Heal Me!

One of the games I downloaded for free this week was Healer's Quest, the work of a one-man studio, the man in question being one Pablo Coma. He's something of a renaiassance man in gaming terms, responsible for everything from coding to graphics to gameplay. He even does the music.

If you're interested in finding out more about Pablo, don't bother looking at the official website for the game. It's one of the most minimal I've ever seen. It has a trailer and an amusing in-character description of what to expect when you play and that's it.

The company behind Healer's Quest also has a website. It seems to consist of Pablo and no-one else and it's called Rablo Games. Presumably Pablo Games was already taken, possibly by this guy. 

The Rablo Games website has rather more detail about the game and about Pablo, who talks about himself rather unsettlingly in the third person, assuming it was indeed he who wrote the text. "Pablo is also the official game developer & game supervisor of the Smurfs’ studio. You can play his Smurfs’ games here" he says, unnervingly. There's no hyperlink so where "here" might be is anyone's guess.

There is a hyperlink to "the best online casino" which we're encouraged to follow "to enter the real money casino competition" for which we'd need to "click on the competition button and log in with your username and password." 

I clicked on it, which was possibly unwise. It goes to a Canadian casino site at which point I declined to pursue things any further. What this has to do with the game I have not the slightest clue.

A much safer bet is to go look for the game on Steam, where it has a current price-tag of £11.39, a peculiar amount I can only assume must have been converted directly from some other currency. It also has a "Very Positive" rating and plenty of reviews explaining exactly what the game's about.

I could do that, too. I've played for long enough. I've healed my way through the first dungeon and some distance into the second. My character is level sixteen with the rest of the team a few levels lower. I've seen enough to put together a first impressions piece, if not a full review.

I'm not going to. I'll just say it's a slick, enjoyable game with compulsive gameplay and a sense of humor that manages to stay just the right side of self-satisfied. Graphically it has clean lines and clear colors that rest easily on the eye. The UI does a job of work and looks attractive doing it.

For a more in-depth impression that goes about as deep as I'd be likely to go after the time I've spent with the game you could try this review at Switchaboo, which matches my own experience fairly closely. The reviewer played the game on the Switch but it sounds functionally identical to the PC version.

It wasn't the game I wanted to talk about, anyway. I was more interested in the elevator pitch that underpins it. 

Healer's Quest is a nutshell parody of the experience of a kind of traditional mmorpg player once common, now all but extinct: the pure healer. For a couple of years I was one of those players. Even now I would say it was the zenith of my career in the genre. It was certainly the most satisfying, fulfilling, absorbing gameplay I ever enjoyed.

Over the course of several years I played a number of healing classes in a number of different mmorpgs. I did my first real group-work as a druid in EverQuest back in the Kunark and Velious eras. At launch, I started out as a Templar in EverQuest II then switched to a Defiler. I was a Disciple in Vanguard, still the best healing class I've ever played. As recently as my short run in Final Fantasy XIV I played one of those healers with the funny little pet. I forget what those are called.

I've played various shamanic healers, I've been the healing priest in any number of religions, I've channelled the primal spirits of beasts and the pure elemental forces of the planes to restore others to health. I've even reversed the flow of the dark powers of necromancy to bring life instead of undeath.

It was always enormous fun. The thrill of standing at the back, watching my party's health bars, topping them off when they dip, is something I've never known to get old. It's fun to be able to throw in the odd dot or debuff but the absolute apogee of the form is the pure healing role, when all you do is keep your colleagues standing and they do all the rest.

 

There's a little more to it than that, of course. There are the cures and the buffs and the wards. Curses need removing. All the little stuff. But it's the healing that counts.

Non-healers rarely see the point. They want to be healed, of course they do. They want to be healed so they can carry on with the real business at hand: dealing damage. Everything fun comes down to that, doesn't it? Hitting things with big hunks of metal and seeing them fall down. Setting things on fire and watching them burn.

