Let me get out of the way, that I am sure it’s possible we are just “Doing It Wrong TM” but in games I’ve GM’d as well as played in, players who focused on healing seem to have a pretty redundant experience. For example, Boon Focus (Heal) gives you auto-success on one target. So they end up just rolling their Heal Power Level on one target every turn. At level II they can move that to a minor action, so now (I think?) they can do auto-success heals on 2 targets each turn in lieu of a major action.
What are some good ways to balance healers, give them more options and more risk/reward type of actions in combat?
I mean, I haven’t found a combat healer that critical in most situations.
It helps, of course, but I usually see players create a character that is a spectrum, not just focused on healing so they are doing other things. Then if it is needed, they throw out a heal.
You could easily focus on buffs. Bolster, Resistance, etc to do more. But you could easily go someone that can fight from range as well.
Creating barriers of thorns or the like. So many boons out there, and banes.
This is true. Though with one Boon Focus being auto-success and the others mostly success/fail, it kind of takes some of the fun out of rolls (no big damage, etc). I don’t know, like I said, it could be something we’re missing, but it’s three different players in three different games that have either outright said it wasn’t as much fun, or just as an observer, they seemed to just have a more monotonous game experience.
I think it might just be how they are approaching it. Were they just trying to be clerics from DnD?
Most of the healers I have either GM’d for or played with seemed to have fun, but they didn’t ONLY heal. They fought and attacked and did healing on the side.
Open Legend can create a lot of interesting characters that don’t have to be all about one thing.
As the GM there are a lot of things you can do with an explosion on a dice roll as well. You can choose to allow higher dice for healing, or allow an extra round of healing to occur, or even allow it to extend to a second person.
I’ll let a few others weigh in here, but I think it’s a perpective issue. I mean, a person just standiing there throwing out heals doensnt sound that interesting to begin with, so if that is the way they designed their character, that is probably the root of it.
Clerics in DnD still did a lot of attacking besides just healing.
I think that is probably the key - as a GM I/we can help highlight their characters other abilities and make sure they have some banes/boons or other attributes prepped that add more options. I think the tendency has been to just see their role as healing so they felt constrained (mostly inexperienced players in my groups).
One way to make “healing” more fun could be to use Boon Focus II to III on the Regeneration Boon instead, because that way once you’ve invoked the boon you just need to sustain it and you can still furfill other combat roles like attack, defend, buff, debuff or do some emergency healing with the Heal boon.