I love building glass cannon dps,so my teams usually consist of buffers,shielders,and/or healers What I love even more is when those games have coop and you can punish people for thinking your supports are a weak choice,”I only chose to not bring my dps because you didn’t want to play healer,I get to decide if you should live”
In my experience running healer in FF14, I've kind of come to the opinion that the DPS is the easiest role to screw up. It's obvious when you're doing bad as a healer and tank, and obvious when you need to improve. DPS too often blame others for not performing their job correctly tho...
@@itsame7491It's not about the value though, healers are obviously valuable, especially in mmo raids etc, that complain is about perspective on the skill, like if you a healer main you're just worse at the game, which is personally i can't argue about bc never mained a healer in any multiplayer game.
One big thing that makes healers feel unfun is the tendency for designers to make a healing specialist who is ONLY capable of healing, and is terrible at everything else. If your healer can also do some damage, throw up mitigation like shields, and apply some status effects they will be much more interesting and fun than 'spam heal move forever' healers could be.
What healers should really be is the utility class. Something for them to actively do to support their team or weaken the foe, and heal their allies as their reaction. They're utility characters, and the healing is just the common secondary to all of them. It's why dedicated healers often don't work outside of situations like SRPGs.
I think instead of making healers less one note, let's remove him and give other classes utility. The dps applies a debuff that restores health on hit for all allies Tanks store damage in a buffer and can apply a healing/regen buffer in an aoe for a % value Mages apply shields on a spell for each target hit Something like that And depending on specialized role you get more or less utility Sure an assasin has all damage but no healing But the 'stalker' class might get a aoe burst of shield applied on unaware enemies or on backstab, something like that
@KingTwelveSixteen Exactly, healers should have different way to mitigate other people's damages, whether it is in the form of pure healing, temporary shields/HPs, %Dmg res or any payoff that depends on effective HP. Giving everything to everyone is the (most often shitty) design choice that ruined the role in a lot of modern games.
This, i love playing healer cause i like to choose wether my team deserves to live or die. I play the other role when i decide if the other team gets to live or die :3
Healers usually: "Stop running away and let m-... Every freaking time." Meanwhile, Hunting Horn users: "Bow before me mortals!" * Whacks fire-breathing dinosaur on the head with bagpipes *
Honestly, this is the real reason I even play bard in MH. The team buffs are a nice bonus; I here so I can smash dinosaur skulls with oversized anime bagpipes. Only if they introduce accordions as a new weapon type in a future entry will anyone be able to top that 🧐
yeah, games that have those are instantly bettter feeling for healers and supports, bc even if you know it's automatic, having sb (in this case the game devs) acknowledge your actions just feels nice, it's wild what little positive feedback can do to make the healer experience much better
I often enjoy playing healer characters because I know they're less played/appreciated. People are usually in demand of a healer so it feels nice to be wanted. I enjoy the feeling of helping my teammates be the MVP of the game. Watching others succeed is fun to me, as I don't mind being a more background presence. Really, the only negative experiences I've had being a healer is the perception some players have that healer players are inherently less skilled at the game. I've even heard it called "The Girlfriend Role" (which has its own set of extremely negative stereotypes). So sometimes, I've been accused in lobbies for picking a healer because I'm "bad at the game" and can't play a "real character". But those have been few and far between, and overall I find being a healer to be a mostly positive experience both from the game and the player communities
Im a healer main too and i am self admittedly not the best at video games. But i dont get why some people are so elitist about player skill. Im sorry i didnt grow up with fps and dont have fast reaction times. Thats part of why i am playing healer. Im going to be playing either way so would you rather me play poorly at a high skill role i suck at or play well at a "low skill" (healers just use different kinds of skills) character i am good at
@@zenmaster8 they're like that because they want to feel better than SOMEONE at this game. they perceive skill at this game as being an important goal, and by not being skilled, they're just a worse person. I know the idea, because I used to be like this in these games. I used to feel like I was awful just for not being really good at things. I never dogged on healers though, I love healers, always have. but their response is to find ANY reason to be perceived as better, even if it's just stupid or silly.
@@zenmaster8the most important skill in any video game is learning to acknowledge strengths and risks, and improving them for yourself and your team. Healing does not require quite the same diversity of skills as other roles, but it absolutely requires a mastery of the ones it does. You are skilled because you know how you work, and never let anyone convince you otherwise. They can gab all they want but they can't make you feel inadequate unless you let yourself agree.
@@Mechan1calMag1c1an yeah, like first of all it's okay to be worse at the game so it's stupid that people get mad at you for that, if that's what they think they should be happy you didn't pick a "harder" dps role where they think you'd cause them to lose. But also being antagonistic towards the "weak low skill healers" is how you get mile long dps queues with nobody wanting to heal, or just teams with no healers and everyone dies? So antagonising your healers for being bad at the game just screws yourself over
This right here. If healers would have the same killing capacities as the other characters, like they do in Battlefield or Apex Legends, more people would play them
The concept of overheal is a good marriage of shielding and healing. You are given an incentive to use your healing skills even when the party is in good shape, and it's the same defensive benefit of mitigating incoming damage. I recall unlocking an overheal passive for a healer class in Etrian Odyssey 5 and it changed the way that healer class was performing.
I think the best approach to a healer is not just making them only healers, but also giving them their own way to dish out damage or do other useful things like dish out buffs. That way when healing is not needed a healer can do other things. I've played some games where the best choice for a healer can also turn around and hurl out devastating debuffs and has their own kind of limited bag of "I came to heal but I am all out of bubblegum" nukes to drop when push comes to shove.
This for sure My absolute favorite is when healer and buffer classes are merged into one and they become insanely bulky support for my fast glass cannons of dps.also whenever a game gives you an ability or item to convert hp% to dmg
Your comment made me remember of Hotarugusa in Onmyoji and her healing basing off her ATK because she functions by sucking the hp out of the enemies to heal herself on the basic move. I dreaded seeing one with a set that allowed her to counter-attack.
Arknights has an alternate form of Reed who can deal devastating DPS to groups of enemies by either spamming spinning fireballs on two characters to burn enemies up close or striking enemies to put up a special debuff that makes them explode and spread the debuff to other enemies hit by the explosion to trigger a chain reaction. This also gives her a ridiculous amount of healing based on the damage she deals
Hello. Healer main here. I’m not much for online team competition games, but I have played a few. When I played overwatch, I started with playing Hanzo and Reaper, but the main I settled on was Lucio. In Pokémon Unite, I was an Eldegoss and Blissey main. Ultimately, I like being the back line support. I don’t find it as stressful. UNTIL my teammates are complete ass. Occasionally in Overwatch and too many bloody times in Unite, I had the highest K:D. The fucking CLERIC had the highest K:D. It was the most tilting thing ever that I just stopped playing both games. In Dragalia Lost, I also liked playing Clerics in multiplayer lobbies. Again I found it more relaxing and that was actually successful for awhile……. Until the meta became blitzing offense and tossing clerics to the wayside. I then became good at ranged dps instead.
Lucio AND Eldegoss? A true person of culture. From a fellow healer main, I shake your hand and share the pain of having a bad team. I remember too many god damn times when people would leave me to guard a lane all by myself and then fight for my god damn life as no one comes to fucking save me.
I felt that last one. Up until a certain point, healing was actually pretty viable in DL, but then blitzing fights became the norm, and then Grace came along and made healers near obsolete due to her life shields. Of course, she would fold soon after the whole Curse of Nihility addition to later fights, which completely broke her back along with many others. Sigh, the game wasn't the same after all that.
@@ernestoportillo5136 that was the MOSt annoying. How am I 1v3ing bottom lane as Eldegoss and yall are STILL losing top. And nobody is helping me kill Drednaw!!!!! The real kicker is that I was able to stave off the 3v1s somewhat successfully, especially with Blissey. It almost felt like I was rewarding my team for abandoning me on bot lane. That’s mainly how I got ridiculous K:Ds. By just surviving the hell that was solo bot lane. Meanwhile Lucio is just fun even if my team sucks. Not having to consciously think about healing is great and of course healing myself. I had multiple games where I was surviving waaaaaaay to bloody long just bobbing and weaving through gunfire pushing the cart. And being able to speed boost parkcore back into combat after death was really fun. Never really mastered the art of pushing people off cliffs tho. Lastly, I swear every single Juckrat had my number. If I ever heard a Junkrat Ultimate, I just knew, no matter where I was, I was about to die in 5 seconds.
Ahh... Dragalia Lost. Good times. That game was a mix of fun and frustrating, but I left with overall positive emotions. I remember Heinwald was really fun for his offensive and proactive approach to healing. That said, the game suffered a lot over time because so much of the design shifted to instant-kill attacks if the party failed to dodge some things, which required a lot of effort and memorization. Too much effort for what's supposed to be a casual experience.
In D&D the major problem I have with healers (and healing in general) is that even the 'Dedicated Healers' are better off just killing the enemy rather than healing. However, in the Epic Battle Fantasy series I can certainly say healing is vital; although the main Healer's role as the Dedicated healer is a bit less pronounced in the later games when certain skills become equipped skill usable by a few member as opposed to the first games when they were all pre-set. Heck the White Mage from Final Fantasy 1 can learn buff spells as early as level 1 which makes me think that said effects should be more prominent on the healers, healing and buffs are kinda cut from the same cloth in my opinion; positive consequences to ally members to help them do their job more consistently and sometimes outright better than normal.
in dnd healing is more useful for picking downed members up. Which is why healing word stays very good. On any given turn you're likely to average more damage than you'd do healing.
21:40 "sorry, forgot about Baizhu" Mika found dead in a ditch 💀. Kaveh, Gaming, Wriothesley and Neuvillette also heal, but only themselves (and every catalyst can heal the party with proto amber, but it's only really viable for Neuvi)
Even on neuvi it's a garbage weapon. I don't get why people like PA is the holy grain when it's literally just a terrible option no matter how you look at it unless you are f2p and coping hard
Every sword user can also heal for themselves, with the Black Sword from the BP. I use that at times in co-op at times for my Chiori, as between that and crystalize, she can happily self sustain.
@@Axterix13 Lol, that's kinda funny. I'm fairly in the weeds in terms of game knowledge, theorycrafting and such, but because I'm f2p, I don't even know what BP weapons do. But yeah, malenurse army grows!
@@GoldenOwl_Game Yeup. He was one of the characters brought into the conversation with Furina's release and ends up being a really good option for wanderer and some other main DPSs if you have her. Eula's best team is Furina-Mika-Raiden now, I believe, so one of the big arguments for not C6-ing Bennett went out the window. It wasn't as much of a deal as it was for characters like Jean or Noelle, but yeah, chocoboi got a moment in the spotlight recently.
As a jrpg enthusiast I vastly prefer having a good healer, I am a slow methodical player rather than being the best at making plays that dish out damage and a good healer is essential for my playstyle. I remember basically getting to a stalemate with the final boss in Bravely Default 2 because i had a hard time doing damage but i outhealed her constantly and suddeny i get the message that the boss si out of mp for their attacks and I was like "Did I just stall out the final boss??"
I've really enjoyed the moments in TF2 when I've been able to heal many as Medic. To me, being able to tell my self, "I did a good job helping the others stay alive in the match today." is satisfying and at least can hold me over until I actually get proper thanks from teammates.
Ur definitely right when it comes to active and passiveness towards the role. If I'm playing healer, I want to be able to do something the entire game rather than react with my abilities. And as much as I love playing some healers in multiplayer games, sometimes I know that I am way better as than the current person playing tank or dps. Supporting a bad teammate means you have 2 useless people in a battle rather than just 1. It's often the most unappreciated, most important, and least rewarding role to play.
Agreed I feel like a lot of the issues I have with poorly designed healers is that they don't have a 'win condtion' they have a 'not loose' condition Or no real gameplan. I unironically loved support moonstone twice in league, because the poison meant 1 attack leads to 3 healing bursts and I always had to keep up the passive effect to keep the numbers big But like soooo many healers just wait for a good moment to heal or buff
Ok so I really REALLY agreed with the part about healers (and other supports more generally) being insulted by extremely toxic players being a reason for people to quit the game. For context, I used to play League of Legends. My sister and I started playing at the same time, and often together, so we kind of gravitated towards bot lane where we could have fun together and coordinate a little easier than if we were on opposite sides of the map. I will admit, she was a better support than me (I generally had little to no situational awareness so naturally I was the perfect low elo ADC player). She perfected healing me and/or the entire team, throwing out any snares or immobility moves, she was really better at support than I was at trying to DPS anything. The number of times the toplaner would take a bad fight, die, and then immediately show up in chat to talk about how shit the Soraka was because he died (HER BURST ISN'T UP ALL THE TIME) was just ridiculous. To be entirely honest, the few times I got to be the carry, I would not have been able to achieve it at all without the Soraka or Lux or Leona or whoever she chose to play at the time. She was really probably only in a lower elo because of me tbh. In our last couple of months playing League, we switched roles so now I bore the brunt of the insults. Now I will admit, I was not the best support, so I did mess up quite a lot, but the amount of flak I would catch for something that was not even remotely my fault sometimes was just amazing. We both quit a couple of months later, because having a 0/15 Yasuo in chat type to the other team about how you don't even have a braincell is not something either of us enjoyed.
Strangely enough, Honkai Star Rail has some of the most creative designs for healers. You got healers whose powers scale off ATTACK stats, healers with AoE attack, healers that tanks damages, healers that raises your crit rate, and so on and so forth. And I think that's what the other games are missing: healers who can do more than just heal.
I liked the explanation used in Log Horizon anime. One of the "healing" class characters is actually preventative. The other thing I always remember is the healing class video for FF14 frim Jocat. Damage prevented, damage done to enemies between heals, acts as pre-healing.
An interesting contrast for me is the healer vs the support. Supports are actually useful proactively, increasing damage, reducing damage taken or doing the opposite to enemies, supports are generally the busiest member of the team since "supporting harder" isn't really a thing generally so they support more by doing more things and getting better role compression so everyone else can work at their best. Generally, healers are the first thing to be cut from a team as the players get better since you can't heal harder than people are taking damage while supports are generally the first thing to be put in and then the team is built around them so they can support as well as possible, reducing overlap in areas covered and making sure that everyone can make use of their buffs and debuffs.
13:43 wish and aromatherapy are quite literally THE healing support moves in Pokémon, but it's more applicable in competitive than in single player for reasons you mentioned (they are quite good actually, just a bit uncommon).
Uncommon is a bit of an understatement. Wish is one of the rarest moves in the game. I don't think any NPC's actually use this move, and most of the Pokemon that learn it do so by egg move (which is a mechanic the average player is unlikely to even know about, let alone avail themselves of). I wouldn't be surprised if the vast majority of people who have played Pokemon have literally never seen this move.
Agreed in that I think there are significantly different implications for healing-focused Pokemon whether considering single player (and largely single battles) vs multiplayer. Double battles (and max raid battles in Sw/Sh) are where healer ‘mons shine the most - providing your hard-hitters with greater longevity through a partner is great, and in some cases invaluable. In Pokemon’s case you can also ensure your healer ‘mons have offensive moves to defend themselves too. Besides direct healing in moves, say Wish/Life Dew/Pollen Puff etc, you have abilities that can make an offensive partner into a pseudo-healer, like pairing a Toxicroak with Dry Skin with any other Pokémon that can use Surf. It’s not often very viable or practical for the single player story of Pokémon, but the implications on competitive play are much greater here.
