yes. they instantly erase all mistakes and reduce the strategy involved for every encounter to "just get healed". Without healers you might have to reconsider the fight, manage resources, or maybe even dodge. But because the whiniest people in the world decided to play games for validation the complexity of every game has to be brought down to their level, which is pretty fricking low considering they posture themselves as a saint for clicking on health bars.
Healers in WoW arenas worked for a veeeery long time. Are they hard to balance? Sure, but that doesn't mean you cannot implement them correctly. In my opinion it's just not worth doing unless your game fundamentally revolves around having this concept as a focus.
>then what is the fricking function of healing???
To make the actual combat last longer than 10 fricking seconds? To make the game more than a hide-and-seek match? moron.
2 years ago
Anonymous
>didn't read what i was replying to
frick off moron, don't reply to me
Except it doesnt matter because they can just erase those mistakes so there is no incentive to even try. Furthermore devs will balance the game around the existence of healers, so not even the devs expect you to do anything else.
If you would lose because your healer isn't attacking alongside you, that's not hard content
If you are losing because you are failing to single out and kill the healer, that's a skill issue
If you have no abilities to separate the healed target from the healer, you walked out of the door without any pants on
2 years ago
Anonymous
>If you are losing because you are failing to single out and kill the healer, that's a skill issue
do you seriously think incentivising players to go out and tunnel down a single character because it's objectively correct is a good idea? you must work for blizzard
I think what games like Overwatch and TF2 did with Healers was bad design, ie make them so incredibly overpowered and easy to use that the entire game revolves around them most of the time.
The thing about Overwatch was its combination of powerful healing and heavy tankiness, Mercy's rapid fire healing works perfectly fine with most DPS but use it on a tank and because of their many ways to mitigate and nullify damage its like they become unkillable. DPS end up not being able to do enough damage to kill those tanks because they gain so much more from healing than the lower health DPS with less survivability.
Snipers only insta kill squishies, if any non shield tank could be instagibbed by a widow they'd be worthless in the role they're meant to fill. The only thing insta killing tanks are death pits
No, there are no single high damage single shots in Overwatch. Widowmaker does 300 damage on a fully charged headshot and most tanks have at least 400 health.
The exception of course being a few ultimates than be blocked by most tanks.
Dude even a double pocketed Rein can be burned if your team just focus fires him down, or blow his shield so you can anti. The only instance I can think of where a healer can outheal damage is a mercy can outheal Winston's shock gun.
You're talking about this 3v6 as if it were the norm. There is a reason tanks replaced DPS in overwatch and that Blizz had to limit them to 1 per team in the sequel.
That’s why GOATS dominated in OW before Baguette got permanerfed into the healer role. Even then, GOATS dominated before role queue got forced in.
There’s just too much sustain in that game. It’s really bad
Designers should not state objective game design as factual. These statements are what alienate your playerbase and project the developers as c**ty elitists.
I guess so. They exist to mitigate wounds taken just to prolong how long a party can venture forth before being maimed or deaded. But you'd have to go back in time like 50 years to tell a young Gary Gygax that Healers are a shitty idea if you want to pick bones about it; while your'e there you might as well tell him his obsession with making Wizards the most overpowered class who can cast I WIN on command was also shit design.
Healers in a tabletop about adventuring where you will make mistakes with potentially permanent consequences for the entire campaign (and where many things can just one shot you anyway) is completely different than the considerations of something like League.
The issue is putting in healers because "games have healers," not that a tabletop game where healing makes sense has healers.
Then hopefully whatever that reason is works well and supports your game design/objective. I'm just saying many games seem to have healers because, that's just something you do, which is often why they end up not fitting with anything else.
Agreed. It's just that even one of the games mentioned in the OP screenshot has a perfectly good implementation of a healer role, so it's clear to me that lots of people just have a kneejerk reaction over perfectly fine game design.
