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.
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.