Perhaps the only players who vaguely understand the healer's point of view are the tanks. The traditional ones, that is. The old school warriors who don't care how much damage they do just so long as they can take what's coming. The ones who want to be a wall no mob is ever going to tear down, who want to stand there and take it and make sure no-one else gets any at all.

Tanks like that are almost as out of fashion as pure healers, of course. It's been a while since just taking damage was a full role. You have to deal it out as well or you just aren't pulling your weight.

I miss pure healing a lot. Playing Healer's Quest has been a bittersweet experience for me. It's a decent simulation of the playstyle I enjoyed back in those glory years although it could do with being slowed down a good deal for the full effect. I always had time to think, back then, and the thinking was the meat of it.

I was mostly lucky with my groupmates, too. I didn't always get taken for granted. Sometimes people even said thank-you when they didn't die, although only when they'd imagined they were going to. Like the Lone Ranger, though, a true healer doesn't do it for the thanks. They do it because it needs to be done.

 

Around the time I drifted away from trinity grouping towards an alpha-omega of solo and gang fights the expectations were shifting in a way I didn't find pleasant. When I was a cleric in EverQuest I prided myself on doing the absolute minimum. Mana was precious. Only a fool would burn it for the sake of looking busy. 

The game was to be always ready. Maybe the fights were easy right now. Maybe I hadn't had to cast a heal for a while. Maybe I could pass the time smiting. Every little helps. Yes, until a roamer walks around the corner and adds or the ranger misses a runner. Then we're knee-deep in goblins and we'd all be wishing I'd sat on my hands instead of wiggling them like a bargain-basement wizard.

Even before I'd given up the game those arguments weren't flying with everyone. A lot of people played healers for less than noble reasons. Healers get groups. But healing is boring, some say. They said it loud and often and eventually someone listened. 

I remember the patches that kept adding damage spells to my cleric's book. I remember every new mmorpg, every new healing class, all adding new ways for healers to put monsters in their place. And that was fine. As I said, my favorite healing class of all time is the disciple, who keeps a party on its feet by kicking monsters in the head. 

Those classes and those games were designed to have dynamic, forceful, aggressive healers. I didn't have a problem with that but I did take issue with the changing expectations it brought for those of us who still followed the old ways. I did not take kindly to being told, or even asked politely, to stand up and smite instead of sitting at the back doing nothing.

 

I wasn't doing nothing. I was watching. Watching for approaching adds or respawns. Watching for anything that might mean a change in the situation. Watching for for anything unforeseen. You could say it wasn't my job to do that. Maybe the ranger ought to be the one, or the tank. But they had enough to do already, the tank keeping all the monsters interested, the ranger figuring out how not to die. Again.

Increasingly, people didn't want to hear it. My regular groupmates never said anything but pick-ups did. Not to me, not often. I didn't heal much in pugs. I took my magician for those. No-one ever expects much of a mage. But I heard plenty.

By the time I finally took a run at World of Warcraft the writing was on the wall. I was about to leave when the Dungeon Finder dropped. I stayed to see what this novel new concept was like. I did a couple of dungeons on my priest. It was eye-opening. Even then, when the whole thing was brand new, everyone was impatient. A priest who only healed was a drag anchor.

In my final healing role, that first month I spent in FFXIV, even though the game and everyone playing it was brand new, there were expectations I didn't want to meet. I was able to meet them, sure. I just didn't want to. That's not what playing a healer means to me. Or it wasn't, then.

Now, I'm not sure what playing a healer means, if it means anything. I play a lot of classes in a lot of games and nearly all of them heal at least a little. In solo play they heal themselves. In groups they chip in with everybody else because the kind of groups I find myself in these days are huge, amorphous, unstructured and above all forgiving. Everyone chucks something into the healing pot and somehow we all survive. 

I was interested to see that the upcoming Swords of Legends uses the holy trinity. I'm curious whether that means genuine, dedicated healing roles or just some damage dealers who heal better than others. Ashes of Creation, the game I still half expect to be my next long-term engagement, also follows the trinity but again I have no clear understanding of what that might mean in practice.