In party based RPGs I think one of the issues I had was definitely the opportunity cost problem only in reverse. Basically in games like Tales of Symphonia, Chrono Trigger, or Skies of Arcadia, you only have a limited party but you also get a steady stream of new characters you want to use with potential new synergies. But I always had to have an active team slot for the dedicated healer, reducing my options for fun experimentation because It’s more cost effective to have a Raine, Marle, and Fina on at all times with their greater suite of healing spells than to have one of the other characters that are more utility/offensive with less healing spells that are also usually less effective. So you don’t really have a party of 3/4 you can customize and play with, in reality you have 2/3 to work with unless you want to completely rely on healing items and that may be tenable in Pokémon but that’s slightly less so in the other games I mentioned.
While I generally agree with your point (I can add Bravely Default and Octopath Traveller to the list where healers in some capacity feels mandatory), I have to point out that Skies of Arcadia is a bit of a weird example here, for multiple reasons. The biggest one have to be that the party is shaped by the story more so than player input. You literally can't customize the party until the very final segment of the game, and even then, three of the four party members are locked to Vyse, Aika, and Fina, with only the fourth slot open to one of the remaining three characters. Secondly, while all her super moves are healing or support, it feels weird to call the girl with the highest magic damage a dedicated healer, even if damage is the worst use for magic in that game. And although Fina does have more defensive super moves than most, all characters do have their own defensive super moves. It's just that Lunar Light in particular is overtuned, healing, and happens to be Fina's final super. Also, the regular healing and revival magics and items all heals fixed amounts and can be learned/used by all characters, so anyone can be an effective healer. In fact, the less magic inclined party members make great (out-of-battle) healers since they probably aren't using their MP otherwise. I also like to use Aika for healing in emergencies due to her speed, as it really hurts when a heal fails because the target already fainted. Regardless, I love to see a Skies of Arcadia mention out in the wild. Sorry for rambling.
@@VTEySAG oh yeah that’s completely fair. I haven’t played Skies in a very very long time so my memory is fuzzy in certain respects including Fina’s complete role. I just know I had certain options in terms of who I could bring along and I don’t know if that was a GameCube difference or it really has just been way too long. I completely defer to your perspective.
@@MousaThe14 Makes sense, it's old game, and it's an easy mistake to make. I certainly don't expect everyone to know every minute detail of one of my hyperfixations, hence ending with an apology and appreciation.
@@VTEySAG No harm done, it’s a good hyper fixation to have, it was a great game, one of the all time greats that I still need to take the time to revisit.
Your point about how a healer becomes less useful the more you have ways to mitigate or avoid damage was definitely one of the first things I thought of. Turn-based games usually make taking damage inevitable for several reasons, whereas more action-based games have scarcer healing sources and tend towards making healing effectively a punishment for not dodging/blocking properly. I'll bring up Etrian Odyssey again, because parts of the community have a bit of a stigma against using the dedicated healer and tank classes. I don't mind using them, myself, and they can be built to have a fair bit of flavor, depending on the game. But I can see why some prefer not to use them, since having a tank do nothing but throw up shields and a healer do nothing but heal isn't engaging and can even feel like a waste of party slots. In EO's case specifically, teams without healers or tanks can be viable if one focuses on lockdown through binds/ailments or just does big damage, though that requires substantial knowledge of the game to be effective and usually takes up limited item slots on healing/revival items, so it's considered a more advanced playstyle that opens up team compositions. EO's dedicated healers typically have several advantages over other healing sources, depending on the game: their skills can heal more effectively than the competition's, they usually have the best or only revival skills, they save money and inventory space over buying items, they sometimes have overheals, etc. They also have amusing quirks of their own: EO1's Medic has abnormally high ATK scaling to pair with a melee move that can stun, as well as a buff that significantly reduces most damage to the party; EO3's Monk can specialize as a bare-fisted fighter to save money on weapons in the early game, even if it doesn't scale the best; EO5's Herbalist can take the Graced Poisoner tree and throw around debuffs, ailments, and magic damage when not healing, though this works best with a Celestrian instead of the default Brouni. But even then, many players prefer classes with less-conventional healing, with EO3's Sovereign being a prime example that heals those they buff and provide party-wide regen if they're unharmed.
It's been a while since I last played EO, I should do that again. I always considered a healer and tank MANDATORY for any party, at least early game. But I remember in most EO games even later game Healers were useful even beyond healing due to often having really strong Utility passives and/or Grind reducers. Could be remembering wrong though, as I said it's been a while.
I'm not sure how or why but playing Xenoblade was probably the first time I ever had fun playing as a healer. Even though Sharla quickly gets outmoded, something about her role was just fun for me
When I played Xenoblade 2 i played a healer the whole time because i liked being in charge of when to heal. They're fun in 3 as well, especially with some classes like Signifer where you rapid fire buffs or playing Crossette in XB2 where her healing scales up her damage
@@tsunderemerc2963 should we consider crosset an healing blade by now? And funnily enough xenoblade x has only 4 healing art because monolith soft thought the player would not used it.
@@tsunderemerc2963same for xc2, though for me I mostly just resented the AI and couldn't trust them to heal correctly. Let me tell the AI to stay on the healer blades please, stop swapping for no darn reason.
X wss kinda designed to be played without healer and soul voices were supposed to keep you going but not heal you fully. Every class had a survivability art that costed TP. It was really interesting. But overdrive broke everything and you can just become invincible with a few tricks...
i feel like overwatch tried to fix this problem by giving healers like moira more attack prowess, but as a result we now have a large subsection of “battle healers” who refuse to actually heal their teammates and instead just act like a 3rd dps
Healers require replacing a team member with someone dedicated solely to making up for mistakes(aka losing health), when often people would prefer to prevent the damage from happening, either by increasing defensiveness, increasing skill to avoid damage, or increasing damage to kill the enemies before they can kill you.
The way how I see it is that restoring health and buffing stats are cut from the same cloth so dedicated healers should be the ones who get BOTH of those things; that way they have something to do when no one has any big gaps in their health bar. Personally, if the healer can protect the party's momentum from otherwise inevitable setbacks and/or speed up their total momentum to the point that it more than makes up for the initial loss of having one less damage dealer then that's a good healer (in my opinion).
Oh yes, I remember Genshin 2.4 when people were crying that shielders got nerfed because they introduced mobs that lowered your health based on your energy recharge instead, I remember people complaining about the mobs that ignore shields and apply bleed. I remember that some bosses have a perma bleed unless you cleanse yourself and I for sure remember people complaining that not even full HP Zhongli can't tank Fontaine's local legends and Natlan's call of war. Nah, Healers have their place, most people just don't know how to build them and dodge attacks, I'm surprised they know how to i-frame. On HSR, I main Aventurine and I can tell that if the boss is sufficiently strong (SU) in the DOT and CC department, I'd bring Lynx along. Just for that full team cleanse.
Plus in genshin healers are more than healing. They have things in their kit that stand out. Baizhu with his application + healing + interuption resist + buffing of reactions. Kuki with electro application + healing + ability to hold freedom sworn and being a monster in hyperbloom teams. Mika for physical dps buffing and atk speed [but I use him in yoiyima's team too for the healing and atk speed so she can keep up with yelan and xingqiu's hydro applications during her E skill and get more healing off consistently by mika] Benny, not a great healer and often times gets you into bad situations due to his self application pyro so overload, vape and such unalive you, is one of the few with intense buffing but also just flat out bad for being the reason you can't stay alive
@@nobody-xh6ii Wait, wait. Did you said Mika in Yoimiya Team? That's something I haven't heard before and now I'm considering giving him some chance of being actually built to be used (got him at AR60). Instead of Yelan in the comp, do you think Shogun would work? Asking because I usually use Yoimiya and Shogun together.
I think one thing some games do to allow healers stuff to do is by making the Support class not just about healing, but applying buffs to teammates/debuffs to enemies so that there's always something.
Xenoblade 2 is a fun case where healers are a semi-necessary class to have for much of the early game, but when you approach endgame and postgame content healers fall off hard, with Advant Guard medals (heal whenever you crit) plus high crit items, you can keep yourself topped up. And then comes the DLC that introduces two healer characters, Fiora and Crossette who are better known for their massive damage potential. Fiora is crits for days while crossette stacks potions collected to deal massive damage and is the crux of speedruns (until endgame HP totals balloon). Two of the higher tier DPS characters, a NG+ earth blade and Dagas (base game), are better known for their support capabilities because one buffs damage to enemies weakness while the other grants a party wide damage buff. And then there is Corvin, another DLC character who is supposed to be a tank, but has really good specials that heal the party. Power creep really confused the power dynamic.
I like playing support because I like winning games, and if I have to be the guy that plays the character no one else wants to, so be it, but I never understood why healers specifically are so maligned. To me it's a matter of perspective: my job isn't to shoot the enemies until their HP hits zero, it's to "shoot" my team until their health bar hits full
I think certain healers introduced recently have broken the mold. The versitility they gave to every character in the FF7 remakes allowed Aerith to become a DPS mage if you wanted which was nice. My favorite recent healer that i've used is Gallagher from HSR. One you ascend him and get his talents up he's a fun mix of offense and healing.
The one game where healers are absolutely fun to play is PGR, where premium healers are on field dps, buffers and sustain all in one while also their visuals are not designed to look like gentle supports but instead range from "Laser brush blade artist" to "Feral lightning wolf girl" and "Angel of mercy with the heat of a sun at her disposal"
As a SMT masochist i actually love healers, is just another part of the resource management gameplay, especially when your healer doubles as a buffer or debuffer. My funniest experience with a healer had to be in Fire emblem 3Houses Maddening, with my Mercedes never missing a magic level up. By the midgame she was dealing more damage than my dedicated magic damage dealer (Lysithea)
Healing and buffs are cut from the same cloth in my opinion, they both help other party members do their job in ways that are slightly different but positive all the same. As for funny healer experiences, Yuna from FFX is meant to be the healer (outside of Aeon shenanigans) but due to having more Agility AND Magic she's actually better at dealing magic damage than Lulu if she gets a hold of some damage spells. Healers really are a funny one.
Before Pokémon Unite banned me for literally 100 years, I loved playing as Eldegoss because she was the first support I got and she could do a good bit of damage as well. In some ways I can see what you said was good about medic, in so far as being fast and able to do good damage so you're simply helpless in a fight. In fact, I ran a mostly offensive eldegoss, stacking sp. atk and atk spd to debuff foes' movement and hunt them down if I felt I was able to do so. I was honestly too aggressive sometimes, but being able to chase down squishies running away or flee myself when it started looking rough, it was very fun to be moving and grooving. The linchpin was how my heal worked. I toss out a ball, it attaches to someone, and after a few seconds, it explodes, either healing or going damage depending on whether foes or allies were in the radius. This meant I could just toss that thing out and then focus on attacking while it cools down, meaning I got a lot more fighting than other healers. If this isn't really a dedicated healer build, then understandable, but this is the most recent multi-player game healer I've played and I've got a lot of good memories as playing as that puffball because I could scratch my itch to be supportive of my team AND the itch to take names if I get the chance. I felt I could take initiative or stay reactive and I loved it.
Expanding on Point 4, Wanting to Stay At Low HP, Final Fantasy 8 (and to a _much_ lesser extent 6) is a unique edge case where there actually _is_ a system wide mechanic that wants you to be at low health. In that game, Limit Breaks are almost always accessible at low health. Because of that, the dominant strategy is to have one character at the lowest sustainable health value for where you are in order to spam limit breaks. Often this is either Squall for his perfect accuracy and ability to hit multiple times per turn with Renzukoken, or Quistis for her utility blue magic (including an instant death spell). However, Zell can take advantage of this decently well with his build a combo limit break, and there is an entire category of items specifically for Irving's limit break. When combined with how the game passively punishes grinding and how you can take advantage of the card mini game to create powerful items and spells early on, this is one of many mechanics that leads to 8 being considered a broken game by many, and inherently kinda fun to speedrun despite being a multi disc PSX RPG. And while 6 has a prototype limit break in Desperation Attacks that can be randomly accessed at low health, it is far more random and less reliable than 8. Not that it matters since 6 lacks a dedicated healer, or the ability to spec someone into one, anyway.
I don’t remember completely, but I think I enjoyed playing a healer in the mobile game Dragalia Lost. While it’s easy to always choose the cool and fast DPS, as you said, healers are often pretty accepted and mistakes aren’t as critical (though when needed, it does become important). In that game, you still would need to learn boss attack patterns and you still have to survive (healers could heal themselves but weren’t necessarily way more tanky or less). It was a nice way to contribute to the team in a meaningful way and (at higher levels, and once you’re more experienced) could provide a challenge too. Of course there were teams that insisted to go without healers, but when things didn’t go *perfectly* you could tell people were getting frustrated (even though running a healer just meant a slower clear time but still a clear).
I really like playing healers, so much that i actively try to create healing classes sometimes, one of my favorites experiences was as using a support Sword and shield in monster hunter world and entering SOS missions to help other players.
One of my favourite Genshin Impact characters to play is Yaoyao :) She's a great healer and she can deal a bit of damage too. Whenever I had trouble beating a boss in the early game due to skill issues I'd make a team with both her and Barbara, which left me with more healing than the bosses could cause me, and with no one to heal Yaoyao damages enemies and I'd just run and dodge with Barbie's ring while Yaoyao's skill + burst did their thing :)
My most prominent memories playing healers in games is Whitemane from Heroes of the Storm and Kokomi from Genshin Impact. In the case of Whitemane, she's so incredibly difficult to play well, but has such an extreme output potential that even though HotS is a MOBA and therefore so much as playing the game will get you flamed by everyone else in the match and their extended family, people would actually respect a Whitemane player who knew their stuff. And for Kokomi, well, DPS Kokomi is real, and can hurt you. But in both cases, they are battle medics who combine healing with attacking. Whitemane went so far as to demand mastery of playing every role in the game to play her to a passable level, as she was required to heal, soak damage, and deal damage through both spells and attacks, being a true Red Mage character. Healers are often most fun when they share other roles instead of being *just* the healer. For Xenoblade Chronicles, Melia and Shulk both work as a combination of attacker and healer, dealing damage through magical and physical means respectively while also using healing spells to keep themselves and allies alive.
I loved playing the OG Astrologian in FFXIV. Because that class had my addiction built into the mechanics, gacha rolling. Why waste time playing gacha games when you can be a healer and the whole party is at the mercy of the gacha gods? It was like drug playing that class... nowadays it's just not the same after the rework.
