Healing is an obsolete game mechanic and developers need to stop thinking they have to shove it into every game, or at least designing the game to mak...

Healing is an obsolete game mechanic and developers need to stop thinking they have to shove it into every game, or at least designing the game to make healing necessary. Healing should be something rare and strategic. The closest thing to healing done well are Fromsoft games, where healing is limited, it's a dangerous task midfight and anyone can do it.

This is made worse in team based multiplayer games which pretty much force you to have a healer on your team or lose. Why? No one wants to heal. And stop pretending not to understand what I mean, you know that I don't mean 0% of people want to heal but that it's less than 3% of people who enjoy it AND want to do it while games usually require 20% of your group at minimum to be healing. Not only that, but I've never seen a multiplayer PVP game where healing wasn't a balancing nightmare.

Get that shitty mechanic out of gaming.

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  1. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    agreed. healer classes do nothing but trivialize the game. Without healers you would have to manage resources, pick your encounters, and in general play smarter. But because they want the narcissists who don't know how to play games feel good about themselves, they force a healing role into games at the expense of any depth it could have had. and then they have the gall to posture themselves as some kind of a saint just because they play the game. Thank you healers, thank you for making me put up with your unbearable attitude just so I can play a game that was dumbed down for your sake.

    • 2 years ago
      Anonymous

      on top of it healing classes also tend to be overpowered because of course the people who play them are fricking garbage and will whine until they get their way.

  2. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    Games should mock the player every time they ask for healing.

  3. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    maybe healers should be made a bit more fun to people who don't like traditional healing, just scrapping it all together when it's so engrained in games in general is impossible

    • 2 years ago
      Anonymous

      Reduce the damage done by enemies, improve mitigation, give players decent self-healing and voilà: Healers no longer required. Healers are a meme pushed by JRPGs. OP pic related. There's a reason why the stereotypical healer is a young starry eyed female.

    • 2 years ago
      Anonymous

      No it isn't.

  4. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    Disagree, I think tanking is a horrid feature.
    You have the AI have this amazing and complex moveset all for the tank to aggro the Boss and stay glued to a corner all day.

    Its dumb, its boring, it bypasses game mechanics and its literally just sit in corner get hit on as DPS finally kill it.

    • 2 years ago
      Anonymous

      Tanking is nowhere near as ubiquitous as healing. We're not just talking RPGs here but all gaming. But I agree with your point as well. I think the "tank build" where your character is harder to kill and focuses more on disruption than damage is a cool playstyle, but yeah, the "keep aggro" bit is idiotic.

  5. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    no ogura-chan virginal healbawd gf feel

  6. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    Dedicated healing roles aren't inherently bad they just always end up becoming braindead in modern games to accomodate the women and gays it attracts.

    • 2 years ago
      Anonymous

      They are inherently bad specifically because of that. Never mind that it encourages lazy design. They design the game around the idea that 20% of people will play that role when less than 5% actually want to. It's idiotic.

  7. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    There are 3 kinds of people:

    Those who like to abuse, those who like to be abused, and those who aren't quite sure what they like but want to be a part of it anyway. That's the holy trinity of MMOs for ya.

    • 2 years ago
      Anonymous

      Sweet dreams are made of these

  8. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    Healbawd thread?

    • 2 years ago
      Anonymous

      Healbawds are specifically the meme which causes healing roles to endure in multiplayer games.

  9. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    if they designed the healing roles so that 20% of people actually want to play it then this wouldn't be a problem but they don't understand how fun healing works so they can't

    • 2 years ago
      Anonymous

      Explain to me how fun healing works because I've yet to see it. I've not seen one multiplayer game where people fight over getting to heal.

