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Splinter Topic: Do I Need To Heal That Yet?
Azherae
Member, Alpha One, Adventurer
A discussion of what I consider compelling Healer gameplay.
Comparisons (in responses) will generally be FF11 vs FF14, and Ashes Alpha-1 extrapolation vs Neverwinter.
So recently some topics have brought up the fact that in many games, the healer's gameplay is very reactionary. The thing that is treated as 'skill' is 'noticing that damage has happened and clicking the anti-damage ability'. Fail to click it and people die (Neverwinter).
This doesn't work well in Action games I think, because it's binary, and if a player misjudges something and the healer wasn't expecting them to misjudge it or fail, it's easy to blame the healer for not healing enough, particularly before the player has learned that the thing they did was a mistake (Overwatch).
There are other things I consider the job of a 'Cleric' or 'White Mage' (notice I don't say Healer here) which are explicitly buffs, but many of those are just 'hitting the anti damage ability before the damage'. For many games, these have to be easy to predict, to avoid passing the average player's difficulty threshold, for those to be easy to predict. I don't want to discuss those in this thread too much.
I feel like recent games have moved away from these. I have many unfounded opinions about why, but I think we can mostly agree that increasing the mass appeal of games involves making them easier, almost by definition.
This means I associate 'normal' MMO gameplay now with 'none of the above' until endgame, and certain games (Neverwinter and FFXIV) don't even start doing those at that point for most content. It's still just more 'see HP bar drop, click healing button'. I watched a video awhile on the Neverwinter one awhile back that I'd link for those who aren't familiar but I can't find it now.
I've basically concluded in my time that if a game doesn't throw enough debuffs at a group to make the 'Healer' have to make a choice, it's not going to interest me. And if all debuffs are removed using the same cleanse, or worse, 'Choose one to remove randomly, or press a button to remove two or three to make sure', I'm going to like it even less.
Other games are usually 'Hey Healer, pls also do action game stuff and also occasionally hit your anti-damage button', which I think has become a default for 'compelling'. Sometimes you get an AoE ground target Regen. These are okay.
Basically if the game does not make me ask the Title Question, it hasn't made me feel like a 'Healer'. Ashes hasn't actually implied this even once yet. There's hints that it might get there, but nothing concrete about the 'direction' they want to take with it.
There. Status removed.
Comparisons (in responses) will generally be FF11 vs FF14, and Ashes Alpha-1 extrapolation vs Neverwinter.
So recently some topics have brought up the fact that in many games, the healer's gameplay is very reactionary. The thing that is treated as 'skill' is 'noticing that damage has happened and clicking the anti-damage ability'. Fail to click it and people die (Neverwinter).
This doesn't work well in Action games I think, because it's binary, and if a player misjudges something and the healer wasn't expecting them to misjudge it or fail, it's easy to blame the healer for not healing enough, particularly before the player has learned that the thing they did was a mistake (Overwatch).
There are other things I consider the job of a 'Cleric' or 'White Mage' (notice I don't say Healer here) which are explicitly buffs, but many of those are just 'hitting the anti damage ability before the damage'. For many games, these have to be easy to predict, to avoid passing the average player's difficulty threshold, for those to be easy to predict. I don't want to discuss those in this thread too much.
- For healing to be compelling to me, Cleanses need to be part of the class that does it. Otherwise I am just playing a character that sustains. Because 90% of debuffs don't need to be cleansed, they just lower performance of the group if you don't.
- Additionally, if I need to choose between healing HP and removing a debuff or status, but the HP damage doesn't imply that death is imminent, this is a judgement call based on what else is happening (best example is any defense debuff on the tank)
- I also like when I can get some benefit from specifically choosing to not use a particular healing ability for healing, whether that's 'using it to do damage' or 'using it to trigger something else' (e.g. FFXI Divine Veil, which allows you to use a skill normally meant to increase an HP healing ability, to instead make your status removal AoE).