Destiny 2 has recently made healing an actually fun mechanic to play for me. I think a few things that make it engaging. 1. Healing doesn't come at the cost of damage, in fact, damage is on the relative better side for it. Because a lot of the healing-based weapons (Lumina, Red Death) need kills and tend to be the highest rarity of items, they have large damage boosts that make them feel powerful to use. Additionally, there are other weapons that require you to first deal damage before dealing it out, that can get perks that allow it to crowd control or just boost its damage. Healing also often comes with the ability to boost damage for yourself and teammates at the same time, which makes it extremely useful in endgame. 2. Self-Reliance, while some healing abilities rely on teammates to be used, many of the healing abilities can target the user too, meaning they benefit from the healing gameplay. 3. It's a massive dps increase for boss fights, as the damage boost part of support benefits the user by making your guns stronger but also makes sure your dps players are hitting their highest numbers more frequently 4. Usefulness, while this one is a bit subjective since technically all content can be done without a healer, in endgame content, bringing one helps greatly with dealing with the fast TTK that enemies have against players. Oftentimes I had high level content turn into me keeping everyone alive due to my own healing. This is also definitely a more personal experience but from that I have had people thank me for the healing since its good passive survivability for the team. 5. Diversity in how it can be done, you can build yourself into having a passive damage minion whenever you use one of your abilities, you can play an entirely aerial gameplay loop, dive bombing teammates to heal them, or you can setup as someone in the back playing more defensively sitting in AoE pools to generate healing. I don't think any game can add healing with just simply the addition of new items if the base game never had it, but I think Destiny 2 has done a decent job at least making healing somewhat enticing for people to play in the past year. I've seen a decent amount of friends who normally would play dps characters swap to healing just because the gameplay loop is fun.
Tales of xillia has Jude the mc as a healer and he's incredible. He can aoe heal in later parts of the game without slowing down his combat. Probably the best healer I've played Fire emblem the later games are trying but healers are still very prone to exploding on touch. Lissa Axe in the fates dlc would have made her great in awakening. But yeah healing makes you feel like you aren't doing anything just spamming a single thing
I think Sharla's other issue in Xenoblade Chronicles is the fact that most of her arts are very poor in chain attacks and don't synergize well with the other party members.
@@maxspecs Okay, and? While she's okay, you generally would want someone else in the party who could do better than her. She was doomed the moment they made her Talent Art, Cool Off.
Bravely Default made healers work, but it was weird. You had to dedicate 1/4 of your team to it, and build speed/turn order around it, but after like 2 turns, you ciuld start reviving the whole team, healing them for half max hp, and giving them extra turns. EVERY TURN.
Not many people play PlanetSide 2 or will see this, but Imma say it anyways. The Combat Medic in PlanetSide 2 gets a decent amount of firepower, the ability to restore people's HP and shields, and a tool that resurrects people. The strongest tool the Combat Medic has is a grenade that mass res people in a small area, which is heavily used by players doing a coordinated push/breakout where casualties mount at an astonishingly high rate. A single medic can bring back a team and a handful of well placed medics can sometimes turn the tables in a battle by resurrecting a massive push. The Engineer is more of a healer for mechanical things, they get a tool that heals exosuits (which is used like the infantry being on foot), they can obvious heal vehicles and emplacements. Best of all, they get grenades that heal a bunch of mechanical things in a group, that grenade is sometimes used when there is a mass breakout/push where exosuits take heavy damage (but to resurrect one you still need a medic). Honestly, PlanetSide 2 is the few I actively enjoy playing healers. I get a set of weapons kit that allow me to defeat non vehicle/exosuit enemies and take objectives decently well, I get kit that supports my job well, and the game actively encourages the use of medics to ensure that casualties can get up and fighting again.
Great video! Logically I understand all the reasons why people don't want to play healer but as someone who has to be dragged kicking and screaming from my healing/support builds in most games (god eater, monster hunter, mmos, hell I even play single player shooters as a healer when I can), it's always a shock when people tell me they hate it.
Meanwhile I have that one friend who loves healer and support, he's actually sad if there's no dedicated role/class like that And I have to say, he's really good at doing his job, in co-op games we simply perform so much better with his support. He's so good I never want to play co-op games with healer/support roles without him haha
If I understand correctly, DPS is satisfying because there is instant gratification when you kick someone's ass, because the situation becomes better than before, and not much frustration when you don't, because the situation remains unchanged. When you heal, however, succeeding keeps the situation the same, and failing makes it worse, leading to frustration and potentionally blame. I wonder, then, if a game were to have a high death penalty, creating a strong negative emotion when that happens, and be slow-paced and analytical, giving an opportunity to see how healing someone avoided disaster, would healing become satisfying because it creates relief?
I recently played ff13 and I love how classes work in that game. Instead of having dedicated healers, multiple characters can switch to the healer role on demand if needed.
I feel like Genshin recently managed to break this curse with some fun design choices. It feels good seeing Kuki trigger a bunch of hyperblooms, and it feels good to use Jean’s burst knowing that it is fulfilling furina’s ult instantly and you are getting a bunch of damage out of it.
There's game like NTBS where healer are hard but fun to play. If you're in team with some amount brain cells your teammates will help you by protecting you and helping you charge your ult gauge(healing make your ult charge faster). Healers are the clases with the most area wide ult in the games and can change the tide of the battle by launching one. They also are able to guardbreak by using heavy attack which allow healer to strike back when they are getting jumped. It's extremely satisfying to do and make you take a proactive role in the battle. Couple that other supportive tool you get a rather proactive healers class. It's not a dedicated healer class but it feels much than just following a rotation and pressing the same buttons for 20 min like healer in a MMORPG for exemple.
One thing that Battlefield constantly gets it right are how they approach the Medic/Healer class and makes it geniuinely fun to play and gives new players the necessary ropes to work together with your teammates. Basically just give them decent (or in some cases outright disgusting firepower like BF4 assault medics with AEKs but every class in BF4 is disgustingly OP if you play your cards right) attacking power necessary to push forward/hold back against enemies and rewards aggresive healing/revive playstyle to help your team push to capture objectives
I used to avoid playing healer because it seemed too hard. You have to be watching everyone's hp and in the right position to help them without getting killed yourself. I hardly ever developed that kind of game sense so I usually don't play healers. There are times that I have wanted to though because I think its fun to prevent a teammate from dying. The few games I can somewhat play them, its really fun. Also some healers have really interesting mechanics and that makes them appealing to me, almost none of which were touched in this video though but oh well. Also, grass type pokemon had been considered the cleric type for a long time, idk if it still is though.
I remember Healer was important on Ragnarok Online. They sought after by people. Like you're a healer, people will flock around you. Also, you can build it as a solo fighter because it has self sustain. There was a time, giving people heal or teleporting, or reviving will earn you money in RO. Like everybody always has a healer on his/her account. That, or a merchant. By i mean healer, it includes Priest, Monk, Crusader, and Soul linker. And to some extent Alchemist.
Hello fellow pyramid 4 turn undead priest. My job as a crusader was to follow the guild leader with sacrifice devotion and reflect shield perma on xpp, what a job! Everybody had a second account with a healer or support like bard.
When I played Xenoblade 3, I actually controlled Taion since I didn't trust the AI to do the healing effectively. I was also able to do some offensive stuff with him so that was a bonus. More offensive healers are definitely needed.
In TF2 Nothing is more satisfying to me than out healing a teams top 4 or 5 damage dealers, negating that damage damage done. I have helped hold points while greatly out numbered from good heals. People do appreciate great heals and will for sure give you props for doing your part. Well timed ubers are just a thing of beauty. I typically play any class that the team needs most, but medic is my goto.
An example in Honkai Star Rail is why some healers are better and preferred over others: At the game's launch Bailu and Natasha were the only options for healing. They were quickly overshadowed by later additions like Luocha and Lynx since these newer characters aside from providing healing also could cleanse any debuffs that were applied to your team, something that Bailu lacked entirely and Natasha could only apply one at a time. Then Huo Huo began to stray beyond just healing/sustain and could buff the team and provide energy to the entire team to be able to deal more damage. And Gallagher enabled a gameplay style that worked really well for a what was once underutilized mechanic, but also provided debuff cleanse and also could decrease the attack power of an enemy unit. This is of course the dilemma of healer/sustain units that had to justify their place in the limited slots of a team that would otherwise be occupied by a different role, especially if there were no other mechanics that could be utilized or exploited for the team to avoid taking too much damage during a battle.
A well-designed healer character lets you act as a force multiplier for your team. Providing extra longevity for your offensive members, especially those who might have a strong output but low hardiness. I suppose I didn’t immediately think of Mercy or the Medic when thinking about contemporary heal-focused characters in games - my experience has had more well-rounded healers who might be better described as supporters anyhow. Restorative healing, preventative healing (shielding), de/buffing (lower incoming attack efficacy, increase ally defenses, etc) are tools I see packaged together more often for engaging healer characters. Heck, some can offer good damage in their own right! My to-date most fun healer character experience has been playing a Warriorpriest in Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning. An active, front- or mid-line healer who waded into battle with hammers (and occasionally tomes). The ability to rock up to enemies with a sledge and wail on them while *simultaneously* healing yourself per hit, and thus go toe to toe with hardier or glass cannon careers was excellent. Moreso, running alongside a friendly heavy character and healing them up with your hammer blows, shoulder to shoulder. AoR placed more emphasis on direct+gradual heals, so laying down HoT’s on your party during a PVP scenario or a Public Quest made keeping others up more manageable. Playing a tank’s pocket-healer was grand though, even from more of a distance. Shout-out to Dungeons and Dragons Fourth Edition “Leader” classes as well! For people who hated/resented playing Clerics in prior editions of D&D, being relegated to pure heal-bots who didn’t get to contribute directly to victory? 4e heard you loud and clear, and Leader classes were all competent in combat and each had their own support-niche they focused on in addition to a relatively standard healing progression package. Clerics laid on extra HP when healing; Artificers dished out temp HP (shielding) and bonuses to hit & damage; Warlords granted bonuses and additional attacks; Bards could slide allies to reposition them and save allies the action economy + opportunity attack provocations; etc. Leaders were a grand way to have one of four class roles dedicated to healing, while still making them engaging to play and giving them each some niche protection. I think the idea of a “dedicated healer” whose sole, or overall purpose is restoring lost HP, is perhaps outdated - or at least, it doesn’t fit the gameplay goals of a lot of modern combat-focused games. Undoing damage alone won’t be enough of a purpose/toolkit for a lot of players, especially in multiplayer scenes where healers & supports are taken for granted. Healers with a more diversified kit strike me as a productive adaptation to the archetype, even if their healing/supporting role remains their primary tool.
Funny thing is Mercy isn't even a good healer. She's used for her damage boost and revive. 55 (or 60) hp per second single target heal is awful if consistent
As someone who has both Huohuo and Aventurine, I still prefer Huohuo. Sure Aventuine has a team shield and offers team Effect Res, but Huohuo offers much more imo. Energy, ATK buff, debuff purge, healing per turn, healing on ult. So Huohuo is one character who NEVER leaves my main team. And as a healer main in multiple games, I just wish I was appreciated more, if at all. Even my friends don’t really thank me for keeping their asses out of the grave.
I main Field Medic in Killing Floor 2, which is the only game I play healer in so here are my thoughts 1) Medics have insane buffs that the medic can use on himself 2) Anything that potentially heals also becomes poisonous to enemies so no tool is useless when there are no allies 3) Medics have medic versions of all weapons so there is variety My only real suggestion for KF3 is that they add critical healing (more healing for headshots) or over heal
As a genshin player, i just like healing more than shields. They are just weird to use, hard to build to be strong, and doging is hard as a mobile player.
I used to be a healer back in the mmorpg days and another big thing is that blaming the healer is far easier than blaming anyone else because out of all mistakes, "my hp went down to 0" is the easiest to point out. It could be the fault of someone else including the now dead one but in almost all scenarios, noticing those issues is muvh harder than noticing the healer not outhealing the damage. In a lot of cases, even you might not realise that the issue isn't on your end.
Yeah, the teammates are the biggest reason behind why people don't play healers (To me). I always tell people that playing a healer is as if you could save your teammates from dying, but you make your teammates act like theyre invisible, run alone into the enemy team, and then blaming the healer.
I enjoy playing as the Healer. Having a passive role in combat fits my slowness I have to react to the fast-paced actions. It's even better in games that have NPC controlling the rest of the party, like in, Ni No Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch.
The reason why I main Medic in TF2 is his defensive tools. Being the 2nd fastest class is definitely useful. His health regen effectively increases his HP pool when positioned properly and only taking chip damage, and his increased knockback and strafing when midair gives Medic more options to handle enemy interactions beyond just "running away."
TF2’s mobility aspect is really an underrated part of the game. It feels so engaging compared to modern shooters where you just press buttons and activate skills
On the note of the preventing damage vs. restoring health topic brought by Hoyo games, doesn't help that in those games especially star rail egregiously so it feels like shields are intentionally superior in their defensive value by leaps and bounds to healing.
Back in the day, when the game was _current_ (mid-00s), Final Fantasy XI was the first game where I took on the healer role, playing both White Mage and Red Mage. Depending on the situation, it could be either an exciting game of whack-a-mole to keep people's HP up or about keeping buff effects where they needed to be and occasionally casting offensive magic (which tended to be severely under-leveled from disuse). Then Star Wars: The Old Republic released, and I played a Samus Aran-inspired Bounty Hunter because I love Metroid. Tank spec because it seemed more useful than DPS. When I moved on to Final Fantasy XIV (2013), I think I just ended up going Paladin because I'd already been focused on playing as a tank. It took until this summer of 2014 before I actually gave a healer job an actual shot, and I swiftly played White Mage/Conjurer from level 16 to level 94 before I decided I should take a break and actually get *other* things done. Non-FFXIV things. Both Tank and Healer roles have their own weights of responsibility that you have to get used to, but they're also both fun and fulfilling.
I do generally agree with the statements about Genshin and its relationship to healers. I have mained Noelle since day 1 of my playing Genshin and the reason I play her isn't specifically because of her healing. I do want to mention one side effect that wasn't mentioned in the video though. Many healers often are more valuable for their own ability to not die rather than their ability to help out wounded party members. Noelle for example has a shield and can heal while her shield is active. In theory this is supposed to ensure that she heals everyone uninterrupted. In practice it basically makes her invincible since you can't take damage while her shield is up and she is healing during its entire duration. Chancy/Blissy in Pokemon is another example. These Pokemon aren't really known for their ability to heal others but are more well known for their ability to tank damage and heal themselves especially in competitive play. When paired with status ailments and traps these pokemon become a nightmare to deal with because of their ability to not die.
In the specific case of HSR, I will say they’ve done a decent job so far of making characters that really want a shielder and characters that clearly get away with teams designed with a healer. I also think of the Bravely Default series where slowly everyone becomes some kind of healer and unreasonably strong dps.
I think game Ennshrouded did the healer issue well because of skill tree works. In Enshrouded you can skill into every class group, meaning: you can play a berserker who can wip out the staff and heal the entire team and yourself. Your not locked into set class. You can choose which skills you want or need and skill them. Any combination works. An assasin who tames beasts, An Mage who uses bows, tank that has massive damage output becouse they are also a mage. Or, how i did it, play a mage who deals more damage than the meele fighters while is also a healer.
Would love to play a rpg where the mc is weaker than his party and has boost and heal abilities for the early game if it's on the switch. Yeah healers and boosters aren't one anyone wants to play. They are great in party and you can feel the effects when they are gone but not getting the appreciation in long battles. It's probably why "I got kicked out of the hero's party" manga exist where the booster healer leaves and the hero's party immediately collapses in a sense. Bur yeah i feel to fix this problem. Make the healer have Mutiple effects in one power like heal team boost attack or attack enemy heal ally all in one powers. That way if you play them and rather do stragety you can make a party keep attacking
I remember my time playing Battlefield 1 and genuinely being a medic. More often than not the only reason someone picked the medic class was for the primary weapons it had and the rifle-launched grenades that no other class got. Rifle grenades that took one of two slots needed to have their healing equipment. So there was this one time a bomber came by and dropped on me and my team. Most of us being bunched up to capture an objective, most of us died, and the enemy team expected to face minimal resistance as they closed in. One issue. I, the dedicated medic, with both health packs and a revive syringe, lived. I got to work reviving and patching up everyone double-time, and once the enemies got there, we swarmed them instead of the other way around. If I hadn't gotten to getting everyone back up, we would have lost the objective and respawned to get pushed at the next one. While with fewer kills and a worse K/D ratio than others, I came out among the top 5 of 32 players on my team score-wise just off of healing and reviving. Don't neglect your healers or being one if there aren't any.
