Wednesday, October 28, 2009 at 7:35PM | Llyra Healing and fun, part 3
Today, the dramatic conclusion. Part 3 of the Healing and Fun series. Weep for the future. And check out part 1 and part 2 if you haven’t already.
Idea 3: Damage should be preventable
Discipline Priests are currently the only healing spec able to actively prevent damage. Given how quickly and how tenaciously the Priest player base has embraced the Discipline spec, it is clear that there’s something good there. Steal it.
Priests should still be the kings of countering damage. Those bubbles prevent all damage up to the strength of the shield. What I propose is that any healer should be able to apply temporary immunities to specific damage types. If I know that a strong fire-based attack is coming, like Sartharion’s Flame Breath, I can fling a fire-resist buff on the tank and buffer it, nullifying the attack.
In addition, I think that DPS players should have an active hand in mitigating their own incoming damage. A Rogue, for example, should be able to activate a short-cooldown dodge ability that forces an evade of the next attack. Perhaps a Hunter could activate an Aspect of the Twin that creates a phantom mirror image that will soak an incoming spell. A Warlock might, through force of will, redirect a boss’ Fel Lightning onto his Fel Hunter, grounding it.
All of these abilities should be active, a button you hit when you expect damage, that gives you a short but total resistance. Not only does this give players a new way of interacting with the world, it is one that is more situationally aware than healers and DPS often have. And it is a counter to the otherwise single-note jobs of “raise the green bars” or “press 3 when it is off cooldown.”
Idea 4: Let healers tank
There is a basic sensibility problem inherent in the threat system. Most mobs, if they had any intelligence at all, would make a beeline for the healers and tear them apart. As evidence, look at what happens in an arena fight. A healer might not be the first to die, but they’re a much higher priority than a so-called tank.
If Arthas wanted to win against whatever raids came after him in Ice Crown, he’d simply walk through any tanks in the group (there’s no body collision, after all) and cut down the healers. Healers — I promise you that Arthas can 1-shot you. That he doesn’t is a signal. He wants to lose. He feels terribly guilty about chopping up all those fine people in Stratholme.
Threat is one of the absurdities of the game that we swallow for the sake of solid gameplay systems. Like the impermanence of death, mob spawning, aggro radii, the ability to pass through the bodies of all living things, and the fact that 80% of the pigs you kill in Westfall have no intestines. These aspects of the game are jarring to our sense of simulated reality. They need to be explained. Or explained away, which as the Forteans will tell you, is a very different thing.
I wouldn’t mind mobs coming after me when I’m healing, as long as I had the tools to deal with it. I am a major threat, after all. I won’t kill you myself, but I prevent you from eliminating the people who will. I’d welcome a tussle, even. Provided the designers give me some survivability tools, that is.
Healing aggro was the single worst part of the game for me when I was Priesting. Because most players, “tanks” included, knew nothing about the invisible threat mechanic, any pull with multiple mobs quickly turned into a “Let’s kill the healer” wipe-fest. Having mobs on me led to this awful thought: “Healing myself will just generate more threat.” Then I would die. Being made of paper certainly didn’t help.
Imagine instead if I had the ability to knock mobs away from me. Imagine if the tank was the number one target because he was the most threatening player on the field. Imagine if I could stun mobs in place and run clear of them. Imagine that standing in a formation is strategically significant beyond how much AoE healing you’ll receive. Imagine if mobs had to fight through a swarm of Mages and Rogues to get to me.
If the designers gave survivability tools to more classes and made the raid’s formation matter, the game’s aggro mechanics could be made sensible. As long as I can stand a few seconds of being hit, long enough for the mobs to be literally peeled off me, I would welcome a return to the days of high healing threat.
So those are my ideas. The floor is open. What do you guys think? What would you do to the healing game to change it up? Your thoughts — I want them!
