Tank + Healer + 6 DPS

Recently I have noticed a rise in the "We need a tank!" or "We need a healer" mentality, even from people I would consider as veterens with 30+ months under their belt, or otherwise intelligent players who have the awareness to join TF related chat channels.

I'm just wondering, will we ever shake this? Is the 'Wow Culture' just too hard to fight against?

I was doing a Synapse TF yesterday with 3 controllers (Fire+Thermal, Illusion+Rad, Grav+Kin) and 2 defenders (FF+AR, Rad+Sonic), and yet despite all these buffs, debuffs and the sheer amount of control at our disposal, plus the fact they were all high level's exemplared down, there was a sense of sheer panic from some members that I had not included a tank in the roster.

The other day I was doing a Posi TF and the leader (a tank), commented how Defenders are only good for healing. Thankfully some of the team quickly corrected him, but as a Force Field defender, it gets me down. This is not the first time I have heard such talk, with comments like "not enough defenders have heals these days" being something that sticks.

Today, I ran a sister psyche TF. We had a tank, several blasters and a peacebringer. We also had 2 defenders, both of us being Force Fields. With 1 spot remaining what does the leader ask for? A healer. We managed to get him to invite a scrapper instead after a quick talk from some of the team, but it feels like an uphill struggle. Although I did enjoy the fact with 2 FF's in the team, everyone was pretty much a tank.

Finally, in the last 3 days I have seen so many heros with the word "Healer" in their name. (All empaths). I've had Empaths proudly flashing a healer inscribed neon sign whilst looking for a team, only to rock the aura and do little else.

With every new wave of players or returning players, it seems we have to refight the same war. You. Don't. Need. A. Healer!

You don't need a tank either if controllers know what they are doing.

I know this seems like a general consensus on the forums, but believe me ingame is a different matter.

Oh well, rant over. :-)

i have two linked hypotheses for this:
1) People are dumb.
2) Stupidity about certain things tends to come and go in cycles.

No. You will never get rid of the stigma. It's not the "WoW" approach, either. It's -far- older.

Try D&D Older.

The "Holy Quartet" has been in play since the 70's. The Holy Trinity is what happens when you cut out the skill-system.

It's not going away. Campaigning about it to raise awareness won't help, either. You've got to educate on an individual level and then stick with the educated... Form long-term bonds rather than PuGs.

-Rachel-

Actually I've only seen it rarely.
Usually when it crops up the team assesses each others powersets and we always come to the conclusion that we really don't need a tank or healer. Usually the only thing we end up missing (if we miss anything at all) is more damage, but usually that just means mobs last a few seconds longer than normal.

And if they make a game where everyone has the ability to heal themselves AND the possibility of one AT being a dedicated healer, people will consider anything less to be *inefficient* and weak.

It is true that trollers can sub for tanks...but it depends very much on the powerset and skill of the players involved.

I had this happen the other day. I'm running around on my 18 (now 20) El/El tanker and I see a broadcast for Posi 1 looking for a Tank and a Healer. Despite misgivings over the "need a healer" mentality, I decided to join up, since I had nothing better to do, lol. Come to find out there's a Dark defender, a Rad controller, and the leader himself was a /TA controller. He spends about 10 minutes looking for a healer, broadcasting and probably spamming any defenders in /search asking if they were empaths. I was fine with this, since I needed to get new enhancers anyway. Once done, I was getting bored and I sent him a tell saying that with the shear amount of debuffs available, plus the fact that we had 2 blasters and one or two scrappers on the team, we'd be fine if we didn't have a dedicated healer. I also mentioned that the /rad troller would be able to toss out emergency heals here and there, as well. So he grabs a scrapper, and we roll. (Unfortunately, just before we roll, the Dark DCed and we never heard from him. We went anyway.)

We wipe in the first spawn. But that was due to poor planning and not everyone was ready. So we hosp, get back in, and proceed to steamroll through the TF. Only time we had another wipe was in the last mission when we went to go into the building, only to get hit with a massively huge ambush full of spectral demons and all their tohit debuffing annoyingness. We hosp/base, grabbing insps from where ever we can, and get back in. Was a very fun TF, and I think I managed to show another of the "need heals" types that heals aren't always necessary, and that 99% of the time, debuffs + high DPS is all you need. Loved it.

I'd argue that the Trinity applies even to CoH, but instead of just straight-up healing, we have more ways of damage-mitigation. The more support-oriented ATs can do anything from healing to buffing resistance/defense to debuffing damage and tohit. These are all arguably better than healing, too, considering that Empathy and Pain Domination are reaction sets that only get useful when things go wrong whereas other sets turns the whole team into invincible juggernauts while simultaneously turning their enemies into declawed kittens.

