Leading up to the release of WAR, Mythic’s marketing machine was in overdrive. Quite a bit of what was said by a hyper-excited Paul Barnett & Co turned out to be just that;
hyper-excited. If it was just marketing spin or a misunderstanding of their own product I don’t know (I’d guess the former), but regardless of the reason it set expectations impossibly high.
One of the things many of us were looking forward to was how in WAR healers wouldn’t just sit at the back watching health bars go up and down. Oh no sir! In WAR healers would be in the middle of the fight, dishing out pain and destruction, which through magical funkiness would in turn heal their allies. Unfortunately this premise turned out to be based on rather Obi-wan Kenobi style statements from Mythic, because what they said was true… from a certain point of view.
WAR’s healers do have abilities that deal damage and heal at the same time. You can purely play as a damage dealer that auto heals if you so wish. It’s just that if ALL your healers play that way, then you group is doomed. The healing from damage is not anywhere near potent enough. There is just no escaping it, you have to have some traditional dedicated backline healers if you want to live... But whilst that maybe the case, we still have the option to play differently (and get our arses kicked) should we choose to. So technically Mythic didn’t lie, they just stretched the truth a wee bit.
When Obi-wan told Luke that his father was “killed” by Darth Vader, he was just selling a dream to an ignorant farm boy. Mythic are no different to Obi-wan, they’re just selling their dream like every business does, and we are the ignorant farm boys (with potential for greatness ofc)… Or we’re suckers with cash to burn, one of the two. ;) But this is just the nature of advertising and building up the hype for your products. Everyone twists the truth. Apart from
Barry Scott obviously, he is the real deal. No, honestly.
With this particular dream, “the loads of fun to play healer”, the problem is probably that it’s very hard for a developer to get the balance right. I’m sure Mythic tried bloody hard and there is more to their healers than those in most other MMOs, but they still didn’t quite manage to break the mould.
How do you make a hybrid healer that doesn’t over balance on one side of the scale? If their DPS and healing is both excellent, then nobody will play other classes that can’t do both. Then if you over balance on one aspect you get other problems. If their healing isn’t potent enough to cope with the damage dealt by high DPS classes, then they’re useless as healers. If their damage is not as good as other DPS classes, then they’re no good as DPS, particularly in PvP where spike damage is often important. It seems like no matter how you set up the scales, it just won’t quite balance right.
It’s a tricky one for sure. If there is a way of becoming significantly better at one aspect, then that aspect becomes their focus, because playing jack-of-all-trades so rarely works. When you look at how people actually play, almost everyone that uses a so-called hybrid class ends up assuming a set role of tank, healer or DPS. Sure by respeccing they can change their focus, but it’s not the same as actually performing a hybrid of roles at the same time. Some poor sod will still end up just watching those health bars.
Of course guilds will often keep one or two DPS specced healers around, but not often because they need to, it's more likely novelty value or just due to people being nice. Yes it’s true that they do have their uses, WoW’s Shadowpriests being a prime example, but you can’t have every healer specced like this. It would be pixel suicide. If you’re a tank or DPS by trade, be honest, wouldn’t you rather they were all pure healers? You know you would really; it’s more reliable...
So is it even possible to make a true hybrid healing class while we remained locked in the MMO mindset of everything requiring set roles? If our MMO games continue forcing people to assume their role of Tank, Healer or DPS, will it ever change or will there always be some poor sod stood at the back watching health bars go down and up, down and up, down and…zzzzzzzzzzzzzz…
To be fair Mythic had a good crack at moving things forward and they’ve made the most fun PvP healers I can think of. I'm enjoying my Shaman and look forward to getting him into the big leagues. OK, perhaps they shouldn’t have gone all Obi-wan on us, but I think there was a genuine attempt behind it. So at least they tried eh? Not that Yoda would approve of just trying… But then that picky little git failed miserably and ended up stuck in some crappy swamp. Maybe he should have tried.
