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Watching other people's mistakes makes you wise.
Meera
Member
So, as some of you may know and many of you may not; World of Warcraft Dragonflight is one of the best expansions WoW has ever managed to release in terms of content abundance, patch cadence, class overhauls and QOL, but there is a giant, Dune Mommy sized elephant in the room.
Despite all the good, there is a healer draught in certain kinds of content. Specifically, Mythic+ Dungeons, and PvP. There are a few factors causing this to happen that I feel AoC could do well to learn from. Regarding Dragonflight Patch 10.1.5. Please let it be known that these are symptoms of design flaws. Any comments about how "wow is bad" isn't constructive to the concern I have as a healer main coming in to AoC.
For those who don't know, Mythic+ (M+) is a system where there is a rotation of dungeons, new and old, that have a ladder of difficulty you can climb. Starts at 0, goes to infinity. Each number, the dungeon tuning gets incrementally more difficult but in addition to that, every ten keys or so they'll add an "affix". An extra effect that impacts the whole dungeon, whether it be flat damage buffs to bosses, or randomly spawned tornadoes, or making killed trash mobs explode and make you take a small DoT.
1) The game fundamentally does not put enough responsibility (through mechanics) on DPS. This leads to DPS forming a false sense of expectation of the healer (Who has to cure poisons, Crowd Control, Heal the group, Route the dungeon, keep DPS from butt-pulling mobs, etc) that any time something goes wrong and people die, it's the healer's fault (even when it had nothing to do with them);
2) Related to point 1, players who main DPS don't know how to be responsible for their own actions in content, nor do they have any understanding of what it's like to heal. Consistently, you will get in to groups with DPS or Tanks who outright fail their own checks, refuse to interrupt, refuse to dispel, or stand in directionals and then ask the healer why they died. This isn't just "bad players". This is an almost ingrained mentality of entitlement in DPS players who have a fundamental belief that they can simply spam 1 and 2, then expect the healer to keep them alive through thick and thin while completely ignoring their own mitigation or interrupt spells and this mentality exists right up to the highest levels of content. Absolute bare minimum effort and responsibility placed on themselves;
3) The game objectively, repeatedly has made healing just from a statistical standpoint, harder. (There was a damage and health buff on all players and mobs for Dragonflight, but healing potency remained the same). Do not scare your healers away with uninspired high end content that isn't anything other than a heroic dungeon with unreasonably high scaling. New players don't pick up healer because of that, and vet players stop healing because of #1, #2, #4;
4) Higher end M+ mechanics are just heal-checks (Mythic plus 21+ keys are essentially Mythic raiding level content that require pure group coordination with kit utilization). The entire experience is just straight up obnoxious as a healer. It's not engaging gameplay at all. You're constantly stressed, and constantly pressed to keep everyone alive because the incoming damage is just so high. It feels as if instead of adding another layer of mechanics to mitigate, they instead just cranked the damage numbers up really high and then called it "challenge" content. This is not what people are looking for when they think of challenge content. They're looking for something like the Legion Mage Tower where a scenario pushes your skills to the absolute limit by forcing you to use your entire kit at the right moments. Not spamming Mass Heal to mitigate overtuned DoTs. It's encounters like the Mage Tower that encourage players to learn how to play their class. You can't expect everyone to pick up the game and instantly know when and how to use all their abilities, and they don't. Even after several hundred hours.
5) Related to point 1, A cumulative coagulation of these previous points has left the game's community treating healers like utter garbage. Just straight up. Everyone knows about "blaming the healer" in WoW, even when they don't play the game, and it's true because DPS players have this weird sense of entitlement to being carried, or the misinterpretation that all Healers do is make your HP go up. (Not remotely true). This mindset exists in FFXIV too, but to a lesser degree because healers are inherently expected to do as much damage as possible over there.
Conclusion: I apologize if this has come off as a rant about WoW in the AoC forums, but I promise the goal here is to draw attention toward the mistakes that are being made in certain content so that AoC, through design, can avoid this from happening here too. Healers need to do more than just heal, and DPS need to do a lot more than just damage. There can't be an expectation that all healers do in the game, is make your HP go up, otherwise you end up with the same community mindset as WoW.
