Green Monster Games - Curt Schilling

All Bloodmages did was let you cast healing and damage spells at the same time. It was a pretty cool concept. There are multiple ways of setting up such a class.

The root of the healer problem is that healers by nature support others. Supporting themselves doesn"t get them anywhere when they are playing alone (PVE or PVP). So no one enjoys playing them most of the time.

However Bloodmages, healing etc have been rehashed a 100 times already. There are many ways to disguise healing and put it into a game, but if you have a fantasy DIKU game, you"ll never get rid of it.

I am hoping they just support the game, lore wise, as well as Eve does with the videos they put out every so often.

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CCP let a player come in and use their equipment to make a CG movie for one of the background stories they have to flesh out their world.

The movie is awesome and really helps (in my opinion) hook the players in.

And yes I know this was in the FoH guide thread, too, but only Eve"rs tend to read it. This it to make a point.

You know if it"s actually a good game that there will be graphic novels, books, and toys involved. Of course they actually have to make a game that doesn"t suck.

Hopefully Curt doesn"t try to interject some of his more hardcore, I still love EQ, tendencies.

sounds like a really slow way to play a game. No healer sounds like it = more down time between mobs.

I"ve done the no healer all Melee groups before when we could not find a healer. After a couple adds or not being able to move agro around to share the incoming damage. it gets old fast, and is a slow way to play.

I get it that a large part of that is because the game is not designed that way. But I"ve certainly had a taste of it, and I really would not care to play a game without healers and trying to regen HP out of battle and all the down time involved there.

I think WAR had it right with the WP and DOK before they changed them. I also like the AOC BS.

I would 100% agree though that the EQ style Cleric is not the way to do a healing class. I could never play one full time without falling asleep of boredom.

I think you can do fantasy without the healing, we just haven"t seen it seriously done yet. Would it shorten fights necessarily? No, stop thinking inside the metaphorical think box that prevents out-of-the-box thinking. Let"s look at the current design:

Boss does X damage
Healers heal X damage
Damage-dealers try to kill boss before healers run out of mana

If you take away healers, you get:

Boss does X damage
Damage-dealers try to kill boss before everyone dies

That"s assuming you"ve removed not only healing classes but not replaced it with a significant amount of self-healing. Let"s get something straight, when a good boss designer designs an encounter, he"s thinking about three things

1) What is going to occupy the DPS?
2) What is going to occupy the tanks?
3) What is going to occupy the healers?

They HAVE to think about #3 because healers exist. Think about all of the fights where the damage output is JUST designed as something to heal. Are those...fun? Like tank damage, or raidwide dot damage, or other unavoidable damage mechanics. Those exist PURELY to give the healers something to do. Then there are mechanics that exist which are meant to be "you fucked up; you will probably die" mechanics. Those can exist without combat healers.

Anyway, I don"t have time this morning to totally flesh-out this line of thought...

No, the conversations don"t have to go nowhere just because there are pro-DIKU and anti-DIKU types. Ultimately you just have to recognize what you are designing, and if you have a trinity-based game you need to make healing more fun. There are a lot of ways to do that, but if you gave rogues Beatsticks of Healing where they followed the tank around using the same goddamned buttons and rotations but instead of damaging the mob they were healing the tank, there would still only be so many people who enjoyed doing that vs. dealing damage. That"s a fact.

For myself, I think both dynamics have their places but the implementation of the proven one needs a lot of new, imaginative design, and anyone attempting a non-DIKU MMO needs even more imagination than that to make it work. It"s a proven dynamic and people WILL try to turn it into that if it simplifies things.

Zehn - Vhex said:

You mean like cure disease, cure poison and dispel magic?

It"s gonna be whack-a-mole regardless.

Your best bet is to just move away from healing altogether. The best heals are the ones you don"t have to manage/babysit. You want to know my favorite heal as a paladin? Judgement of Light. I cast it once, it heals the entire raid for 20 seconds, done. I can do other shit while it works it"s magic.

I don"t have to spam the MT with a cancel-cast macro, I don"t have to keep my eyes glued to 25 little squares on my screen. I can play the fucking game.

So let"s roll with that instead eh? How about I drop a barrier somewhere on the battlefield and anybody standing between it and the mob takes less damage for the remainder of the fight or unless I move it? I cast a buff on the MT that absorbs 20% of the damage he takes until i cancel it or cast it on somebody else.

Anyways...

There"s your basis for a non-healing game as well. Just a bunch of "absorbs 20% of damge" buffs and the like for your support-classes. Nearly all positional. Fire and forget and unless you have to change where your buffs or who your buffs are placed on you spend the rest of the fight dodging void zones and killing the mob.

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May as well just give everyone heal pots and be done with it then.

Draegan said:

You know if it"s actually a good game that there will be graphic novels, books, and toys involved. Of course they actually have to make a game that doesn"t suck.