This is the only MMO I ever seriously played, so I can't really compare it to most other MMOs, but I get the impression that in other MMOs, buffs and debuffs aren't all that useful and healing is the only type of support, so when people come to CoH from other MMOs, they just don't know that here, buffing and debuffing is equal to or better than healing.

And as for needing a tank? Considering that buffs and debuffs are useful in this game, if ATs with support sets are on the ball, you won't even need a tank. In fact, I think you'd only "need" a tank if you only have Empathy defenders. If you got, say, two Force Field Defenders, you'll do fine if the rest is Blasters.

Hell, given this game, you'd do fine with just Blasters because then you got a dervish of death as a team, annihilating everything in a matter of moments.

Just play Bad Team Bingo.

Well, part of the desire for heals probably comes from the fact that for the first 15 levels heals are far more powerful mitigation than much of anything else available. Enemy damage is low and slow coming, buffs are still relatively weak, Controllers don't have the recharge worked down on the few AoEs they have, and melee AT armor barely sets them apart from squishies. The effectiveness of heals isn't entirely imagined nor necessarily carried over from WoW/D&D. IMO it's carried over from the objective experience of people who have played low levels and assumed the game at high levels works the same way.

I ran a Citadel TF (my most hated TF) with a PuG team that was forming as I happened by, wasnt from the Badge/TF Channel I usually run TFs with, and it was mostly an SG (4 from it) and 4 PuG.

It was a (poorly built) tank, not sure of the powersets, an emp, myself as Grav/Sonic and the rest a mix of scrappers and blasters.

I did a mistell meant for a PM, which said "Sonic makes Citahell easystreet" and it came out in team, instead of the sound of agreement, I was instead told the only reason this was easy was because of a good tank and the emp throwing out "awesome" heals. Furthermore told that I had the worst control set (Poor Grav is missunderstood) and a rubbish secondary as it had good powers, the steamrolling was just the emp and the tank. hmmmm

Now personally I do not find Healing Aura on auto "awesome heals" since thats all the emp had done, so part way through a mission I let my buffs drop, my Disruption Field and Sonic Dispersion detoggled and I hung back a bit... and watched the slaughter.

The tank faceplanted from one mob, not even an oversized multimob herd, and the rest of the team followed suite a moment or 2 later. This continued for a few rounds, I managed to keep myself alive through it mostly from good inspiraiton usage and knowing when to run.

The tank was quick to point out that the enemy had become alot harder, and I ofcourse pointed out that was not the case, we had simply become alot easier because I had stopped wasting my endurance on "useless" powers from my secondary.

A quick buff up again and we were on our way to victory. Still ddint get any praise, but the team had noticed the poor quality of the emp.

It makes me feel really happy when I know, despite wha the team thinks, the buff/debuff set im playing at the time is as big, or even bigger a contributing factor to their survival than an emp.

(not that I find emps to be useless, I have one, and he does a darned good job of keeping people on their feet and buffed up, But i would rather play a proactive buff set, than a reactive buff set.)

Quote:

Originally Posted by VoodooGirl [*]Watching out for the Spinning Disco Portal of D00M!*

I usually don't waste my breath trying to educate each and every team about the merits of one play style over another - But I do try to passively booster the self-esteem of defenders and controllers who are usually have their abilities overlooked. Every time someone compliments a tank or healer, I'll agree and throw out an additional "Totally. Not to mention Force Fields is a recipe for success!"

Just little things to try to keep morale up. If people start idly pointing out how useful things like /sonic and /force field is, chances are others will start to notice... Plus it's less aggravating than the constant, never-ending healer vs. defender seminars.

I guess people dont have faith in their powers and others

I've started to more broadcasts looking for "support" lately, instead of the usual "need healer" stuff. I am firmly in favor of this change.

(Of course, my Defender got invited to a PuG a few days ago because, apparently, her name sounded like it would belong a healer. That was fun.)

Technically my Stalker functions as a healer. Aid Other and Resuscitate are heals after all. Although I should probably respec into Stimulant, it's just that I've been in teams where my lame heal has helped.

Kind of ran into this yesterday, but I wouldn't call it "panic." We had 2 scrappers, 2 defenders and 3 blasters, and someone asked if we should wait for a tank. I just said with the bubbles and the rad debuffs, the blasters are essentially tankers.

Of course, the blasters do a BIT more damage.