- I don't mind games where three different problems are presented to the player at once and they must choose a priority order for resolving those problems within 2 seconds or less.
I feel like recent games have moved away from these. I have many unfounded opinions about why, but I think we can mostly agree that increasing the mass appeal of games involves making them easier, almost by definition.
This means I associate 'normal' MMO gameplay now with 'none of the above' until endgame, and certain games (Neverwinter and FFXIV) don't even start doing those at that point for most content. It's still just more 'see HP bar drop, click healing button'. I watched a video awhile on the Neverwinter one awhile back that I'd link for those who aren't familiar but I can't find it now.
I've basically concluded in my time that if a game doesn't throw enough debuffs at a group to make the 'Healer' have to make a choice, it's not going to interest me. And if all debuffs are removed using the same cleanse, or worse, 'Choose one to remove randomly, or press a button to remove two or three to make sure', I'm going to like it even less.
Other games are usually 'Hey Healer, pls also do action game stuff and also occasionally hit your anti-damage button', which I think has become a default for 'compelling'. Sometimes you get an AoE ground target Regen. These are okay.
Basically if the game does not make me ask the Title Question, it hasn't made me feel like a 'Healer'. Ashes hasn't actually implied this even once yet. There's hints that it might get there, but nothing concrete about the 'direction' they want to take with it.
There. Status removed.
Sorry, my native language is Erlang.
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Comments
However, whether all cleanses need to be on the cleric is another matter. Sleep has already gone to mage instead of Enchanter. There are options to switch other skills or functions about without homogenisation.
Furthermore, I have to wait to see the full cleric kit before I decide what methods I wish to employ. We might be able to make different healers at 12 skills each from the 30 or 40 planned skills overall.
You say 'instead of' but that's based on an assumption that I don't share.
FFXI Bard has 1 Single Target sleep and one AoE sleep, resisted by building resistance to Light element.
FFXI Black Mage has 2 Single Target Sleeps and 2 AoE Sleep, resisted by building resistance to Dark element.
FFXI White Mage has 1 Single Target Sleep, resisted by building resistance to Light Element again.
If I were to blindly go with the 'But MY old game did it THIS way' then I'd just assume that Cleric, Bard and Mage all get Sleep.
Edit: I would've changed sleep on mage to freeze in truth.
When I play healer I am on the look out for what I can cleanse. If they don't take damage there is nothing to heal has always been my view point. I think WoW classic did this a good way. Mage has decurse. Priest has remove disease and dispel magic. Other classes have various remove negative effects abilities. Point being it take the group to be interdependent and work together or somethings never get cleansed.
I am not a fan of a one size fits all button to remove negative effects. I would also like to see Ashes spread out the cleansing effects to the various archetypes. Maybe a tank or fighter stomp can create an AOE effect around them to startle people awake. Really hope they do something their own way.
The game had its cleanses based on element/damage type. You had physical, magical, elemental and noxious. Each effect in the game would fit in to one of these categories. Being on fire would be elemental, being poisoned would be noxious. However, some things like a snare could be physical, magical, elemental or noxious, depending essentially on the flavor of the ability itself. A Druid casting Noxious Roots (not an actual ability, just an example) may cause poison roots to sprout from the ground snaring the target, while a Wizard may cast Icy Chains causing the targets legs to be wrapped in chains of ice also snaring the target.
From there, the six healers all had an ability to cleans a specific level of spells, but it was single target. They also has the ability to AoE cleanse one of physical, elemental, magical or noxious, depending on the specific healer class (there was the ability to spec in to improving this). This would also cleanses a specific level of effects.
In a fight, it wasnt unusual for tanks to be hit with 3 or 4 effects immediately. In a raid it wasnt unusual for them to have 8 - 10 effects. Since a cleans would always start with the effect that has been on the target the longest, and then remove abilities up until the level the cleans can remove, there was never anything random about it (a good thing).
