Making healing fun

Okay, so I’m shamelessly stealing this topic from Tobold, but I noticed it in a recent post on his blog and it got me to thinking about the current state of healing in MMOs.

Back when I was a kid, I remember playing hockey in the gym at my elementary school. We had a pretty small class, 12 or 13 kids in my grade, so we were actually in a split-class most of the time, with two grades merged into one classroom. The teacher would divvy up the teams as fairly as possible, with all of the little Gretzkys and Lemieuxs spread out evenly, and some poor schlub stuck playing goal on either side. We used plastic sticks and plastic pucks (which hurt like a m***erf***er every time you got hit by a slapshot on the shin or thigh without pads on), wore running shoes on a non-skid gymnasium floor, and everyone wanted to score goals. No one wanted to play defense.

Of course, it wasn’t the NHL. Stay-at-home defensemen in the big leagues get paid two-, three-, and even four-plus million dollars a year to ply their trade, nowadays. Scoring forwards are always going to make the big bucks, but it pays well to be a Willie Mitchell, a Robyn Regehr, or an Adam Foote, playing consistently in the background and acting as that last line of defense in front of your goalie.

As kids, everyone wanted to be that big scorer. Everyone wanted the glory. No one wanted to be the defenseman and do the grunt work of keeping your crease clear, defending your goaltender from interloping forwards, anchoring the penalty-kill, and back-checking.

Okay, enough of my hockey analogy

Healing in MMOs is a bit like that. While it can be argued that tanks defending the back-line in specific situations (like in many of WAR’s scenarios) can be considered defenders, they fall down dead pretty quickly without good healing. Your healer(s) are always going to be your key defensemen. The problem is, healing in MMOs just isn’t as entertaining as going up and smacking someone with a big two-handed sword, or a pair of poisoned daggers. There’s little glory involved, and little respect for players who take on the thankless role of healer. Just the satisfaction of a teammate saved, a flag defended, and a job well-done.

In his post, Tobold suggests that “even Blizzard doesn’t know how to make healing feel epic.” I concur with this sentiment. WAR has done a pretty good job of changing up healing by mixing in alternating damage bonuses for healing (Shamans and Archmages), and giving healers a few different melee spec options (Warrior Priests and Disciples of Khaine), but there’s still a long way to go before playing a healing class will actually be as much fun as their melee and ranged DPS counterparts. It’s still a step up from older games, where healers either became completely overpowered (Paladins, Druids, and old-school Shadow Priests at different points in time in WoW), boring to the point of being botted (Shamans and Clerics in DAOC, unless they went with a damage spec and gave up their healing abilities), had enormous crowd control options that changed the face of the game (Pacification Healers in DAOC), or were generally unplayable due to not having enough damage to solo.

The long and the short of it? Healing is boring and thankless, and sucks unless the game gives you something else more entertaining to do to compensate for it.

WAR is the first game where I’ve played a primary healing class from start to finish. (Note: I had a 50 Shaman in DAOC, but he was a buffbot.) I played my Warrior Priest as a hybrid melee class (mainly as Wrath/Grace, and then Grace/Salvation specs for the last few levels) until hitting rank 40. Upon my entry into the end-game, however, I quickly realized that (a) you’re not going to be very effective in PvE instances with a melee-specced Warrior Priest, and (b) you’re not going to be very useful or effective on the front-lines of RvR battle with a melee-specced Warrior Priest.

Why, you ask? Because on the front lines, I get CC’d and killed pretty much instantaneously. If I stay back with the casters and other healers, I’m left to be the poor sucker trying to peel a heavily armoured tank (or the odd Witch Elf) off of my caster mates, since I can’t both stay in the back lines and still generate any Righteous Fury in order to heal properly. At least, not without using a book and halving my damage output. Wrath and Grace Warrior Priests were meant to be in the thick of combat, yet we don’t have the survivability or CC to be able to do it properly without being geared out the wazoo and completely neglecting healing. It’s too much of a sacrifice and you really feel that Salvation ends up being the only reasonably viable option left… unless you’re a complete masochist who enjoys earning a quarter the renown for double the effort (and yes, there are some out there.)

All of this led me to respec over to full Salvation, with the rest in Grace. Which is fine, but it’s not what I wanted when I rolled the class. I wanted to play a hybrid healer/melee class, and I ended up being railroaded by game mechanics and the game’s community (expectations, you see) into being a full-on group healer. Bleh.

Inherent problems with balancing healers

There are a couple of primary concerns that game designers have that prevent healers from being both fun and balanced all rolled into one tidy package:

• It’s tough to give a healing class decent damage potential without overpowering them.
  Healers in MMOs are historically either one of: low damage, medium armor, high healing, or medium damage, medium armor, low-medium healing. Having a high-damage healer is pretty uncommon (though Shadow Priests came close back when I played WoW) and the usual tradeoff is in survivability. The minute you have a healer that has moderate healing and survivability, and reasonably good damage, they become nigh impossible to kill in a 1v1. Now, I’m sure many will argue that this shouldn’t matter in a team-based or RvR game, but it still does. One-on-ones happen quite often even in a scenario-type situation and even cloth healers in WAR are hard to kill without a full-on DPS class beating them down fast.
• Healers are meant to heal, not do damage.
  Many will also argue that the healing archetype was never intended to be a damage-dealer. That’s fine. I’m not saying that it should be — what I’m asking for is to be able to both stay alive long enough to do my job, and to actually have fun doing it. This is a game, after all. Why isn’t healing as much fun as the rest of the game mechanics? WAR has tried to balance this by adding damage specs across all of the healing classes, and by creating both the melee healer mechanic and the trading damage for healing power (and vice-versa) in the Shaman’s Mork/Gork system (which the Archmage also shares, although I can’t remember the name.) Unfortunately it still falls flat on its face — healing classes are still relatively weak and their damage output isn’t anything to write home about. Not to mention everyone expects you to heal, and criticizes you for doing damage.

Making healing fun is hard

Many MMOs have tried to make healing fun, or at least a little more balanced with damage, and so far I don’t think any of them have really succeeded without falling into one trap or another. The primary issue here is that the act of healing alone isn’t enough to keep the average player entertained. Sure, WoW had some nifty effects for heals like the Shaman’s Chain Lightning spell, they had Druids who could shape-shift and do a variety of jobs in a group without respeccing, and WAR’s tried to diversify the healer’s job by giving them damage options, but none of them really address the root of the problem. They’ve tried to make the classes more appealing by layering on alternatives to distract you from the tedium of tossing out heals left, right, and center.

Now let’s all stop and think for a moment: if the act of healing itself were entertaining enough to keep our interest and attention, there’s a good chance more people would play the healing archetype. In turn, thanks and DPSers would complain less about not getting timely heals, and healing would be less of a thankless job.

Now all we need to do is solve that last little niggly issue. How do we make healing fun? I haven’t figured it out yet. And neither have the guys building the games, although they are making baby steps in the right direction, by at least attempting to address the problem. But it’s something that should be at the top of any future MMO developer’s list. There’s only so many distractions you can toss into the mix before players realize that when it gets down to it, they’d rather be doing something entertaining. These are games we’re playing, after all.

What do you all think? What would make healing fun for you? Let’s get a discussion going.