Play Healer’s Quest; appreciate healers

There are many things about Healer’s Quest that are good observations of playing an MMORPG (like, for example, the fact that the other players in your party are motivated variously by gold, XP grinding, or meeting hot female characters), but none more accurate than its central mechanic, that being gamifying the experience of maining a healer and then expanding its into a whole game.

Your healer in Healer’s Quest, who you customise before starting, follows a group of adventurers who are already friends, each taking the place of an RPG archetype. Tanky is an armoured knight, Grumpy is a warrior with a berserker ability, Beauty is an elf with a bow, and is called Beauty because elves are hot, and Murky is a spellcaster who learned magic ‘cos chicks dig wizards. He also has a Gentleman’s Amulet which gives him -10 damage vs. women. There’s a delicate balancing act with them all, as Tanky can absorb the most damage, but his attacks are buffed if he’s at near full health, while Grumpy is more delicate but his buff only kicks in when his health is low. The party members can also suffer from status effects like confusion, poison and stun, and you also have to manage their moods because if you let them die too often they get all sulky.

You have a small spell book, limited to a range of heals, buffs and mana restores, and can only have four of those equipped for a fight. Fights themselves can require punishing amounts of multitasking as you frantically heal one dude, take time to cure the poison on another, and then find the original dude died while you weren’t paying attention. The game describes itself as ‘like juggling with magic, and the crowd hates you.’ This is accurate.

Because the thing is, when I say the game recreates ‘the experience’ of being a healer, I don’t just mean you’re looking after four other players, buffing them and keeping an eye on their health bars rather than taking the fight to the enemy. I also mean that Healer’s Quest recreates all the other stuff that Mercy mains can often experience: the bitching, the spamming of HEALS PLS, the dismissal of healers as a useful class at all until a player happens to die, at which point everything is the healer’s fault. When you rest at an inn, the healer is made to sleep outside. It is uncanny, and parcelled in a nice satirical adventure (with a lot of fun, fourth-wall breaking silliness that only gets a bit annoying sometimes).

It’s accurate enough that if you’ve ever screamed at a flustered Priest for not buffing you in time then playing Healer’s Quest could serve as a useful learning tool for you. Because why should it be a joke we all know that healers get treated with whiny contempt; like they are, essentially, mothers to a clutch of adolescents? Surely a key demographic for Overwatch isn’t a bunch of angry teenagers who could definitely main heal better than you, they just don’t feel like it, and also why haven’t you washed their favourite t-shirt yet? Is it? Jeff? Jeff?

Healing is a thankless task. Everyone wants to be a DPS – a damage dealing character – or to run onto the front lines, because that’s the most fun. Stab all the things! Leeroy all the Jenkins! Make timely references! Nobody wants to be a healer because a) there are fewer opportunities to asplode things b) the other players spam for help but will also not stand anywhere remotely helpful c) the other players will not thank you anyway, so why bother? The only class harder to find for raids in World of Warcraft is a tank, because tanking and healing are both very hard to do well, although at least if the healer dies nobody says it’s the tank’s fault. Being a good healer takes practise but nobody wants to practise when they get yelled at all the time, so there are never enough healers. There’s also the side effect that healers who do stick it out sometimes evolve the kind of bitter attitude that’s always sucking desperately on a dog end and Doesn’t Have Time For Your S***; one of my earliest experiences in World of Warcraft when I was a new player was making a mistake in a raid and the healer then refusing to actually, y’know, heal me until I left the group. An ouroboros of toxicity; a feedback loop leading to fewer healers and fewer people who want to even try. Whereas all that giving people help and friendly advice does is make better healers.

The thing is that most of us aren’t that mean to healers and most of us aren’t actually horrible people. We are human, and sometimes human and horrible intersect, especially if someone else starts first, because then it’s not really your fault, is it? In Healer’s Quest you’re spinning so many plates with increasing desperation, and get no thanks for keeping them up but condemnation when you let them fall (which is also usually the process with unpaid overtime, incidentally). And it’s challenging and it’s funny, but it also gives you a little taste of what your local healer faces every day. Just a few thanks a month can keep them in business. So play Healer’s Quest, and maybe you too will be moved to say #thanks4theheals