I haven't played LoL in a long long time, though I had no issues with heals/healers at the time or people who relied on saving people with shields. Going more generally, I can understand some complaints about healers/healing, though it's not something that has ever presented me a huge problem. Slowing the game down can be a legit concern.
2 years ago
Anonymous
I agree completely. There's a fine line between "encouraging all-out fights over boring, safe long distance engagements" and "making it impossible for even an all-out offense to accomplish anything in a timely manner".
Healers that can heal in combat are shit design. So purely combat focused games should not have them.
Ideally healers fit well into dungeon exploring, adventuring games etc where healing is a resource you need to manage to keep your party going over a long adventure
Healers in single player are okay. But they're fricking lame in team based multiplayer. What kind of person goes, I want to be the b***h of the player that fricks everyone up? Sure, they're useful, but they're so lame to play as and because they're useful, someone's gonna end up forced into the boring b***h job if someone else isn't into it.
Yeah I don't know how they did it. Despite being a shameless Overwatch clone filled with bugs, Paladins is actually fun to play and doesn't make you want to have a nice day when you play it.
It's perfectly fun when you don't feel like putting in effort, and wants to have a more supporting role while more directly trying to work for the benefit of the team. It's not like you play Healer once and then are contractually obligated to only do that for life.
Plus, there's something extra fun about fricking people up as the class that is NOT meant to frick people up
Healers only make sense in games with mana, or some secondary resource. Then you're just converting mana into health, which is pretty normal, easy to balance. Health is the short term resource, mana is the long term resource.
Putting healers into a mana-less, ammo-less game? moronic. Its free fricking health and completely mandatory and game warping.
To add onto to this, the whole point of healing is resource management. Burst damage should be countered by heals. Heals should be countered by efficient, consistent damage that drain the healer of mana/resources and win in the long con.
Its incredibly fricked up to see modern games doing it backwards. "Free" resourceless healing is uncounterable. The only solution is to kill something so hard it overpowers the free healing, which means you have to burst harder than the infinite heals, which is already hard because healing counters burst. Its just fricked. I dont even get why tf2 and overwatch have braindead infinite healers, why don't healers have healing ammo/cooldowns?
Healers in WoW arenas worked for a veeeery long time. Are they hard to balance? Sure, but that doesn't mean you cannot implement them correctly. In my opinion it's just not worth doing unless your game fundamentally revolves around having this concept as a focus.
>WoW arenas
Braindead concept because the game revolves around a large party or raid. The PvP was NEVER balanced around 1v1 duels or even 3v3 fights. The minimum PvP balance point was a 10v10 fight. When they introduced arena shit in just before BC release I found it the most boring fricking shit ever, just nonstop line of sight blocking using the pillars. One of my friends actually grinded that arena shit and went to some tourney in Texas. Cringe.
Without Medics it becomes a game of spam and chip damage where you win by attrition, not because you commit to a play.
Healers and buffers keep the action close range as opposed to long range, at least for non-tanky characters.
Healers are fine. Battles of attrition are anti-fun, and to use his example against him, TF2 is at its best when you have more people on both teams than could reasonably be topped up by health kits. There are plenty of situations where a random idiot with a medic will easily die to a more skilled player, too, so it's hardly like medics are a huge swing factor in regular 1v1s, they're at their most game-changing when they have ubers in big pushes.
"Resetting the fight" until there's an all out fight instead of a skirmish is indeed more fun than five skirmishes until chip damage finally kills someone and things start snowballing, yes.
Another thing about healers is they create goals i.e. if you take out a healer your team has a better chance at pushing and winning. In the case of TF2 the ubercharge is very powerful but slow to build so you have an incentive to play aggressively to stop the ubercharge deployment.
Healers work in BF4 whereas they’re broken or useless in Overwatch.
At least in military shooters, you’re still a soldier first and foremost, but with a medkit.
