The RPG Trinity : Healers / Supports
“Flint looked over the group from his position at the top of the hill, taking in the state of the battlefield and the condition of his allies. Closing his eyes, he reached out with his mind asking his god once again for the gifts he had been given, and opened them again to watch the healing light flow from his hands towards Toya at the front, surrounded by countless ghouls. It wrapped around her body, knitting together wounds sustained from the creatures, stopping the bleeding and warming the flesh as it reformed into muscle. Lady Toya turned towards him, just enough time for a smile and curt nod of the head, before spinning and separating head from body of the ghoul straight in front of her. It wasn’t the first time he had healed her wounds together, and it likely wouldn’t even be the last time he had to do it today.”
The role of the support or healer (I am likely going to refer to this as healer going forward for the sake of brevity, but assume they are interchangeable in this sense) is key and essential in most groups, but can be one of the most undervalued and overlooked. As a healer, there are typically 3 main tasks you will be expected to carry out, and probably in this order (the bottom two could be interchangeable depending on the situation).
Keeping everyone alive - Typically the main task, and the one that takes up the majority of your time, when the health pools and health bars drop the healer is responsible for topping them back up again or in some cases stopping the health bars from dropping in the first place. The healing can be measured using a statistic called HPS (Healing Per Second) which, similar to DPS, is the raw amount of healing the healer can output in a set period of time (typically a second).
Removing debilitating effects - Everyone may be healthy, but there are other things out there that can inhibit the party from completing their goals. Debuffs are negative effects, which can include causing the party to do less damage, take more damage from enemies, not be able to cast or possibly slow movement around the battlefield. Typically healers have the ability to remove these effects, through cleansing or de-cursing allies, which has no impact on their main metric (HPS) but does significantly improve group effectiveness.
CC and Buffs - Everyone is healthy, everyone is at full capacity, now the supporting side of the healing role comes into play. In the same way all of those Debuffs can be applied to your allies, you can apply the opposite and buff allies with increased speed, more damage or extra stats to help them do their job better. Also, those debuffs can potentially be applied to enemies (known as CC or Crowd Control). Wanting to stop that group from appearing through the corridor, drop a web of sticky glue. Wanting to increase your tanks ability to get to the front line, give them super speed or the ability to jump. Again, a task that doesn’t have the most obvious outputs but will be a huge factor between success and failure.
So the main job of a healer is to heal, who would have thought it. But that healing doesn’t come in the same way, shape and size for all healers, with the two types of differentiation being in the way the healers target their allies and the way in which that healing hits the health of the allies it’s targeted at. First, let's look at 3 different types of targeting a healer can do:
Single Target Healing : Pick a target and focus all of your energy into healing that target. This is normally a highly efficient type of healing, with large heals and big numbers, but it comes with the downsides that if multiple people are taking damage then you need to switch between targets, which can be hard if they are taking that damage at the same time.
Group Healing : The ability to heal multiple targets at the same time, in the form of an aura, picking multiple targets, or just everyone within range. The healing is typically smaller in pure numbers than a single target heal, and will normally cost a lot more in terms of mana, energy or resources compared to healing everyone individually, however it allows the healing to happen simultaneously saving time in a difficult situation.
Enabling Self Healing : This format is more about allowing others to make their own decisions, freeing you up to concentrate on some of the more pressing matters in the encounter. This can be through handing out consumable items before the fight, such as potions, bandages or health packs, or it can be through setting up zones or pick-ups that others can spend their action / time self healing rather than eating up your precious time. Self healing is normally an additional type of healing rather than a primary source of healing, just because of the inherent cost to the individual being healed.
