Line of Sight is for Wussies

Line of sight plays an important role in modern MMO's.  If you're an old bastard like me, you probably remember running around in Ultima Online, spamming "Corp Por" and shooting lightning up the various orifices of your opponents through trees and walls and fences.  But for the past several mmo's that have come out (and by several I mean every single one that was 3D), LOS has been important.  It determines how you fight an enemy.  It defines where you can stand to heal your party and where you can stand to let the buggers all die a horrible death.  It's a nice little piece of code that helps with immersion (after all, how can one shoot arrows through five feet of brick in real life?).

Warhammer, however, has taken the idea of LOS and firmly backhanded it into last week like an abused puppy.  Certain spells/attacks/what have you will not work if a twig is between you and your target of choice, however others will be more than happy to speed their way through six trees, a house and a few hundred yards of rock.  Take turrets for example.  For those of you who don't play destruction, just know that turrets are a majorly minor annoyance.  It's not that they're going to kill you or anything, they do about 80 damage a pop.  However the do **** up casting quite well.  Turrets back in Warhammer days, apparently, were more intelligent than modern-day spy satellites; able to see through rock and trees and ground and whatever might be between them and their target, and then able to shoot through said materials.

However, this can be overlooked.  As I said, turrets are really just a minor annoyance, somewhat like a younger brother who follows you around and tells you how great you are until you backhand him like the previously mentioned puppy.  I hate to break it to you engineers out there, but your little toys are pretty worthless.

But there's something else that the whole LOS fiasco has completely ****** up, and that's healing.  I play a shaman, and first off let me say that 99% of my healing spells obey LOS to an alarming degree.  If a small spit of dirt is between me and my target, I'll get error messages overflowing my screen.  However I recently hit 20, and something amazing happened: I got a group heal.  If there was ever an "I Win" button for scenarios/battlegrounds/pvp ever invented before this, group heals in WHO would utterly destroy it.

Regardless of LOS issues, group heals are handy.  Most of my other spells were heal over time, or a small burst of health followed by heal over time, or a three second cast for a fairly insignificant amount of healing.  My general tactic pre-20 was to cast my HoT's on every single person I ran across.  This tended to work fairly well.  I was always near or at the top of the healing charts in scenarios.  When I hit 20, however, I started casting my group heal now and then when necessary.  Suddenly I noticed that I was no longer near the top of the healing charts, I was always at the top.

So I did an experiment.  For one round I cast only group heals plus the occasional shield.  The result... well I think the image on the right speaks for itself.  Keep in mind that I'm in a T2 scenario, and I'm casting only one spell the entire game.

Now this is a somewhat game breaking bug.  Obnoxious turrets are one thing, but healing going through walls?  That just doesn't seem right to me.  Not to say I haven't been using it.  Since discovering that my group heal did not obey LOS, my tactic in scenarios has been to tuck myself into a corner and spam the spell over and over the entire match.  If people start to get out of range, I move up and find a new corner to shove myself into.  It has not once failed to place me at the top of the healing charts.

Clearly this is a tactic for healers of lesser skill.  I've played healer classes in several games, and I've come to understand the role quite well.  I understand when someone is a lost cause, and I should concentrate on others.  I understand when to shield an important team member and blow my large, instant moral heal on them.  But the lack of LOS on group heals simply overpowers any of my previous experience and knowledge.  Unlike many classes in mmo's, healing does take some talent and experience.  DPS classes will disagree with me here, but ask any healer you know: healing is tough.  You need to be constantly watching every single person in your party/warband, deciding who needs a heal the most, choosing a heal, casting the heal, keeping out of the way of enemy players, keeping yourself alive all the while, and dealing with obnoxious bastards in your group who incessantly ask, "WTF WAI NO HEALS?".  I've played DPS in a whole lot of games, including WHO.  All DPS needs to do is charge at the clothies, mash buttons and hope some healer keeps them alive so that they can brag about their damage post game.  Hell, tanks even have harder jobs, and all they have to do is take damage.

Regardless... I'm unsure of how I feel about all of this.  While I do feel a certain amount of guilt when sitting behind a wall casting my group heal, I still have to deal with turrets and the occasional Bright Wizard talent that ignores LOS like an unwanted child.  If they don't have to worry about LOS, why should I?  But it has to mean something that in every single scenario I play my team is constantly at full health and hardly ever loses a player while other friendly teams and enemy teams are dropping like flies.  But rest assured that until Mythic decides to patch this unfortunate and wonderful problem away, you'll find me in corners and behind hills and anywhere where I can keep my party alive and kicking your ass while you can't so much as see my pointy little ears.