Pure healing is boring, characters with something tied into their healing without being a healer is better. DOTA2 mentioned doesn't have a pure healer since most are built on long cool downs or regen. Mek has been around forever, guardian greaves less so but still there. It's not an oppressive item at all
think hes got a good point when it comes to a PVP team fight game but healers seem necessary for a PVE game where you're supposed to be slogging your way through dozens of mobs
Women are not competitive and the healers are usually duo’d with their boyfriends.
Their boyfriends are shitty casuals btw and they will never cover the tanks.
look at overwatch.
So, yes.
yes. they instantly erase all mistakes and reduce the strategy involved for every encounter to "just get healed". Without healers you might have to reconsider the fight, manage resources, or maybe even dodge. But because the whiniest people in the world decided to play games for validation the complexity of every game has to be brought down to their level, which is pretty fricking low considering they posture themselves as a saint for clicking on health bars.
>Without healers you might have to reconsider the fight, manage resources, or maybe even dodge.
You can still do all of that with healers.
you can but it barely fricking matters
nothing about wow arena worked you mongoloid
>you can but it barely fricking matters
Not if the enemy does enough damage to potentially mitigate the healing.
then what is the fricking function of healing???
they weren't because the game wasn't fricking balanced???
There absolutely were seasons that were well balanced.
>then what is the fricking function of healing???
To make the actual combat last longer than 10 fricking seconds? To make the game more than a hide-and-seek match? moron.
>didn't read what i was replying to
frick off moron, don't reply to me
Except it doesnt matter because they can just erase those mistakes so there is no incentive to even try. Furthermore devs will balance the game around the existence of healers, so not even the devs expect you to do anything else.
Please play some real content.
Real content is pressing the heal button and erasing all mistakes?
>then what is the fricking function of healing???
to satiate a bunch of whiners who use the game to go on a powertrip
If your healer can save you from a mistake you made then it's not real content, yes.
If you would lose because your healer isn't attacking alongside you, that's not hard content
If you are losing because you are failing to single out and kill the healer, that's a skill issue
If you have no abilities to separate the healed target from the healer, you walked out of the door without any pants on
>If you are losing because you are failing to single out and kill the healer, that's a skill issue
do you seriously think incentivising players to go out and tunnel down a single character because it's objectively correct is a good idea? you must work for blizzard
In PvP games yeah
>League's current meta is bruisers dashing a million times and draintank cancering out of their ass
yep, he was right
Morello being employed is bad game design
I think what games like Overwatch and TF2 did with Healers was bad design, ie make them so incredibly overpowered and easy to use that the entire game revolves around them most of the time.
Healers are always overpowered because the people who play them will whine if theyre not.
The thing about Overwatch was its combination of powerful healing and heavy tankiness, Mercy's rapid fire healing works perfectly fine with most DPS but use it on a tank and because of their many ways to mitigate and nullify damage its like they become unkillable. DPS end up not being able to do enough damage to kill those tanks because they gain so much more from healing than the lower health DPS with less survivability.
They don't have any instant kill classes like sniper?
Snipers only insta kill squishies, if any non shield tank could be instagibbed by a widow they'd be worthless in the role they're meant to fill. The only thing insta killing tanks are death pits
No, there are no single high damage single shots in Overwatch. Widowmaker does 300 damage on a fully charged headshot and most tanks have at least 400 health.
The exception of course being a few ultimates than be blocked by most tanks.
Dude even a double pocketed Rein can be burned if your team just focus fires him down, or blow his shield so you can anti. The only instance I can think of where a healer can outheal damage is a mercy can outheal Winston's shock gun.
focus fire is even more of a problem than healing, believe it or not
You're talking about this 3v6 as if it were the norm. There is a reason tanks replaced DPS in overwatch and that Blizz had to limit them to 1 per team in the sequel.
That’s why GOATS dominated in OW before Baguette got permanerfed into the healer role. Even then, GOATS dominated before role queue got forced in.