This meant that it was actually important for a healer to know what effects an enemy could use. If, for example, there was an ability the mob could use that did a lot of damage quickly, the healer needed to keep all effects off the tank so that effect could be removed quickly when applied. On the other hand, if there was nothing quite that dangerous, cleanses could be relegated to a less important status, useful if the target in question is more focused on high direct damage requiring the healer to spam heal the tank.
This did make things somewhat dangerous if you were fighting a mob with high direct damage and managed to pull an add that used a lot of status effects for debuffs and damage.
Healers in EQ2 were expected to keep the group alive via heals, maintain control over cleanses, buff tanks, debuff mobs AND do an amount of DPS (6 - 10% of the groups total damage output).
This is my base level expectation for healers in Ashes.
I should also point out, some classes in EQ2 had the ability to cleans themselves of any status effect that had a specific component - snare being one. Such an ability would get the caster out of both the noxious snare and elemental snare I mentioned above, but would do nothing against non-snare abilities. This is also an expectation for Ashes.
I think what really enables satisfactory class balance in regards to debuff-versus-cleanse balancing is cooldowns and mana cost. Cooldowns and time-critical spells alone tend to force you to make deliberate decisions about how quickly to trigger-cast a cleanse every time you see any CC or debuff.
It also helps a little that every dispel you cast is casting time you're not using on another abiliity.
That said, I don't mind the idea of creative cleanse balancing either.
Two ideas that I've been thinking about and consider worthy of discussion are:
Out of these choices, the combination I find most intriguing is actively choosing how much Conviction/mana to invest by keeping the cast button held to channel to determine the potency of your cleanse. And then that potency could decide how far back from the most recent debuff your spell reaches, and how many spell levels it covers, or something. Would have to be balanced with the general system behind skills and their ranks.
The potency could also affect specific debuffs differently (e.g. reduce damage on a DOT, reduce % bonus on a damage-type vulnerability, or alter hard-CC to soft CC but leave a lingering debuff). All depends on how impactful you want to make dispelling, and how much its cooldowns already serve to balance its power.
Crucially, in my experience, when dispelling has too high of a chance of having no noticeable effect, it just won't be skilled by anyone, except for some tryhard support players, whom it will just offer slightly higher skill ceilings, because they'll know the few windows where casting a dispel is worth it - and in my opinion, that's a bit too little effectiveness to make it feel rewarding. In general, if dispelling exists, then it should be reasonably possible to dispel many critical crowd-control effects, debuffs, and DOTs, assuming you choose the right tools and time it right. Especially if it requires you to select the right single target ally player.
Cleric would have different ways of addressing different bombs. Smth like: stopping the timer for a bit, reducing the growth lvl, redirecting the effect back onto the enemy caster, taking the effect from the target, exploding the bomb at will, reducing the effects of the explosion, changing the effects to smth positive (heals included), etc etc.
Link those debuffs to synergies sometimes and you have yourself a huuuuuge well of design space, which makes the cleric a very active archetype that has to constantly monitor the situation in more ways than one.
Different archetypes could have self buffs that address certain types of effects (just as Noaani described), but clerics would have all the tools. And cleric augments could then help distribute those tools.
Healers, would this be interesting gameplay? Obviously the healing part remains, but as pointed out several times, healing can sometimes take a background role. Oh, and of course all the mobs would have those debuffs as well, and ideally they'd have interactions amongst each other that can speed up timers or maybe even enhance effects or put anti-cleric protections on the target.
I played EQ2, and the cleanse system I didn’t like at all. It was setup where people had to choose a cleanse while leveling as a permanent choice without being able to respec.
Raid encounters were about ‘do you have 4 classes with a poison cleanse?’ If not you’re unable to do it.
Cleanses are okay in general, but I’d have to say EQ2 was the worst implementation I’ve seen in a MMO.
I found it, I think!
Context for Neverwinter. It's obviously quite long, but the Content Creator is pretty clear, I think.
Neverwinter's depth in Healing is not so much that you need to have played the game to understand what she's saying.