Would I want to be a pure healer again? That's a question. Until yesterday I most likely would have said not. I've thought about it a few times in latter years and I thought I'd come to the conclusion I was over it, until Healer's Quest, simple as it is, gave me a jolt of how healing a group used to feel.

It felt good. Until it went wrong. Then it was hell.

On balance I'm not sure I could take the stress. If I do end up grouping regularly again in Ashes or Pantheon or some other game with structured roles, most likely I'll go for a utility class, someone who can patch heal and off tank and generally make themselves useful without everything falling apart if I get it wrong once in while.

Pure healing is a thankless task. It's all responsibility and no grandstanding. It's making people feel so safe they forget they need you at all. It's being the desgnated driver, every time.

The appeal is limited. I can see why it died out. 

But I'm glad I was able to do it when it counted, all the same.

Healing For Fun And Profit. Okay, Forget The Profit : GW2

Over the long years since the dawn of EverQuest I've played most of the standard MMO roles but my favorite and the one I feel most competent and confident in is Healer. One of the famous, or infamous, decisions ArenaNet made when designing GW2 was to do away entirely with the Holy Trinity. At the time I didn't have particularly strong feelings about it one way or another but the one thing I really didn't like was way it effectively removed the role of Healer from the game.

In GW2 everyone's her own healer and everyone else's patch healer at the same time. Healing is your job, my job, no-one's job. It works well enough and I've certainly become used to it but it's never been ideal.

Consequently I felt that one of the more welcome additions brought to the game by the Heart of Thorns expansion was the introduction of the closest thing GW2 has ever had to a dedicated healer - the Druid. Druid is the Elite Specialization for the Ranger class. Rangers might seem an odd choice for the healing role but, as Zubon pointed out way back when, the Ranger started out as a good match for the then-favored "main" healing class, a Staff Elementalist in Water attunement.

Don't turn your back on me Rytlock. I'm tougher than I look. What do you mean, "You'd have to be?"

I played both a Ranger and a Staff Ele and I tried for a while to fit into a support role as a healer but it was never very comfortable or satisfying. It works best in World vs World, where dropping water fields on command has always been an integral part of gameplay. It doesn't feel like proper healing , though, and the game itself didn't recognize any form of healing as worthy of credit so it took a very selfless player to commit to a full-time healing role. Few did.

With the coming of HoT all that changed. The Druid was designed primarily as a support class, with the bulk of that support coming in the form of healing. On top of that, the rules were changed so that healing players during combat gave the healer credit towards whatever rewards might be on offer. True, you do still have to do some nominal damage as well in order to be recognized but some of the healing skills come with damage built in so that's simple enough.

Amazing how the arrows don't go right through.

It's surprising, then, that it's taken me six months to get around to trying the Druid out. Mrs Bhagpuss, who has had a Druid up and running for a good while, has been telling me for weeks I ought to give it a go. And it's not like I wasn't ready. I completed the specialization back before Christmas, along with the ascended weapon quest collection for Yggdrasil, the druid staff. And yet I carried on playing as a ranger.

In fact,three rangers: one a Charr, my first GW2 character, another, on my third account, a Sylvari, and in-between those two there's my Asura. A year or so ago, on a whim, I re-specced and re-geared the Asuran Ranger for pure survivability. He's all toughness, vitality and, most especially, healing power. His passive and reactive regeneration is so high that in most PvE fights his health barely appears to drop at all.

That made him the ideal candidate. Over the weekend I tuned him still further in that direction, put a staff in his hands and sent him out to learn how to Druid. It was a happy experience.

In open world PvE he is virtually indestructible. Packs of mini-raptors, hordes of mordrem, whole temples of risen minions of Zhaitan throw themselves against his healing and bounce. It makes traveling a breeze.

Hi, King Adelbern! Look, he's waving!

In WvW he is both an irritant and a salve. In the zerg his heals throw clouds of green numbers as far as the eye can see. It feels like contribution. It feels satisfying.

Roaming, something I have rarely managed to bring off with anything even remotely comparable to success before, he is a total nuisance. He may not be able to kill other players  - the downside of the healing build is DPS like a wet dishcloth - but boy, can he hold a ring.