I make this post because I recognize a bias in the AoC community. The impression that AoC will be better than all the others, that the community here is above such problems. If you played WoW, or ESO, or FFXIV and you were one of these DPS players who has never touched healing in your life, then you're bringing that mindset with you to AoC.
If you've gotten to the end of this post I ask; What sort of design issues have you noticed in other MMOs that have led to a notable vacancy in certain classes? Is it the community? Is it the dungeon design that stops players? Is the new raid simply too hard?
Despite all the good, there is a healer draught in certain kinds of content. Specifically, Mythic+ Dungeons, and PvP. There are a few factors causing this to happen that I feel AoC could do well to learn from. Regarding Dragonflight Patch 10.1.5. Please let it be known that these are symptoms of design flaws. Any comments about how "wow is bad" isn't constructive to the concern I have as a healer main coming in to AoC.
For those who don't know, Mythic+ (M+) is a system where there is a rotation of dungeons, new and old, that have a ladder of difficulty you can climb. Starts at 0, goes to infinity. Each number, the dungeon tuning gets incrementally more difficult but in addition to that, every ten keys or so they'll add an "affix". An extra effect that impacts the whole dungeon, whether it be flat damage buffs to bosses, or randomly spawned tornadoes, or making killed trash mobs explode and make you take a small DoT.
1) The game fundamentally does not put enough responsibility (through mechanics) on DPS. This leads to DPS forming a false sense of expectation of the healer (Who has to cure poisons, Crowd Control, Heal the group, Route the dungeon, keep DPS from butt-pulling mobs, etc) that any time something goes wrong and people die, it's the healer's fault (even when it had nothing to do with them);
2) Related to point 1, players who main DPS don't know how to be responsible for their own actions in content, nor do they have any understanding of what it's like to heal. Consistently, you will get in to groups with DPS or Tanks who outright fail their own checks, refuse to interrupt, refuse to dispel, or stand in directionals and then ask the healer why they died. This isn't just "bad players". This is an almost ingrained mentality of entitlement in DPS players who have a fundamental belief that they can simply spam 1 and 2, then expect the healer to keep them alive through thick and thin while completely ignoring their own mitigation or interrupt spells and this mentality exists right up to the highest levels of content. Absolute bare minimum effort and responsibility placed on themselves;
3) The game objectively, repeatedly has made healing just from a statistical standpoint, harder. (There was a damage and health buff on all players and mobs for Dragonflight, but healing potency remained the same). Do not scare your healers away with uninspired high end content that isn't anything other than a heroic dungeon with unreasonably high scaling. New players don't pick up healer because of that, and vet players stop healing because of #1, #2, #4;
4) Higher end M+ mechanics are just heal-checks (Mythic plus 21+ keys are essentially Mythic raiding level content that require pure group coordination with kit utilization). The entire experience is just straight up obnoxious as a healer. It's not engaging gameplay at all. You're constantly stressed, and constantly pressed to keep everyone alive because the incoming damage is just so high. It feels as if instead of adding another layer of mechanics to mitigate, they instead just cranked the damage numbers up really high and then called it "challenge" content. This is not what people are looking for when they think of challenge content. They're looking for something like the Legion Mage Tower where a scenario pushes your skills to the absolute limit by forcing you to use your entire kit at the right moments. Not spamming Mass Heal to mitigate overtuned DoTs. It's encounters like the Mage Tower that encourage players to learn how to play their class. You can't expect everyone to pick up the game and instantly know when and how to use all their abilities, and they don't. Even after several hundred hours.
5) Related to point 1, A cumulative coagulation of these previous points has left the game's community treating healers like utter garbage. Just straight up. Everyone knows about "blaming the healer" in WoW, even when they don't play the game, and it's true because DPS players have this weird sense of entitlement to being carried, or the misinterpretation that all Healers do is make your HP go up. (Not remotely true). This mindset exists in FFXIV too, but to a lesser degree because healers are inherently expected to do as much damage as possible over there.
Conclusion: I apologize if this has come off as a rant about WoW in the AoC forums, but I promise the goal here is to draw attention toward the mistakes that are being made in certain content so that AoC, through design, can avoid this from happening here too. Healers need to do more than just heal, and DPS need to do a lot more than just damage. There can't be an expectation that all healers do in the game, is make your HP go up, otherwise you end up with the same community mindset as WoW.