Hopefully Curt doesn"t try to interject some of his more hardcore, I still love EQ, tendencies.

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Curt has said in a number of interviews that he is a "convert" to having fun rather than being EQ type hardcore nowadays.


I wonder in Salvatore"s first book how long the hero will spend putting the raid together to kill the final boss, due to not being able to find enough healers....

Flight said:

Curt has said in a number of interviews that he is a "convert" to having fun rather than being EQ type hardcore nowadays.


I wonder in Salvatore"s first book how long the hero will spend putting the raid together to kill the final boss, due to not being able to find enough healers....

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I was wondering personally how a system similar to the current fantasy model would work if it allowed health regeneration during certain fights, coupled with the character"s abilities for a self-heal, damage prevention (buff to self/debuff to mob) or other characters healing/protecting them. The biggest problem with that model, however, is that one or more characters would be so focused on healing that they would be left out of the true enjoyment of combat (like the current healer in group issue) - unless healing were spread out among almost all of the group (defensive targeting). Some people wouldn"t be wild about mandatory healing, though, so we"re back at square one.

Not to mention the combat would become too much like console play, though, and lose what few MMO elements the genre has left.

As long as there is a health bar, play will be centered around one or more characters performing preventative or restorative actions to it.

Flight said:

Curt has said in a number of interviews that he is a "convert" to having fun rather than being EQ type hardcore nowadays.


I wonder in Salvatore"s first book how long the hero will spend putting the raid together to kill the final boss, due to not being able to find enough healers....

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lol@ the book. As for the rest, proof is in the pudding. If the game sucks I get to laugh at Blackguard for being a carebear.

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@Fog

Healing allows designers to do different things with encounters. If you just have damage takers and dps and you"re in a DIKU setting, it becomes more tank and spank race. However if it"s non DIKU and more of player controlled environment (i.e. action-game control style) where you"re actively dodging and blocking and damaging then yes it becomes more interesting. There are all sorts of things you can do, just think about Zelda dungeons that are larger, more complex and with 9 other people.

The one thing that needs to come out of this debate is that having dedicated healing classes is nothing more than a design decision.


Everquest created the main tank / healer concept in 3D MMOs; the fact it is used in nearly all fantasy MMOs since is purely a decision to follow that model (I"d suggest a subconscious decision - most folk take it for granted it HAS to be done this way, which isn"t the case).

Ultima Online didn"t use it (even though a number of the design team were DIKU players), Diablo didn"t use it and original D&D used it sparingly (Clerics were designed to spend most of their time in an offensive role, not to be healbots).


Its a system that works. Its also a system that has MASSIVE drawbacks.

The most obvious is that all control over group makeup goes out of the window. It would be so nice to play an MMO where any group of people could get together and run through a dungeon together, regardless of their class.

.

Well since we"re just throwing out basic concepts and seeing what sticks here"s one.

get rid of the healer archetype altogether, give every player the same two healing spells one group and one single target. base the amount of healing off of direct damage %. so if I heal and then attack a mob a % of the damage I do also heals the group, or the single target I selected.

DPS classes would be the best healers, tanks would suck at healing but would require less.

Flight said:

The one thing that needs to come out of this debate is that having dedicated healing classes is nothing more than a design decision.

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Healing/damage prevention needs to be item- as well as class-based andactually matter. Scrolls and the like need to be able to effectively mimic/match current DIKU healer abilities when combined with class abilities, and be stackable to a degree.

I"d be all for it, personally. Nothing bites more than having to wait for a proficient healer to run group content.

Just a speculation: Do you think group makeup is forced into the holy trinity to retard progress through content? And do you think those types of limitations are required in the current MMO environment?

Draegan said:

Healing allows designers to do different things with encounters. If you just have damage takers and dps and you"re in a DIKU setting, it becomes more tank and spank race. However if it"s non DIKU and more of player controlled environment (i.e. action-game control style) where you"re actively dodging and blocking and damaging then yes it becomes more interesting. There are all sorts of things you can do, just think about Zelda dungeons that are larger, more complex and with 9 other people.

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Spot on. And going back to the Baal analogy, it could be the Sorc, the Amazon, the Druid or the Necro that uses any one of a series of abilities that dictates the encounter, rather than it being the tank taunting the mob into the best position every single encounter.


I remember quoting you, Draegan, a year ago to the day, when I said :

I"m a hero. I"m Drizzt; I"m Conan. Sometimes I want to hang out with Wulfgar and Bruenor, or with Taurus or Sonja, sometimes I just want to do my thing and be a hero. Or Drizzt, "New guild, Companions of the Hall, looking for members. We need more healers and a mezzer before we can finish off the Hunters Blade quests and move on to Transitions." I"m not belittling party content - I want that too. But we CAN have it all. We don"t need to live by the barriers EQ1 created.


