The only time I had fun being a healer was when I made a shaman in WoW, and it’s mostly because it was like being a cleric in D&D; a tank that can heal. I would do BGs and invariably wreck fools who thought targeting the healer would be easy. 😈
I’m a cleric on undeath and indulgence in Pathfinder and it’s great. Really good healing and can call down huge blasts of fire and summon a demon friend. I consider it a switch who brings their own threesome.
In the early days of Rift there was a mage build that used a bunch of attacks to target what the tank was targeting and would build your crit chance to 85%+ and then crit heal the tank for their entire bar. The tanks absolutely hated it, but it was the most fun healing I’ve done across 10+ MMOs, MOBAs, and arena shooters
Chloromancer? Yeah, I remember RIFT fondly, and I feel sad that Gamigo are milking the rotten husk of Trion Worlds out of every last cent before they inevitably shut all their games down.
In the original Team Fortress (and maybe TFC, I don’t really remember) the medic gave people on the other team AIDS if they used their healing pack weapon on them.
The cleric in D&D that I had the most fun with made it so that my Magic Missiles were still useful at level 15+. She had decided early on that reach-spell was a feat that was absolutely needed, and would routinely stock a few reached Harm spells. This meant that she had a 25’ “Touch Attack” that ignored armor, and dex bonus. All you get is natural armor. If she successfully “touched” you, you now have 4 HP and a host of debuffs. Cue Magic Missile, and at that level I don’t even have to roll because I am going to do between 10 and 20 points of damage, that cannot miss.
The first time we used it, she snuck attacked the boss in the middle of him monologuing, and I killed him in one move from each of us. DM started handing us three to four BBEG as boss fights after that.
At least it’s an interesting role. I’ve always played FPS, which seems so vanilla. And I play ESO solo a lot, so about 25% of the time I forget to take off the Ring of the Pale Order when I do dungeons, which prevents being healed.
Healing is a very interesting experience, for me. You need a whole new level of awareness, as you’re now watching what everyone is doing, and need them working in line to best do your job. Resource management is on a whole other level when you now have all of yours, the entire parties health and buffs, and whatever the boss has counting down.
It’s a very active style of play, especially once triage comes in. When shit hits the fan, you need to decide who you can even try to save, and if they’re worth saving. I’ve had times that I left a DPS on the ground because it was quicker to just start dumping all I had into burning down the boss, and grab 'em up after the fact.
Then comes in the fun of having multiple healers. You gotta work out who’s taking what chunk, if and when you need to cover each other, and half the time you might end up healing the wrong people, because at some point you stop seeing the names. It’s just health bars and cool downs. Nothing matters except keeping those bars just full enough.
It takes the right kind of person. I don’t know what, exactly, is broken in us, but there’s just something about all the chaos and going “Yeah, I can turn this into order”. People thought I was kidding when I told them tanking was me taking a mental break. Hell yeah, it was, shout at things, make sure to use my squishes as fart-targets, and just shut my brain off and let all of the rage I’ve built up keeping idiots alive out by smashing this things face in.
About to say, I’ll be kind, but you wanna sass me? When I kept your ass alive in the fire? When I’m topping your DPS while pulling the tank outta the red? Bitch, I’ll keep myself alive while I walk outta here.
Don’t cross your healers. We might sometimes be sluts for some praise, don’t mean we’ll take shit.
Healer mains: when you get sick of nobody healing so you do it yourself, only to realize you enjoy people appreciating your hard work. It’s the start of a long road that ends in wanting to be railed by the best DPS main 😔
The only downside is you eventually end up hanging out with so many healer mains that you get forced to DPS 😫
I was so pissed when OW2 limited teams to a single tank. They were such a good fallback when I didn’t get to heal.
I swear DPS players are just jerks:
Me: Applies continuous healing and damage resistance to DPS
DPS: Walks right through multiple DoT inflicting AOEs and into the middle of a huge group of enemies immediately dying.
DPS: How dare you not keep me alive!
I tried returning to WoW (Classic) after a 10 year absence, thought I’d try tanking for a change instead of healing. Deadmines, what could go wrong?
Well, one mage managed to not only constantly draw agro from me, he also bumbled into the next group of mobs while the rest was still regaining mana again and again. Looted the box that starts that boss fight with a Tauren while the rest was not ready and wiping the party as a result. After that we all concluded that pressing on wasn’t going to work. Fucking hell, never gotten such a toxic shit load of crap in my chat ever before, he sent me a book’s worth of profanities all because “I sucked at tanking” according to him. Decided then and there that this was not the way how I wanted to spend my free time. When I quit WoW I already noticed that the social aspect was going down the drain, apparently it hasn’t gotten any better during my absence.
I think the reason FFXIV is enjoyable is more-so that if you act like a toxic dickwad, you’ll be yeeted out of the community at record pace by Square Enix, because unlike Blizzard, they actually enforce their game rules.
Healing is fun when the community is supportive and not when people are blowing a gasket over imperfect play.
Eh, only works for specific games. Medics and healers are purposely badass in a bunch of games specifically because of this attitude and the need to make sure people play the class.
I was (am?) very fond of mid-high level Nurse Maya in Borderlands 2 but since my damage healed my crew it justified spamming high area-of-effect damage into the fray, so she was healing and crowd control.
In fact, the Bonus Package grenade mod was so effective they had to change the rules so that grenade damage couldn’t heal. Curiouslyn they buffed the rest of Maya’s skill tree to add balance.
i think the idea here is, that bottoming is like helping someone (the top) out and more selfless. you arent doing it because it feels good, but because someone else wants to penetrate something.
i think this is an interesting idea. it seems very patriarchical. seeing bottoms (traditionally women) as passive, submisse sex object, that dont need to enjoy it. its all about the dominant tops (traditionally men).
i think some parallels can be drawn from this incorrect image, to how healers are seen by those they heal
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