Similar to the multiple forms of tanking, there is more than one way to approach the problem of keeping all those health bars and hit points topped up as the combat ensues. Whilst it is never as black and white as popping everything into little boxes, with some types of healing spread across multiple boxes and other forms being in a box all of their own, I have attempted to boil it down into 3 rough types:
Healing Bursts : This is all about big chunks of healing that typically take place at the end of a cast or action. Cast a healing spell, and the health bar of your target(s) goes up. Drink a potion, your hit points go up. This is useful after big chunks of damage or to get fighters back up and on their feet quickly, but has the downside of “wasted” healing if the amount of healing is greater than the missing health of the target, as well as locking you into a cycle of constantly having to use time and actions to heal.
HOT’s : Healing over Time (HOT) is the opposite of DOTs from damage. Apply a bandage or cast a spell, and healing is dolled out in smaller chunks or increments over time. This tends to have two main advantages, the first being you can “set and forget” applying a small heal to those who need it and letting the heal take care of them whilst you focus on healing other priority targets, addressing other tasks such as removing effects or just running away from the scary orc with the axe. The other is it can reduce the amount of wasted healing or “over heal” coming from the biggest and largest of the heals, instead spreading that out over time to match with some of the damage or tanking profiles discussed in the previous posts. Where HOTs can struggle however is in periods of large chunking damage, as they may not have the instant healing needed to get someone back up and stable again.
Shielding : Not necessarily pure healing in the traditional sense, shielding keeps health bars topped up not by restoring health, but by stopping them from going down in the first place. A much more preventative form of healing, shields are typically combined with either Burst or HOT healing as a tool in the healer’s kit rather than the only form keeping the tanks alive in the Trinity. Depending on the time, they have the advantage (similar to HOTs) of being “set and forget”, and can help to mitigate some of the weaknesses of HOTs when it comes to burst type damage profiles, but if you are only relying on shielding then once the shield goes down what picks the target back up again?
So we have broken down what a healer does, the way they can do it and who they can do it to, hopefully giving you a high level view of the complexities behind what at first can seem like a simple task. If it sounds appealing or you know your group may need a healer going forward, I can see three traits that separate the good healers from the great healers.
Knowing when to let someone die : OK, maybe not necessarily die, but knowing who is the right person to save in a situation can be key in ensuring that everyone makes it through. Imagine a situation where you have 1 tank and 3 damage dealers, and all are taking damage and are likely to die if you don’t heal them - who should you focus on the most? In the most common situations, the answer is normally the tank. If you lose a damage dealer, you may kill the monster a little slower but you will kill it, whereas if you lose a tank there is a high chance the enemy now just rips through your squishy damage dealers without a second thought. Sometimes as a healer, it’s about knowing where to prioritize and focus your energies more than it’s about being able to keep everyone alive all of the time.
Keeping Calm under pressure : Healing is stressful, probably the most stressful role within the trinity a vast majority of the time, as you quite often have the power of who lives and who dies within your hands. That tends to mean that great healers are the ones that when everything is going wrong, when people are taking big chunks of damage everywhere and there are monsters in your face, they know where to focus their healing and how to keep a calm head when everyone around them is panicking.
Practicing Restraint & Knowing your Limits : This is very much dependent on experience with the system and players you work with. Understanding how much damage someone can take, if they can heal themselves or manage a situation without your input, it can allow for great healers to save encounters and get their groups through when others would have run out of spells, potions or energy. Efficiency is about healing the right people for the right amounts, avoiding over healing and wasted efforts, to ensure everyone gets to the end rather than just a few, or no one at all.
Healing is for me the perfect example of the swan on the water - serene and simple above the surface, where if everything is going well and people are doing their jobs no-one really notices and every one ticks along happy and healthy. Under the surface however, there is a maelstrom of decision making, awareness, support, and sometimes stress, that only comes to the surface when something doesn't go according to the plan.
That brings us to the end of this mini series exploring the RPG Trinity of Tank, Healer and DPS. Hopefully that helps define and explain some of the types of jobs and tasks each one of the key roles plays, why they are important and how if you want to play one of them you can potentially look to improve and help your party succeed. Let me know down below if that was useful, and if there are any more topics you want me to deep dive into - I could talk about this kind of stuff all day!
