Already seeing a bad trend on the Warfronts between Factions.

[whistlingwind]

I will preface this by saying that this may just be my perception, so take it with a grain of salt.

I tend to put in alot of different hours when I'm playing Rift, and I play alot of hours. Morning, night, primetime, off hours, you name it. I rolled a guardian warrior. I wanted to clarify this from the beginning so people don't think its just the time of day that I'm playing, because I have literally experienced ALL the different times of day or night.

Anyway, what I have seen so far in my 29 levels of mostly Warfronts is that Guardians have VERY few healers. We have lots of clerics, mages, and rogues, but all of them are DPS specs. I can say with confidence that I am lucky if one out of five games has more than a single healer. I would play a cleric or bard myself, but I absolutely despise being the healer. There's something about the playstyle I can't stand. Maybe that makes me a hypocrite, I don't know.

Conversely, the defiants seem to always have a plethora of healers. I see gobs of bards, and many clerics. I even played in one game of Black Garden where the Defiants had 10 rogues. That was a nightmare.....

Normally this wouldn't be a problem. More healers just means less DPS, and so you would think that things would balance out. However, what I tend to see, except in rare cases, is the Guardian players bashing their faces against the tanks up in their face, while the Defiant bards and clerics happily sit in the back waving their hands in the air and playing instruments. In the meantime, the Defiant DPS are homing in on casters and the rare Guardian healer like they all have a macro for it.

I see this All. The. Time. Its infuriating.

You could make the excuse that Rift is a new game and people are still learning, but the blunt truth is that Rift isn't exactly bringing anything fundamentally new to the world of MMO PvP. And if that was really true, then why wouldn't it equally apply to both factions? Healers in back healing while melee dps up front hitting people isn't new. Nor is the concept of, at the very least, CCing or harassing the healers so they can't just spam heals. Letting healers go unmolested is a surefire way to lose every time.

I wouldn't even be asking about this if it wasn't happening virtually every game. Sure, there's exceptions, and I'm a pretty tolerant guy when it comes to losing a match, especially if it was a well played game. I occasionally see that I'm not the only one focusing fire, or taking down bards and clerics. And the one time I had a dominator CCing people while he assisted me in shutting down a team of 3 bards, I nearly wept tears of joy!

But those kinds of things are, at least from my experience, clearly the exception and not the rule. So why am I seeing so few healers and so little mastery of the basics of PvP from the Guardians, and so much of both from the Defiants? Can anyone explain this to me?

You have to understand the pain that is cleric at the moment, I am guardian side too and I rather not play healing even though I do. I don't even have to be healer to be targetted I am just targetted for being a cleric.

Trion in its great wisdom gave healers very few counters for CC and its difficult to survive without help from DPS, and from a cleric view point its much easier to see why the opposition wins.

DPS have all the tools to protect and destroy the correct targets, but when they don't not only do you lose warfronts but the cleric has died 5x more than you have.

I have been full healer and put out one heal throughout the whole game due to being dead majority of the time, and you know what people scream at me?

'Where are the heals!'

My reply is 'Protect your healer and you'll get your heals!'

Their reply is

'No heals means no damage!'

My reply is (you can **** yourself I'm playing as DPS) we win because I down the fang carrier pick it up and bring it to one of my friends who i play with because the rest have no clue of the dynamics of the game, skills of other classes and are usually pretty worthless to a cleric.

It would'nt be that way if we as clerics had more escape mechanisms, counters to drains etc, but we don't so we rely on DPS.

And as the communication I had above with DPS, they obviously don't understand our concerns, so clerics roll as DPS, at least you know they'll focus on drainers/healers/fang carriers becuse they understand all those things too well.

[CaptainMcCloud]

I have a 50 Warrior and now 34 Cleric. When I'm PvPing on my Warrior, there are usually less than 2 healers, and none of them are Clerics. When I PvP on my Cleric, there's 5-6 healers in the Warfront, and most will be Clerics. I assume that all of these 30-39 healers will eventually hit 50 and be in the same Warfronts as my Warrior.

I'd give it longer than a few weeks after release to talk about shortages, although there certainly are over-abundances of some classes/callings. (Warriors and Rogues in general, DPS Warriors and Ranged Rogues specifically)

[Dink]

You might switch to defiant if you want heals. Although you'll wait 20-30 minutes for warfronts queues.

