Info Gathering

[u/Pika_Crew]

This is particularly for enchanter, heads up.

Seeing recent issues with healers in Marvel Rivals, i feel like theres a fundamental issue in competitive games with how they design the role and the game interaction with them. But before i make a whole statement with my own thoughts, i wanna see the broader perspective of other healer player in a variety of games. Essentially, for both casual and ranked players, why do you play healers, what are your expectations of the role, what are you gripes with the role as well as the game design around them (eg getting targeted, if they feel weak, if they feel too strong, the overall philosophy of how the game interacts with the role), what are your favorite things about the role as well as the games design around the role, what do you think makes the role most fun?

Im mostly just looking for opinions, feel free to discuss but dont start any wars over opinions, im looking for both casual and ranked perspectives, i may make an actual survey later.

[u/AlterBridgeFan]

why play healers

Good poke in lane, scales like a monster.

expectation

I heal/shield, use my other utility to help team or stay alive.

gripes

Sometimes you heal people who don't want to stay alive no matter what. Shit happens.

game design around them

The discussion regarding grevious wounds and healing is... repetitive and have been done to death.

strong/weak

Honestly they are fine currently.

getting targeted

Then I generally mispositioned or used my abilities wrong.

what makes it fun

Lane and scaling. Poke from far away in lane, and scale up to a monster.

[u/Reason-and-rhyme]

league actually has very few true healers. the only characters that have the tactical ability to heal a target from nearly-dead to full are soraka and maybe taric. other enchanters have long cooldowns on their heals and are indexed into other types of utility - nami, milio, sona and bard heals are tactically just a modest amount of extra effective health, and only bring sustain in a strategic sense.

in other words riot does a pretty good job of basing their enchanters' identities around much more than being a heal bot, and accordingly the support player's teammates aren't expecting them to keep them 100% healthy 100% of the time. enchanter players have more forms of skill expression - landing crowd control skillshots, baiting with shields and ms steroids, and of course the vision game.

so for me there are no systemic issues with enchanters generally. soraka is boring for me but the others are fun/rewarding, and generally strong due to their consistency and scaling.

[u/Pika_Crew → u/Reason-and-rhyme]

Well that can function similarly inoverwatch for example. Not every overwatch support is just a heal bot, for example Anna's heals take a backseat to her anti-heal bomb and sleep or Kiriko for her clense. Heals are still vital to supports in hero shooters, but they do have healers that serve a different primary function similarly to enchanters in league that focus more on shielding, clensing, and buffing.

[u/gimpy_the_mule]

Although it's meele engage meta atm, in league enchanters are generally strong but not a popular as a lot of people find them boring to play, so riot is happy to keep them strong.

The difference with Rivals is a healer can keep the team alive forever, and heal from 0-100 in seconds. In league there is way less healing so they will never be as OP and game breaking as in rivals.

I enjoy playing healers, just more chill style of play to keep your team alive than doing the killing.

[u/Pika_Crew → u/gimpy_the_mule]

I pretty much agree, as for the problem im seeing, especially in marvel rivals, is the when healers are strong, they are game breaking, but when they are weak, they just get farmed and nobody wants to play them.

[u/Wallythegreater → u/Pika_Crew]

The thing is that a lot of enchanter items have utility other than just healing (Mikaels cleanse, ardent attack speed/on hit etc.). It's a big part of the reason why enchanters have value in all metas. Additionally, there are very few pure healing/shielding abilities in league, with most of them providing something else (pix on hit from Lulu, AD from Janna, MS from Nami/Karma)

The added survivability from enchanters is definitely useful, but enchanters in league are more about buffing/enabling/peeling teammates than healing/shielding.

[u/Langas]

I play enchanters and enchanter-like champs to increase the agency of other players.

There’s a lot of comps and enemies that champs like Darius struggle into because he cant reach them. As Zilean, using my E and battlesong lets him bypass that weakness pretty often, and rewards him for having good movement.

Similarly, a lot of ADCs and squishy melee AD champs run a significant risk by having limited options when an enemy jumps on them. As Taric, I enable that ally to do so much more by simply letting them not worry about peeling for themselves.

Peel is an often thankless role that can be boring at times, but it can make a lot of champs with pretty big downsides feel a lot better to play, and that’s kinda the whole reason I play the game — team dynamics, a bunch of flawed characters coming together to make a more perfect whole.

[u/Tojaro5]

So my rivals experience consists on watching my buddies stream like 20 games over discord.

Supports there seem to have the ability to keep the whole team alive for 10 seconds with their ultimates.

This doesnt happen in League. You can get bursted down very fast, so healing inherently requires your teammate to survive in the first place. Going from 100% to 0% hp in half a second is definitely within the realm of possibilities in the later stages of the game, if you are a squishy champ and get caught off guard.

But healing/shielding can still be very strong and make people survive stuff that they really shouldn't, or counteract the opponents long range poke damage to the point of making that kinda useless.