When he turns up, a simple camp capture for a couple of invaders turns into a long-drawn out war of attrition as he dodges and rolls and throws out heal after heal that not only keep him and his pet alive but revitalize all and any of the camp guards that are still standing.

The longer the fight goes on, the higher the chance another player on my side will turn up to assist, and once that happens the tide just turns. Having a heal generator on tap frees up whoever has found the fight to blaze away while, as everyone knows, you have to kill the healer first and that was already problematic when the healer was alone.

This guy seriously doesn't know when he's beaten.

So, I spent a good few hours over the last few days doing that. So much in MMO gaming - gaming in general - comes down to muscle memory and being able to act without thinking. I am nowhere near being "good" at playing a druid yet but I'm beginning to pass the point where I have to think about everything as it happens. When instinct can take over performance will improve.

Off the back of this positive experience I had the bright idea, late last night, to see how the Druid would go in a dungeon. In all the time I've played GW2 I've done just one of the original dungeons and that but a single time. That was the final Zhaitan fight at Arah on Story mode, way back in 2012.

I've done around a dozen fractals and all the temporary Living Story and holiday dungeons but the regular ones, never. I thought I'd start at the beginning so I went to the entrance of Ascalon Catacombs in Plains of Ashford, knocked on the door and went in. Alone.

Rytlock Brimstone wasn't impressed. He thought I needed to bring some help if I was coming with him to find Eir Stegalkin. Apparently a three foot tall Asura wearing a child's cat hat and waving something that looks like a sapling he just uprooted doesn't equate to a full warband in the eyes of a great soldier like Rytlock.

Twenty-six silver? You're kidding, right?

Well I sure proved him wrong. I wasn't expecting to get far. The last time I tried that dungeon solo I didn't get past the first room. This time I progressed and kept progressing. I had a walkthrough up but I didn't really need it. I only died once and that was the fault of the in-game instructions, which put up a huge message telling me I'd disarmed all the traps only for all the traps in the room to fire at once as soon as ran back the way I'd come.

Other than that, none of the fights even came close. I was never downed. Rytlock, Eir and her wolf, Garm, fell over many times but I quickly learned that if you just run back a few dozen yards they pop back up at full health as though nothing ever happened.

The dungeon was gorgeous, insofar as a decaying, ghost-ridden crypt can be. The mechanics weren't too annoying. Difficulty felt almost identical to Advaned Solo in EQ2. Rewards were poor but it was interesting to follow another part of the story, even though it's more like history by now.

Rytlock's stormed off in a huff. Again. Everyone feels bad. Even the pets.

It opens up the prospect of doing more dungeons solo and of duoing them with Mrs Bhagpuss, who has already expressed an interest in running Twilight Arbor for tokens to buy the Nightmare Court armor. Researching that I found the beautifully designed guides at GWDungeon.net, a resource I didn't even know existed. I anticipate making considerable use of all their hard work.

I am not a fan of running dungeons over and over. I have always thought it a poor mechanic and a wrong-headed direction for designers to take. I do like a good dungeon, though - solo, duo or full group. It would be good to see them all and what's more, if I've been through a dungeon at my own pace solo or duo I'll be much more likely to take a run with a group. Even if you don't know the ropes it's nice to at least feel you know where the ropes are.

It's also made me more interested to play around with the other Elite Specializations and also experiment with builds. Who knows, I might even make some effort to put a character into full Ascended.

If I do, it'll be the Druid.

Make Way! Druid Coming Through! : GW2

Back when GW2 was still in Closed Beta I was feeling somewhat anxious. I knew it was an MMORPG I wanted to play but some of the aspects ArenaNet were promoting most heavily made me wonder whether they were making a game I'd find difficult to enjoy.

My primary area of concern was the emphasis on active combat and dodging. I don't like Action RPGs very much and at that time I had little experience of any that required constant ducking and rolling to survive. It sounded like a lot of work and not much fun.