In pokemon there are ways heal in combat without items through the move called wish, where it staggers the healing by one turn in which you can switch in a pokemon that needs the healing
Idk healers in ffxiv gives me pure serotonin. Doubling a tank’s hp with barriers, timing perfect heals to optimize life, etc. I find FFXIV makes healing feel more impactful than doing damage due to the amount of hp to damage through, while you can watch a party’s hp skyrocket when a healer pops a big CD. If ffxiv gave healers a more complex rotation, I feel like their popularity would skyrocket.
With Pokémon: in the main series, you're absolutely right. I'm glad that healers, while not ubiquitous, see a lot more love in competitive, both Singles and Doubles
The thing with Pokemon is that a vast majority of the single player experience is through single battles. Where most rpgs have a party of heroes all on the battlefield at once, in pokemon it’s usually only 1 (2 at the most), thus it is much easier to design in a dedicated healer role. Any Pokemon must be able to face battle alone in a one on one battle, the ability to switch around and synergise is entirely external (I.e. as a result of trainer actions rather than pokemon actions). While there are moves that can heal, these are mostly selfish in their execution, mostly to heal the user rather than someone else. Whilst moves like Wish do exist and can be used to heal other party members, the successful use of it is quite finicky. Generally you are mush better off just using an item (which I would argue is the intended design philosophy, majority of boss trainers use healing items in battle). I would argue that whilst healing is a thing in competitive play it is invariably a secondary task for a defensive pokemon. Majority of 'support' Pokémon’s primary roles are to stall or debut their opponents rather than healing. Take Umbreon for example, whilst it could pass on wishes to other pokemon its primary role is to sit there and take hits while their opponent wears itself out, not to heal up someone more flashy. This is the point. There are no dedicated healer pokemon, just moves that happen to be able to heal.
@@intergalactic92 In general agree, but I find Umbreon to be a strange example. Wish heals half the user's HP to the recipient and Umbreon's HP isn't even that high XD I would argue that healing can be accompanied with redirection to form the goal of mitigating damage to sweepers...in Doubles, anyway. Amoonguss's two roles are to harass the opponent (mainly through Spore) and to keep sweepers alive (with Rage Powder and Pollen Puff). They're the GOAT because they *also* have Regenerator, so they get to heal *themselves*, simply for switching out. If all they did was Spore/deal minimal damage/have Clear Smog, I expect their usage to be non-existent. Revival Blessing offered a unique opportunity to see a ramp-up in healing, but I think it's really only been used on Dondozo/Tatsugiri teams, I suppose because it's generally just...not worth it in other cases. But yeah, generally in Doubles, redirection is better than healing your ally. And in Singles, probably the most healing comes from the user healing themsleves, which wouldn't count as playing a healer. But it's still there from time to time.
When I mained Soraka in League of Legends, I almost always got very fast que times, always and I mean always got my character, and pretty consistently was thanked for my help and honored for being a positive, non-toxic and helpful player. Though on the flipside, I often faced a lot of people who would doubt my contributions in character select, would sometimes intentionally ban my character, and were just generally cunty to me. It's certainly a double edged sword. But personally, I always really enjoyed being in the background, helping people do things they couldn't do alone. Being able to be there in the nick of time to save someone from otherwise certain death, or using my ultimate, a global heal, to save someone who would definitely have died, or even turn a 1v1 fight that was very even into a win for my ally on the other side of the map. There were many times where my healing prevented our primary damage dealers from being able to be killed by the other team, and that directly lead to us being able to win crucial fights, and the game. Personally, I love the role. Maybe the damage dealers and tanks had a more active role in winning the game than I did, but that's fine with me. I like to be the lynchpin that held it all together, knowing that their health pool was far greater than it would have been without me, and that our mileage went much further than it would have had I been absent, even if it wasn't as flashy as the massive, health bar crushing damage of a mage or ranged attack carry. It's just the kind of fun I like to have, and my best memories are of fights that would definitely have ended badly if not for me sprinting across the map to save an ally, putting myself at risk and blowing any number of heals just to make sure they won that one crucial fight. Sometimes it was even enough to get a toxic player who had a bad game thus far to realize there was someone on the team who really wanted them to win, and it turned their attitude around, which buoyed team morale enough for us to unify and not have a bad game after a bad start. The power of that alone was often worth it, and a better reward than all the honors and friend requests I would get after matches for just being an unyeildingly good teammate who cared more about the morale of my team and mending rifts between players than who was right or wrong about an early game mistake or whatever.
Tera Mystic healing was probably one of the best healer experiences I've had. Close range high value aoe heals, targeted lock-on ranged heals, multiple auras to manage depending on the needs of the team or encounter, divvying out orbs to tank or high performing dps, and some minor offensive capabilities to add some damage to skilled teams that can properly i-frame made for some really interesting and fun gameplay. Having an on demand buff purge to get rid of boss shields or dangerous buffs was nice to have as well. Never a dull moment as mystic, although it sort of struggled if the team was full blown skill issue and didn't know how to i-frame, position, or use mitigation. At that point they are beyond saving and it's best to just drop group lol. Not usually an issue for me personally tho since I would mostly que with 2 other friends which happen to be tank and dps.
One of my recent experiences with healing has been in 7-Stars Tera Raids in Pokemon Scarlet/Violet. The thing is, most of these raids are hard enough that if your team is bad (read that as, 80% of the time when you play with random players), no amount of healing will be enough to save the party, they will just die too fast. But on the opposite side, if you play with people who all bring Level 100 Pokemon and know what they're doing, then you end up not needing dedicated healing, only a cheer here and there, and you spend more time spamming Helping Hand than your heal moves. Raid bosses very rarely reach a level of damage consistent enough to warrant constant healing. Healing moves are also a rather scarce ressource in Pokemon, with a lot of mons being either good at healing themselves OR their allies but rarely both (Life Dew heals everyone but in small quantities so it won't save near-death allies), and attackers in raids have an easier time recovering HP by hitting aggressively with a Shell Bell. I think good healers need something more than just healing to become fun and/or important. They need other support moves and flexibility on what they can accomplish. I don't believe in making games so hard that you cannot succeed without a 24/24 healer on the party.
Surprisingly some of my favorite healing has come from tabletop. Pathfinder 2nd Edition has what I lovingly call the healdoken, a single target ranged heal that recovers a substantial amount of hit points, often rivalling the best damage dealer of the party. There are other methods of healing out of combat that don't require these valuable spell slots either. This means you can often save them for when they are needed most during combat.
A lot of people really underestimate the power Healers (and by extension Support characters) have Ofcourse, you know how they can benefit YOUR team, but often times when I play as: Medic (tf2) Bridget (Overwatch) Sunflower (pvz GW2) Noelle (Genshin Impact) People truly underestimate the damage you can deal, or atleast the disorder you can cause most healers can be used/build in a way that not only benefits your team, but also allows for some kills for example, Medic has his primary and God-given-always-critting melee, which makes encounters with stronger classes way more interesting. Demoknights for example truly love rushing easy kills, and when looking at the statistics, demoknights have stronger Melee dmg than a medic... unless you crit
I think a lot of games do not understand the healer archetype, the thing that makes it annoying to play as a healer or support is when you can't be impactful through decision making, one of the things that I enjoy the most is when those have a plenty of options to consider and act through, and you don't feel burdened by being the healer. In other words, utility and powerful effects, action economy are all things to consider.
I used to love playing healers in TERA. Never had to worry about people whining about my equipment not being good enough or my skill rotations being wrong, just had to keep buffs/debuffs up and top everyone off (and whatever other weird side tasks the raid bosses required). People always thought I was the shit in the team PVP modes too. Also enjoyed maining Medic in TF2 back in the day
When I still played Overwatch1, I loved to play Zenyatta since he basically is a DPS healer. Like the healing aspect always happened automatically, while you still dealt good and satisfying damage from the far. Some DPS characters have tendencies to be not fun, when you are not playing well enough - in case of Overwatch its Widowmaker. It also puts pressure on you bcs you basically throw the game when not doing good. I tried really hard to be consistent with Widowmaker, but at some point I gave up, bcs it was just not fun to always miss your headshots, which are the most satisfying aspect of her.
SMITE's Chang'e and Hel (and to a lesser extent, Aprodite) made me genuinely enjoy playing a healer -- though I think in huge part of what made them fun to play was how stat efficient the items in the item shop were. Sure these were made very squishy to compensate their ability to sustain themselves and their team, but not only did tank-centric items way cheaper (aka more accessible) than their damage-centric ones, they almost always came with incredible utility stats. When I played for example, an item called "Shield of Regrowth" not only gave you tons of HP but also had 10% cooldown reduction (a stat that caps at 40%) and a passive that makes you 10% faster whenever you heal yourself. Oh and it costs a mere 2k gold (items on average are around 2.2k, most crit items are at 2.7k). So basically play right and you're like a fast unkillable tank and sure you might not be able to kill your enemies, but they can never kill you so
The best way to balance a healer imo is to make them capable of doing good damage too. In ffxiv for example, healer damage is important and necessary to clear higher end content, which naturally attracts players to them, and in overwatch, most healers are more than capable of 1v1ing dps as well.
Best kind of healer characters imo are self sustaining Crit Healers. Mythra in Xenoblade 2 is a great example of fun to play Crit Healer (Maybe even too good)
Mythra is odd case of just being incredibly OP in general, to the point that the healing isn’t even that critical of a part of her kit Xenoblade in general tends to fall into the issue of having so many mechanics that healing is more or less unimportant. All of the good healers in that game are good because they do other things and just have a bit of healing on the side
Funnily enough, the most time i had fun as a "dedicated" healer is when i switched to a support build in Isonzo an immersive ww1 shooter. Essentially get the class that gives ammo and faster healing and you are good to go. Its funny because since everyone has bolt action rifles, most people die in 1-2 hits. Its because grenades and arty are a little bit undertuned that lets a healer have enough time and space to get to work. Since its a ww1 game, everyone gets a weapon that can drop people in 1-2 hits so your initiative and offensive capability doesnt go down. It does have to mention that I generally play such a build after several matches of going for my usual offensive minded playstyle so for me it served more as a palatte cleanser rather than i like being a healer. Generally i play crazy assault charging the front line. I think a game like Foxhole which is a MMO appreciate healers because individual contributions are so small and its such a large team game that having a good medic corp can turn the battle. Also its funny in genshin you mention statue of the 7 or food but since i have an inventory hoarding problem, I tend to stockpile consumables so i generally put in barbara in my party. This helps especially on long exploration sections especially in new maps since i want to avoid heading back to statue of 7 since it could be out of the way. I actually prefer barbara in my exploration or farming party because of her C6 ability to revive so i can turn my brain off even more. Since its not endgame content, the three other slots can all help with dps, plus everything folds quite easily in the overworld with endgame builds. Though i haven't gotten around Natlan too deep yet and i hear the local legends are quite strong this time. Something about barbara having effectively an undo button quite nice and convenient because if i play really poorly with other characters, no matter how slim, if i fk up then a key party member and i actually have to think and pay more attention to the combat once i use a revive item.
I liked a lot the Methuss from GunEvo (may it rest in peace). It basically has healing cables, similar to medic, but the big difference is that he doesn't need to sacridice fighting for healing, as it only takes a right click towards an ally in sight, while you can still shoot and use abilities. And Methuss is PRETTY GOOD at fighting. Not only that, but he can fly, and has a charged shot, and a mini (and weak) turret. In GunEvo, EVERYONE is a dps, just some with more supportive ability compared to other, but it didn't prevented them to feel good when it comes to fighting too.
One of the solutions to make healers fun and interactive to play is to make use of one of the most shockingly least explored mechanics in games as a whole, over-healing. The rewards you get from it could be increasing the target’s maximum health or provide them a health-scaling shield. One of the artifacts from Genshin, the Ocean-Hued Clam set explored the reward you get from over-healing, which was dealing physical damage to the target, making the one who healed a sub-DPS. This was, theoretically speaking, could give healers some agency, without overstepping into other roles they are not, DPS or Tank.
In Marvel Rivals I always make sure to give a thumbs up to healers. In overwatch I generally give the thumbs up to the healers. A lot of the time I’d be the one playing as the healer (I suck at the rest of the roles)
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I love playing healer. I just hate how others constantly tell me I'm worse at the game than them because I do.
Just don't heal bro, they'll know your value
I love building glass cannon dps,so my teams usually consist of buffers,shielders,and/or healers
What I love even more is when those games have coop and you can punish people for thinking your supports are a weak choice,”I only chose to not bring my dps because you didn’t want to play healer,I get to decide if you should live”
In my experience running healer in FF14, I've kind of come to the opinion that the DPS is the easiest role to screw up. It's obvious when you're doing bad as a healer and tank, and obvious when you need to improve. DPS too often blame others for not performing their job correctly tho...
@@itsame7491It's not about the value though, healers are obviously valuable, especially in mmo raids etc, that complain is about perspective on the skill, like if you a healer main you're just worse at the game, which is personally i can't argue about bc never mained a healer in any multiplayer game.
@@Engitsu good or bad you respect your healer.
One big thing that makes healers feel unfun is the tendency for designers to make a healing specialist who is ONLY capable of healing, and is terrible at everything else. If your healer can also do some damage, throw up mitigation like shields, and apply some status effects they will be much more interesting and fun than 'spam heal move forever' healers could be.
What healers should really be is the utility class. Something for them to actively do to support their team or weaken the foe, and heal their allies as their reaction. They're utility characters, and the healing is just the common secondary to all of them. It's why dedicated healers often don't work outside of situations like SRPGs.
The problem is if you make healers *too* good, everybody becomes tank/support/dps all in one and cracked players become basically unstoppable.
I think instead of making healers less one note, let's remove him and give other classes utility.
The dps applies a debuff that restores health on hit for all allies
Tanks store damage in a buffer and can apply a healing/regen buffer in an aoe for a % value
Mages apply shields on a spell for each target hit
Something like that
And depending on specialized role you get more or less utility
Sure an assasin has all damage but no healing
But the 'stalker' class might get a aoe burst of shield applied on unaware enemies or on backstab, something like that
Discipline priests from WoW...
Honorary mention to Ankama's "healers"
@KingTwelveSixteen Exactly, healers should have different way to mitigate other people's damages, whether it is in the form of pure healing, temporary shields/HPs, %Dmg res or any payoff that depends on effective HP. Giving everything to everyone is the (most often shitty) design choice that ruined the role in a lot of modern games.
"I don't heal, I control whether you live or DIE"
I am exactly the same way. I hold you life in my hands. Go on your solo crusade, I got other people to heal. ❤
That's how I play healer too. I'm a harmacist get it right
Healer ❌
Judge deciding who will live and who not ✅
This, i love playing healer cause i like to choose wether my team deserves to live or die. I play the other role when i decide if the other team gets to live or die :3
Lol, until, they realize letting the tanks and dps dying is just denying themsleves the clear.