Or you can roll a healer yourself. Otherwise, complaining won't get you far.

[Rawr]

Wow, long post to say nothing. How many sentences were the before you actually got to your point?

[Cedworth]

I queue as healer often. But I generally stop queuing when our team isn't doing well and/or idiots start yelling about heals.

The factors that go into that are usually:

A. You're nowhere near the fang or any node or flag. I won't heal you if you're being useless to the team. I care none whatsoever for damage/healing/kbs in the stats. I care about carrier kills, recoveries, caps, the things that actually matter. Try padding THOSE numbers please.

B. You're completely out of range. Look for blue names (those are healer specs) and if they are darkened, you will never get heals due to range.

C. I am CCed or dead. I get a lot of attention from the enemy when I heal and I rarely have anyone make any effort to help keep me alive. Also, I spend at least 50% of my time in some sort of silence/stun/whatever CC during any kind of contact. See if there's any way you can help with that.

When I get on a streak with good groups, I get complimented on heals. With bad groups, healers get yelled at and I just do something else for a while.

[jereome]

Simple solution make the battlefront que system put together a more balanced group. Meaning that it will make sure a certain amount of clerics get into the match, a certain amount of mages, rogues etc..

[Onideath]

Well i have hit 50 today and done LOTS of warfronts...slowed my leveling down quite abit. Did at least 10+ warfronts in each bracket and i have to say that I've won about 20% of the warfronts as Defiant. Guardian always seems to have loads of sabs...at least 4 and its impossible to outheal that.

[Chomag]

Defiants, a lot of them, came from wow's horde who was always more interested in pvp. You can expect a lot of them to be skilled pvp healers, unlike guardians who, like wow's alliance, does wfs mostly for the lolz and go in as dps-ers or tanks.

[Beorg]

Same thing happens on the Defiant side.

Luck of the draw, really.

[Vaidency]

II would play a cleric or bard myself, but I absolutely despise being the healer. There's something about the playstyle I can't stand. Maybe that makes me a hypocrite, I don't know.

So you think your teams aren't doing well enough in warfronts, and one of the main problems is a lack of healing, but you refuse to take the most obvious step toward solving that problem by playing a healer yourself. So what you're doing instead is making long-winded forum post lambasting your teammates for not doing it for you.

Since you don't seem to know whether or not that makes you a hypocrite, here's your answer: yes.

[fervor]

Sorry, but basically everyone is just making observations and trying to draw conclusions based on their own extremely limited experiences. Not statistically significant. Can't draw conclusions based on so little data.

Seriously, the randomness of PUG's is probably the biggest factor. It's just a big mess and trying to draw conclusions without having Trion's bird's eye view of the situation is pretty much hopeless.

[Tolbiac]

I don't think this is a Rift trend. I think this is MMOs, period. Healers, especially PVP healers, are rare no matter what game you're playing.

[Sharuko]

It seems like Guardian win 80% of the Warfronts on the Battlegroup I play in.

You are just unlucky.

[thomasmgp]

I had a level 50 with over 500 plat and I just rerolled. What ever server group Greybriar is in is beyond terrible at pvp. I havent won more than 5 WFs in a week at level 50. I have tried healing with 3 different specs and my team mates just sit there and let them stunlock and manadrain me to death. Either that or we wont even play we will just stay at our rez spot while they farm us. I guess its too hard to run through them, since we obviously cant kill them, to get fang carrier. Its like our team is a bunch of braindead monkeys that cant ever beat the premades we have to play against. Most of the time we never even get more than 3 or 4 kills while the other team each person has over 25. I have never seen a group of players that insist of losing so badly. Even in all the terrible BGs I did in WoW as alliance at least we won every now and then. Right now Guardians in my server group are just terrible. And before all the Trolls say "lol ur bad" Please tell me how 1 player can turn a WF around. Maybe if we are losing 500-450 I would admit its partly my fault but 1 player cant turn around a 450-25 game and come out with a win.

[Gryz]

You don't want to play a healer -> that is fine.
Other players don't want to play a healer -> that is a big problem.

Trion, do something about it !

We get it.