I'd be okay with having cleanses be spread amongst Archetypes overall, it's all balance overall.
I guess I'll continue to assume FFXI is the best since it sounds like it has 'everything that EQ2 has but without the pain points'.
I've mentioned various aspects of the White Mage from there in different threads but for those who are encountering all this only through this one and also read Noaani's post, just assume that's the description of FFXI's White Mage. EQ2 has the 'class variety', and FFXI has the 'combinatoric' style that Ashes sorta-has.
So you'll get the WhiteMage Primary BlackMage Secondary who had sustain and lower MP costs, the WhiteMage Primary Summoner Secondary who had decent special buffs and a few more AoE cleanses/slight DPS options, etc.
But they always had the full kit of elemental defenses, cleanses, etc. No 'class variety' here except 'where the focus of your energy' is, but this is due to the explicit intention to make it so that if you like to do those things but don't want to be a 'Pure Healer' you use the White Mage as the 'Secondary' for your other Mage Primary, and you just lose your higher healing spells and some stronger buffs/debuffs (depending on which Mage you chose as Primary).
So, no respec since you just always have everything, and you're only manipulating 10-15% effectiveness in any direction.
The problem here is that unless a Developer is experienced with this and implements it VERY precisely you'll get something bad. In a simplistic design, the choice of 'if' to deal with it is reduced to the same as 'high HP loss, must react to avoid critical problem' rather than 'issues with effectiveness, choose which malady to heal'.
Not as a CORE feature of the concept, just the 'dev who doesn't understand all the nuances required for what you wrote' problem of the '10s.
I imagined it kinda like a whac-a-mole gameplay, but instead of using the same hammer for all the different moles, you'd have several hammers that led to different effect changes. But I can definitely see how this kind of gameplay would be super frustrating to any semi-casual player, not only because you'd need to juggle this decision making with proper healing, but also because those effect changes' results would also rely on your mates' proper movements. And that is if the system itself is designed well enough to even work properly.
In other words, it's just yet another overcomplicated suggestion by me
It's moreso tuning/growth in content.
If you start healers off with 'enemy weakens something so the party is low efficiency', and they don't keep up, the party is slow. The learning process is then better. They can 'have an effect that isn't binary' and 'probably get to see it'. Other players can 'afford' to be kinder even to new healers, because it's their speed that's suffering, not their ability to play.
At endgame high difficulty/raid tier, do whatever you like in that regard, but I'm currently talking about the 'base/midgame gameplay style' because my philosophy on design is always to design based around the midgame experience (where 70% of casual players play).
The debuffs themselves could sometimes not even impact the victim all that much. Or, well, not impact directly. Say, a bleed just drains their hp by a bit, but it obviously synergizes with any ability that's related to bleeds, and on explosion instead of directly damaging the target it might just heal the caster for the amount the target bled out. So impact of the debuff itself would be somewhat low, but the caster would still benefit.
And the healer could have a ton of way to change that effect. The healing could go to the target. Or bleed could be turned into a slow hp regen with a burst on explosion. Or mirror it on the caster and use your own bleed synergies on it (this could potentially be used in some pve encounters that are known for their specific debuffs, so the party members can avoid getting that debuff themselves, but have synergistic abilities for it, because the healer would mirror the effect onto the mobs). And I'm sure there's at least several other interactions that could be interesting and useful.
And pretty much all of that would be a proactive move on the side of the healer, because it'd be a decision that impacts the future, even if the reaction to the effect came at the present.
My experience with what people consider 'CC' is that it's often too short duration or too difficult to cleanse in the timeframe required, so it gets into 'high chance of no noticeable effect'.
So for clarity, in general in this thread when I say 'cleanses' I mean things with long durations (7s or more) but 'inconveniencing' problems being presented.
I feel like you're talking about many of the same things (or play games where certain CC is quite long duration? Roots, maybe?) or count certain things that I don't count as CC.