There’s just too much sustain in that game. It’s really bad
yes its oudated mechanic
Designers should not state objective game design as factual. These statements are what alienate your playerbase and project the developers as c**ty elitists.
I guess so. They exist to mitigate wounds taken just to prolong how long a party can venture forth before being maimed or deaded. But you'd have to go back in time like 50 years to tell a young Gary Gygax that Healers are a shitty idea if you want to pick bones about it; while your'e there you might as well tell him his obsession with making Wizards the most overpowered class who can cast I WIN on command was also shit design.
Healers in a tabletop about adventuring where you will make mistakes with potentially permanent consequences for the entire campaign (and where many things can just one shot you anyway) is completely different than the considerations of something like League.
The issue is putting in healers because "games have healers," not that a tabletop game where healing makes sense has healers.
What if you put in healers for a reason other than "games have healers"?
Then hopefully whatever that reason is works well and supports your game design/objective. I'm just saying many games seem to have healers because, that's just something you do, which is often why they end up not fitting with anything else.
Agreed. It's just that even one of the games mentioned in the OP screenshot has a perfectly good implementation of a healer role, so it's clear to me that lots of people just have a kneejerk reaction over perfectly fine game design.
I haven't played LoL in a long long time, though I had no issues with heals/healers at the time or people who relied on saving people with shields. Going more generally, I can understand some complaints about healers/healing, though it's not something that has ever presented me a huge problem. Slowing the game down can be a legit concern.
I agree completely. There's a fine line between "encouraging all-out fights over boring, safe long distance engagements" and "making it impossible for even an all-out offense to accomplish anything in a timely manner".
Healers that can heal in combat are shit design. So purely combat focused games should not have them.
Ideally healers fit well into dungeon exploring, adventuring games etc where healing is a resource you need to manage to keep your party going over a long adventure
DnD never had a pure “Healer” though. I mean there are clerics but they have offensive spells and can tank hits, they can also use melee
Who you really have to blame are JRPGs inspired by DnD that completely misunderstood what a cleric was
Healers in single player are okay. But they're fricking lame in team based multiplayer. What kind of person goes, I want to be the b***h of the player that fricks everyone up? Sure, they're useful, but they're so lame to play as and because they're useful, someone's gonna end up forced into the boring b***h job if someone else isn't into it.
I like playing as healers in Paladins.
Healers in Paladins are fun characters with healing as a bonus, it's done pretty good
Yeah I don't know how they did it. Despite being a shameless Overwatch clone filled with bugs, Paladins is actually fun to play and doesn't make you want to have a nice day when you play it.
It's perfectly fun when you don't feel like putting in effort, and wants to have a more supporting role while more directly trying to work for the benefit of the team. It's not like you play Healer once and then are contractually obligated to only do that for life.
Plus, there's something extra fun about fricking people up as the class that is NOT meant to frick people up
No, they're not.
Healers only make sense in games with mana, or some secondary resource. Then you're just converting mana into health, which is pretty normal, easy to balance. Health is the short term resource, mana is the long term resource.
Putting healers into a mana-less, ammo-less game? moronic. Its free fricking health and completely mandatory and game warping.
To add onto to this, the whole point of healing is resource management. Burst damage should be countered by heals. Heals should be countered by efficient, consistent damage that drain the healer of mana/resources and win in the long con.
Its incredibly fricked up to see modern games doing it backwards. "Free" resourceless healing is uncounterable. The only solution is to kill something so hard it overpowers the free healing, which means you have to burst harder than the infinite heals, which is already hard because healing counters burst. Its just fricked. I dont even get why tf2 and overwatch have braindead infinite healers, why don't healers have healing ammo/cooldowns?
Healers aren't intelligent enough to be able to manage resources. they can barely click on a health bar as is
which is why they demand the entire game be brought down to their level, no resource management for anyone.
healing has its place, you want to encourage players to take fights and angles without getting poked out because they took a risk
what's not ok is in combat healing or healing on par with damage dealing
Healers in WoW arenas worked for a veeeery long time. Are they hard to balance? Sure, but that doesn't mean you cannot implement them correctly. In my opinion it's just not worth doing unless your game fundamentally revolves around having this concept as a focus.
