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I'm poking at FF14 again and, as a very longtime MMO healer player, I keep thinking about... the fundamental friction/contradiction of support roles in these games.

That fundamental contradiction being simply; MMOs have two "modes" of operation; solo play and group play. In a group context, a support character (often tanks or healers, but sometimes other kinds) is often vital, maybe even impossible to live without, with encounters explicitly designed around their inclusion. In a solo context, a support character is often full of kit that is completely useless to them and is forced to engage in a gameplay style that bears little to no resemblance to what they do in group play. This leads to a lot of problems, but two in particular are the biggest:

  1. Unviable solo characters who simply can't solo anything
  2. A total lack of tutorialization/learning-curve for group play expectations (because most games start off with heavy solo play and focus primarily on that behaviour.)

So it's got me thinking; how have various games attempted to solve this problem? I'm going to list off a few:

No Solution, aka Too Bad, Fucker

Examples: Everquest, Ragnarok Online, WoW (partial), City of Heroes (partial), Maplestory (partial), TERA (partial)

Ah, the classic of older games that just assumed everyone would want to group up. Pretty much any MMO released before 2010 has been guilty of this at some time, in differing degrees of extremity. Trying to play certain classes solo in vanilla EQ or RO is basically an exercise in futility, and when it works it can require some very silly shenanigans (ask me about level capping a priest in RO). More recent (or recently updated) games tend to balance combat such that solo play is technically viable for every class, but merely miserable for support characters.

This, obviously, falls really deeply into both of the cited problems above - You either can't play solo at all or solo play bears no resemblance to group play. This is, arguably, THE original state of things when 'the triad' was invented and what most of the other entries on this list are trying to fix.

I wonder, more than anything, if this is a symptom, though, rather than a cause - specifically a symptom of the ways in which MMOs started out way more interested in freeform group play - why would you NOT play with others in this online game?? - and transitioned, as they became more linear, more themeparky, more about tightly balanced encounters - into something that was enough of its own genre that people were more interested in the gameplay experience than the existence of other people. The genre's developed in such weird directions over time and I still wonder what it'd look like to see a more freeform UO-y mmo in the modern day.

Everyone's a DPS

Examples: Guild Wars 2, PSO2, Destiny 2
The simple solution to teaching players multiple modes of play is to not have multiple modes of play - this is kind of the MMO equivalent of playing Left 4 Dead with your friends. You're all shooting at stuff but you're not really interacting with each other.

It definitely seems like this design style works for a lot of people, and handily solves problem 2 above - you're always learning what you're always going to be using! And I think it really successfully supports casual pickup group play in games like destiny - you'll never have to worry about whether anyone else is pulling their weight - but as a longtime healer player it feels kind of isolated compared to traditional group play; the interplay of "oh, you're in trouble, I'll help you out" is missing. It's definitely one of the reasons I didn't stick with GW2 once I hit the level cap.

I also think this causes some difficulties in introducing challenge - since "combat coordination" is an axis of difficulty that's been completely removed, generally speaking the challenges start creeping into places that entirely don't exist during normal play, like "everyone has to know to flick 3 different switches at once" - a common criticism I've heard of Destiny 2's raid content.

Trivial Solo Play

Examples: FF14, Guild Wars 2 (arguable)
The simplest solution to problem 1, of course, is to just throw challenge out the window and say "hey! everyone's welcome!" This works very straightforwardly - and I suspect it saves world designers a LOT of agony - but it definitely comes with the trade-off of making solo content feel kind of 'fake'. This is okay if you can provide really intense multiplayer fights as your climaxes (as both the games listed do) but there's something about this as a solution to me that feels... incomplete, or like giving up. Or acknowledging the degree to which world fights in MMOs are there for flavour, or filler. Idk! These are hard problems.

Role Toggle

Examples: WoW (partial), FF14, The Secret World
Need your players to be a DPS to do content? Easy! just let them be a DPS whenever they want! A targeted solution for problem 1 that runs the risk of exacerbating problem 2.

WoW does this in a more literal way than the other two games listed here, by having these be occasional in-class options; tank stances for melee classes that can DPS, for examples, or druids that can transform into different creatures to pick their style of play.
The other two simply let you have multiple classes, or specs, or etc - essentially you're never locked into a single style of play for leveling.

All these kind of fall into the same general risk, though, which is that if you're not leveling with an archetype you're not likely to know how to play it when the time comes. FF14 runs a little less risk of this than other games because you only get xp for a class when you're playing as it, but even then, I've seen people speed level healers/tanks and then faceplant. Is "just don't perform your role most of the time" really a viable solution for leveling? Hmm.

