You’re looking for logic? In WoW? Bwa-ha-ha-ha-ha-choke,gasp,wheeze-ha-ha!
This is the “world” where “undead” can be “killed” and “resurrected”, hurt and then “healed” with the Light, where DeathKnights, the ultimate scourge of the Alliance can be welcomed back with open arms even though they spread disease and rot and work side-by-side with Paladins. Where blacksmiths can’t repair armor, and where engineers can make bullets but not arrows or cross-bow bolts.
And despite all that ridiculousness, I’ll probably be running around with my Pally later tonight.
I play WoW, and I play a Holy Priest, and rolled from the very beginning with the intention of playing a healer, I’m very good at it and I enjoy it a lot, so hopefully I can provide some meaningful answers to you.
I don’t think this is a fair way to state a lack of healers. Some people love healing, like I do, and some people don’t enjoy it. The thing is, the gameplay and the mindset for different roles, and the mindset of DPS just seems to be more in line with how more people are.
I like to compare the major roles in WoW to football.
Your tank is like the Quarterback. He is often the leader of the group, gets a lot of credit, even when he really doesn’t deserve it, and he gets a lot of blame, even when it isn’t really his fault. It’s a stressful role because he needs to have a good idea of where people are, so he can position and move correctly, he needs to be able to make split second decisions like using certain abilities to mitigate damage or keep mobs from killing people, and he needs to do all of this while maintaining his threat rotation. IME, people who like to play tanks are the same sorts of people who like to play quarterbacks because they get to be the center of attention and they like having the responsibility.
Your tank is like your skill positions like your receivers and running backs. These people usually have the singular task of doing damage, and often don’t need to know about what else is going on because what directly affects them. Unlike tanking and healing, your DPSers are a simple min/max problem of doing the most damage possible, just like receivers or running backs are just worried about getting the one extra yard or whater. Also unlike tanking and healing, DPS seldom get’s blame when things go bad, but often take credit for simply doing their job (eg, doing lots of damage). Much like those players, many DPSers are focused on maximizing how much damage they do and loathe situations where they’re stuck doing something that hurts their numbers. But much like those players, the best ones are the ones who know what else is going on and contribute in otherways (like a good block, or whatever).
Your healers are like your offensive linemen. They’re the backbone of a successful group, and as long as they do their job well, no one even pays attention to them, but as soon as things start to go wrong, they get a lot of blame. Also, they need to have as much, and in some cases more, knowledge about what’s going on because they need to know where the damage is going out, when it’s going out, and how to best handle it. Beyond that, they also need to have fast reaction time, like linemen do with blitzes, especially when it comes to spike damage or random raid damage. Finally, in raids, healers are only as good as the weakest of them; where you could have 4 linemen block perfectly, and one blown block ruins a play, one healer who misses his job, or if they’re stepping over eachother clipping heals and wasting mana, the group wipes. Moreover, often a single mistake can spell massive disaster. Players who like to play healers tend to enjoy the challenge of teamwork, of being able to make effective quick decisions, managing resources (HPS versus their mana pool), and they’re not in it for attention or glory or big numbers.
As someone who played offensive line in high school and plays a healer now, this comparison may be why I like it, but I think it’s apt. When I played offensive line, I had got a very good idea for how my fellow linemen played, when they needed help and when they didn’t, and we all knew how important it was to handle our designated roles. The satisfaction of knowing I did my role well and that it contributed to a victory was enough satisfaction. As far as healing goes, I have a very good sense of how my fellow healers play, what kind of damage and targets they can and cannot handle well; we make a great team and I enjoy that aspect a lot.
The problem with healing as it is now is that it’s fundamentally flawed. Healing isn’t like DPS, and it shouldn’t be, because it’s not. Healing doesn’t have a rotation or priority, per se, since pushing maximum HPS is seldom the goal, and there’s only so many ways healing can be challenged. They can do “OMG the tank is getting crushed”, they can do endurance fights to test efficiency, they can do raid damage to see how well you can hit multiple targets while not stepping on eachother’s toes or wasting mana, or some combination of those. There’s many more ways to challenge DPS, like movement, multiple targets, single targets, etc.