I remember quizzing the Kill Ten Rats team, who at that time were quite deep in the loop, on how the combat felt and whether a traditional stand-and-cast player coming from an EQ/WoW background would be able to cope. They were re-assuring but it wasn't until the first open beta weekend that I got to test the waters for myself to find out whether they were warm and balmy or filled with sharp rocks and sharks.

As I wrote at the time "I was apprehensive about some of the things I'd read about GW2's "action combat" so I went with a class that could stand off a ways and see what was going on. That class, of course, was The Ranger and, as I soon discovered, a ranger in GW2 doesn't have to dodge at all. Not for nothing has playing a ranger in the open world been seen as playing the game on easy-mode ever since.

Staff envy

I stuck with my Charr ranger through all the beta weekends and thoroughly enjoyed the experience. When headstart arrived I simply re-made him and started over. He was the first character I leveled to 80 and he's still one of the key members of my team three years later.

Rangers have long had good utility in what ANet now likes to call the "soft trinity". They can stand in all three corners. They bring excellent "Control" (almost unsurpassably so, as was discovered to the detriment of many Mannequin runs) when using a bear pet as a tank. Damage is decent, with exceptionally good burst DPS on the Longbow and a range of conditions elsewhere. What has been less celebrated, although Zubon spotted it as long ago as November 2012, is their capacity for group healing.

Over the years a lot changed and it must be a very long time indeed since rangers were anyone's go-to healers in or out of a dungeon. GW2, of course, famously doesn't have a specialist healer class. The nearest would probably be an Elementalist in Water, a very common and required role in WvW, but there's never been anything even close to the kind of dedicated pure healer role of an EQ cleric or a WoW priest. Until now.

On Friday ANet lifted the veil on the final Elite specialization: The Druid. It brought the HoT wheel full circle. The Ranger was the very first class to have its Elite publicly named and its new weapon, the Staff, announced - all the way back at the start of the year. For once, when all is revealed, the method in ANet's mystery makes sense.

The Druid offers GW2's first and only full-time, full-on, full-function healing spec. Had that been made known back when we saw a ranger waving a stick for the first time there would have been uproar. Rangers get the shaft again. Why do ANet hate rangers? Well that's it - deleting my ranger now! And so on and so on.

Six months later there may not quite be a deafening roar of unanimous approval but there's plenty of love going around in the lengthy discussions and dissections of the new skills, traits and gameplay options offered by The Druid. The addition of raids to the game, the harder open-world content coming in the expansion and, most especially, direct statements of intent from the developers along the lines of "Upcoming content will have stuff that you can’t just dodge to survive" and "The Berserk meta is going away" make it quite clear that the class that gets the best healing is getting a plum job.

Not going to cut it in HoT. Allegedly.

Naturally that won't please every ranger. Not everyone wants to spend their play-session keeping the other folks upright. Enjoying playing a dedicated healer requires a particular personality. After three years in a game with almost no outlet for those tendencies is it likely there are even any would-be full healers still playing and if there are would they be playing rangers?

Well, I am. It's a long, long time since I filled the straight-up, main healer slot but it remains my favorite MMORPG group role. And what's more I don't just have my semi-meta zerker Charr ranger, I also already have a max-level Asuran Ranger, fully kitted out in Apothecary exotics and Ascended trinkets, who, when he hit 80, was specced with healing as his focus. Don't ask why. He just was.

What's more, in a piece of remarkable foresight (even if at the time it looked like a careless mistake) both rangers are on the same account and it's the one that's got HoT. I'm all set up ready for The Druid and I have to say the reveal has significantly increased my excitement for and interest in the expansion.

It was all so simple then. And we had hats.

It won't all happen at once. There will be an inordinate amount of theorycrafting and trial-and-error for weeks if not months before the inevitable codifying and concreting of The New Meta. Fun for those that like that kind of thing. Maybe in the end it won't turn out to be as spectacular as it looks on paper. Maybe it will be so overpowered it will die the death of a thousand nerfs.

I don't care. I'm just happy to see it tried. I've given the lengthy list of new skills and traits the once-over, surprising myself with just how many times I've nodded and smiled and murmured approval. For now I'm happy to wait until its time to test it out in the field.