Healers usually: "Stop running away and let m-... Every freaking time."
Meanwhile, Hunting Horn users: "Bow before me mortals!" * Whacks fire-breathing dinosaur on the head with bagpipes *
I can't wait for Monster Hunter Wilds to just be able to kill a massive beast by shredding the horn(?)
Honestly, this is the real reason I even play bard in MH. The team buffs are a nice bonus; I here so I can smash dinosaur skulls with oversized anime bagpipes. Only if they introduce accordions as a new weapon type in a future entry will anyone be able to top that 🧐
In some games, when one character heals or revives another, they say thank you. I know it's just common decency but it's so heartwarming.💖
I used to do that a lot in " RWBY: Grimm Eclipse"
And then there is Imperius from HotS who basically says something like "Do you expect me to thank you for doing your job?"
@@ef3001man I did not expect someone reference rwby grimm eclipse online ever, what fun and janky game that was
And then there's Demoman:
"I didn't need ya help y'kno"
yeah, games that have those are instantly bettter feeling for healers and supports, bc even if you know it's automatic, having sb (in this case the game devs) acknowledge your actions just feels nice, it's wild what little positive feedback can do to make the healer experience much better
I often enjoy playing healer characters because I know they're less played/appreciated. People are usually in demand of a healer so it feels nice to be wanted.
I enjoy the feeling of helping my teammates be the MVP of the game. Watching others succeed is fun to me, as I don't mind being a more background presence.
Really, the only negative experiences I've had being a healer is the perception some players have that healer players are inherently less skilled at the game. I've even heard it called "The Girlfriend Role" (which has its own set of extremely negative stereotypes). So sometimes, I've been accused in lobbies for picking a healer because I'm "bad at the game" and can't play a "real character". But those have been few and far between, and overall I find being a healer to be a mostly positive experience both from the game and the player communities
Im a healer main too and i am self admittedly not the best at video games. But i dont get why some people are so elitist about player skill. Im sorry i didnt grow up with fps and dont have fast reaction times. Thats part of why i am playing healer. Im going to be playing either way so would you rather me play poorly at a high skill role i suck at or play well at a "low skill" (healers just use different kinds of skills) character i am good at
@@zenmaster8 they're like that because they want to feel better than SOMEONE at this game. they perceive skill at this game as being an important goal, and by not being skilled, they're just a worse person. I know the idea, because I used to be like this in these games. I used to feel like I was awful just for not being really good at things. I never dogged on healers though, I love healers, always have. but their response is to find ANY reason to be perceived as better, even if it's just stupid or silly.
True. It feels like you're actively increasing the chances to win when you play healer.
@@zenmaster8the most important skill in any video game is learning to acknowledge strengths and risks, and improving them for yourself and your team.
Healing does not require quite the same diversity of skills as other roles, but it absolutely requires a mastery of the ones it does.
You are skilled because you know how you work, and never let anyone convince you otherwise. They can gab all they want but they can't make you feel inadequate unless you let yourself agree.
@@Mechan1calMag1c1an yeah, like first of all it's okay to be worse at the game so it's stupid that people get mad at you for that, if that's what they think they should be happy you didn't pick a "harder" dps role where they think you'd cause them to lose. But also being antagonistic towards the "weak low skill healers" is how you get mile long dps queues with nobody wanting to heal, or just teams with no healers and everyone dies? So antagonising your healers for being bad at the game just screws yourself over
As Dr. Ludwig himself once said...
Ze healing is not awarding as ze hurting.
I mean, you get to decide who lives or dies. Particularly in MMOs, being a healer can potencialy trigger a player's god complex.
@@legeul does it satisfy you more than hitting a random melee crit on ze man who killed ze man you were healing?
This right here. If healers would have the same killing capacities as the other characters, like they do in Battlefield or Apex Legends, more people would play them
Medic has an Canon name?
*Mr. Ludwig
He did tell the story of how he lost his medical license!
The concept of overheal is a good marriage of shielding and healing. You are given an incentive to use your healing skills even when the party is in good shape, and it's the same defensive benefit of mitigating incoming damage. I recall unlocking an overheal passive for a healer class in Etrian Odyssey 5 and it changed the way that healer class was performing.
I think the best approach to a healer is not just making them only healers, but also giving them their own way to dish out damage or do other useful things like dish out buffs. That way when healing is not needed a healer can do other things. I've played some games where the best choice for a healer can also turn around and hurl out devastating debuffs and has their own kind of limited bag of "I came to heal but I am all out of bubblegum" nukes to drop when push comes to shove.
This for sure
My absolute favorite is when healer and buffer classes are merged into one and they become insanely bulky support for my fast glass cannons of dps.also whenever a game gives you an ability or item to convert hp% to dmg
Your comment made me remember of Hotarugusa in Onmyoji and her healing basing off her ATK because she functions by sucking the hp out of the enemies to heal herself on the basic move. I dreaded seeing one with a set that allowed her to counter-attack.
Arknights has an alternate form of Reed who can deal devastating DPS to groups of enemies by either spamming spinning fireballs on two characters to burn enemies up close or striking enemies to put up a special debuff that makes them explode and spread the debuff to other enemies hit by the explosion to trigger a chain reaction. This also gives her a ridiculous amount of healing based on the damage she deals
Any good support can support themself to godhood.
Amplifiers from pgr
Hello. Healer main here.
I’m not much for online team competition games, but I have played a few.
When I played overwatch, I started with playing Hanzo and Reaper, but the main I settled on was Lucio. In Pokémon Unite, I was an Eldegoss and Blissey main.
Ultimately, I like being the back line support. I don’t find it as stressful. UNTIL my teammates are complete ass. Occasionally in Overwatch and too many bloody times in Unite, I had the highest K:D. The fucking CLERIC had the highest K:D. It was the most tilting thing ever that I just stopped playing both games.
In Dragalia Lost, I also liked playing Clerics in multiplayer lobbies. Again I found it more relaxing and that was actually successful for awhile……. Until the meta became blitzing offense and tossing clerics to the wayside. I then became good at ranged dps instead.
Lucio AND Eldegoss? A true person of culture. From a fellow healer main, I shake your hand and share the pain of having a bad team. I remember too many god damn times when people would leave me to guard a lane all by myself and then fight for my god damn life as no one comes to fucking save me.
I felt that last one. Up until a certain point, healing was actually pretty viable in DL, but then blitzing fights became the norm, and then Grace came along and made healers near obsolete due to her life shields. Of course, she would fold soon after the whole Curse of Nihility addition to later fights, which completely broke her back along with many others. Sigh, the game wasn't the same after all that.
@@ernestoportillo5136 that was the MOSt annoying. How am I 1v3ing bottom lane as Eldegoss and yall are STILL losing top. And nobody is helping me kill Drednaw!!!!! The real kicker is that I was able to stave off the 3v1s somewhat successfully, especially with Blissey. It almost felt like I was rewarding my team for abandoning me on bot lane. That’s mainly how I got ridiculous K:Ds. By just surviving the hell that was solo bot lane. Meanwhile Lucio is just fun even if my team sucks. Not having to consciously think about healing is great and of course healing myself. I had multiple games where I was surviving waaaaaaay to bloody long just bobbing and weaving through gunfire pushing the cart. And being able to speed boost parkcore back into combat after death was really fun. Never really mastered the art of pushing people off cliffs tho. Lastly, I swear every single Juckrat had my number. If I ever heard a Junkrat Ultimate, I just knew, no matter where I was, I was about to die in 5 seconds.
Ahh... Dragalia Lost. Good times. That game was a mix of fun and frustrating, but I left with overall positive emotions.
I remember Heinwald was really fun for his offensive and proactive approach to healing. That said, the game suffered a lot over time because so much of the design shifted to instant-kill attacks if the party failed to dodge some things, which required a lot of effort and memorization. Too much effort for what's supposed to be a casual experience.
@@wastelandkingI freaking hated the Curse of Nihility. It made a bunch of the early game units dead weight EVEN IF they play flawlessly.
In D&D the major problem I have with healers (and healing in general) is that even the 'Dedicated Healers' are better off just killing the enemy rather than healing.
However, in the Epic Battle Fantasy series I can certainly say healing is vital; although the main Healer's role as the Dedicated healer is a bit less pronounced in the later games when certain skills become equipped skill usable by a few member as opposed to the first games when they were all pre-set.
Heck the White Mage from Final Fantasy 1 can learn buff spells as early as level 1 which makes me think that said effects should be more prominent on the healers, healing and buffs are kinda cut from the same cloth in my opinion; positive consequences to ally members to help them do their job more consistently and sometimes outright better than normal.
Ah a fellow Epic Battle Fantasy fun
in dnd healing is more useful for picking downed members up. Which is why healing word stays very good. On any given turn you're likely to average more damage than you'd do healing.
21:40 "sorry, forgot about Baizhu"
Mika found dead in a ditch 💀.
Kaveh, Gaming, Wriothesley and Neuvillette also heal, but only themselves (and every catalyst can heal the party with proto amber, but it's only really viable for Neuvi)
Even on neuvi it's a garbage weapon. I don't get why people like PA is the holy grain when it's literally just a terrible option no matter how you look at it unless you are f2p and coping hard
Every sword user can also heal for themselves, with the Black Sword from the BP. I use that at times in co-op at times for my Chiori, as between that and crystalize, she can happily self sustain.
@@Axterix13 Lol, that's kinda funny.
I'm fairly in the weeds in terms of game knowledge, theorycrafting and such, but because I'm f2p, I don't even know what BP weapons do. But yeah, malenurse army grows!
Mika can heal!? I thought he was just a normal attack speed buffer. I never realized he was also a healer
@@GoldenOwl_Game Yeup. He was one of the characters brought into the conversation with Furina's release and ends up being a really good option for wanderer and some other main DPSs if you have her.
Eula's best team is Furina-Mika-Raiden now, I believe, so one of the big arguments for not C6-ing Bennett went out the window.
It wasn't as much of a deal as it was for characters like Jean or Noelle, but yeah, chocoboi got a moment in the spotlight recently.
As a jrpg enthusiast I vastly prefer having a good healer, I am a slow methodical player rather than being the best at making plays that dish out damage and a good healer is essential for my playstyle. I remember basically getting to a stalemate with the final boss in Bravely Default 2 because i had a hard time doing damage but i outhealed her constantly and suddeny i get the message that the boss si out of mp for their attacks and I was like "Did I just stall out the final boss??"
I've really enjoyed the moments in TF2 when I've been able to heal many as Medic. To me, being able to tell my self, "I did a good job helping the others stay alive in the match today." is satisfying and at least can hold me over until I actually get proper thanks from teammates.
Ur definitely right when it comes to active and passiveness towards the role. If I'm playing healer, I want to be able to do something the entire game rather than react with my abilities. And as much as I love playing some healers in multiplayer games, sometimes I know that I am way better as than the current person playing tank or dps. Supporting a bad teammate means you have 2 useless people in a battle rather than just 1. It's often the most unappreciated, most important, and least rewarding role to play.
Agreed
I feel like a lot of the issues I have with poorly designed healers is that they don't have a 'win condtion' they have a 'not loose' condition
Or no real gameplan.
I unironically loved support moonstone twice in league, because the poison meant 1 attack leads to 3 healing bursts and I always had to keep up the passive effect to keep the numbers big
But like soooo many healers just wait for a good moment to heal or buff
Ok so I really REALLY agreed with the part about healers (and other supports more generally) being insulted by extremely toxic players being a reason for people to quit the game.
For context, I used to play League of Legends. My sister and I started playing at the same time, and often together, so we kind of gravitated towards bot lane where we could have fun together and coordinate a little easier than if we were on opposite sides of the map. I will admit, she was a better support than me (I generally had little to no situational awareness so naturally I was the perfect low elo ADC player). She perfected healing me and/or the entire team, throwing out any snares or immobility moves, she was really better at support than I was at trying to DPS anything. The number of times the toplaner would take a bad fight, die, and then immediately show up in chat to talk about how shit the Soraka was because he died (HER BURST ISN'T UP ALL THE TIME) was just ridiculous. To be entirely honest, the few times I got to be the carry, I would not have been able to achieve it at all without the Soraka or Lux or Leona or whoever she chose to play at the time. She was really probably only in a lower elo because of me tbh.
In our last couple of months playing League, we switched roles so now I bore the brunt of the insults. Now I will admit, I was not the best support, so I did mess up quite a lot, but the amount of flak I would catch for something that was not even remotely my fault sometimes was just amazing. We both quit a couple of months later, because having a 0/15 Yasuo in chat type to the other team about how you don't even have a braincell is not something either of us enjoyed.
Strangely enough, Honkai Star Rail has some of the most creative designs for healers. You got healers whose powers scale off ATTACK stats, healers with AoE attack, healers that tanks damages, healers that raises your crit rate, and so on and so forth. And I think that's what the other games are missing: healers who can do more than just heal.
I liked the explanation used in Log Horizon anime. One of the "healing" class characters is actually preventative.
The other thing I always remember is the healing class video for FF14 frim Jocat. Damage prevented, damage done to enemies between heals, acts as pre-healing.
An interesting contrast for me is the healer vs the support. Supports are actually useful proactively, increasing damage, reducing damage taken or doing the opposite to enemies, supports are generally the busiest member of the team since "supporting harder" isn't really a thing generally so they support more by doing more things and getting better role compression so everyone else can work at their best.
Generally, healers are the first thing to be cut from a team as the players get better since you can't heal harder than people are taking damage while supports are generally the first thing to be put in and then the team is built around them so they can support as well as possible, reducing overlap in areas covered and making sure that everyone can make use of their buffs and debuffs.
13:43 wish and aromatherapy are quite literally THE healing support moves in Pokémon, but it's more applicable in competitive than in single player for reasons you mentioned (they are quite good actually, just a bit uncommon).
Uncommon is a bit of an understatement. Wish is one of the rarest moves in the game. I don't think any NPC's actually use this move, and most of the Pokemon that learn it do so by egg move (which is a mechanic the average player is unlikely to even know about, let alone avail themselves of). I wouldn't be surprised if the vast majority of people who have played Pokemon have literally never seen this move.
No one mention Revival Blessing.
@@maxspecs very important in some competitive regulation G teams
Agreed in that I think there are significantly different implications for healing-focused Pokemon whether considering single player (and largely single battles) vs multiplayer. Double battles (and max raid battles in Sw/Sh) are where healer ‘mons shine the most - providing your hard-hitters with greater longevity through a partner is great, and in some cases invaluable. In Pokemon’s case you can also ensure your healer ‘mons have offensive moves to defend themselves too.
Besides direct healing in moves, say Wish/Life Dew/Pollen Puff etc, you have abilities that can make an offensive partner into a pseudo-healer, like pairing a Toxicroak with Dry Skin with any other Pokémon that can use Surf. It’s not often very viable or practical for the single player story of Pokémon, but the implications on competitive play are much greater here.
Most 'healers' are just walls in singles.
In party based RPGs I think one of the issues I had was definitely the opportunity cost problem only in reverse. Basically in games like Tales of Symphonia, Chrono Trigger, or Skies of Arcadia, you only have a limited party but you also get a steady stream of new characters you want to use with potential new synergies.