Virtually every fight has a different flavor for DPS, but many of them are fundamentally the same for healers. For instance, Thaddius has the dps needing to do lots of damage while moving and keeping the charge stacks, for healers, a little bit of raid damage, yay. Kel Thuzad has steady predictable raid damage, and tanks that get hit moderately hard, while DPS has to kill all the adds, then kill the boss while managing mind controls and watching the threat wipes. Malygos has the tank getting a beating with some raid damage, while DPSers have to kill sparks, move to them, and manage threat, then in phase 2, healers heal random raid damage, while dpsers have to watch threat on the ones the tanks have, and then they get to fly up on the disks. Even on multi-drake Sartharion, it’s just more combinations of the tank getting crushed, raid damage, and endurance.
Beyond all of that, healing is inherently stressful and it burns people out. Healers constantly have to make split second decisions that very well could determine the difference between a wipe and a successful kill. For instance, if I misjudge a precast on a GH on a tank and I cancel it and I shouldn’t, he dies, it’s a wipe, or I don’t cancel it and I should, and I waste mana that could put me OOM, especially if I was OO5SR, or multiple people need heals, and I don’t prioritize exactly right, and we lose someone important, or I die for whatever reason, and we now don’t have enough healers to keep people alive, and it’s a wipe. If a DPS screws up, most likely he drops aggro and loses a little bit of DPS, even if he pulls aggro, it usually only means his own death, but with the current threat situation and tools like omen, that’s very unlikely. Even for a tank who could also singlehandedly mean a win or a loss, he’s generally not threat limited, and DPS can always hold back if he is, and his health is generally just the concern of the healers, and any cases where he may need to use an ability or trinket is, more often than not, something he knows ahead of time. It’s a lot of stress and responsibility to know that a single minor mistake could very well mean a wipe, where for others it usually just means a little less dps or, at worst, your own death.
One of my biggest complaints when I played a holy priest in WoW (quit last year) was the over-reliance on healing meters. Meters are BS, pure and simple – well, they show if someone’s asleep, but it’s super easy to game the meters.
I also found that if the GM or RL played a healer or at least had some experience in it, things were better for healers. My GL was a tank and his co-GL was a dps class, so they did not really grok the procedure and often assigned heals rather illogically.
I burned out on raiding and on playing really, and quit, but my toon was holy from day 1 and I never had a problem soloing.
Another advantage that “healers” have in City of Heroes/Villains is that healing ( and buffing/debuffing ) powersets are available to classes with pets. Which means that most of your healing powers are still of actual use solo. A Thugs/Pain Domination Mastermind or Fire/Empathy Controller isn’t stuck with a bunch of heal powers with nothing to heal solo. I know that I personally find it a lot more fun to play a character whose powers I can mostly use solo or teamed, and not be dragging around half a dozen useless powers solo.
That reminds me of something I saw on the CoX forums a while back that amused me. Someone with a Force Field Defender ( one of the strongest buffing characters in the game, for non-players ) mentioned being kicked from a team for the Terra Volta trial ( back when it was harder ) because the team “wanted a healer”. He said it was one of the more satisfying moments in the game to see them a while later all fall out of the mission door, dead.
Absolutely, healing meters are only marginally useful, and it’s annoying as hell when people try to judge how effective a healer is based on the meters. Healers can only heal as much damage as there is to heal, and different classes and roles have very different results in different fights. DPSers are generally judged purely by how much damage they put out, but for healing, a solid MT healer in many fights will often put out less healing than a less skilled raid healer. Malygos is a good example where MT healers are tested in their ability to manage burst damage, but a poor raid healer can just throw out heals wantonly and often end up with considerably more healing done.