There's one more beta weekend to come but I'm working the first day and going on holiday on the second so the first chance I'll have will be at launch. Can't wait!

Taking Turret 3 : GW2

Lately, I've been doing the Tequatl event most days. I'd almost forgotten about it until the kerfuffle over the change to critical damage brought the once-notorious event back into the news. When that blew up I went to see what the fuss was about and ended up adding Teq back into my "must do" World Boss list. He gives good loot and the event is entertaining, especially when you get a disorganized map and everything goes to the wire.

When it was added, almost exactly two years ago, Evolved Tequatl became the first permanent, open-world event in GW2 to require major organization. In the days before Megaservers some servers couldn't beat it and most couldn't guarantee a win. The event was tweaked downwards in difficulty numerous times and even then, for a long while, it took half an hour or more to set up. It was wise to get there early.

It also led directly to the birth of those irritating cross-server guilds that use out-of-game voice chat and dubious map-stacking techniques to gain advantage. For a while they turned the event into a toy for a self-appointed elite. It was a dark time.

The coming of megaservers largely put a stop to all that, helped by the gradual learning process that eventually led to Teq acquiring "farm" status. Apart from the brief crit blip that's where he remains.

Unevolved Teq. I still prefer that fight even if no-one ever used a turret back then.

One of the more interesting aspects of the event is the wide range of player-created roles it has spawned. I can't remember any event in an MMO with quite so many named locations that require dedicated teams. I still have only a vague idea where each of them is. All of those were decided upon and named by the playing community.

As well as the key defensive locations and the big offensive zerg, usually led by a tagged-up Commander, which stacks at Tequatl's feet on the spot where attacks strike the dragon twice for double damage, there are the Turrets. There are six of these hylek-constructed devices, ranged in two sets of three.

Running a turret is a very specific task that daunts newcomers. I was wary of it for a long time, partly because of the endless yelling from the zerg that seemed to suggest most turret operators were getting it wrong most of the time.

Possibly because of this there are often calls for people to volunteer to operate a Turret. I eventually decided I couldn't do any worse than all these poor saps who were being shouted at so I thought I'd give it a go.

I think this is South Hills. I could be mistaken.

It was a little nerve-wracking at first but I took to it almost immediately. It was only after a few runs, when I'd begun to feel I was on top of my brief,  that I realized why it was all starting to feel so familiar. It's because being on a Turret at Teq is eerily reminiscent of playing a cleric in Everquest.

That's a very good thing. I played a cleric in EQ for several years and it's probably either my favorite or second favorite MMO role of all time (the other contender being the Disciple in Vanguard). Anything that feels like playing a Sit&Heal Cleric is fine by me.

Anet stirred things up recently, not only by referring to the upcoming raids as requiring specific, previously forbidden, roles such as "Tank" but by daring to mention the dreaded "T" word - Trinity. They claim, to the aggravation of many but with some justification, that the game has always had a Trinity - just not the Trinity.

For those who came to MMOs via WoW or its descendants, The Trinity means Tank, Healer, DPS. GW2 has never had that line-up. For those of us with longer memories, however, the Holy Trinity in Everquest was originally Healer, Tank, Crowd Control.

In some ways the GW2 version is a call-back to those early days. The three legs of this particular stool are Damage, Control and Support. Back in the Norrathian day, everyone was responsible for DPS, which was never deemed a separate role unless you were a rogue (and if you were...poor you). In Tyria everyone is responsible for their own healing. It's the Healer role that's vanished, rolled up into the general buffing brief "Support".

I'll take any turret but #3 is the best.

I'd love to play a true, dedicated healer in GW2 but it's just not going to happen, so driving a Turret at Teq is the next best thing. Not because the T-Op gets to heal - there is a heal among the skills on the Turret's bar but it's probably the least important. No, it's the cadence and the feels.

