That being said, PvE Healing in World of Warcraft is boring as hell. Why? Beacuse it’s just making the bars go up. To be more correct, PvE Healing sucks… hell, for the sake of screwing my point over, PvE sucks as a whole.

Ok, so that being said… can you make supporting abilities more interesting (although healing’s pretty interesting as it is, better then being a DPS bot), possibly better then straight healing at keeping people alive (that whole “Ounce of Prevention, Pound of Cure” thing doesn’t really apply in MMOs). Still, you’re treading on the ground of the TBCs, so that way indeed lies madness.

Honestly, healing in PvP is slightly more interesting, although it really depends on communication (i.e. Teamspeak) and telling the person soaking up the damage to not be retarded. It really comes down to teamwork and not really based on the mechanics. The whole responsibility for keeping people alive is the attraction, and if you actually care about the people you’re working with, that helps… a lot.

Still, if you look at an example of a game without healers like RFO… well RFO’s problem is that Consumables > player abilities in terms of keeping people alive, so that’s kinda fucked up. Rather similar to the debate over Health Pills being nearly as strong as Patcher skills (in the hands of a mediocore player) at keeping someone up. It’s outsourcing in games! (Although it stems back to D&D healing potions being called “Clerics in a Bottle”.)

Don’t know, I’ll have to think over this one, but I’m not sure how you work on making “support” a better “supporter” then a straight healer (just look at CoH with groups really asking for “Empathy” over dedicated Defenders in other areas like CC or buffs) without making the proper healer completely worthless. I think some CU SWG comparisons between Combat Medic and Doctor may be useful here (I’ll have to look the math up again later today).

• Oblivion,
• Kyo,
• and RF Online.

The first being at fault because it fucking rocks (but under closer examination is flawed), the second because she fucking rocks, and the last because it fucking blows but Kyo wanted to play it so (kidding mind you).

After we got Xfire In-Game working, so as to get around the game’s asstastic chat filter and disabled Windowed mode. We were able to like… talk. For an example of the chat filter: if a long, well thought out message contained the words, “as such” the entire message would get nuked because the chat filter sees “as s…” as “ASS” so it kills it. Also, at least on her machine, RFO + Teamspeak = me cutting up, so good thing Xfire In-Game works.

I’m still downloading the client off of FilePlanet but log sorta goes like:

[01:56] alynna: this is alot like RO
[01:56] Cal: but 3D
[01:57] alynna: RO was 3d, with sprites.
[01:58] Cal: ok then: 3D in the modern way, not in the FFV way
[01:59] Cal: you know… you starved the MxO community from very long and dry tree guides? how do you sleep at night?
[01:59] alynna: lol

The pot popping (say that three times fast (although in your defense, I can hardly say it once slowly)!) is similar to RO, so I can sort of see where she doesn’t find it quite as “offensive” as I do.

Then again… I’ve been reading too much F13, The Cesspit, with a bit of Lum on the side so… you can forgive me for being waaaaaaay too cynical about things.

Still, I’ve “learned” a lot from reading through their archives, most of which makes my feeble attempts at categorizing the genre look, well, to put in Skaald’s words, “You did pretty good… for a kindergartner.” I was intending to write about it (since I’ve been reading a lot of over the weekend) but, reference the above three as to why I haven’t.

Still, as something useful, I cleaned up the “pages” so as to look less stupid and spruced up the links section (I can’t believe I used the word “spruce”…).

Finally…