I make this post because I recognize a bias in the AoC community. The impression that AoC will be better than all the others, that the community here is above such problems. If you played WoW, or ESO, or FFXIV and you were one of these DPS players who has never touched healing in your life, then you're bringing that mindset with you to AoC.
If you've gotten to the end of this post I ask; What sort of design issues have you noticed in other MMOs that have led to a notable vacancy in certain classes? Is it the community? Is it the dungeon design that stops players? Is the new raid simply too hard?
3
Comments
And there they did just "make your HP go up". Well, that and resurrect you when you did die.
So I guess it might come down to battle resurrections, which Ashes will have, so I think we already have this issue covered. Can't blame a healer for fucking up the entire raid if he can just rez you during said raid.
Hell, some tanks didn't even know how to tank properly. Healing has been nerfed to a point where a healing check is a challenge when all avoidable damage is dodged, all defensive cooldowns are used and interrupts and dispels are used properly.
The higher you go in mythic plus ( 20+ ) the more healing checks there are. It becomes a game of pure healing checks and it's simply not fun anymore.
For example:
At the beginning GW2 don't have real trinity roles. Everyone has the responsibility to heal their own HP and stay alive but still a lot of people heavily rely on other classes has more support skilles to heal them in dungeon runs, despite thier own character has other skilles to keep them alive. Later people start categorize some classes should play as support others as DPS and most LFM posts become find the particular builds they want and then only META builds. Then in HoT Anet update raid contents and bring trinity in GW2.
Is those kind of players causing those problems than design flaws in my opinion.
↓Good youtube channel to learn things about creating games.↓
Masahiro Sakurai on Creating Games:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCv1DvRY5PyHHt3KN9ghunuw
The Ashes devs are all MMORPG PvP gamers. And many of them have worked on EQ/EQ2.
Steven wants Ashes Clerics to contribute more in battle than just standing in the back Healing...
So... I'm pretty sure they will have your concerns covered.
I'm intrigued to know what skills you've seen in the recent update that indicates cleric won't be stood around healing? Gone are the damage to heal abilities and instead we have held abilities.
How many Active Skills, total, will Clerics have available to use in Alpha 2?
Furthermore, the cleric has moved towards heal bot rather than a damage/healer. At least the cleric has moved back towards instant cast at button release though.
We'll have to see what's available when Alpha 2 drops.
All we know right now is that the devs chose to demo a bunch of new Cleric Active Skills we have never seen before.
They didn't state that there has been a change in concept for the Cleric role or that A1 Active Skills are gone.
They didn't state, "In this demo, we will show you all of the Cleric Active Skills that will be available in A2."
We can, of course, speculate that A1 Active Skills have been removed.
But, that's not the only reasonable conclusion.
We will need more info before we can debate the veracity of the speculation in any meaningful way.
The wiki currently lists 25.
Castigation is a damage Active Skill that is on the wiki but was not seen in the most recent demo.
Hallowed Ground is Damage/Heal that was in A1 but is not currently listed on the wiki.
Those are basically the two I remember from A1. I usually leave it up to the wiki to maintain an archive of all the changes - although they don't always reflect all of the changes.
So... we will have to wait for more info before we know what has been removed or whether the direction has changed. Because the devs have not stated that the direction has changed. They simply showed us a bunch of Heals we haven't seen before.
Recent live stream stated you won't have all of the 18 skills on a single cleric, therefore, there must be other skills to help one build large. Building small is simple.
supports are usually the least played class. most people want to play dps.
Healer draught definitely doesn't exist because of battle rez's (or the lack thereof). Numerous classes have Brez that they didn't have before for Dragonflight. In addition to that, everyone can get crafted bracers that let you Brez.
I max my M+ rating, and get AOTC every expansion, every raid. Not really the problem being discussed here but thanks anyway.
It's not always that they don't do anything themselves, it's simply that many people are just not at the level to understand that the healer is there to maintain a situation.