But I always had to have an active team slot for the dedicated healer, reducing my options for fun experimentation because It’s more cost effective to have a Raine, Marle, and Fina on at all times with their greater suite of healing spells than to have one of the other characters that are more utility/offensive with less healing spells that are also usually less effective.
So you don’t really have a party of 3/4 you can customize and play with, in reality you have 2/3 to work with unless you want to completely rely on healing items and that may be tenable in Pokémon but that’s slightly less so in the other games I mentioned.
While I generally agree with your point (I can add Bravely Default and Octopath Traveller to the list where healers in some capacity feels mandatory), I have to point out that Skies of Arcadia is a bit of a weird example here, for multiple reasons.
The biggest one have to be that the party is shaped by the story more so than player input. You literally can't customize the party until the very final segment of the game, and even then, three of the four party members are locked to Vyse, Aika, and Fina, with only the fourth slot open to one of the remaining three characters.
Secondly, while all her super moves are healing or support, it feels weird to call the girl with the highest magic damage a dedicated healer, even if damage is the worst use for magic in that game. And although Fina does have more defensive super moves than most, all characters do have their own defensive super moves. It's just that Lunar Light in particular is overtuned, healing, and happens to be Fina's final super.
Also, the regular healing and revival magics and items all heals fixed amounts and can be learned/used by all characters, so anyone can be an effective healer. In fact, the less magic inclined party members make great (out-of-battle) healers since they probably aren't using their MP otherwise. I also like to use Aika for healing in emergencies due to her speed, as it really hurts when a heal fails because the target already fainted.
Regardless, I love to see a Skies of Arcadia mention out in the wild. Sorry for rambling.
@@VTEySAG oh yeah that’s completely fair. I haven’t played Skies in a very very long time so my memory is fuzzy in certain respects including Fina’s complete role. I just know I had certain options in terms of who I could bring along and I don’t know if that was a GameCube difference or it really has just been way too long. I completely defer to your perspective.
@@MousaThe14 Makes sense, it's old game, and it's an easy mistake to make. I certainly don't expect everyone to know every minute detail of one of my hyperfixations, hence ending with an apology and appreciation.
@@VTEySAG No harm done, it’s a good hyper fixation to have, it was a great game, one of the all time greats that I still need to take the time to revisit.
Your point about how a healer becomes less useful the more you have ways to mitigate or avoid damage was definitely one of the first things I thought of. Turn-based games usually make taking damage inevitable for several reasons, whereas more action-based games have scarcer healing sources and tend towards making healing effectively a punishment for not dodging/blocking properly.
I'll bring up Etrian Odyssey again, because parts of the community have a bit of a stigma against using the dedicated healer and tank classes. I don't mind using them, myself, and they can be built to have a fair bit of flavor, depending on the game. But I can see why some prefer not to use them, since having a tank do nothing but throw up shields and a healer do nothing but heal isn't engaging and can even feel like a waste of party slots. In EO's case specifically, teams without healers or tanks can be viable if one focuses on lockdown through binds/ailments or just does big damage, though that requires substantial knowledge of the game to be effective and usually takes up limited item slots on healing/revival items, so it's considered a more advanced playstyle that opens up team compositions.
EO's dedicated healers typically have several advantages over other healing sources, depending on the game: their skills can heal more effectively than the competition's, they usually have the best or only revival skills, they save money and inventory space over buying items, they sometimes have overheals, etc. They also have amusing quirks of their own: EO1's Medic has abnormally high ATK scaling to pair with a melee move that can stun, as well as a buff that significantly reduces most damage to the party; EO3's Monk can specialize as a bare-fisted fighter to save money on weapons in the early game, even if it doesn't scale the best; EO5's Herbalist can take the Graced Poisoner tree and throw around debuffs, ailments, and magic damage when not healing, though this works best with a Celestrian instead of the default Brouni. But even then, many players prefer classes with less-conventional healing, with EO3's Sovereign being a prime example that heals those they buff and provide party-wide regen if they're unharmed.
It's been a while since I last played EO, I should do that again. I always considered a healer and tank MANDATORY for any party, at least early game. But I remember in most EO games even later game Healers were useful even beyond healing due to often having really strong Utility passives and/or Grind reducers. Could be remembering wrong though, as I said it's been a while.
I'm not sure how or why but playing Xenoblade was probably the first time I ever had fun playing as a healer. Even though Sharla quickly gets outmoded, something about her role was just fun for me
When I played Xenoblade 2 i played a healer the whole time because i liked being in charge of when to heal. They're fun in 3 as well, especially with some classes like Signifer where you rapid fire buffs or playing Crossette in XB2 where her healing scales up her damage
@@tsunderemerc2963 should we consider crosset an healing blade by now?
And funnily enough xenoblade x has only 4 healing art because monolith soft thought the player would not used it.
@@tsunderemerc2963same for xc2, though for me I mostly just resented the AI and couldn't trust them to heal correctly. Let me tell the AI to stay on the healer blades please, stop swapping for no darn reason.
X wss kinda designed to be played without healer and soul voices were supposed to keep you going but not heal you fully. Every class had a survivability art that costed TP. It was really interesting. But overdrive broke everything and you can just become invincible with a few tricks...
i feel like overwatch tried to fix this problem by giving healers like moira more attack prowess, but as a result we now have a large subsection of “battle healers” who refuse to actually heal their teammates and instead just act like a 3rd dps
Healers require replacing a team member with someone dedicated solely to making up for mistakes(aka losing health), when often people would prefer to prevent the damage from happening, either by increasing defensiveness, increasing skill to avoid damage, or increasing damage to kill the enemies before they can kill you.
The way how I see it is that restoring health and buffing stats are cut from the same cloth so dedicated healers should be the ones who get BOTH of those things; that way they have something to do when no one has any big gaps in their health bar.
Personally, if the healer can protect the party's momentum from otherwise inevitable setbacks and/or speed up their total momentum to the point that it more than makes up for the initial loss of having one less damage dealer then that's a good healer (in my opinion).
Oh yes, I remember Genshin 2.4 when people were crying that shielders got nerfed because they introduced mobs that lowered your health based on your energy recharge instead, I remember people complaining about the mobs that ignore shields and apply bleed. I remember that some bosses have a perma bleed unless you cleanse yourself and I for sure remember people complaining that not even full HP Zhongli can't tank Fontaine's local legends and Natlan's call of war. Nah, Healers have their place, most people just don't know how to build them and dodge attacks, I'm surprised they know how to i-frame.
On HSR, I main Aventurine and I can tell that if the boss is sufficiently strong (SU) in the DOT and CC department, I'd bring Lynx along. Just for that full team cleanse.
Local Legends have no timer, so 1 dps + 3 sustains is a reasonable strategy unlike Spiral Abyss.
@@Gnidel Yup, it truly is a reasonable strategy. But my point still stands: they have their place, it's just not everywhere.
Plus in genshin healers are more than healing. They have things in their kit that stand out.
Baizhu with his application + healing + interuption resist + buffing of reactions.
Kuki with electro application + healing + ability to hold freedom sworn and being a monster in hyperbloom teams.
Mika for physical dps buffing and atk speed [but I use him in yoiyima's team too for the healing and atk speed so she can keep up with yelan and xingqiu's hydro applications during her E skill and get more healing off consistently by mika]
Benny, not a great healer and often times gets you into bad situations due to his self application pyro so overload, vape and such unalive you, is one of the few with intense buffing but also just flat out bad for being the reason you can't stay alive
@@nobody-xh6ii Wait, wait.
Did you said Mika in Yoimiya Team? That's something I haven't heard before and now I'm considering giving him some chance of being actually built to be used (got him at AR60).
Instead of Yelan in the comp, do you think Shogun would work? Asking because I usually use Yoimiya and Shogun together.
how much hp do their zongli's have? Mine's sitting pretty at 52k and can tank 2 hits from the Capybara local legend at world level 6
I think one thing some games do to allow healers stuff to do is by making the Support class not just about healing, but applying buffs to teammates/debuffs to enemies so that there's always something.
"Go forth my minion! Unleash death upon this realm and bring me blood for my mercy!"
Me, every time I heal, in any game.
Xenoblade 2 is a fun case where healers are a semi-necessary class to have for much of the early game, but when you approach endgame and postgame content healers fall off hard, with Advant Guard medals (heal whenever you crit) plus high crit items, you can keep yourself topped up. And then comes the DLC that introduces two healer characters, Fiora and Crossette who are better known for their massive damage potential. Fiora is crits for days while crossette stacks potions collected to deal massive damage and is the crux of speedruns (until endgame HP totals balloon). Two of the higher tier DPS characters, a NG+ earth blade and Dagas (base game), are better known for their support capabilities because one buffs damage to enemies weakness while the other grants a party wide damage buff. And then there is Corvin, another DLC character who is supposed to be a tank, but has really good specials that heal the party. Power creep really confused the power dynamic.
I like playing support because I like winning games, and if I have to be the guy that plays the character no one else wants to, so be it, but I never understood why healers specifically are so maligned. To me it's a matter of perspective: my job isn't to shoot the enemies until their HP hits zero, it's to "shoot" my team until their health bar hits full
I think certain healers introduced recently have broken the mold. The versitility they gave to every character in the FF7 remakes allowed Aerith to become a DPS mage if you wanted which was nice. My favorite recent healer that i've used is Gallagher from HSR. One you ascend him and get his talents up he's a fun mix of offense and healing.
You could turn Yuna in ff10 as a one shooting black mage. That was fun !
Back in college the TF2 Medic was the most fun I could have playing a game while drunk
Sounded more like you were in the spirit of Demoman
The one game where healers are absolutely fun to play is PGR, where premium healers are on field dps, buffers and sustain all in one while also their visuals are not designed to look like gentle supports but instead range from "Laser brush blade artist" to "Feral lightning wolf girl" and "Angel of mercy with the heat of a sun at her disposal"
Liv, Vera and the Amplifiers are some incredibly badass medics 👍
Vera Garnished my favourite DPS
Liv and Vera being healers is so funny, both as the most unhinged characters in the story.
As a SMT masochist i actually love healers, is just another part of the resource management gameplay, especially when your healer doubles as a buffer or debuffer.
My funniest experience with a healer had to be in Fire emblem 3Houses Maddening, with my Mercedes never missing a magic level up. By the midgame she was dealing more damage than my dedicated magic damage dealer (Lysithea)
Healing and buffs are cut from the same cloth in my opinion, they both help other party members do their job in ways that are slightly different but positive all the same.
As for funny healer experiences, Yuna from FFX is meant to be the healer (outside of Aeon shenanigans) but due to having more Agility AND Magic she's actually better at dealing magic damage than Lulu if she gets a hold of some damage spells.
Healers really are a funny one.
Before Pokémon Unite banned me for literally 100 years, I loved playing as Eldegoss because she was the first support I got and she could do a good bit of damage as well.
In some ways I can see what you said was good about medic, in so far as being fast and able to do good damage so you're simply helpless in a fight. In fact, I ran a mostly offensive eldegoss, stacking sp. atk and atk spd to debuff foes' movement and hunt them down if I felt I was able to do so. I was honestly too aggressive sometimes, but being able to chase down squishies running away or flee myself when it started looking rough, it was very fun to be moving and grooving.
The linchpin was how my heal worked. I toss out a ball, it attaches to someone, and after a few seconds, it explodes, either healing or going damage depending on whether foes or allies were in the radius. This meant I could just toss that thing out and then focus on attacking while it cools down, meaning I got a lot more fighting than other healers.
If this isn't really a dedicated healer build, then understandable, but this is the most recent multi-player game healer I've played and I've got a lot of good memories as playing as that puffball because I could scratch my itch to be supportive of my team AND the itch to take names if I get the chance. I felt I could take initiative or stay reactive and I loved it.
Expanding on Point 4, Wanting to Stay At Low HP, Final Fantasy 8 (and to a _much_ lesser extent 6) is a unique edge case where there actually _is_ a system wide mechanic that wants you to be at low health. In that game, Limit Breaks are almost always accessible at low health. Because of that, the dominant strategy is to have one character at the lowest sustainable health value for where you are in order to spam limit breaks. Often this is either Squall for his perfect accuracy and ability to hit multiple times per turn with Renzukoken, or Quistis for her utility blue magic (including an instant death spell). However, Zell can take advantage of this decently well with his build a combo limit break, and there is an entire category of items specifically for Irving's limit break. When combined with how the game passively punishes grinding and how you can take advantage of the card mini game to create powerful items and spells early on, this is one of many mechanics that leads to 8 being considered a broken game by many, and inherently kinda fun to speedrun despite being a multi disc PSX RPG. And while 6 has a prototype limit break in Desperation Attacks that can be randomly accessed at low health, it is far more random and less reliable than 8. Not that it matters since 6 lacks a dedicated healer, or the ability to spec someone into one, anyway.
I don’t remember completely, but I think I enjoyed playing a healer in the mobile game Dragalia Lost.
While it’s easy to always choose the cool and fast DPS, as you said, healers are often pretty accepted and mistakes aren’t as critical (though when needed, it does become important).
In that game, you still would need to learn boss attack patterns and you still have to survive (healers could heal themselves but weren’t necessarily way more tanky or less).
It was a nice way to contribute to the team in a meaningful way and (at higher levels, and once you’re more experienced) could provide a challenge too.
Of course there were teams that insisted to go without healers, but when things didn’t go *perfectly* you could tell people were getting frustrated (even though running a healer just meant a slower clear time but still a clear).
I really like playing healers, so much that i actively try to create healing classes sometimes, one of my favorites experiences was as using a support Sword and shield in monster hunter world and entering SOS missions to help other players.
One of my favourite Genshin Impact characters to play is Yaoyao :) She's a great healer and she can deal a bit of damage too. Whenever I had trouble beating a boss in the early game due to skill issues I'd make a team with both her and Barbara, which left me with more healing than the bosses could cause me, and with no one to heal Yaoyao damages enemies and I'd just run and dodge with Barbie's ring while Yaoyao's skill + burst did their thing :)
My most prominent memories playing healers in games is Whitemane from Heroes of the Storm and Kokomi from Genshin Impact. In the case of Whitemane, she's so incredibly difficult to play well, but has such an extreme output potential that even though HotS is a MOBA and therefore so much as playing the game will get you flamed by everyone else in the match and their extended family, people would actually respect a Whitemane player who knew their stuff. And for Kokomi, well, DPS Kokomi is real, and can hurt you. But in both cases, they are battle medics who combine healing with attacking. Whitemane went so far as to demand mastery of playing every role in the game to play her to a passable level, as she was required to heal, soak damage, and deal damage through both spells and attacks, being a true Red Mage character.
Healers are often most fun when they share other roles instead of being *just* the healer. For Xenoblade Chronicles, Melia and Shulk both work as a combination of attacker and healer, dealing damage through magical and physical means respectively while also using healing spells to keep themselves and allies alive.
I loved playing the OG Astrologian in FFXIV. Because that class had my addiction built into the mechanics, gacha rolling. Why waste time playing gacha games when you can be a healer and the whole party is at the mercy of the gacha gods? It was like drug playing that class... nowadays it's just not the same after the rework.
Destiny 2 has recently made healing an actually fun mechanic to play for me. I think a few things that make it engaging.