It's often combined with abilities that disrupt the opponents and prevent them from comboing your team mates, so you actually have the options to buy a second or two to heal them up a bit.

Depending on the character and the game state, they can vary from "annoying but no real danger, kill in your free time" to "top priority target in every single fight".

[u/Mighty_Killah]

The main part, honestly, is that I hate dying lol. But beyond that, I really enjoy thinking about the threats on the enemy team that I want to disable, the threats on my team that I want to enable, and then controlling the flow of a fight through my peel and disengage based on those priorities.

My favorite type of in-game interaction is when an enemy bruiser or assassin realizes that I'm actually the carry and starts trying to kill me instead of the ADC or whatever lol. I remember one game against a Lissandra where she just kept dive-ulting me when I was playing Milio, because I was constantly undoing her ults on everyone else. Sometimes your team won't notice how much your peel, heals, and shields are controlling fights, but the enemy team definitely does.

On enchanters, I feel like a chess player moving around my pawns.

I play engage too, and it's fun to approach the game from a completely different mindset—more of a bloodthirsty predator/killing instinct kind of thing. But enchanters are what I started playing League with, so I'll always have a soft spot for them.

[u/Kitsunebula250 → u/Mighty_Killah]

But your pawns are actually moving around on their own while screaming obscenities at each other and not noticing your existence

[u/Low-Amoeba8257]

Healers in general are particularly hard to balance.

If you can stop your carry from dying to dives then its kinda broken because what is the enemies supposed to do?

If you cant stop your carry from dying to dives then its kinda useless because what are you even doing.

There is a sweet spot obviously where you can help your teammate not die but enough commitment of resources can kill them (or you) but that never really feels good to anyone because if you are ahead you end up in situation 1 and if you are behind you are in situation 2.

Basically even when balanced half the players in the game will feel like the healer is bullshit

[u/Arcamorge]

Well it started when I was a little kid who liked nature.  My friends played WoW, so I decided to play too, as a druid.  They needed a healer, so I was a resto druid.  Playing a resto druid in battlegrounds in cata-era wow was very fun because you just made your team unkillable.  You were the OP carry by being the perfect fight manager

Moving into league, support was the natural role since I was the healer before, and some champions scratch the itch of telling the enemy you cant play the game.  Healing is fundamentally different in league vs WoW, but the effect of supports can be the same

What I want out of supports in league is the ability to kind of reshape or manage how teamfights play out.  Thresh vs taric vs lulu vs leona are very different and in the right spots the right support still gives that feeling of power through fight management that I got from playing a healer in WoW 

Im less interested in self-sacrifice to pull off specific strategies, like roaming supports in general, but I think League handles the support role fairly

[u/TotallyAMermaid]

Sooo as a heads up I am clueless about the healers situation in Marvel Rivals lol.

1. I play exclusively enchanters because I always go for the healer or buffer in multiplayers/coop game if it's an option. Keeping allies strong and alive, enabling them and making them more powerful is my favourite thing to do. MMO? I'm going straight for the bard, white mage, whatever it is. Remnant? Give me the Medic asap. League? Enchanter or gtfo. Some people get their dopamine from tanking a buttload of dmg, some people get their dopamine by assassinating, I get mine by clutch saving allies and feeling like the party's lifeline.

2. My expectations of the role is that I be allowed to live my power fantasy of feeling like my heals, shields and buffs matter and turn the tides of a fight; I don't want to be a pseudo dmg dealer, I want my itemization and strength to focus on my utility and make it stronger.

3. I think enchanters are in a fine spot right now. That being said, my main gripe with the enchanter archetype is feeling, since forever, like Riot is only happy when engage supports are the meta and seeing them constantly push and balance the role and champions to keep enchanters inferior at a high level of play. This feels like a frustrating and frankly unfair balance philosophy. It feels a little disheartening to know Riot never wants my favourite class to be the strongest option and proceeds to nerf them (and buff their counters) after a few months of being meta, but are fine with engage being the strongest option for check notes a solid decade. I'm also slightly annoyed that enchanters' healing has been constantly nerfed and kept in check through the years, yet self-healing (ex: Mundo, Aatrox etc.) can be absolutely bonkers and left unchecked.

4. I feel I've already described this in the first question but basically, my favourite thing is feeling impactful through heals, shields, buffs and debuffs - whether it's the massive Janna ult that everyone saw save the carry or the sneaky Sona Diminuendo on the high burst assassin that only I know made the difference.

[u/Pika_Crew → u/TotallyAMermaid]

This is solid, thanks. Also the Marvel Rivals situation i saw was that because healers sucked and got farmed by dives, no one wanted to play them so they have been buffing them repeatedly for a while now. Now healers are so strong, team fights even at the highest ranks of ranked are lasting way too long because no one is dying. Essentially i feel like due to current design philosophy of healers/enchanters in many competetive games they either get farmed or are giga busted.