NPC party members

Examples: SWTOR, FF14(eventually), Everquest (eventually), Guild Wars 1 (eventually)
I think SWtor is the only game on this list that shipped with this the ability to play with a party of NPCs. All the rest had to think about it for a few years (or a decade, for Everquest). I suspect a lot of MMO designers view this as somewhat of an admission of failure; that people don't want to engage with the "M"s in MMO. But I'll give it this; it does a good job of letting support players do their damn job and learn it in a pressure-free environment. I think the biggest risk of this solution is if it becomes too successful and starts depleting the pool of players who would otherwise be seeking out group content with other real humans - but keeping those stocked can be hard anyway, and usually necessitates other countermeasures, like FF14's duty roulettes, which give endgame players rewards for rerunning dungeons with newbies.

Of the solutions on this list, I think this is definitely the cleanest I've seen.

Enforced Party

Examples: Guild Wars 1, Warframe (mostly)

Want to solve mode-switching problems with solo play? Easy! Delete solo play.

GW1's the only game I'm aware of that does this entirely (Warframe seems like it leans on it but added some solo areas eventually?), mandating that literally all gameplay in the entire game be party play from the start. It definitely solves all the issues mentioned handily, but I do think it also comes with a tradeoff in intensity; never getting time to yourself makes for a very high energy game that can be exhausting to play in long bursts. It also kind of robs away one of the core elements of fantasy MMOs (at least to me), which is the act of just wandering around the wilderness meeting people because it's fun to inhabit a space - squad mission design understandably trends very mission-y and focused (herding cats et al) and there isn't much room for 'sploring, or meeting other players casually.

I'd say "still, it worked!" but given how hyperaggressively GW2 pivoted away from this style - previously their calling card! - I wonder if they felt that it didn't.

Roles aren't a thing

Examples: Ultima Online
I'd joke that this is the opt-out, but in a way every other game on this list is the opt-in.

I'm sure there are other examples, but of the ones I've played, UO is the only one that so thoroughly defies this concept that I'm not even sure you could specify anything as "support" or "healing" or "DPS" in that game, let alone other vaguer terms. A game fundamentally balanced around roleplaying in the classical sense of the word, UO's skillsets - examples include Peacemaking, Spirit Speak, Begging, and Cartography - often have zero interest in combat utility at all, and mix and match concepts extremely heavily in a way that often defies slotting into any archetype. A character in UO certainly can make a 'build' but it's deeply unlikely to look like anything normal unless the player in question is minmaxing for the super hard fights that were added way, way later in expansions.

In this sense, UO kind of defies the entire concept we're considering: instances, "story", etc aren't really a thing. You can go visit a dungeon with friends and kill stuff, or go solo and hope to run into other people. Maybe that'll change your play somewhat and maybe it won't, but it's unlikely the developers have particularly concrete expectations for what that looks like - the tight, almost perscriptive balance of the modern theme park MMO is absent. Dungeons are just another place you can be, if you want.

Wow, this post got REALLY long. Oops.

Uh, anyway, before I wrap up I'd like to ramble slightly about some elements in this space that I feel would get me, as a healer, excited about an MMO.

Living the Fantasy

So to me part of being a healer or a tank etc is a desire of wanting to help people out, and I keep thinking about how little opportunity you get to do that in the world on a moment to moment basis in MMOs. In my fantasy world I would love to dash about the battlefield, healing the injured, ressurecting downed people, etc. I can imagine tanks would love the feeling of swooping in at the last second when someone else is in danger. I'd love these to be a core element of my class, too, viable means of progression.

The problem, of course, is that this requires a kind of big investment in facilitating that kind of play.

  • Meaningful and frequent opportunities to heal NPCs and Players (in the case of players, this likely also means putting them in real danger, which contradicts with some of the above principles other MMOs do)
  • Those opportunities need to award something, or else they're not viable as a regular activity. This always becomes a problem when it intersects with other players, who love to break things, but also I think many designers are very reluctant to have their core gameplay not involve killing things and that presents a real blocker.

When I think about this, I'd love to see something that takes inspiration from Fantasy Life, a game that makes logging as exciting as combat. In FL, there are rare trees that have weak points you have to seek out, regenerating health, even other attributes - to log a tree is to engage in a sort of "combat" that is definitively logging and yet as complex in design as any game's combat system. I would love to see this idea applied to support archetypes; a wide-scale fight to heal a dying elder tree as corruption sinks into its roots, a
group of tanks who herd giant goats by wrestling them. I recognize even as I say these things that what I'm asking for is a game that looks nothing like a modern MMO and is probably way more expensive to develop because it exists in that unexplored space - I'm sure that, in the end, it's far easier to simply have monsters to beat on - but this is what I think of when I think of a game that truly loves its support classes.

