Design Blog

Monday, June 1, 2009

Team Based Games and Healer Classes Part 1

I was planning to write about Blazblue today, but something else came up that has been dominating my thinking time recently so I'll get that off my chest first. Blazblue updates will continue soon, since I want to finish before the game is released. It seems bad to start another multipart post when I still haven't finished my first one but I think this is worth it.

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Today want to talk about healer classes and their presence in team based games. I speak primarily of MMO style games like Guild Wars, as this is where the majority of my experience comes from, though I feel it has relevance to other games with healing roles as well, such as Team Fortress 2, to a lesser extent.

So my main issue with healers is that I don't believe that it's possible for them to be balanced. Certainly healers can have a degree of balance and games with healers enjoy what can be construed as balanced play with occasional updates, but I think in general the concept itself has flaws at the game mechanic level. Let's set up some premises first on which I'm basing my argument.

1. In a team based game, it's possible to focus fire. Which means that one person can potentially be ganged up on by several enemies, causing him to die very quickly.

2. Dying is bad. This is common to all games, but most of the time it carries a penalty so that players will avoid it.

3. To counter dying as a result of many simultanious attacks, the designer creates a healer class.

4. A healer is a class dedicated to the defense of his allies, while he may have some offensive skills, in general his assumed role in the team is to keep his allies fighting while being attacked.

Based on these premises, a few conclusions quickly develop:

"A healer must have the potential to protect an ally from the damage from at least three enemies."

Let's start from the beginning here. If a healer can only keep himself alive, he is worthless, if he can only keep one ally alive, then you should take another damage dealer instead. Because healing classes typically contribute very little in the way of offensive power you can consider that they add a value of zero (0) to the parties offensive capabilities. If we assume that any other class contribues equally to attack and defense in a ratio of 1/1 then a healer must contibute at least 0/2 to make him worth taking. In fact, because he does not contribute significantly to attacking which is the ONLY way to defeat opponents in most games he must be worth more than 2 in terms of defense to warrant a spot on the team.

The next logical following is where things start to fall appart:

"Because healers are worth so much defensively, they become priority targets."

This conclusion is backed up from emperical evidence. If you look at any Guild Wars PvP game or even many situations in PvE the first target is always the healer. This is because every player on some level inherantly recognizes that he is more valuable than the other classes. Looking at TF2 yields this example as well if anyone remembers the Penny Arcade strip about "shoot the doctor".

Another thing to consider here is a situation where a healer class fights any other class in a 1v1 situation. If we consider the non-healer's goal to kill the healer and the healer's goal not to get killed then the result will commonly be that the healer "wins" and the attacker "loses" even though the match is technically a draw.

Expanding this to larger groups, the case tends to be that groups with healers tend to have the advantage over groups without healers. Take a 4v4 situation where one group has a healer, assuming average players the team with the healer is more likely to win. The reason is because if a good healer can heal the damage from up to three enemies, then that one healer is already worth three members of the opposing team. Taking them away means it is a 3v1 situation. The condition only escalates when more healers are added, though there is obviously a limit (which I will address in a later post).

So in the end the final conclusion we arive at is:

"Healers are objectively worth more than other characters."

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Now that we've established the basic idea, the next post on this topic will go into arguments in favor of healers and why they still do not address the problem. Stay tuned!

Labels: game mechanics, guild wars

posted by Saikyo at 1:43 PM