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.
Fuck no.
As someone who loves maining healers, I would never play one again if my only hope for defence was my team mates.
Healers are already are hard role due to lack of support and cover, making them more dependent on it would be worse
You’ll just die all the time because hardly anyone would help you, and as a bonus you get yelled at by your team for not healing them. Sounds like fun.
As one of the commenters has put it, there could be options, like having more of a “field healer” that is armed but has less healing-related abilities, and a full healer that only heals but has unique options.
You could pursue the former.
Also, movement and stealth abilities are a must for a defenceless healer, so you could still protect yourself in other ways.
like having more of a “field healer” that is armed but has less healing-related abilities, and a full healer that only heals but has unique options.
And this differs from most existing games how, exactly?
I enjoy playing support classes, you want me to stop Playing support classes? Make it so that they are utterly defenseless and rely solely on others to stay alive.
Ultimately, it will play absolutely terribly if all you can do is run away unless you are playing with a well organized team. And then you may find that all your team mates get to have all the fun in the game while you get stuck with only the boring stuff.
No thank you.
I like the idea from a roleplaying-POV.
However, as someone who loves to play medic since BF2, I can tell you that I’d stop playing supportive (medic) if they’d remove the guns from the class. It sounds like it’s just half as fun.
Team Fortress is built off the idea that no class can’t do something, some just do it way better.
This almost seems like healers would become the main focus of the game. Some might like it some may not. But it would change things. It almost seems like you want healers to be so core that you will basically auto lose a fight due to a lack of revival and sustain. So if your healer gets caught out of position or sniped you just have to back off or otherwise just lose. To me that does not sound like a fun game loop.
A better option would likely to be have a multitude of different style of healers that can fulfill multiple different styles of gameplay. Sure have one that can only heal and not dps and has to be protected by teammates, but also have a healer that can Frontline and half allies when they do melee dmg. Have are healers, have single target healers. Have dot healers, have burst healers.
