Adding a +1 to smiling bandit’s answer to Calatin.
In my guild, bids are over raidchat. You say “bid” or “bid offspec;” offspecs are taken in consideration only if there are no “mainspec bids.” Trialists don’t get EP and can get items only if no member wants them. Often someone will “bid offspec” and then, seeing some “bid” from a trialist who’d benefit more, “withdraw.” To me that’s absolutely lovely. After all, a +2 increase for one player would be a +2 increase for the raid; a +22 increase to another player is a +22 for the raid’s totals.
There’s a general problem with buffs as well as healing, yeah. I used to be Marksmanship (MM) as a hunter and would always be assigned to groups where I’d buff everybody else but nobody buffed me. MM is relatively low DPS. The raid leader we have still hasn’t figured out why, on that raid where I had to sit out due to “low DPS” (I was 5 point below the limit they’d magically come up with), the people who’d been in my party previously all had their DPS lowered by about 115… :rolleyes:
This is what I like about being a buffer or healer. I can say, “You think I’m not doing my job? All right. You tackle this next group without me.”
In the early days of City of Heroes I had to forcibly educate the idiots about how much damage a Radiation Defender could defray. I dropped both of my debuff toggles on some enemies and said, “Watch. See? No ow. They can’t hit me. They can’t hurt me. Do you UNDERSTAND? Now stop complaining that I’m not a healbot.”
Just noticing that of all the problems Diablo II had, this wasn’t one of them. Making each character primarily responsible for its own healing totally removed this problem. Why not move back in that direction?
Duh & Duh, every edition, Everquest, WoW, every single rpg in existence has the same issue, playing the healer sucks ass, unless you happen to be one of the .000001% of gamers who actually like that shyte. what they should do is just parse the group and raid logs of every single healer ever played and then create npc healers capable of the same kind of numbers.
similar issues, in EQ you had the Buff classes. Sony hated gamers and nothing made this more evident than raiding if you were a buff class. Chanters 1 critical raid buff maybe 3 depending on the raid, Druids same boat, Clerics 3 critical raid buffs costing expensive reagents to cast as well, Shaman, about 50 raid buffs (ok ok so it was only what 4-6) and the absolute best part of being a raid buff class? the asshats who click off your buffs because they were out of order…eat my bleeding arse. (everquest had this stupid thing with buff order and it could be important when dealing with mobs that debuff, but anyone who thought that a raid consisting of 70+ people was going to get buffed in order when dealing with 6 different people casting buffs was a moron)
Star Wars: Galaxies had a stupid way of handling Doctors also. Certain attacks would wound: that is, reduce your maximum health. Wounds could only be healed in hospitals, or with the use of an expensive portable 'droid. Wound medpacks had to be crafted at the Doctor’s own expense, using supplies he could mine himself (if he could afford it, if he could brave the dangerous areas on foot without any combat skills in order to place his mining equipment) or purchase (if he could afford it).
The combatants, once healed, would say “thanks, bye” and leave the hospital. Healing was nothing more than a very slow way of converting credits into XP. You couldn’t run missions to make money because you had almost no combat skills; you couldn’t make money healing; and you couldn’t make money crafting medical supplies because placing the mining equipment at distant veins of valuable resources was too hazardous to do alone.
FFXI gets this semi-right, in that both of the two main taking jobs (paladin and ninja) are primarily responsible for themselves (paladin with cures and defense buffs, ninja with debuffs and ninjitsu dodge magic), which means the white mages are more for emergencies, buffs, and debuffs. Granted, a party without a healer type is still likely a dead party, but healers are not just curebots.
I’m interested in the way this discussion went about WoW, I’m a non-conventional enhance/resto shaman right now, and when dual-specs are implemented I’m likely going to end up with at least one spec being my guild’s dedicated raid healer. I like it, though.
Warhammer got it right if you’re in a good guild–there is nothing quite like the Priests of Sigmar getting things like “Ability that hits the enemy with five rapid strikes, transferring a portion of damage dealt as cures to your cure target” to encourage healing as a job. I’m trying to build out my WoW shaman like this, because in-the-thick healing is too much fun.
I think the main dearth of healing is the way DPS trolls treat healers, though–it really is always the healer’s fault when things go wrong and never to their credit when things go without a hitch in the minds of most people I’ve played with. I would go so far as to say that across every MMO I’ve ever played (Guild Wars, FFXI, EVE Online, City of Heroes, WoW, Warhammer), the sole best predictor of a Guild’s overall merit is how they treat healer/support primaries–the more pampered the healers, the higher the overall skill level is likely to be.
