One way to breathe a new life into multiplayer shooters could be removing any guns from healers.
Make them potent, but vulnerable!
Why is it important:
- Players that don’t like shooting, but love teamwork would finally be represented (yes, I’m speaking of your girlfriend!)
- Having to protect healers would benefit more organized teams, rewarding teamwork
- Healers would have a more dynamic gameplay revolving around avoiding damage: stealthy movement, ability to quickly traverse dangerous zones, coordination with fellow teammates are all required to benefit your team as a healer
What might need to be tweaked:
- Healers should be made into the only revivors, and we should either punish death more (which we’d better be careful of if that’s a dynamic game) or give buffs on revival
- Healers should get more movement abilities to increase survivability. They may also get speed boost when running towards teammates (similar to Conduit Savior’s Speed in Apex Legends)
- Team compositions should accommodate for several healers as to not introduce a single point of failure
Overall, I think it could introduce a new dynamic to team arenas and skirmishes, as winning now requires more coordination within a team and better understanding of everyone’s roles.
Fuck no.
As someone who loves maining healers, I would never play one again if my only hope for defence was my team mates.
Healers are already are hard role due to lack of support and cover, making them more dependent on it would be worse
You’ll just die all the time because hardly anyone would help you, and as a bonus you get yelled at by your team for not healing them. Sounds like fun.
As one of the commenters has put it, there could be options, like having more of a “field healer” that is armed but has less healing-related abilities, and a full healer that only heals but has unique options.
You could pursue the former.
Also, movement and stealth abilities are a must for a defenceless healer, so you could still protect yourself in other ways.
like having more of a “field healer” that is armed but has less healing-related abilities, and a full healer that only heals but has unique options.
And this differs from most existing games how, exactly?
I enjoy playing support classes, you want me to stop Playing support classes? Make it so that they are utterly defenseless and rely solely on others to stay alive.
Ultimately, it will play absolutely terribly if all you can do is run away unless you are playing with a well organized team. And then you may find that all your team mates get to have all the fun in the game while you get stuck with only the boring stuff.
No thank you.
There could be options. You can get some sort of a balanced healer/damager, while someone else would pick a pure healer. It’s just that there should be an option to heal only.
You have to balance that. A pure healer would need to be so strong that it would become the primary target at all times. Which would be frustrating for both sides. For players playing against it because they can’t really play the game anymore. For the pure healers because they would be under tons of pressure.
Unfortunately (or fortunately) we (should) design games around a core audience. Chances are that if your ( r my) hypothetical friend isn’t enjoying the competitive part of the game at all, that she (or he) is going to get frustrated at that game at some point anyways. And there are probably games that suit both your needs better to start with. Competitive games may just not be the right choice. Don’t ruin the game feel of those games for those that enjoy them for the sake of non competitive players because that will just create a game that no one actually wants to play.
Mercy from Overwatch is a perfect example of why pure healers don’t work too well in shooters. She is consistently throughout the games lifespan either been too overtuned or too undertuned. It is very difficult to find that balanced spot for pure healers.
They either end up too powerful and require constant tagging by the opponents team which is frustrating both for the healer player and the opponent team. Or they become almost mandatory for a team too win even in a casual setting, which is incredibly unfun for both teams.
In the case of being undertuned though, if they’re not powerful enough then no one picks them as it is just not as fun or engaging to play as a pure healer.
Or finally in the case of medic from tf2. They become a fairly predictable 1 trick pony, low reward class.
Overall pure healers in shooters just really don’t work well for the medium/genre. I love being a support player myself in games. But I loathe seeing pure healers in shooters. It’s nearly always just a source of frustration rather than fun
Or finally in the case of medic from tf2. They become a fairly predictable 1 trick pony, low reward class.
I miss the medic from TFC. The double-barreled shotgun and the concussion grenades gave them options.
(I guess that’s kinda proving the point against “pure healers,” LOL)
So basically Mercy from Overwatch? I think most games have versions of this type of healer. Medic in TF2 etc. They basically have guns that can’t do much other than be used to shoot your teammates in the face to get their attention.
Have you never seen a battle mercy wipe an enemy team?
Mercy got that Glock delivered straight from the angry hands of God and it shows
Kitsune Angel combo, unlimited ammo delivered at high speed
Medic mains when their “useless” ubersaw crits for the 12th time in a row
Last time I played Overwatch I was healing as Mercy and our Roadhog just watched as I fly past while getting chased by someone on the other team and kill the guy chasing me. Then he bitched me out for fighting instead of healing him. I was like mfer if you don’t want me to fight keep them off me. Then everyone acted like I was the toxic one.
Medic in TF2 is a pure healer. The only time their weapons come out is if they get separated or get surprised by a spy. In high-level play, basically never.
Same with Mercy in Overwatch. She has a little peashooter pistol but is effectively defenseless. This already exists.
There are pure healers in wow too for example.
None of them are totally 100% healers. Even Holy priests can cause some damage.
Yeah by switching to a farm-stance, but when healing they do super little damage (and if they do they aggro hard so not very useful).
The only reason I start shooting is if my team isn’t doing their job. You want me to go out there and heal with no protection from the enemy? They already focus on the healers as it is, and we get left behind often. I honestly would never play healer again. All the stuff you’re explaining already happens. My goal already is to avoid damage, my team is already supposed to protect me (and when they don’t/can’t, I have a weapon for that).
also, not only “girlfriends” dislike shooting, there are plenty of guys who are main healersGirlfriend joke was just a light pun :D
I respect healer main guys, and often am one :)
Went over my head. My bad.
Was with you until you thought you were speaking of my girlfriend being a support role.