So that's my ramble!!! I meant this to be like a 2 paragraph post but I just kept typing and typing and this is what we have ended up with. May you all be blessed for reading this far into my hot takes. Goodnight


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in reply to @MOOMANiBE's post:

One cool thing that stuck with me during my original time with Final Fantasy XI was having random healers or paladins stick to me for a bit as I levelled my low level character, just so they could either work on the needed spell skills, or to just help someone out early, because it was easy to buff random people.

It was nice.

Older XI fell into the "Group up assholes" beyond the first two zones around each city, but now you can easily get NPCs to party with and do a bunch of stuff with, at least the bit I dipped back into. It was nice to be able to skillchain stuff in solo play, and actually be able to use the Thief's positional attacks in a fight.

Older XI is gone, but newer XI is entirely the "NPC party members" flavor! It's actually really awesome, and kinda better than it is in XIV, if I'm being honest. The NPCs take damage, perform weapon skills/skill chains/magic bursts, and they can fail mechanics outside of cute flavor, so it's not just entirely free versions of all content

Actually I want to expand on this--there's ALSO a lot of "roles are fake" anyway. Like, not entirely, mages are squishy, but then "tanks" can actually have a few meanings entirely dependent on the content.

niceRO has been pretty fun even as a low population low rates server since it's the first time ive ever really done group play in ragnarok. grouping up to do out of depth stuff as a bunch of swordsmen and acolytes was way more fun than i expected but i remember back when i played maple and other servers people were generally pretty hostile to grouping up, i think since exp would be split so it would be "less efficient" or whatever, kind of a shame. mmos are such an interesting genre despite being so kinda fucked up lol

One part of the design space that I haven't seen explored much (although I'm not extensively travelled in this space) is having a support who's a Pet Class. Pet Classes are more traditionally DPS, rather than tank or heal.

What I'm imagining is that in solo play the character would perform the Support role for your pet who would have a complimentary function. Tank/dps for a healer character, or DPS for a tank. I'm not sure exactly what the pet does in group play, but this could help align solo & group playstyles.

Like one thing I noticed in WoW is that players of the pet classes (warlock and hunter) tended to have a higher average baseline for knowing how to manage their agro in a party setting. Which makes sense because their solo play experience usually involved working with their pet as a tank, and managing their agro. And agro is the one part of a DPS role where there is misalignment between the party and solo experiences.

This is getting closer to "NCP party" territory, but I think could more easily be bolted on to an existing game. If they have pet classes, which I guess not all games do.

Also I'm a fan of pet classes in general so maybe this is just my bias.

Mostly on the mark, but as a... really early supporter/player for Warframe, I gotta pick this one out on principle-

Warframe seems like it leans on it but added some solo areas eventually?

You've ALWAYS been able to run pretty much all† content solo (and, as Obspogon points out, it even fully pauses the game (in non-open-world areas) if you open the escape menu whilst playing solo). It's definitely not an optimal route, as you do run into the same kinds of "solo support" issues if you pick support-oriented frames for solo play, doubly so if you run certain mission types, and triply if you're trying to do the really high end content. But for the low to mid end casual stuff? It has always been moderately viable to run solo, albeit you'll probably want to a) know your shit, and b) have good gear put together.

†There were some 8P-mandatory raids a long while back, but they got retired entirely due to balance/maintenance issues IIRC. Everything else just gets easier (and generally speaking more rewarding in terms of XP/loot drops, due to higher enemy counts) with more people.

I've been playing GW2 off and on since season 1. I mainly come back for the main story questlines, main Elementalist, and I need to say I often desperately wish that soloing in GW2 was trivial.

In City of Heroes, Defender is my least played AT, but if you decide to go with one of the powersets that can only buff allies and not yourself, I'd assume you know what you're intending to do. As a side note, CoH has the awesome distinction of being the only game where healing is the least effective way to keep teammates alive. One of the many reasons I wish CoH had become the default for MMO design instead of WoW it that it's the only game to do support/buff/debuff correctly. After you've played CoH, why would you settle for 'support' classes who let their teammates take damage?

Warframe's solo toggle has already been mentioned, and come to think of it, I'm pretty sure its storyline missions can't be played in a group.