It was a somewhat related discussion about scaling content and solo instances.

Flight said:

The one thing that needs to come out of this debate is that having dedicated healing classes is nothing more than a design decision.

Everquest created the main tank / healer concept in 3D MMOs; the fact it is used in nearly all fantasy MMOs since is purely a decision to follow that model (I"d suggest a subconscious decision - most folk take it for granted it HAS to be done this way, which isn"t the case).

Ultima Online didn"t use it (even though a number of the design team were DIKU players), Diablo didn"t use it and original D&D used it sparingly (Clerics were designed to spend most of their time in an offensive role, not to be healbots).

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EQ was just a graphical MUD. But we know this. UO didn"t have healers because it was a skill based system so there weren"t any classes per se. It wasn"t generally refered to as a PVE-Raid game though either, so I don"t think you can use that as an example.

Diablo is a single player game that evolved to allow multiple players to play together eventually. Blizzard didn"t really have to balance classes in reference to each other but vs. the single player game. They intended that each class be able to beat the game single handedly. In an MMOG, "beating" the game is usually done with other people. So you balance gameplay with the balance of other character power being present.

D&D healing was extreme amounts of downtime after every fight. Which is fine since the main point of the game wasn"t fighting! It was the story/adventure.

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Healing is necessary in a DIKU style game in some form. It only depends on what form it takes whether it is potions, spells or skills. What happens when you give everyone the ability to heal? Eventually people will conform to who does it best and that will be your "healer" but maybe that class design will be more entertaining than a dedicated healer class.

Dedicated healer classes suck in the days of casual gameplay, since as a dedicated healer you need the help of other players to accomplish anything on your own, or it just takes forever to do it with yourself and you bash your face in.

Unchained Acolyte:

Just a speculation: Do you think group makeup is forced into the holy trinity to retard progress through content? And do you think those types of limitations are required in the current MMO environment?

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People don"t force content through a holy trinity, rather people are used to that sort of game play in a fantasy RPG environment. It"s a staple, just like running backs, wide recievers and quarterbacks are a staple of football.

Those limitations are not required at all, but a game must be designed from the ground up to support that, however you won"t find that style in a typical DIKU MMOG. It"ll be something you won"t be able to compare to WOW or EQ.

Draegan said:

EQ was just a graphical MUD. But we know this. UO didn"t have healers because it was a skill based system so there weren"t any classes per se. It wasn"t generally refered to as a PVE-Raid game though either, so I don"t think you can use that as an example.

Diablo is a single player game that evolved to allow multiple players to play together eventually. Blizzard didn"t really have to balance classes in reference to each other but vs. the single player game. They intended that each class be able to beat the game single handedly. In an MMOG, "beating" the game is usually done with other people. So you balance gameplay with the balance of other character power being present.

D&D healing was extreme amounts of downtime after every fight. Which is fine since the main point of the game wasn"t fighting! It was the story/adventure.

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Some of those things are true, though not all of them. The point is that the only thing that separates those games from EQ is a design decision to not include a dedicated healer as a required class.

However, each of those games has encounters which are on par with boss mobs in DIKU MMOs.

There is nothing that stops any of those games being made into an MMO, without dedicated healing classes (DDO doesn"t count as it made sweeping changes to the pnp D&D).

Draegan said:

Healing is necessary in a DIKU style game in some form.

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I think we are all largely in agreement in a desire to see some "form" of healing in the kind of MMO being discussed.

To those of us who know what DIKU was (DikuMUD), using the term DIKU is actually limiting the debate - a conventional Healer was an essential element of DikuMUD. If we said," a healer is needed in a DIKU game", it would be like saying,"jam is needed in a jam sandwich".


I suspect we are agreeing with each other and making the same point from different viewpoints.

Yes we are.

I"d like to see a non-Diku fantasy-MMO. The only issues, I think, are technology. We"ll see, but I think it"s going to come in the form of a console game before you see it on the PC.

Vanguard Bloodmages have been mentioned several times for being fun healers and say what you will about Warhammer Online but Warrior Priests (and I would imagine Disciple of Khaines - I haven"t played one) are incredibly fun healers also. I was telling a friend the other day that WP"s are Ret Pallies done right.

AoC also had healers that could do damage, and had healing abilities tied to doing damage.

Know what people did about them? Bitched at how OP"d they are.

the solution to this is to not have defined classes. anytime you pigeon-hole people into picking a class, you"re forcing a role. you then gotta find a way for them to change these roles (talents, jobs) to allow more flexibility. but it"s dumb.

that"s not the answer. the answer isn"t switching roles. it"s defining your own roles. give players the freedom to be or try any type of combination they want. they want to try to beat a dungeon as nothing but a cook and blacksmith, then let them. that"s what needs to be understood here; the next mmo need not be bounded by these archaic design ideas of classes and roles.