One idea I liked from EQ2 was the use of Wards. Wards are like healing,but they protect you from so much damage. I wish more games used them, because they are like heals, but work very well with different kinds of healing. I was grouped with a healer when I was warding.
Together, it was an nigh-unbeatable combo. I was delaying the onset of damage, doing a little DPS, then the healer would take over, and while that was going on, I re-warded people. If things got too hairy too quickly, I could drop a quick ward over the party (it had a longer rest period, so it was a sparing-use thing) and then ward the tank.
It was great. It’d be nice if more people had more flexible ways to heal/mitigate damage. You could have the Healers, the Regenators, the Increase-Max-Healthers, the Warders, the Damage Resistors, etc…
Someone’s never been in a serious raid guild I see. There are plenty of people who enjoy healing and play with other people who appreciate them. It’s just that they tend to get snapped up by the bigger raid guilds and get used to doing things with their guild so you won’t ever meet them. Pick up groups as a healer tend to suck ass (although as heal team lead for my raid guild I did force people to do PuGs at the start because nothing teaches you reflexes and fast triage like a sucky puG group).
Meter spamming and other such crap is symptomatic of playing with teenagers and other people who lack the patience and insight into how raids function. Guilds that focus on meters as a performance tool (they can be a useful guide but only in competent hands) tend not to do very well.
As for the dps performance of healers while levelling in wow: Respecs are cheap and the same spell power gear you get as a healer will do you just fine for solo dps. Prior to the level cap, just heal as moonkin or shadow or elemental or whatever, there’s no reason to be a full out healing spec prior to level cap.
In summary no I don’t at all feel stuck playing a healer. I’m happy that I can perform a vital role in raids well and every guild I’ve been in has been as appreciative of their healers as they are of their tanks and DPS.
(For the record:
2 years as a priest (holy) from molten core -> Naxx 1
2 years as a druid (mostly resto) kara -> Naxx 2
LOTRO does manage to break up the holy trinity rather nicely by providing off-healing, off-tanking, and even passable DPS specs to almost all of the classes. Some complain that this erodes class roles, and they are afraid that their particular class won’t be needed anymore. Au contraire. Almost any group quest can be completed with several configurations of classes, which can make for some truly entertaining gameplay.
I love my loremaster. The traditional loremaster role is cc and pets, but we have since branched off into off-healing, outstanding debuffing, and passable AoE DPS. And I get to charge to the front lines wearing a bathrobe and dual-wielding a sword & paddle. I have a ton of situationally useful skills and a role that changes from group to group. I think it’s a great system, and though I am not part of a traditional raid guild, my group raids all the time and is highly successful. I think we were the third kinship on our server to take down the BBEG from the newest paid expansion.
This is why I like my rogue. Generally in raids I simply have a clear goal and that’s it. Sometimes there’s some switching around with a rare bit of offtanking or something, but in general the only thing I have to worry about is keeping an eye on my threat, not fucking up, and dealing with whatever boss gimmicks. I am the only person on whom my failure will fall; if I fuck up, I can’t blame anyone else for it but me, and vice versa. OTOH, my main in City of Heroes is a Psych/Force Field Defender, and I have a lot of fun even in pick up groups with that, of course assuming there are no complete idiots coughblasterscough in the team.
My guild’s healers don’t seem to be too bothered about being healers; but thinking about it they do all seem to have high-level alts they switch to sometimes, more so than anyone else.
I’m a young (lvl 20) priest in WoW, but I’ve also played CoH for a few years. Personally I love(d) playing anything that would let me buff-heal someone else. It just felt like I was keeping the fight going (or that I was keeping my “pet” alive, depending on how kind I was feeling ) I think part of it really is ego, as was said above-do you care if what you do is appreciated by others? In a good guild it should be, but that shouldn’t be your whole reason for choosing the class. I’m quite happy thus far being a (shadow)priest.
I’ll fully admit to wanting to roll a warrior though just to try out the “front-line” action, though.