I absolutely agree with this. To a lot of tanks and DPS, healers just heal or maybe are raid healers or single target healers, but they don’t understand more intricate things like burst damage vs. steady damage, or how the different heal styles mesh together. Many times I’ve gotten in arguments when some of the other officers will say “we have enough, why is the MT/raid dying?” “they’re dying because we don’t have a Druid/Shaman/Paladin to do such-and-such a job”. Blizzard has done a lot to homogenize specs and classes, but there’s still considerably more in the way of niches for healers that make some encounters a lot easier.
I love playing my holy paladin healer and I’m very good at it, but it is perhaps telling that this character has never been my main. The comments above are right- healing is stressful. The worst part is that healers can compensate for the mistakes of others, and I often do. If the tank doesn’t mitigate damage very well, or breaks CC, or whatever, I can usually heal him more and get through it. If dps pulls aggro, I can often heal him through it or use blessing of protection. When the healer makes a mistake, it’s often the case that no one is going to be able to compensate for it. Someone will die, and quite possibly the group will wipe. The healer is the last link in the chain, and when it breaks, it’s all over.
Another reason that puggers have problems finding healers is that a good healer is highly valued and sought after again and again by those who know him. He just doesn’t have to join pugs as often. Good are of course valued but (a) you can get dps just about anywhere and (b) subpar dps usually won’t get you all killed the way subpar healing will.
Incidentally, I agree that healing meters are all but useless.
My CoH healer was built to follow my spouse’s blaster around. But it is from her that I learned my dislike of pickup groups. Having seven people go off in three directions and then blame you when the heal wasn’t there for them is not my idea of a good time.
The other problem with healers is that there is something satisfying about using an MMO to kill stuff.
And with a healer you pretty much need a team, soloing is really difficult.
But as a duo, it rocked and was a lot of fun. We sit in the same room when we play, so we could communicate easily. I don’t mind being the “sidekick” to my husband’s “hero.”
I play a restoration shaman in WoW and love it. My guild cleared all of Naxx the other night and I had a blast. I’ve played nearly every class and role in the game, and nothing is more exhilarating to me than getting that last second burst heal to save the tank and the raid.
I've never felt unappreciated either; quite the opposite in fact. Good, dedicated tanks and healers seem to be royalty in these games. They get geared first, they get healed first (we had our warlock and holy priest both get frost blocked by Kel'Thuzad the other night [which meant both had 3 seconds to live without burst heals]. Guess who I saved.) You need them if you want to succeed in group content. In WoW, every class can DPS effectively, so that makes them interchangeable cogs.
And I find that if most of the group is good, then crappy DPS is a self-correcting problem. You want to consistently ambush / pyroblast / steady shot the sheep and pay no attention to strats and kill orders? You'll catch heals if I can spare them. Otherwise, enjoy the repair bill, staring at the floor, and doing 0 dps.
I sometimes browse forums, and one of the main things that healers say draw them to the role is 'playing God': choosing who lives and dies. I got the impression many of them like the passive-aggressive power this gave them over other players; I just like being the main source of our groups longevity and the final barrier to wipes. And it's not something I let stress me. The virtual lootz are simply means to the fun, not the end.
As for ways to correct the healing dearth? In WoW at least, Blizzard will probably do that next patch, which will allow dual-speccing so healers can heal when playing group content, and go damage spec when soloing. As long as healers are only good for filling health bars when 90% of the game involves draining health bars, then they will probably remain unpopular. I agree that leveling a healer is agonizing.
I guess that would depend on your idea of serious but I did my time in a dedicated raid guild, its where I got my hatred of the healers role, EQ1 was possibly the worst at this. the healers would join a channel and create macros so the next in line with the 10 second cast complete heal would know when to start, and each boss had its own timer. I loved hearing the healers in that channel bitch because it made me realize that my shaman really did have it a ton better than them…after the raid I could always go solo Lodi or something fat and nasty while they were off trying not to die in a pug.