As a Turret Operator you have two main jobs: keep Tequatl's Hardened Scales buff to a minimum and Cleanse the zerg of poison. That means hitting Skill 2, Scale Penetration, every 12 seconds as it refreshes and skill 3, Poison Cleanse, every 5 seconds. The former is auto-targetted at the start of the fight as soon as you target the Dragon, preferably his head; the latter has to be ground-targeted wherever you want the shell to land.

In-between these you can do some DPS with Skill 1, Stake Thrower, which, on a one-second cooldown, is effectively an auto-attack. You might once in a while throw a buff on the zerg (de rigeur if you're still on the turret during a "Burn" phase, when everyone goes flat-out for maximum damage) or a heal, using skills 4 and 5, Hylek Elixir and Hylek Salve respectively. As they're both on a fifteen second delay, however, you have to pick your moments carefully.

The upshot is that using a Turret feels very much like the same decision-making process I remember from healing as a Cleric. Watching cooldowns,, doing triage assessment on the fly, manually swapping targets for cures, throwing in a nuke when you get a chance - all the essentials are there.

If the Turrets just had a resource to manage as well, the way a Cleric has to manage mana, it would be darn near identical. And if the six Turret Operators worked out a rota to manage their Scale Penetration so it didn't overlap wastefully, why, then you'd have the Clerics' Raid Heal Chain! They probably even used to do that when voice chat was still a thing at Teq.

The final cherry on the top, icing on the cake or nail in the coffin, as you will, is what I alluded to right at the start. The yelling.

Oh, the yelling! "Turrets! Use Skill 2!", "Turrets! Spam Cleanse!" "Scales too high!" Even "Is anyone on Turrets?" when we're clicking our fingers to the bone. Poor old Turret Operators can never get it right. If they're Cleansing they should be Penetrating and the other way around. Grenth forbid any of them should waste one second firing a stake. DPS is Not Your Job. Until the Burn, when it's "Turrets! Spam Skill 1".

When I used to Cleric for a living, so to speak, as Mrs Bhagpuss will gleefully tell you my catchphrase was "FFS!". I was a very calm healer as a rule but I was prone to fits of Not Being Able To Work With Chimps. Particularly if the chimps thought they knew better than I did how to do my job.

At Teq today I actually stopped firing at one point and yelled back in map chat "FFS we can't "spam" scales. It's on a 12 second cooldown". At that point I realized I was truly in the throws of a Clerical Flashback.

And it was flippin' great!

Watching Hotbars For Fun And Profit (But Mostly Fun)

Mercury at Light Falls Gracefully has a very interesting post up concerning the qualitative and subjective differences between those games whose combat mechanics demand you focus directly on what you can see your enemies doing and the ones that require you pay close attention to the UI instead. He describes the two approaches, neatly, as first-person and third-person (not to be confused with first and third person perspective, of course).

By and large, using these definitions, the two waves of 3D MMORPGs that followed first Everquest and, later, WoW  fall into the static, UI-focused third-person category. The last few years, beginning  at the point when, arguably, developers gave up trying to build their WoW-killers and instead began to scratch around for other ways to make money for their investors, have seen the genre move towards a much more action-oriented, visually-keyed, first-person approach.

My own original experience of online 3D gaming came with Everquest. It was only fifteen years ago but looking back it seems almost impossible to believe that at the time, like most players, I saw Norrath through the curved screen of a 15" CRT monitor. What's more, the moving image of the gameworld itself only showed up in a rectangle smaller still, set inside a frame that housed the UI that dominated the entire play experience. (That's the image at the top of the post. I don't have any screenshots from that period so I borrowed that one from The Druid's Grove).

It's no wonder we were all trained to treat the UI as paramount. It was pretty much all we could see. Especially if you happened to play a healer. When I first discovered what I still consider to be my true metier, main healing for a group, even that small window onto the world went away.

Killing the easy version of Feydedar for someone's epic.
This is apparently a raid though you'd hardly know it from that UI.
My SK is not in shot. He's the one saying "feared" at the end. I think he fell in the sea. Good thing he wasn't main tank.