In Eve ships fitted with armor/shield reps get a bit more respect than it’s sounding like in your games. The thing about it though is that it’s handled through fittings and skills rather than on the Kill mails. That’s the problem with playing support, you don’t get on the kill mails. But as anyone can fit their ships with the correct modules for it, more people have a respect for it. You aren’t stuck as a career class. Your career class only gives you a head start on certain trajectories, ie it’s easier to train skills your have the right attributes for. That being said, having a good repair ship around is awesome. A high DPS Gank ship being repped by a high tanked repair ship is a really hard combo to defeat.
I tried leveling up a priest in WoW once in the belief that it would be appreciated by my guild at the time. And it might have been had I stuck with it. But I joined a few too many pick-up-groups and found that too many players use healers as a crutch to enable reckless behavior. They’ll go rushing ahead and tackle the next big mob while I was still dealing with healing the wounds from the last battle, then complain when I couldn’t heal them mid-combat. Didn’t seem to matter to them that I’d run out of mana completely and didn’t have a way to instantly fill up my mana bar. After a couple of these, I soured completely on playing any class that is known primarily as a healer. (And it wasn’t too many more PUGs later that I decided against doing anything in a PUG…)
I am an 80 Healadin and I love my spec. Unfortunately for my guild and would-be PUGs, I don’t enjoy healing instances or raids. I do it with my guild, but it isn’t fun for me. No one gets as much scrutiny or blame for poor runs or compensates for others’ sloppy play as much the healer. Dungeon/raid gear-- if it drops-- isn’t worth it.
I prefer battlegrounds, where I can save EVERYONE’S ass if they stay within range and don’t do anything dumb, but if they die, it’s their own damn fault and no one’s going to blame me for their stupidity. My awesomeness is right there on the leaderboard for all to see. I’d rather do 100 BGs than 50 dungeons.
I never thought I’d say this, but healing in FFXI was kind of fun by comparison.
I was first brought into WoW by a friend and he told me to roll a Dwarven Priest (old school Fear Ward, FTW), but since I was new to the game, his guild wouldn’t accept me. I quickly found a guild, and I spent a lot of my “pre-level cap” time in instances / groups. It wasn’t until the first expansion that I discovered the joy in speccing Shadow for leveling and then respeccing at the cap. If you are Shadow up until 80, you shouldn’t ever have to run an instance, as Blizzard has been pretty generous with the experience from quests. When I re-rolled a new character on another server, I didn’t have to hit any instances until 80.
Something odd I found, though, was on my first server, (back when BWL was “new content” and UBRS was run incessantly) I didn’t have many PuG problems at all. This was on a RP server. You’d hit a snag now and then, but nothing compared to horror stories I’d heard. When I went to the PvP server, with my current Blood Elf Priest, I’ve had 5 wipes on the first boss in Heroic AN (a few months ago, mind you), before the group gave up and disbanded. Is it something specific to the “type” of realm, or was it just the upscale in difficulty?
Truth. The one Alterac Valley I was in that Alliance won, I finally gave up trying to do DPS (even a Retribution Paladin’s going to suck at DPS when he’s 52 in a field full of 55-59 DKs) and started healing the high-levels on my side. I won’t say that tipped the scales or anything, but I felt I made a bigger contribution in keeping the big guys alive than I ever would have stabbing things with my spear.
I really like the hybrid healing classes in Warhammer Online, the Shaman and Archmage. They have a neat see-saw system where using healing magic improve their attacks and vice versa. You are basically encouraged to switch between healing and blasting. The melee healers are even cooler (Warrior Priest and Disciple of Khaine), because you actually heal by attacking. Smashing heads with a giant hammer while spreading the love around to your allies…good stuff.
City of Heroes puts healing as part of larger power sets (with the exception of the Empathy set, and that at least has wicked buffs too). Take Radiation Emission, for example…you have a (fairly weak) heal, but can also severely debuff enemies (with giant green clouds of billowing cancer smoke) while strengthening your friends.
I’ve never liked being a dedicated healer because it sucks solo. I know these are games oriented around teams, but sometimes that 's not feasible or desireable. I like to heal and support teammates, but also be able to handle myself, which is why I always prefer playing a debuffer to a buffer/healer type.
) I think part of it really is ego, as was said above-do you care if what you do is appreciated by others? In a good guild it should be, but that shouldn’t be your whole reason for choosing the class. I’m quite happy thus far being a (shadow)priest.
A girl should never leave her Inn without a couple of Dummies and Goblin Jumper Cables. 