One way to breathe a new life into multiplayer shooters could be removing any guns from healers.
Make them potent, but vulnerable!
Why is it important:
- Players that don’t like shooting, but love teamwork would finally be represented (yes, I’m speaking of your girlfriend!)
- Having to protect healers would benefit more organized teams, rewarding teamwork
- Healers would have a more dynamic gameplay revolving around avoiding damage: stealthy movement, ability to quickly traverse dangerous zones, coordination with fellow teammates are all required to benefit your team as a healer
What might need to be tweaked:
- Healers should be made into the only revivors, and we should either punish death more (which we’d better be careful of if that’s a dynamic game) or give buffs on revival
- Healers should get more movement abilities to increase survivability. They may also get speed boost when running towards teammates (similar to Conduit Savior’s Speed in Apex Legends)
- Team compositions should accommodate for several healers as to not introduce a single point of failure
Overall, I think it could introduce a new dynamic to team arenas and skirmishes, as winning now requires more coordination within a team and better understanding of everyone’s roles.
Yeah, Mercy was one of my inspirations.
I feel like one of the reasons FPS scene is like that is exactly because players have no choices left but to pick up a gun and shoot enemies. Without that, you are useless in any classical FPS composition, regardless of the role, which alienates players that want to see other types of gameplay.
Simply put, if you are not a “killer” in an FPS game, you have nothing to do there, and that’s why only those players remain. Something has to be changed inside the genre.
and continuing my thought, overwatch was literally what you wanted in them first years. But it turned out that the main game group was not interested in playing for healers or tanks without damage, and as a result, the bias in choosing these roles was more than 3 times. This increased the waiting time in the queue quite a lot. As a result, everything returned to the option where each role can cause damage.
I think it goes both ways; FPS games attract “killer” type players, so designers design the games to cater for them. Because designers cater the game more to them, they attract more of those type of players.
Like a spiral only spiraling into itself~
Mercy so easy only in low ranks.
If you have good move you can do teamkill by mercy under ultimate skill… Especially if your DPS no have damage. In overwatch you should kill by any role, but in healer mode you should don’t die at first, heal you team at second and do damage in third. That’s true less for mercy, because she has damage increase bean and you should change to it for support ultimates for example, but more on Birgit or for new healers.
And with tank too. You should protect your team, know all mechanics and do damage for enemies. For example sigma, you can eat Moira orb and Zarya ultimate skill by bullet protection skill. that is literally black hole. And if tank don’t do that you team in pain. And if you don’t damage targets you team lose.
But Overwatch bad example because that more arcade shooter. Many moves depend by skills, not for headshots. You literally have melee characters without any targeting.