1. Healing doesn't come at the cost of damage, in fact, damage is on the relative better side for it. Because a lot of the healing-based weapons (Lumina, Red Death) need kills and tend to be the highest rarity of items, they have large damage boosts that make them feel powerful to use. Additionally, there are other weapons that require you to first deal damage before dealing it out, that can get perks that allow it to crowd control or just boost its damage. Healing also often comes with the ability to boost damage for yourself and teammates at the same time, which makes it extremely useful in endgame.
2. Self-Reliance, while some healing abilities rely on teammates to be used, many of the healing abilities can target the user too, meaning they benefit from the healing gameplay.
3. It's a massive dps increase for boss fights, as the damage boost part of support benefits the user by making your guns stronger but also makes sure your dps players are hitting their highest numbers more frequently
4. Usefulness, while this one is a bit subjective since technically all content can be done without a healer, in endgame content, bringing one helps greatly with dealing with the fast TTK that enemies have against players. Oftentimes I had high level content turn into me keeping everyone alive due to my own healing. This is also definitely a more personal experience but from that I have had people thank me for the healing since its good passive survivability for the team.
5. Diversity in how it can be done, you can build yourself into having a passive damage minion whenever you use one of your abilities, you can play an entirely aerial gameplay loop, dive bombing teammates to heal them, or you can setup as someone in the back playing more defensively sitting in AoE pools to generate healing.
I don't think any game can add healing with just simply the addition of new items if the base game never had it, but I think Destiny 2 has done a decent job at least making healing somewhat enticing for people to play in the past year. I've seen a decent amount of friends who normally would play dps characters swap to healing just because the gameplay loop is fun.
Tales of xillia has Jude the mc as a healer and he's incredible. He can aoe heal in later parts of the game without slowing down his combat. Probably the best healer I've played
Fire emblem the later games are trying but healers are still very prone to exploding on touch. Lissa Axe in the fates dlc would have made her great in awakening.
But yeah healing makes you feel like you aren't doing anything just spamming a single thing
I think Sharla's other issue in Xenoblade Chronicles is the fact that most of her arts are very poor in chain attacks and don't synergize well with the other party members.
Hey, she has Thunder Bullet!
@@maxspecs Okay, and? While she's okay, you generally would want someone else in the party who could do better than her. She was doomed the moment they made her Talent Art, Cool Off.
@@avlynkatabiya2849 you're not wrong. Honestly healing as a concept falls off a cliff in that game once you get your 4th party member.
@@maxspecs True. Terrible party member in comparison to everyone else, but she's still got a place in my heart.
Bravely Default made healers work, but it was weird. You had to dedicate 1/4 of your team to it, and build speed/turn order around it, but after like 2 turns, you ciuld start reviving the whole team, healing them for half max hp, and giving them extra turns. EVERY TURN.
Not many people play PlanetSide 2 or will see this, but Imma say it anyways.
The Combat Medic in PlanetSide 2 gets a decent amount of firepower, the ability to restore people's HP and shields, and a tool that resurrects people. The strongest tool the Combat Medic has is a grenade that mass res people in a small area, which is heavily used by players doing a coordinated push/breakout where casualties mount at an astonishingly high rate. A single medic can bring back a team and a handful of well placed medics can sometimes turn the tables in a battle by resurrecting a massive push.
The Engineer is more of a healer for mechanical things, they get a tool that heals exosuits (which is used like the infantry being on foot), they can obvious heal vehicles and emplacements. Best of all, they get grenades that heal a bunch of mechanical things in a group, that grenade is sometimes used when there is a mass breakout/push where exosuits take heavy damage (but to resurrect one you still need a medic).
Honestly, PlanetSide 2 is the few I actively enjoy playing healers. I get a set of weapons kit that allow me to defeat non vehicle/exosuit enemies and take objectives decently well, I get kit that supports my job well, and the game actively encourages the use of medics to ensure that casualties can get up and fighting again.
Great video! Logically I understand all the reasons why people don't want to play healer but as someone who has to be dragged kicking and screaming from my healing/support builds in most games (god eater, monster hunter, mmos, hell I even play single player shooters as a healer when I can), it's always a shock when people tell me they hate it.
Meanwhile I have that one friend who loves healer and support, he's actually sad if there's no dedicated role/class like that
And I have to say, he's really good at doing his job, in co-op games we simply perform so much better with his support. He's so good I never want to play co-op games with healer/support roles without him haha
If I understand correctly, DPS is satisfying because there is instant gratification when you kick someone's ass, because the situation becomes better than before, and not much frustration when you don't, because the situation remains unchanged. When you heal, however, succeeding keeps the situation the same, and failing makes it worse, leading to frustration and potentionally blame. I wonder, then, if a game were to have a high death penalty, creating a strong negative emotion when that happens, and be slow-paced and analytical, giving an opportunity to see how healing someone avoided disaster, would healing become satisfying because it creates relief?
I recently played ff13 and I love how classes work in that game. Instead of having dedicated healers, multiple characters can switch to the healer role on demand if needed.
I feel like Genshin recently managed to break this curse with some fun design choices. It feels good seeing Kuki trigger a bunch of hyperblooms, and it feels good to use Jean’s burst knowing that it is fulfilling furina’s ult instantly and you are getting a bunch of damage out of it.
There's game like NTBS where healer are hard but fun to play. If you're in team with some amount brain cells your teammates will help you by protecting you and helping you charge your ult gauge(healing make your ult charge faster). Healers are the clases with the most area wide ult in the games and can change the tide of the battle by launching one. They also are able to guardbreak by using heavy attack which allow healer to strike back when they are getting jumped. It's extremely satisfying to do and make you take a proactive role in the battle. Couple that other supportive tool you get a rather proactive healers class.
It's not a dedicated healer class but it feels much than just following a rotation and pressing the same buttons for 20 min like healer in a MMORPG for exemple.
One thing that Battlefield constantly gets it right are how they approach the Medic/Healer class and makes it geniuinely fun to play and gives new players the necessary ropes to work together with your teammates. Basically just give them decent (or in some cases outright disgusting firepower like BF4 assault medics with AEKs but every class in BF4 is disgustingly OP if you play your cards right) attacking power necessary to push forward/hold back against enemies and rewards aggresive healing/revive playstyle to help your team push to capture objectives
I used to avoid playing healer because it seemed too hard. You have to be watching everyone's hp and in the right position to help them without getting killed yourself. I hardly ever developed that kind of game sense so I usually don't play healers. There are times that I have wanted to though because I think its fun to prevent a teammate from dying. The few games I can somewhat play them, its really fun. Also some healers have really interesting mechanics and that makes them appealing to me, almost none of which were touched in this video though but oh well.
Also, grass type pokemon had been considered the cleric type for a long time, idk if it still is though.
I remember Healer was important on Ragnarok Online. They sought after by people. Like you're a healer, people will flock around you. Also, you can build it as a solo fighter because it has self sustain.
There was a time, giving people heal or teleporting, or reviving will earn you money in RO. Like everybody always has a healer on his/her account. That, or a merchant.
By i mean healer, it includes Priest, Monk, Crusader, and Soul linker. And to some extent Alchemist.
Hello fellow pyramid 4 turn undead priest. My job as a crusader was to follow the guild leader with sacrifice devotion and reflect shield perma on xpp, what a job! Everybody had a second account with a healer or support like bard.
@@EuropeanVisitor-pe6xd I used to turn undead at GH monastery i think, against those wraiths. Or at guild dungeon. But anyway hiya fellow healer!
When I played Xenoblade 3, I actually controlled Taion since I didn't trust the AI to do the healing effectively. I was also able to do some offensive stuff with him so that was a bonus. More offensive healers are definitely needed.
In TF2 Nothing is more satisfying to me than out healing a teams top 4 or 5 damage dealers, negating that damage damage done. I have helped hold points while greatly out numbered from good heals. People do appreciate great heals and will for sure give you props for doing your part. Well timed ubers are just a thing of beauty. I typically play any class that the team needs most, but medic is my goto.
An example in Honkai Star Rail is why some healers are better and preferred over others:
At the game's launch Bailu and Natasha were the only options for healing. They were quickly overshadowed by later additions like Luocha and Lynx since these newer characters aside from providing healing also could cleanse any debuffs that were applied to your team, something that Bailu lacked entirely and Natasha could only apply one at a time. Then Huo Huo began to stray beyond just healing/sustain and could buff the team and provide energy to the entire team to be able to deal more damage. And Gallagher enabled a gameplay style that worked really well for a what was once underutilized mechanic, but also provided debuff cleanse and also could decrease the attack power of an enemy unit.
This is of course the dilemma of healer/sustain units that had to justify their place in the limited slots of a team that would otherwise be occupied by a different role, especially if there were no other mechanics that could be utilized or exploited for the team to avoid taking too much damage during a battle.
A well-designed healer character lets you act as a force multiplier for your team. Providing extra longevity for your offensive members, especially those who might have a strong output but low hardiness.
I suppose I didn’t immediately think of Mercy or the Medic when thinking about contemporary heal-focused characters in games - my experience has had more well-rounded healers who might be better described as supporters anyhow. Restorative healing, preventative healing (shielding), de/buffing (lower incoming attack efficacy, increase ally defenses, etc) are tools I see packaged together more often for engaging healer characters. Heck, some can offer good damage in their own right!
My to-date most fun healer character experience has been playing a Warriorpriest in Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning. An active, front- or mid-line healer who waded into battle with hammers (and occasionally tomes). The ability to rock up to enemies with a sledge and wail on them while *simultaneously* healing yourself per hit, and thus go toe to toe with hardier or glass cannon careers was excellent. Moreso, running alongside a friendly heavy character and healing them up with your hammer blows, shoulder to shoulder. AoR placed more emphasis on direct+gradual heals, so laying down HoT’s on your party during a PVP scenario or a Public Quest made keeping others up more manageable. Playing a tank’s pocket-healer was grand though, even from more of a distance.
Shout-out to Dungeons and Dragons Fourth Edition “Leader” classes as well! For people who hated/resented playing Clerics in prior editions of D&D, being relegated to pure heal-bots who didn’t get to contribute directly to victory? 4e heard you loud and clear, and Leader classes were all competent in combat and each had their own support-niche they focused on in addition to a relatively standard healing progression package. Clerics laid on extra HP when healing; Artificers dished out temp HP (shielding) and bonuses to hit & damage; Warlords granted bonuses and additional attacks; Bards could slide allies to reposition them and save allies the action economy + opportunity attack provocations; etc. Leaders were a grand way to have one of four class roles dedicated to healing, while still making them engaging to play and giving them each some niche protection.
I think the idea of a “dedicated healer” whose sole, or overall purpose is restoring lost HP, is perhaps outdated - or at least, it doesn’t fit the gameplay goals of a lot of modern combat-focused games. Undoing damage alone won’t be enough of a purpose/toolkit for a lot of players, especially in multiplayer scenes where healers & supports are taken for granted. Healers with a more diversified kit strike me as a productive adaptation to the archetype, even if their healing/supporting role remains their primary tool.
Funny thing is Mercy isn't even a good healer. She's used for her damage boost and revive. 55 (or 60) hp per second single target heal is awful if consistent
Clerics in 3.5 ED where cracked and just a better fighter who could cast the most broken spell in the game Harm that reduce enemy HP to 1.
As someone who has both Huohuo and Aventurine, I still prefer Huohuo. Sure Aventuine has a team shield and offers team Effect Res, but Huohuo offers much more imo. Energy, ATK buff, debuff purge, healing per turn, healing on ult. So Huohuo is one character who NEVER leaves my main team.
And as a healer main in multiple games, I just wish I was appreciated more, if at all. Even my friends don’t really thank me for keeping their asses out of the grave.
idk if you did this on purpose, but thank you for making the video 40 minutes on the dot, it is very satisfying
I main Field Medic in Killing Floor 2, which is the only game I play healer in so here are my thoughts
1) Medics have insane buffs that the medic can use on himself
2) Anything that potentially heals also becomes poisonous to enemies so no tool is useless when there are no allies
3) Medics have medic versions of all weapons so there is variety
My only real suggestion for KF3 is that they add critical healing (more healing for headshots) or over heal
As a genshin player, i just like healing more than shields. They are just weird to use, hard to build to be strong, and doging is hard as a mobile player.
I used to be a healer back in the mmorpg days and another big thing is that blaming the healer is far easier than blaming anyone else because out of all mistakes, "my hp went down to 0" is the easiest to point out. It could be the fault of someone else including the now dead one but in almost all scenarios, noticing those issues is muvh harder than noticing the healer not outhealing the damage.
In a lot of cases, even you might not realise that the issue isn't on your end.
… but I like playing healers 🥺🫣😭
No judgement, genuinely curious
Are you the social butterfly of your friend group?
What is a social butterfly?@@FossilApostle
o7
NERD!!!!!! 😂 ❤
Me too, we're cool guys according to the funny internet owl 🤚
Yeah, the teammates are the biggest reason behind why people don't play healers (To me). I always tell people that playing a healer is as if you could save your teammates from dying, but you make your teammates act like theyre invisible, run alone into the enemy team, and then blaming the healer.
I enjoy playing as the Healer. Having a passive role in combat fits my slowness I have to react to the fast-paced actions. It's even better in games that have NPC controlling the rest of the party, like in, Ni No Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch.
The reason why I main Medic in TF2 is his defensive tools. Being the 2nd fastest class is definitely useful. His health regen effectively increases his HP pool when positioned properly and only taking chip damage, and his increased knockback and strafing when midair gives Medic more options to handle enemy interactions beyond just "running away."
TF2’s mobility aspect is really an underrated part of the game. It feels so engaging compared to modern shooters where you just press buttons and activate skills
On the note of the preventing damage vs. restoring health topic brought by Hoyo games, doesn't help that in those games especially star rail egregiously so it feels like shields are intentionally superior in their defensive value by leaps and bounds to healing.
Back in the day, when the game was _current_ (mid-00s), Final Fantasy XI was the first game where I took on the healer role, playing both White Mage and Red Mage. Depending on the situation, it could be either an exciting game of whack-a-mole to keep people's HP up or about keeping buff effects where they needed to be and occasionally casting offensive magic (which tended to be severely under-leveled from disuse).
Then Star Wars: The Old Republic released, and I played a Samus Aran-inspired Bounty Hunter because I love Metroid. Tank spec because it seemed more useful than DPS.
When I moved on to Final Fantasy XIV (2013), I think I just ended up going Paladin because I'd already been focused on playing as a tank. It took until this summer of 2014 before I actually gave a healer job an actual shot, and I swiftly played White Mage/Conjurer from level 16 to level 94 before I decided I should take a break and actually get *other* things done. Non-FFXIV things.
Both Tank and Healer roles have their own weights of responsibility that you have to get used to, but they're also both fun and fulfilling.
I like playing healer in multiplayer games, because if we lose, I can always blame my team mate for not dealing enough damage.
100%, in Final Fantasy 14 (MMORPG) we have a huge shortage of Healers, I play one purely so I wait less to play.
I do generally agree with the statements about Genshin and its relationship to healers. I have mained Noelle since day 1 of my playing Genshin and the reason I play her isn't specifically because of her healing. I do want to mention one side effect that wasn't mentioned in the video though. Many healers often are more valuable for their own ability to not die rather than their ability to help out wounded party members. Noelle for example has a shield and can heal while her shield is active. In theory this is supposed to ensure that she heals everyone uninterrupted. In practice it basically makes her invincible since you can't take damage while her shield is up and she is healing during its entire duration. Chancy/Blissy in Pokemon is another example. These Pokemon aren't really known for their ability to heal others but are more well known for their ability to tank damage and heal themselves especially in competitive play. When paired with status ailments and traps these pokemon become a nightmare to deal with because of their ability to not die.
