There have been some posts lately on the Clan Lord Sentinel about Healers needing more stuff to do, more ways of getting unstuck when surrounded, more reasons to bring lower-level healers on hunts, and basically more independence from needing fighters to do anything. There are many suggestions from healer pets to tagging weapons to a potion giving a shieldstone effect and many more besides.
The essential problem is that Clan Lord has little else to offer besides going on hunts for experience, coins, or rarely both. The only way to get baking, brewing, blacksmith, bard, alchemy, and berries is to go from snell to snell and hope you get lucky. Professions are only suitable for a library character since you need so many ranks that they're unsuitable for anything else. Both of which mean that gathering and crafting, which many other MMOs have as a way of doing something besides killing stuff, are nonexistent. Even if you do bother to learn how to bake or brew there's really not much point as most of the items you can buy with coins that are much easier to get, and besides food and beer are only for role-playing.
Well you say, wandering around finding items is something I can do without killing stuff. Except you probably can't because practically every beast is hostile and will attack you if they see you or even if you just enter the snell which makes leaving Puddleby not a safe thing to do. Of course, some beasts should be hostile such as Orgas since we are at war with them, but I'd really like to see more beasts be passive or hostile only if you get close just to let people be able to walk around in peace. At the present moment however, only fighters can really wander around at their leisure.
The concept for Clan Lord is that ranks would have the most impact on a character's development which means that there are few items that make a noticeable difference and therefore we have no stable economy and nothing really to spend our money on besides the library. Since everything is found by luck people basically save their money and if something is found such as a bard part or an orgaberry then they spend thousands just because it's such a pain to find them. Maybe when we get items then we could have some quests because at the moment there would be nothing to reward people with besides experience and money.
I've written elsewhere about the death of role-playing and GM-guided stories and the difficulty in creating Player-guided stories. There are many stories that players can't work on without official support and most of the role-playing that did take place didn't really involve more than a select few. Using clans as a means of role-playing or even getting people involved would be great but there's basically no point to being in a clan either.
What I'm saying is that there's nothing for people to do besides hunt and hunting revolves around fighters and when fighters get hurt they need healers and mystics get left behind. Healers need more to do but everyone needs more to do which is why the population is small and isn't likely to increase no matter how much advertising is done. There are free MMOs on Facebook with more features than Clan Lord and I don't think that's how things should be.
There should be a different profession system that doesn't use ranks, a different gathering system that doesn't rely on luck, more items/item customization which lessens the importance of ranks, more support for role-playing and clans, an easier time of being able to wander around without needing an escort, a revamp of the mystic and healer and Champion classes, and a change in the interface with less of a reliance on the sidebar to see if something happened. Unfortunately the odds of any of these things happening is about zero as the GMs that are active don't bother to tell us what they're doing or interact with us at all lately. Apparently we're too negative or demanding or something.
I'm saying all this because, as many great aspects there are to Clan Lord, there are many more bad aspects and there just isn't anyone with the time or knowledge or money to make the needed changes to turn Clan Lord from being barely above solitaire in being something to do when there's nothing else to do to being an MMO people will not only want to play but will spend money to play. At this point I think Joe Williams only keeps Clan Lord around from a sense of guilt because he doesn't seem to want to do anything with it. The GMs seem to be good at making new areas and there's an artist or two who are good at adding a tree or beast, but I don't think any of them have the time or inclination to make fundamental changes to the game even if Joe Williams would allow them to.
Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but it seems to me that the problems that some healers are complaining about run deeper than just being bad class design to being bad game design and there doesn't seem to be anyone capable or willing of changing this.
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