Pre-mod title edit: Healers are bad game design (I have reported the moderator.)
Disclaimers:
Posts worth reading:
Original OP:
Every game is consistent for the healer: heal damaged allies and stay as safe as possible. Win or lose, it's easy to fulfil your purpose. Healers may depend on damage dealers (dd) to win, but dd depend on healers to even function. Complex, algorithmic matchmaking (mm) systems can also force you into the healer class forever. When you try your hand at damage, mm does not know you are practicing damage. It expects you to do the job - a job you cannot do well.
Healers are only redeemed by their easy, noob-friendly gameplay that can make a game accessible to a wider audience.
This is why I am looking forward to leaving Overwatch for Splatoon 2 - no healer class and no mm memory. I can get to S+ and not be expected to use rollers forever, because there is no record of me using rollers.
Disclaimers:
- In Overwatch, I am a healer main with hundreds of hours on Ana/Zen/Mercy.
- A statement like 'healers are the most noob/beginner friendly' does not mean healers have no skills/depth to master.
- I am not attacking the healer class; I am challenging its balance, and opening discussion to what a game could look like without healers. (Splatoon has no healers.) There are other, arguably more interesting ways, to support a team other than healing.
Posts worth reading:
I can't speak for other genres, but in class-based FPS games when there are dedicated healer classes that have healing/support as a prime purpose and not as an added utility, it often becomes a matter of them being an absolute necessity to have on a team, but also one of the least popular roles to fill in. Because of this dichotomy, I agree to an extent. It turns a niche pick into something mandatory and that can be very frustrating. In an Overwatch context, the game's design has popularized a third of your team being in this role.
What I DON'T like is the 100% dependency on healers we see in games like FFXIV and other old-timey tab targeting MMOs. Make one element of the party too damn important and the game becomes rigid in how heavily structured it is. I didn't realize just how much I appreciated having some freedom until I got to experience what partying is like when you can have any party composition you want and still succeed at completing content. It's liberating, is what I'm saying. I really enjoy these types of games now. I hope that this is the direction we continue to head in for the foreseeable future.
How much cooler would support characters be if you kept the depth and difficulty of healer style gameplay, but moved the focus to mitigation rather than healing? Take the controller class from City of Heroes; rather than healing, you are summoning cold storms to slow enemies down, freezing the ground to make enemies slip and be unable to attack and turning yourself into a walking tornado and running into enemies to knock them off course. You're still doing the same thing a healer would do; you're keeping your team alive, but you're doing it in a much more engaging manner.
The problem is that healers deal with health, which is a pretty bland resource in most games. It's a number that goes up and down and when it hits zero you die. There are only so many other mechanics that can interact with health in any interesting or meaningful way. Moving forward with the Overwatch example, take an offensive character like Tracer. Tracer's main points of interaction with the world are her movement and her guns. She gets to think about things like spacing, relative movement speed, number of blinks available, time to close distances, basically tons of spacial reasoning and reflex based stuff. Mercy,on the other hand, doesn't get to take these things into consideration nearly as much, because her heal is a tether that never runs out of ammo. Mercy instead has to make decisions about heal priority, team positioning, and ult timing, all of which are very important, but generally considered less interesting decisions, at least in a second-to-second game play kind of way. Lucio is almost worst in this regard, because his heal is an AOE; he just gets to run around (kind of makes up for it with more dynamic movement options though). Ana is probably the "best" in this regard, because you actually have to aim her heal; gives her a similar possibility space to an offensive class, but with a fun twist in that you're targeting your allies. Proposed solutions? I dunno.
Original OP:
Every game is consistent for the healer: heal damaged allies and stay as safe as possible. Win or lose, it's easy to fulfil your purpose. Healers may depend on damage dealers (dd) to win, but dd depend on healers to even function. Complex, algorithmic matchmaking (mm) systems can also force you into the healer class forever. When you try your hand at damage, mm does not know you are practicing damage. It expects you to do the job - a job you cannot do well.
Healers are only redeemed by their easy, noob-friendly gameplay that can make a game accessible to a wider audience.
This is why I am looking forward to leaving Overwatch for Splatoon 2 - no healer class and no mm memory. I can get to S+ and not be expected to use rollers forever, because there is no record of me using rollers.