>nothing about wow arena worked you mongoloid
Right, I forgot they shut down the idea after the first season, what am I smoking.
@(You) of course
they should have, a shit game buoyed up by tons of mmo paypiggies
I agree, but the point is that healers were a perfectly fine component of the balancing there.
>WoW arenas
Braindead concept because the game revolves around a large party or raid. The PvP was NEVER balanced around 1v1 duels or even 3v3 fights. The minimum PvP balance point was a 10v10 fight. When they introduced arena shit in just before BC release I found it the most boring fricking shit ever, just nonstop line of sight blocking using the pillars. One of my friends actually grinded that arena shit and went to some tourney in Texas. Cringe.
t. guy who did the R14 grind in vanilla.
But I liked thing. Then again, I also like fighting games and most people hate those.
sorry bud vanilla rank grinding was for kids and arenas were for adults.
it's more like one type of autism vs another
Healers are fine if the amount they can heal is meaningfully finite. Infinite heals make games worse, yes.
You need healers for coordinated PvE content. Without them you can't do any mechanics that aren't just "lmao dodge this".
Without Medics it becomes a game of spam and chip damage where you win by attrition, not because you commit to a play.
Healers and buffers keep the action close range as opposed to long range, at least for non-tanky characters.
Healers are fine. Battles of attrition are anti-fun, and to use his example against him, TF2 is at its best when you have more people on both teams than could reasonably be topped up by health kits. There are plenty of situations where a random idiot with a medic will easily die to a more skilled player, too, so it's hardly like medics are a huge swing factor in regular 1v1s, they're at their most game-changing when they have ubers in big pushes.
frick off mercy main
>Battles of attrition are anti-fun,
Frick off. Pressing a button to magically reset the fight is better?
"Resetting the fight" until there's an all out fight instead of a skirmish is indeed more fun than five skirmishes until chip damage finally kills someone and things start snowballing, yes.
If you're playing a shitty battle royale game.
as opposed to what
exactly
Another thing about healers is they create goals i.e. if you take out a healer your team has a better chance at pushing and winning. In the case of TF2 the ubercharge is very powerful but slow to build so you have an incentive to play aggressively to stop the ubercharge deployment.
Attrition is bad game design. Healers are just health regeneration that can be killed.
Healers work in BF4 whereas they’re broken or useless in Overwatch.
At least in military shooters, you’re still a soldier first and foremost, but with a medkit.
>"nobody likes losing kills"
>-developer of League of Legends, where losing a kill to Flash happens at least 5 times a game
Masters of bipolar game design since 2009
WTF
There are games where they are absolute fricking cancer that singlehandedly make the game less fun to play. TF2 isn't one of them and neither was LoL.
Pure healing is boring, characters with something tied into their healing without being a healer is better. DOTA2 mentioned doesn't have a pure healer since most are built on long cool downs or regen. Mek has been around forever, guardian greaves less so but still there. It's not an oppressive item at all
think hes got a good point when it comes to a PVP team fight game but healers seem necessary for a PVE game where you're supposed to be slogging your way through dozens of mobs
Anything outside of RPGs, yes
there needs to be a role for women to play
Women are not competitive and the healers are usually duo’d with their boyfriends.
Their boyfriends are shitty casuals btw and they will never cover the tanks.
No and Guild Wars proves it.
Was just about to bring up GW2.
I'm not talking about GW2.
They are in lol because there is no attrition by default since you can recall whenever
Morello is a known moron
>competitively
gross
He was always right and you know it
Healers have no place in a game, they're never fun, they ruin game balance, and they're played by w*men
Healing is fun!
Healing IS fun. Especially when you beat up the enemy healer.