But I also have to admit that I'm one of those players who goes "Why the hell are you in a multiplayer game if you want to play solo?"

I thought GW1 always had NPCs in mission lobbies you could add to form a party? Little Thorn and what not. Their AI wasn't good though... so it's fair to say that playing that way didn't become truly viable until much later.

It's possible they "always" had it in the sense that they made it in by 1.0 - I don't recall entirely - but I started playing GW1 wayyy earlier than that and a lot of my playtime was pre npc

I always had the opposite experience in GW2, but I think that's because I played a couple classes that actually did have good heals; I did end up directly coordinating with other players, planted healing turrets at exactly the right moment to turn the tide, etc. But the fact this is down to a couple specific examples and not the whole game is definitely a sign that my experience there wasn't really most peoples'.

this is particularly interesting to me because I remember reading a bunch of blog posts that allowing players to do this kind of thing was extremely antithetical to their design principles at the time; it was all self-sufficiency all the time.

I definitely didn't get to basically do anything interactive with anyone as a thief tho I'll say that

Yeah, I remember that, so I was surprised I ended up having quite a few support-ey options. I think it just reflects the classes I'd oriented towards; I definitely didn't have those options when playing thief.

An MMO that slipped under the radar on this, and... I think ends up mostly in the Role Toggle camp, is RIFT. I always like mentioning it because their role system has both "Healer" and "Support" as separate things, with the latter often trying to do a little of everything dependent on what subclass you're playing.

is it the use Turn Undead on Anubis's priest to max level gameplay?

I think FFXIV also does something with the solo duties, not often in any case, where you step in another role to rp a character fight I remember EW having one where you are healing rather than hitting things with a stick for a change tho I do not remember other instances of that for solo dutys in that game just that one

it also makes me think of how often does resing people in a random fields happens, that game has an achievement for doing that many times but usually if you are dying in an mmo in the wilds you just insta click that respawn button, WoW at least (If i remember correctly) makes you insta spawn back on your corpse if you are ressurected after you pressed the respawn button doing the spirit runback, Ragnarok Online had a catalyst tax from the priest to res with a blue gem making it cost money albeit not much lmao

Great post. I'm gonna be a bit nitpicky here though and say that in FFXIV you can level jobs you don't intend on playing by switching to a different job while in PVP, since experience from PVP duties goes to whatever you queued as.

i dont feel like the "(eventually)" is fair for GW1 because it did ship with predefined npc henchmen and i completely played through the story with those. some missions are a little harder but it just means you need to change your own build to fit the mission.

customizable npc "heroes" did come much later but they also only became arguably necessary in those story expansions modes

Elder Scrolls Online largely fits into “Role Toggle” in the best way. The many mandatory multiplayer dungeons and public dungeons that encourage co-op are so plentiful & heavy on rewards, and paired with excellent matchmaking. A major criticism of ESO is how solo is encouraged and the faceplant is still a problem because of this but so is the utility of support classes specific abilities. Healers and tanks have many options to bolster themselves in solo as a sort of private lesson before you jump into multiplayer. That seamlessness of the public spaces is also noticeable when a unpartied tank draws attack or a rogue healer douses you in buffs.

The two modes of play are distinct while the biggest difference is simply being able to read the screen in a party, something solo can better tutorialize.

This thought has been haunting me ever since my EQ years. I don't know how to rectify it in a way that would work in a modern context yet I still miss it terribly. In early era EQ it was generally considered that the necessary 'trinity' of any party was a tank, a healer, and control -- damage dealers were considered fungible. Soloing in that game was fraught, even for the handful of classes that could manage it. Early era FFXI followed in this mold very closely. I spent most of my time in EQ as an Enchanter and have been chasing that high ever since.

The non-healer support is the archetype I probably had the most fun ever playing, but it is so hard to make it exist in the modern world of instanced content and queues and everything else. I freely admit I could probably never go back and play a game that demanded as much as EQ did at the time, so nostalgia is absolutely doing some damage here.

But as far back as playing old QWTF, in our organized games I was always playing a strong dedicated support position, and that has carried through. It's just in my bones somewhere. The only real mode of expression for that these days though is the 'healer' in most games, if it exists at all in any meaningful way.

This is definitely a large part of the reason I still dip into League now and again, it's fairly low commitment, and I can still get a piece of that in a variety of ways as a support queue. It's not a real replacement in the MMO context by any measure, I don't get to have that feeling of embodying it, and all of the other social bits of MMOs that I quite enjoy, but at least it scratches the itch a couple times a year.