I've got no issues with the 'charged Cleanse' concept, and now I'm actually wondering if the one Ashes showed has the ability to bounce between the Cleric and some initial target one more time if in a group of just 2 (to remove two effects).
A 15 second cooldown on a single sorta-all-purpose Cleanse might be a problem in Ashes, I think, since the number of status effects possible might be quite high.
I don't really mind 'every class being able to Cleanse one thing relative to their gameplay type' but at that point, by 'removing it from the Healer' you create a type of gameplay that in my experience, people eventually dislike. That's just anecdotal though, so if you enjoy it, I think Intrepid can count you as at least one counterpoint to my perspective on that.
Makes sense. I didn’t play FF, but they probably iterated around the EQ2 concepts and refined them. Older MMOs were generally worse than newer ones where newer games fixed their issues, but sometimes new games made big mistakes that killed their games (like the dumb idea of getting rid of the trinity or positional/ground effect healing).
Do you know anything about how it was in EQ1?
I definitely expect that Square Enix iterated off someone or something (based on what I know of their data) but FFXI is before EQ2, so I presume they both just 'iterated off EQ1 in divergent ways'.
I happen to prefer the FFXI iteration over the EQ2 iteration from the sound of it, but quite possibly EQ1 was better than both.
I'm going to assume a little and put some words in your mouth that you didn't say.
It would seem to me that your issue here is with how players gained access to group cleanses in early EQ2, rather than it being an issue with the actual system. I agree with that specific piece of criticism, but only in relation to early EQ2.
Once they took group cleanses from "character progression" and added it to the AA system, the whole issue became moot.
Once players had access to cleanses, the system itself was actually great.
So, you missed the part where it became the best MMO on the market.
The original release was really bad. We were running bards as tanks because they had essentially unbreakable hate, and ridiculous defense.
As an aside, many people misunderstood how and why EQ2 character progression went how it did.
In the early days of development, they specifically didnt want to repeat what they saw as EQ making a massive mistake with AA's, and how in that game they were basically a perpetual progression mechanic. EQ2 wanted progression to end at some point.
However, they still wanted progression, and they wanted some player choice. For progression, they added in the ability progression of Apprentice, Adept and Master abilities. For player choice, they gave players an option to pick every 4 (iirc) levels. These options were supposed to give players the ability to differentiate themselves, so that not every Fury was the same, etc.
Then with KoS they realized that they could add more progression and more player choice by adding AA's, but they could avoid the EQ perpetual progression trap by simply limiting how many you could gain.
Thus, everything that was considered important in the original "character progression" options was moved over to AA's, where players could respec fairly easily. As a replacement, they gave players an option every 10 levels of picking one ability out of four to be at Master 2 level.
There is still a few basic things that are a part of that "character progression" system (HP and mana pool I think), but nothing that could be considered important.
As a further aside, SoE making these changes allowed them to better predict what over all power level raids will be at (in conjunction with fixing the combat system in LU#13), and meant that the developers could do a much better job with raid content.
The increase in raid quality from the original game to KoS (the second expansion), is actually kind of mind blowing.
And if the dmg was inevitable, you choose the one who helps your party's gameplay the most. And in the context of having combat rez class abilities and rez scrolls on top of that - you should heal the one who has the best scrolls, so that they can rez the others in the best way possible.
Generally speaking, this is a scenario that your raid leadership would have gone over.
For my part, you heal who ever is in your group within the raid first. If you have two people in your group within the raid that need healing, you heal the player that is highest in the group window. If you have no one in toue group that needs a heal, you look through the raid window for the next group after your group that has two people that need healing, and heal that second person. If there are no groups where two people need healing and you dont need to heal anyone, you dont bother healing anyone.
This sounds complicated, but once you have played with a system like this for a few days it is really simple. The key thing is for players and leadership to realize that a raid is made up of groups, and those groups are still present within the raid. While it may not matter in terms of mechanics, it is a really useful tool for organizing your raid.