in my opinion) hook the players in.

And yes I know this was in the FoH guide thread, too, but only Eve'rs tend to read it. This it to make a point.

[Draegan]

You know if it's actually a good game that there will be graphic novels, books, and toys involved. Of course they actually have to make a game that doesn't suck.

Hopefully Curt doesn't try to interject some of his more hardcore, I still love EQ, tendencies.

[Greyform]

sounds like a really slow way to play a game. No healer sounds like it = more down time between mobs.

I've done the no healer all Melee groups before when we could not find a healer. After a couple adds or not being able to move agro around to share the incoming damage. it gets old fast, and is a slow way to play.

I get it that a large part of that is because the game is not designed that way. But I've certainly had a taste of it, and I really would not care to play a game without healers and trying to regen HP out of battle and all the down time involved there.

I think WAR had it right with the WP and DOK before they changed them. I also like the AOC BS.

I would 100% agree though that the EQ style Cleric is not the way to do a healing class. I could never play one full time without falling asleep of boredom.