Dude, I’d be willing to bet she’d eat your lunch in a multiplayer shooter.
Maybe lose the sexist shit and I’d say you’ve got something here!
Sorry if this sounded offensive, I thought it could be a light pun. My apologies.
In any case, I know plenty of girls that would absolutely kick my ass in shooters and that actively take offensive roles. I never meant to say all girls are opposed to taking a gun!
You’re all good.
Nope, I’m cancelling OP. He’s cancelled. He’ll get the paperwork… Eventually.
That’s not what a pun is anyway tho
Wouldn’t shooting them violate some kind of convention (like Geneva, idk) in this case?
If shooters were played by Geneva convention, where would be the fun? :P
I try to play my Arma 3 abiding to Geneva convention and is quite fun
Arma is a full blown simulator, which is an entire different story :)
But I should have clarified it
I feel like there’s already lots of things in lot’s of games that violate a variety of conventions
buT THInk aBOUT wHaT KINd oF exAMpLe it pReSenTS TO THE cHILdREN
I like the idea from a roleplaying-POV.
However, as someone who loves to play medic since BF2, I can tell you that I’d stop playing supportive (medic) if they’d remove the guns from the class. It sounds like it’s just half as fun.
So you’re respawning and no DPS are near you and you encounter an enemy DPS in a narrow corridor. No thanks.
Wouldn’t that mean death for you either way? Unless the healer has a massive weapon, I guess.
See team fortress 2 for healing done properly
That would just make them even bigger targets than they already are. And now they won’t have a way to defend themselves? That sounds like a nightmare. I used to play Overwatch and would always play support. There’s no way in hell i’d trust my team to help me if I’m being attacked. They’re probably just gonna jump ahead and say “I need healing!” fifteen times and call me a trash healer as I get the shit beaten out of me with no way to fight back. If this is how support roles worked nobody would play them. I already get left to my own devices as the rest of the team ignores me getting attacked in the back line. It’s already a thankless and painful role to play and this would make it unbearable.
Sounds like you want OG Mercy from Overwatch, who didn’t work out btw
No, FPS players tend to be the “killer” type of player who play to score and win, they are rarely the “socialite” type of player who are in it for teamwork.
Simply put, this is the wrong audience to implement this idea in, there are gaming communities where this works but FPS just isn’t one of them.Since so many people played the original overwatch at it’s prime, it was a good way to see what people played and how. The dps queue was sometimes 30 to 40min, while as a healer you got into a game instantly. When Ana dropped, people just played ana and didn’t heal people, because she had a sniper rifle. When moira dropped, people just played her as a dps who could heal herself. Support is very niche already, making it more niche, and only a handful of people would even consider support.
I think the finals did a good job in giving the medium class a healing beam. It’s supper powerful on it’s own, and if your team dies, you can still whip out a very good if not the best gun.
Yeah, Mercy was one of my inspirations.
I feel like one of the reasons FPS scene is like that is exactly because players have no choices left but to pick up a gun and shoot enemies. Without that, you are useless in any classical FPS composition, regardless of the role, which alienates players that want to see other types of gameplay.
Simply put, if you are not a “killer” in an FPS game, you have nothing to do there, and that’s why only those players remain. Something has to be changed inside the genre.
and continuing my thought, overwatch was literally what you wanted in them first years. But it turned out that the main game group was not interested in playing for healers or tanks without damage, and as a result, the bias in choosing these roles was more than 3 times. This increased the waiting time in the queue quite a lot. As a result, everything returned to the option where each role can cause damage.
It would exclusively work for competitive eSports.
Many people play just for fun, don’t want to focus on teamwork
Nope. Favours pro play and is absolutely shit at lower tiers.
This is why Mercy has a gun and why tanks in mobas have to have a bit of kill potential. It’d be incredibly frustrating to want to play a healer like that and your team being completely dogshite without you having any ability to affect enemies.
AugustUwU, a Riot developer talks about that a bit on some of his videos.
Disagree. Both Ragnarok Online pvp and World of Warcraft arena had tank mage builds (discipline priest and priest/high priest) and they were incredibly fun to play. Especially early-ish discipline pvp was all about proactive absorption and then removing as many buffs and burning mana of the enemy.
Then of course blizzard did their usual blizzard shit.
Balancing is different in a MMORPG. And one person having fun really doesn’t tell a lot. The point is that when it’s done in team games, usually it ends up frustrating most players.
Like say a MOBA had a hero who had a 30% winrate. There might be plenty of mains who don’t mind at all and find the hero fun and good. But the stats from a million games tells a better story than anecdotal experiences.
edit remember that in an mmorpg, everyone in a pvp scenario already has a ton of experience in the game, whereas with a moba, you haven’t necessarily played one character through hundreds of hours of grinding.
I still think it’s okay to have high skill ceiling classes though. It’s one reason dota2 Invoker was so popular for example.
They could probably add one healer in a moba or team shooter that has a complicated but rewarding game play.
I still think it’s okay to have high skill ceiling classes though
I never implied otherwise.
But you can’t really have 100% healers and 100% tanks who can’t deal damage in teamgames like mobas and shooters.
That’s why Mercy has a gun, even when it is very rarely used.
Like think about this this way; you couldn’t really have a champion who couldn’t heal at all either, and did “100% damage”. Like, if you did insane amounts of damage, but only had a certain amount of health and no way of getting it back.
It’s not exactly the same, of course, but it does highlight something that could sort of never work. (Never say never, but, you know…)
This is coward talk. Healers should be given silver bullets for their guns with badass names like “Spectre Covenant” and huge medieval maces.
Play squad or Arma.