Similarly, there are a few poor healers out there that perceive that just because a Tank or DPS 'takes a risk to finish their rotation or get a good situation' and therefore requires a lot of healing in that moment, that somehow they have 'messed up'.
Being able to know the flow of allies so that you know when that can or will happen, is important, and so is the reverse - "I can't take this risk because the healer doesn't have enough Mana".
This is especially problematic in WoW given the way the game 'teaches' you. If you're used to taking the risk in a lower difficulty and being healed, what would make you think 'Oh I need to get out of the fire this time' other than dying?
And when you die, after having spent hours 'doing it the other way and just being healed', guess who takes the blame...
Rest assured I will kick up a Holy Fuss if I see signs of the same thing in Ashes though.
And everyone knew this because you were a part of a party and the whole party would die w/o the healer. I remember multiple instances where several people casted the rez on the healer and the PL complained about that, because bless rezes cost quite a lot and that situation was a waste of money. But it just goes to show the appreciation and understanding of the healer's role in the party.
It kinda blows my mind that WoW has such a toxic environment in this context.
I have played as both dps and healers for my former guilds. As a dps, I was certainly called out and expected to know how to use my class' non-damage abilities when needed. But in a raid finder? Pfft, just do whatever and blame the healer.
also i hope in the future they add another healer, being locked into the cleric sort of sucks, but that could change depending on secondary classes
My assumption would be that the notion if being a damage dealing healer would be a secondary class thing.
Those abilities seemed too focused in function to me for them to be base abilities.
What we saw the other day seems a little more likely to be the base healer.
Yeah, like a cleric/cleric function on a level 15 toon. In which case either we continue to get abilities from the primary class after level 25 or we saw augmented abilities from the first and second cleric archetypes.
A game that gets healers to be able to perform their job without gluing their eyes on UI elements will greatly help a healer hold other party roles accountable for their mistakes rather than blaming the last saftey net for not catching them all like its pokemon. That also explains why WoW at some point had so many external tools developed
I don't know whether that has ever been done but I would think a possible solution for that would be visual queues in-game instead of on-UI. Example: Party A has two healers, one takes care of the tank and meele DPS, the other heals the ranged DPS's and checks the safety of himself and the healers.
Both healers can for that purpose activate an ability I will call "Caring Eye". [note this is just one suggestion and shouldn't be the only option healers have]
This is an ability that can mark up to 7 targets.
Targets marked will have an aura around them that indicates their health.
In turn activating caring eye reduces the color saturation of everything besides the targets and enemies - maybe by 15-30% (it should be a notable difference but not too turning the game into a permanent black-white experience).
Maybe there could be different mechanics for this skill and healers can just pick up which one works best for them. (e.g. targets get simply marked with an orb/symbol above their head only visible to the healer)
Another option would be for healers to have an "Echo of the dead" ability that allows the healer to read the last moments of a character. So if they stood in the completely avoidable fire breath, that would pop up in the "log" and those people could be held accountable for that.
But to finsh this: I think one of the best things for (good) healers is the dynamic faction system in Ashes. If the people of a given Node are all entitled and incompetent DPS & Tanks they will push out the healers with their attitude towards other guilds in other Nodes. Those will rise in power and perform better. And if these strong guilds recognize the healers as a critical factor in their success plus appreciate them for it this knowledge will spread and change the attitude overall. Or it won't spread leading to those who do not understand it to be trampled.
I was so WTF that I quit healing. I will no longer play a healer. All the things you mentioned about M+ and the affixes - all the dancing you have to do to avoid all the crap while still stopping long enough to get your heals off - just brought back so many bad memories for me. The highest I went was m+21 and the only reason I was able to pull that off was because the tank was a pally and helped with the healing. It was beyond a miserable experience for me, having to go into m+ for the sake of my guildies because there just weren't other healers available. It's a thankless job, and as you said, the healer ALWAYS gets the blame and none of the credit.
Playing a game has to be fun for me, else there's just no point. I will be DPS'ing in AoC. This is what WoW did - it killed 17 years of being a healer in every MMO I played. No more. I don't know what AoC can bring to the table to get me to heal again but it would have to be something really spectacular and fun. I guess I'll have to see endgame healer experience as a DPS and then decide if it's worth the headache of rolling a healer.