I always treated a skilled healer well, I know how hard it is to keep retards alive when they are bound and determined to get themselves ganked.
I just dont know a lot of people who really like being such a one trick pony. pretty much every other class in the game is more capable at more things than the healers are. and for the most part it doesnt matter what the game is.
Basically it’s like playing whack-a-mole, only you don’t get to look at the moles because you’re busy looking at the bars telling you when to swing. Healers can also get abused sometimes when people get themselves killed. I’m sorry, but if you’re going to start AOEing before the tank gets more than one swing in on the group of mobs, there ain’t a damn thing anyone can do to keep you alive, short of maybe DI (fortunately, that mage vanished and hasn’t reappeared). I actually kind of enjoy healing, but it’s not really what I want to be doing. You’re not actually the one killing the mobs, and trash pulls can get REALLY damn boring as a result.
Our guild also just had a healer get pissy and quit because he was specced entirely around COH, so when it got nerfed he couldn’t heal worth crap. Instead of learning to heal properly, he became a whiney little bitch.
One other issue is that Healers often don’t get any side abilities worth a damn.
In WoW…
Hunters get pets and Cheetah Speed, and don’t have to fight much over gear because not many other players use their kind of stuff. (Well, they use almost every kind of stuff, so it’s more a matter of them not having to be as picky).
Rogues get sprinting ability, can sneak, and are the only ones (outside of a few rare engineering gadgets) that can open locked chests and doors. They get to dual-wield.
Druids get a very early-game teleport, taking them to a zone with multiple teleport gates leading to major zones.
Mages get teleport, a very awesome ability, and can summon food and drink (sounds small, but it’s always the best stuff and they can easily supply a group or raid).
Warlocks get the ability to summon players to zones and the most evil-llooking special mount in the game.
Paladins do get a warhorse (which until recently involved one of the msot obnoxious and lengthy quests in the game). Shamans do get ghost wolf form. Clerics get jack squat.
The only group more screwed were the Fighters, who… ah… didn’t really get anything.
Man, WoW certainly has changed since I quit playing in 06.
I played a shaman and a priest. Both classes I chose specifically for healing. I would not play another class if I was paid to do so. There is simply nothing better in that game than healing. I was in a high level guild constantly pushing endgame content against some of the best guilds in the world (I played on Arthas Horde against Retribution guild which had several world/USA firsts including C’Thun). I highly valued the reputation of being one of the best healers in the game. My guildmates knew it, players in other guilds trying to keep up with us knew it, the scrubs wanting in our guild or recently kicked for being scrubs knew it, and the opposition Alliance players knew who to target first in PVP situations.
Sure, it’s a thankless job, and if the raid blows up the healers will ALWAYS get blamed unless it is obvious a tank or overzealous DPSers fault, but there is simply nothing better than healing in high pressure situations. It takes a very high level of skill, a lot of concentration, and a team first mindset that is completely lost on the rest of the raid. It is the glue that keeps any raid together, and doing it well at a high level is way more fulfilling than holding aggro, standing in the back and shooting bullets or fireballs, or trying not to be a stupid rogue.
Healing in PVP is not much different either. As a shaman, back in the DAY when the PVP system was first released, me and my guild set the tone on our server for how to effectively PVP. And I don’t mean to really toot my own horn or spew a bunch of hyperbole, but we were the best and most effective. While we had a gear advantage for sure when that system was released, those of us that healed for our beastly warriors got just as much respect. When we released our first PVP video it was hugely popular and our style was copied not only on our server but everywhere else. It sparked huge debates about shaman making the Horde way too overpowered in PVP, and it was simply that we understood the utility and importance of the support role healers take.
Don’t underestimate the value of being a truly skilled healer. They will always be needed and if you do it well your reputation will skyrocket. Healing is the best.