In the specific case of HSR, I will say they’ve done a decent job so far of making characters that really want a shielder and characters that clearly get away with teams designed with a healer.
I also think of the Bravely Default series where slowly everyone becomes some kind of healer and unreasonably strong dps.
I think game Ennshrouded did the healer issue well because of skill tree works. In Enshrouded you can skill into every class group, meaning: you can play a berserker who can wip out the staff and heal the entire team and yourself. Your not locked into set class. You can choose which skills you want or need and skill them. Any combination works. An assasin who tames beasts, An Mage who uses bows, tank that has massive damage output becouse they are also a mage. Or, how i did it, play a mage who deals more damage than the meele fighters while is also a healer.
Would love to play a rpg where the mc is weaker than his party and has boost and heal abilities for the early game if it's on the switch.
Yeah healers and boosters aren't one anyone wants to play. They are great in party and you can feel the effects when they are gone but not getting the appreciation in long battles.
It's probably why "I got kicked out of the hero's party" manga exist where the booster healer leaves and the hero's party immediately collapses in a sense.
Bur yeah i feel to fix this problem. Make the healer have Mutiple effects in one power like heal team boost attack or attack enemy heal ally all in one powers. That way if you play them and rather do stragety you can make a party keep attacking
Sounds like you need to play Earthbound.
Lucas from Mother 3
Also Tidus from FFX starts out with Support moves
Literally Miitopia and you dont even control the other party members.
Banger RPG
The Atelier series comes to mind though they're typically not healers per se.
@@epb9000 been wanting to get into that series but too expensive for me at the moment. Maybe during Christmas
I remember my time playing Battlefield 1 and genuinely being a medic.
More often than not the only reason someone picked the medic class was for the primary weapons it had and the rifle-launched grenades that no other class got. Rifle grenades that took one of two slots needed to have their healing equipment.
So there was this one time a bomber came by and dropped on me and my team. Most of us being bunched up to capture an objective, most of us died, and the enemy team expected to face minimal resistance as they closed in.
One issue. I, the dedicated medic, with both health packs and a revive syringe, lived. I got to work reviving and patching up everyone double-time, and once the enemies got there, we swarmed them instead of the other way around. If I hadn't gotten to getting everyone back up, we would have lost the objective and respawned to get pushed at the next one.
While with fewer kills and a worse K/D ratio than others, I came out among the top 5 of 32 players on my team score-wise just off of healing and reviving.
Don't neglect your healers or being one if there aren't any.
In pokemon there are ways heal in combat without items through the move called wish, where it staggers the healing by one turn in which you can switch in a pokemon that needs the healing
Idk healers in ffxiv gives me pure serotonin. Doubling a tank’s hp with barriers, timing perfect heals to optimize life, etc. I find FFXIV makes healing feel more impactful than doing damage due to the amount of hp to damage through, while you can watch a party’s hp skyrocket when a healer pops a big CD. If ffxiv gave healers a more complex rotation, I feel like their popularity would skyrocket.
With Pokémon: in the main series, you're absolutely right. I'm glad that healers, while not ubiquitous, see a lot more love in competitive, both Singles and Doubles
The thing with Pokemon is that a vast majority of the single player experience is through single battles. Where most rpgs have a party of heroes all on the battlefield at once, in pokemon it’s usually only 1 (2 at the most), thus it is much easier to design in a dedicated healer role. Any Pokemon must be able to face battle alone in a one on one battle, the ability to switch around and synergise is entirely external (I.e. as a result of trainer actions rather than pokemon actions). While there are moves that can heal, these are mostly selfish in their execution, mostly to heal the user rather than someone else. Whilst moves like Wish do exist and can be used to heal other party members, the successful use of it is quite finicky. Generally you are mush better off just using an item (which I would argue is the intended design philosophy, majority of boss trainers use healing items in battle).
I would argue that whilst healing is a thing in competitive play it is invariably a secondary task for a defensive pokemon. Majority of 'support' Pokémon’s primary roles are to stall or debut their opponents rather than healing. Take Umbreon for example, whilst it could pass on wishes to other pokemon its primary role is to sit there and take hits while their opponent wears itself out, not to heal up someone more flashy.
This is the point. There are no dedicated healer pokemon, just moves that happen to be able to heal.
@@intergalactic92 In general agree, but I find Umbreon to be a strange example. Wish heals half the user's HP to the recipient and Umbreon's HP isn't even that high XD
I would argue that healing can be accompanied with redirection to form the goal of mitigating damage to sweepers...in Doubles, anyway. Amoonguss's two roles are to harass the opponent (mainly through Spore) and to keep sweepers alive (with Rage Powder and Pollen Puff). They're the GOAT because they *also* have Regenerator, so they get to heal *themselves*, simply for switching out. If all they did was Spore/deal minimal damage/have Clear Smog, I expect their usage to be non-existent.
Revival Blessing offered a unique opportunity to see a ramp-up in healing, but I think it's really only been used on Dondozo/Tatsugiri teams, I suppose because it's generally just...not worth it in other cases.
But yeah, generally in Doubles, redirection is better than healing your ally. And in Singles, probably the most healing comes from the user healing themsleves, which wouldn't count as playing a healer. But it's still there from time to time.
When I mained Soraka in League of Legends, I almost always got very fast que times, always and I mean always got my character, and pretty consistently was thanked for my help and honored for being a positive, non-toxic and helpful player. Though on the flipside, I often faced a lot of people who would doubt my contributions in character select, would sometimes intentionally ban my character, and were just generally cunty to me. It's certainly a double edged sword. But personally, I always really enjoyed being in the background, helping people do things they couldn't do alone. Being able to be there in the nick of time to save someone from otherwise certain death, or using my ultimate, a global heal, to save someone who would definitely have died, or even turn a 1v1 fight that was very even into a win for my ally on the other side of the map. There were many times where my healing prevented our primary damage dealers from being able to be killed by the other team, and that directly lead to us being able to win crucial fights, and the game. Personally, I love the role. Maybe the damage dealers and tanks had a more active role in winning the game than I did, but that's fine with me. I like to be the lynchpin that held it all together, knowing that their health pool was far greater than it would have been without me, and that our mileage went much further than it would have had I been absent, even if it wasn't as flashy as the massive, health bar crushing damage of a mage or ranged attack carry. It's just the kind of fun I like to have, and my best memories are of fights that would definitely have ended badly if not for me sprinting across the map to save an ally, putting myself at risk and blowing any number of heals just to make sure they won that one crucial fight. Sometimes it was even enough to get a toxic player who had a bad game thus far to realize there was someone on the team who really wanted them to win, and it turned their attitude around, which buoyed team morale enough for us to unify and not have a bad game after a bad start. The power of that alone was often worth it, and a better reward than all the honors and friend requests I would get after matches for just being an unyeildingly good teammate who cared more about the morale of my team and mending rifts between players than who was right or wrong about an early game mistake or whatever.
...you guys remember Queen Charges in Clash of Clans before Healer got nerfed?
Tera Mystic healing was probably one of the best healer experiences I've had. Close range high value aoe heals, targeted lock-on ranged heals, multiple auras to manage depending on the needs of the team or encounter, divvying out orbs to tank or high performing dps, and some minor offensive capabilities to add some damage to skilled teams that can properly i-frame made for some really interesting and fun gameplay. Having an on demand buff purge to get rid of boss shields or dangerous buffs was nice to have as well. Never a dull moment as mystic, although it sort of struggled if the team was full blown skill issue and didn't know how to i-frame, position, or use mitigation. At that point they are beyond saving and it's best to just drop group lol. Not usually an issue for me personally tho since I would mostly que with 2 other friends which happen to be tank and dps.
Healers: Must be weak
Doc from R6: Not my problem
crazy you'd put gallagher in the thumbnail when he's the single most fun sustain in all of star rail
“MEDIC!”
“AHHHH I CANT TAKE IT ANYMORE!!!!!!!”
One of my recent experiences with healing has been in 7-Stars Tera Raids in Pokemon Scarlet/Violet. The thing is, most of these raids are hard enough that if your team is bad (read that as, 80% of the time when you play with random players), no amount of healing will be enough to save the party, they will just die too fast. But on the opposite side, if you play with people who all bring Level 100 Pokemon and know what they're doing, then you end up not needing dedicated healing, only a cheer here and there, and you spend more time spamming Helping Hand than your heal moves. Raid bosses very rarely reach a level of damage consistent enough to warrant constant healing. Healing moves are also a rather scarce ressource in Pokemon, with a lot of mons being either good at healing themselves OR their allies but rarely both (Life Dew heals everyone but in small quantities so it won't save near-death allies), and attackers in raids have an easier time recovering HP by hitting aggressively with a Shell Bell.
I think good healers need something more than just healing to become fun and/or important. They need other support moves and flexibility on what they can accomplish. I don't believe in making games so hard that you cannot succeed without a 24/24 healer on the party.
Surprisingly some of my favorite healing has come from tabletop. Pathfinder 2nd Edition has what I lovingly call the healdoken, a single target ranged heal that recovers a substantial amount of hit points, often rivalling the best damage dealer of the party.
There are other methods of healing out of combat that don't require these valuable spell slots either. This means you can often save them for when they are needed most during combat.
A lot of people really underestimate the power Healers (and by extension Support characters) have
Ofcourse, you know how they can benefit YOUR team, but often times when I play as:
Medic (tf2)
Bridget (Overwatch)
Sunflower (pvz GW2)
Noelle (Genshin Impact)
People truly underestimate the damage you can deal, or atleast the disorder you can cause
most healers can be used/build in a way that not only benefits your team, but also allows for some kills
for example, Medic has his primary and God-given-always-critting melee, which makes encounters with stronger classes way more interesting.
Demoknights for example truly love rushing easy kills, and when looking at the statistics, demoknights have stronger Melee dmg than a medic... unless you crit
I think a lot of games do not understand the healer archetype, the thing that makes it annoying to play as a healer or support is when you can't be impactful through decision making, one of the things that I enjoy the most is when those have a plenty of options to consider and act through, and you don't feel burdened by being the healer. In other words, utility and powerful effects, action economy are all things to consider.
I used to love playing healers in TERA. Never had to worry about people whining about my equipment not being good enough or my skill rotations being wrong, just had to keep buffs/debuffs up and top everyone off (and whatever other weird side tasks the raid bosses required). People always thought I was the shit in the team PVP modes too.
Also enjoyed maining Medic in TF2 back in the day
When I still played Overwatch1, I loved to play Zenyatta since he basically is a DPS healer. Like the healing aspect always happened automatically, while you still dealt good and satisfying damage from the far.
Some DPS characters have tendencies to be not fun, when you are not playing well enough - in case of Overwatch its Widowmaker. It also puts pressure on you bcs you basically throw the game when not doing good. I tried really hard to be consistent with Widowmaker, but at some point I gave up, bcs it was just not fun to always miss your headshots, which are the most satisfying aspect of her.
SMITE's Chang'e and Hel (and to a lesser extent, Aprodite) made me genuinely enjoy playing a healer -- though I think in huge part of what made them fun to play was how stat efficient the items in the item shop were. Sure these were made very squishy to compensate their ability to sustain themselves and their team, but not only did tank-centric items way cheaper (aka more accessible) than their damage-centric ones, they almost always came with incredible utility stats. When I played for example, an item called "Shield of Regrowth" not only gave you tons of HP but also had 10% cooldown reduction (a stat that caps at 40%) and a passive that makes you 10% faster whenever you heal yourself. Oh and it costs a mere 2k gold (items on average are around 2.2k, most crit items are at 2.7k). So basically play right and you're like a fast unkillable tank and sure you might not be able to kill your enemies, but they can never kill you so
The best way to balance a healer imo is to make them capable of doing good damage too. In ffxiv for example, healer damage is important and necessary to clear higher end content, which naturally attracts players to them, and in overwatch, most healers are more than capable of 1v1ing dps as well.
Best kind of healer characters imo are self sustaining Crit Healers. Mythra in Xenoblade 2 is a great example of fun to play Crit Healer (Maybe even too good)
Mythra is odd case of just being incredibly OP in general, to the point that the healing isn’t even that critical of a part of her kit
Xenoblade in general tends to fall into the issue of having so many mechanics that healing is more or less unimportant. All of the good healers in that game are good because they do other things and just have a bit of healing on the side
@@GoldenOwl_GameYeah that's true. Healing is really just a small bonus to the really OP parts 😅
Funnily enough, the most time i had fun as a "dedicated" healer is when i switched to a support build in Isonzo an immersive ww1 shooter. Essentially get the class that gives ammo and faster healing and you are good to go. Its funny because since everyone has bolt action rifles, most people die in 1-2 hits. Its because grenades and arty are a little bit undertuned that lets a healer have enough time and space to get to work. Since its a ww1 game, everyone gets a weapon that can drop people in 1-2 hits so your initiative and offensive capability doesnt go down. It does have to mention that I generally play such a build after several matches of going for my usual offensive minded playstyle so for me it served more as a palatte cleanser rather than i like being a healer. Generally i play crazy assault charging the front line. I think a game like Foxhole which is a MMO appreciate healers because individual contributions are so small and its such a large team game that having a good medic corp can turn the battle.
Also its funny in genshin you mention statue of the 7 or food but since i have an inventory hoarding problem, I tend to stockpile consumables so i generally put in barbara in my party. This helps especially on long exploration sections especially in new maps since i want to avoid heading back to statue of 7 since it could be out of the way. I actually prefer barbara in my exploration or farming party because of her C6 ability to revive so i can turn my brain off even more. Since its not endgame content, the three other slots can all help with dps, plus everything folds quite easily in the overworld with endgame builds. Though i haven't gotten around Natlan too deep yet and i hear the local legends are quite strong this time. Something about barbara having effectively an undo button quite nice and convenient because if i play really poorly with other characters, no matter how slim, if i fk up then a key party member and i actually have to think and pay more attention to the combat once i use a revive item.
I liked a lot the Methuss from GunEvo (may it rest in peace).
It basically has healing cables, similar to medic, but the big difference is that he doesn't need to sacridice fighting for healing, as it only takes a right click towards an ally in sight, while you can still shoot and use abilities. And Methuss is PRETTY GOOD at fighting. Not only that, but he can fly, and has a charged shot, and a mini (and weak) turret.
In GunEvo, EVERYONE is a dps, just some with more supportive ability compared to other, but it didn't prevented them to feel good when it comes to fighting too.
One of the solutions to make healers fun and interactive to play is to make use of one of the most shockingly least explored mechanics in games as a whole, over-healing. The rewards you get from it could be increasing the target’s maximum health or provide them a health-scaling shield.
One of the artifacts from Genshin, the Ocean-Hued Clam set explored the reward you get from over-healing, which was dealing physical damage to the target, making the one who healed a sub-DPS.
This was, theoretically speaking, could give healers some agency, without overstepping into other roles they are not, DPS or Tank.
Both MMORPG and RPG games I always pick the most valuable Job "Healer". Without those job all player can't do the hardest content in game.
In Marvel Rivals I always make sure to give a thumbs up to healers. In overwatch I generally give the thumbs up to the healers. A lot of the time I’d be the one playing as the healer (I suck at the rest of the roles)