Tucked into the corner of a room just inside Back Door at the Sarnak Fort in Lake of Ill Omen with my group relying on me to keep them alive, I'd spend most of the fight sitting down, desperately meditating to regain mana. In front of me all I'd see on my monitor would be my open spellbook and the UI. I'd stare at the health bars of my party and try to scry their fortunes, judging when to stand, cast a heal and sit back down again.

I loved it. It had such purity. It was so calming and yet so exciting all at once. It was zen healing. I was very annoyed when, not all that long after I'd begun my career as a healer, SOE did away with the full-screen spellbook and at last allowed healers the pleasure of seeing what was killing the overnuking wizard rather than having to divine it from his screams.

Of course, I soon got used to having that blindfold taken off and it would be crazy to pretend I'd willingly have put it back on. When I got my first horse, with the arrival of the Shadows of Luclin expansion (we had to go to the moon before we got mounts), I didn't even have to sit down to med any more and I liked that even better. But always, always I had to watch that UI.

As the amusing Little Healer app seeks to remind us, healing in MMOs is all about those bars. I miss that kind of healing a lot, although whether I still have the self-discipline and patience to do it night after night, month after month, I somewhat doubt. I enjoyed a small, brief resurgence in FFXIV a couple of years back but it wasn't enough to pull me away from GW2's "every man for himself" anarchy.

Tanking again. Somewhere in Velious. No idea what's going on but it's very unusual to have the group window on the right. Would never have done that as a cleric. Apparently taking screenshots was also something I never did as a cleric. Off-tanks have all the time in the world to admire the scenery.

It didn't stop at healing though. Playing EQ didn't just show me what adventuring in a virtual world could be like. It showed me what it should be like. I learned to use the cursor keys to move. I learned to click hot keys to cast spells. I learned to stand still and not jump about while I was fighting. I learned to press Num Lock to auto-run, F10 to hide the UI and Numpad Minus to take a screenshot.

It was a language and over the course of five years or so I attained something like fluency. So much so that after about a decade and a half pretty much the only preferences I've changed willingly are using WASD (which I think I probably picked up around 2009, when I first played WoW), moving while casting (got that from Vanguard) and dodge-rolling (GW2 of course). And even in GW2 I dodge roll by clicking the hotbar.

Most of the other attempts by developers to get me to play MMOs as though they were proper video games I have stalwartly resisted. It's not that these mysteries are beyond me. I can do it if I'm motivated. I enjoyed DCUO and Neverwinter and ESO among others. Just not enough to play them for more than a month or two. It gets to be hard work and I don't like hard work all that much. Especially not when it's dressed up as fun.

Sometimes I get to have my own way. In WildStar, where Carbine would love me to watch the action not the UI and have even tried to make it more palatable by turning the action into a UI all of its own, with telegraphs that cover the screen every time anyone does anything at all, the first thing I've done is switch them all off. I even worked out how to put my dodges onto the hotbar so if, heaven forbid, I ever need to dodge anything (hasn't happened yet but I expect it will) I can click on those as nature intended instead of doing that weird double-tap thing.

Classic solo set-up from my magician on Stromm back near launch. Here she's invised watching some hot NPC on NPC action. And given that fire elemental, probably about to take an unexpcted faction hit.

I don't believe a third-person, UI-centered approach is innately superior (alright, maybe I do, just a little...). It's mostly that it's far more comfortable, relaxing, enjoyable and, yes, distant. And I want it to be distant. It's my character having these adventures, not me. He can have the adrenalin rushes. I don't want them. I'm happy floating somewhere overhead and a little behind, pointing and making suggestions. That's what I'm here for.

Having to watch all the tells, read all the signals, react in real time to fragments of the visual storm rather than just letting it burst around me like a fantastic firework display is too intense, too involving, too stressful. Frankly it's more effort than I'm prepared to put in for the sake of entertainment. I'm not so jaded I need that level of stimulation. It's so much easier and just nicer all round to read the UI and take it from there.

So, when Colin Johansen pops up with his mantra of thrills, spills and chills it makes me want to switch off and go do something more boring instead. Like topping up a health bar. That never gets old.