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Reader Comments (8)
Many classes already have damage mitigation spells. Mages with their frost and fire shields, Shaman's Grounding totems, Paladin's Sacred Shield, not to mention the bubble. And I'm sure there are others amongst classes I don't have more experience with. The problem is getting them to use them. Simply because staying alive isn't their responsibility. It's the healer's job to keep them up, so they don't want to "waste" their GCD and lose precious places on the DPS meters.
I'd welcome more mechanics like the Twins fight where DPS are obliged to make an effort to save themselves. But putting it into their spell books is asking for it to be ignored. Look at how often talents have been adjusted because those "staying alive" talents are ignored for DPS ones, no matter what else might be a consideration.
And while you're right about the aggro mechanics, giving healers even some of those survivability tools is just asking for a PvP whine fest, and I don't want to think about how deep a pool of tears I'd find myself swimming in.
It seems to me that there are models out there in other MMOs for different dynamics of healing and group management. City of Heroes is not a game I recommend per se, but they do have some different models of healing and fight management that take these types of concerns into account. I am thinking in particular of
- A specific class of healers that heals by hitting mobs and causing them to radiate a healing pulse to nearby allies of the healer
- Controller classes whose primary job is comprehensive crowd control
- Movement powers that give players different methods of using terrain and position to their advantage to avoid or escape damage.
The truth, though is that while threat mechanics are inorganic we like them as players. It creates a structure for gameplay that supports a lot of the other design we seem to really like (people are raiding in record numbers AFAIK)
"A specific class of healers that heals by hitting mobs and causing them to radiate a healing pulse to nearby allies of the healer"
--Ret pallies, and (loosely interpreted) judgment of light already do both these things, albeit healers are rarely hitting the boss to obtain this latter benefit.
"Many classes already have damage mitigation spells."
Agreed, it is kind of a shame that shaman have such limited mitigation tools for boss fights or pvp. Solo - sure, two totems involve taunt, puppies if you're enhance, Earthshield is almost like mitigation -- we have some ok (not great aside from puppies, but okay) mitigation tools and other classes have better.
When I first read Llyra's post my reaction to that section was "Rogues already have both evasion and feint." I've seen a rogue tank Icehowl for nigh on 10 sec (and then get 1-shot). All druids have barkskin.
So some of what he's talking about is already in the game, it's just not happening with shaman.
Funny I've never looked at it as that 20% of the murdered pigs had no intestines... simply as "oh shit I murdered them so bad the value of their intestine is garbage so I don't get to loot my quest item".
Something akin to the combo-point powered shield wall of the Malygos encounter in Eye of Eternity? It's pretty important to use in 10-man. Rogues do get Feint which is a short cooldown ability they can use to drop incoming damage. Spell Reflect can do the same for warriors, if the devs bothered to incorporate it into the design of the encounter instead of just making the mob immune.
Spell reflect is a great example. It would be perfect for this. Except that it requires a shield, and Blizzard had made sure than no DPS player ever carries a shield.
Having thought about it, I realized the one place healing is not particularly fun is large-scale pvp.
Being able to heal raid-mates in AV or WG means having a raid-frame large enough to identify and click on 40 names (plus pets - tho I have to just start cutting them out, it completely futzes up my interface). If I only had to heal, that wouldn't be a problem, I could just let it take up my whole screen. But as is, where I also need to be alert to my environment, target enemy mobs for interrupts/cc/purge it makes for a giant mess that just isn't very fun.
WG is worse because the majority of the people around me may not even be in my group. So healing them requires some manner of click or tab or /tar which is incredible clunky when in a swarm of 50 bodies and siege vehicles. If you got lucky enough to have a raid group that really worked as a team it wouldn't be so bad, but since the new queue implementation...fat chance of that.
Plus either all the hunters and locks out there are very good or there's some sort of mechanic that the first heal I cast pulls 3 pets onto me even if I'm hiding behind terrain. In Arena or AB I expect that because I stand out, but I can deal with one pet usually.
Damage prevention and body collision are both things Guildwars implimented quite well. The prevention side result in Protection Monks which, in my opinion, is about as much fun as you could have healing.
Gobble gobble.