      • 2 years ago
        Anonymous

        it's not about people fighting over getting to heal it's making people not hate having to be the healer, like the scientist in PvZ Garden Warfare where he can heal but he can also do other stuff while healing and is not forced to choose between either healing or fighting

        • 2 years ago
          Anonymous

          why play something i merely tolerate when i can play a fun class

          • 2 years ago
            Anonymous

            I see people playing as scientist all the time so obviously they're doing something right

  10. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    I have had similar thoughts but there I'd go as far as saying that healing (including potions and bandages and shit) deviates from what I would consider the ideal. After all, the criticism being laid out against healers tend to apply here as well: so long as you can figure out some way to find brief respite to use the healing items (which, in my experience, is very rarely a genuine issue) it effectively removes punishment from mechanics, it tends to be in form of busywork like playing inventory tetris with potions or backtracking to an area without enemies so you can camp, or whatever.

    Even in place of severely constrained ability to heal, the content might as well have been designed under the assumption that you can only use up 100% of your health pool, rather than 300% or something like that with largely the same experience, except that you don't have to play inventory tetris. And I'd like to add a point that tends not to come up: as a major proponent of thematic mechanics supporting emergent narratives, serious injury is a dramatic event that should be a big deal, and partial loss of function due to injuries opens up a lot of emergent gameplay opportunities that you can't have if health is modeled only at granularity where health is a number that doesn't do anything unless it hits zero.

    • 2 years ago
      Anonymous

      That being said, if we look at irredeemably unthematic games centered around concepts like boss fights and vertical progression and all that, I want to push back to the other direction in defense of healers and tanks: it's no coincidence that holy trinity is popular.

      For one thing, even if it was the case that almost no one liked healing or tanking, I think class interdependence is really really beneficial. Secondly, min/maxing is literally about stacking synergistic combat factors while ignoring everything else, and so long as you have room for deep character customization, it's just about inevitably better for 6 players to maximize damage, 2 players to maximize support, and 2 players to maximize control, than it is for 10 players to make 60/20/20 split (doesn't matter if support is healing or (de)buffing, or if control is CC or aggro) so you end up something to that effect anyway. And as it turns out, people tend to prefer healing over being an aura bot, or tight control afforded by aggro mechanics over CC-bruiser making things just a tiny bit less chaotic. After all, as it's often observed, a lot of people really do enjoy popping up and making lots of damage as opposed to kiting one loose mob that escaped the chain-CC pile. On the other hand, the criticism of healers making content easy misses the point catastrophically, as "relevant" endgame content tends to have enrage timers and in order to beat them, what you have to do is to cut healers to the best of your ability. Indeed, a marquee player playing a healer might well push you over the threshold of needing one healer less (and take one damage-dealer more, about the biggest damage boost possible).

      Now, I can see some room for improvement. For example, it's true that less than 20% of players tend to prefer healing/tanking, so you'd probably do well to have 6-player parties as small-group content, say. But I think wanting to get rid of these is misguided so long as you keep the core formula.

  11. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    >can heal as much as you want on any given turn with no cost besides items
    >healing expensive as shit though
    >you either learn to mitigate damage by wisely equipping your team and strategizing to minimize the number of attacks you take
    >or you get filtered

  12. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    Whenever people complain about healing, I think back to Bozja in FF XIV where it's 30 DPS dying over and over trying to brute force things and then worship the ground a healer walks on when a healer shows up.

    • 2 years ago
      Anonymous

      >things that have never happened

      • 2 years ago
        Anonymous

        That's literally been my experience the past 2 weeks. Started on my first ShB relic weapon and it's literally swarms of DPS constantly dying. I read it's no longer an issue in Zadnor once people start using lost essences but right now it's just DPS and a few tanks rushing the enemy and dying. I'm sick of critical engagements failing because there wasn't enough healing.

    • 2 years ago
      Anonymous

      The boss is only like that because they design around the healers capability to instantly erase all mistakes. Wow, thrilling. I love not having to pay attention.

  13. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    DAMN BRATTY HEALER

  14. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    Its the best when games use HP as a currency. As in you start wiht a good amount of HP, but then there are perks like "Do more damage, take more damage", "remove 10% max hp, attack faster" etc.
    So if you're confident you can turn your character into a glass cannon

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