Protection Prayers and other MMOs

Something that GW has done perfectly is the idea of protection prayers. It is what got me hooked on the game; the ability to actively stop damage before it happened just seemed so interesting. While the skill choice is limited (although the recent buffs seem to have added some diversity) it is always fun to watch a warrior run up to a fellow teammate and watch as guardian gets placed right before their eyes.

Protection prayers are a completely different approach to the classical "healing" aspect of MMOs. Watch the battle, not the red bars that have your party members' names. While looking over NCSoft's new game, Aion, I was disappointed to see the lack of protection type skills. It seems to use the basic "fast cast low heal" and "long cast high heal" skeleton that every other MMO uses.

Maybe the idea of being able to block attacks from an enemy in other games seems overpowered, especially when only taking on 2 or 3 enemies at a time and considering a taunt type aggro control. Maybe the PvP in the other games are so large scale that it would be worthless to try to stop damage on one target when you know five other people are going to be getting hit at the same time. So why dont other games use a protection prayers system? Any other ideas? Would you like to see more skills like prots in other games?

tl;dr:
Why dont other MMOs use a similar approach to damage reduction as GWs protection prayers?

Smaller numbers helps it work in Guild Wars, as well as not having characters designed for soaking up damage. The system in Guild Wars is significantly more enjoyable as a backline character as it's far more engaging.

Anet > other devs

*Awaits rants on how I'm wrong*

i think its because some of the other mmo's stem from the pen & paper aspect of rpgs. gw definitely feels more like an action game--theres more too it then just numbers and text and graphical measurements.

Since you understand the other games, think of having even ONE prot spec GW monk in your raid team, even at current power with nothing changed. All of a sudden when you go up against the baddest mofos in the game they only do 1/2 damage (guardian) and you can't get rounded because each ping of damage can only be 10%. Protting just does not have a place in the historical Everquest / D&D system of fighting.

Prots are basically evolved D&D buffs (like 'Aid' for example) made to scale with ability rather than level and be more twitchy rather than fire and forget.

They would break traditional MMO to pieces because it would be nobrainer:

Fights are too predicable: if you know who is guaranteed to have aggro (which you know), it is nobrainer to maintain prot of choice on him. With that, any skill involved simply dies. Simple 'best' prot/heal roation would be numbercraftred to existence and that would be it.

In a more traditional MMO setting, the brainlessness could be helped by the Prot abilities having high-threat. Also if a Prot would be used on say a Warrior like in WoW then depending on the Prot it could rage-starve him.

Red baring > watching the field!

Red "baring" was a hard word to syntax. I agree, with most above, except for prot spirit which I hate. That one skill has shaped GW too strongly on both sides.

Certainly, Protective Spirit, coupled with another skill or two, created mechanics which could be regarded as "broken--" I.E. too easily used to farm elite area, too easily used to reduce areas of the game to two-and-three person teams... But monks would have lost their appeal without the ability to farm like many of the other classes. I'm sure plenty of players made their monks so they could farm; healing and protting arose as a side consideration.

But prot spirit in a full team becomes a valuable skill. It's almost infinitely maintainable if you have the energy for it, and combined with a small pop in healing from Divine Favor, really reduces the load on a healer. Just last night, one monk, halfway through a HM FoW trip lost connection and never returned; our sole surviving monk was a prot hybrid. Through careful aggro and some luck, we finished the FoW: griffons, flaming forest, forest, priest of Menzies, the Hunt, and one or two others. I'm not sure a pure healer could have kept up; not sure a pure protter could either, but the mix of skills did the job.

I'm a huge fan of prot skills, especially in HM; as they reduce the loads of damage put out by the baddies; I'm sure there's a reason PvP monks like it, too....

This is, I think, key to understanding why Prot spells work differently, and work well in GW.

One GW dev stated that GW was built specifically with a "Magic:The Gathering" type of combat system in mind, as opposed to the traditional D&D combat mechanism.

This not only explains why there is a place for prot spells, but also why there are a limited number of skills (or cards, if you will) to play at one time.

Agreed. When attacks deal 400 damage to a 8000 health character, and you are raiding a keep with 50 people fighting 50 defenders who are all spamming AOE.... using prot wouldn't really work unless it was also AoE of some sort, like your healing is. Yeah you kept 6 guys alive, to bad 30 other people are now dead.

GW works because of the way it is instanced. I don't know if we will see true prot like that again in GW2.

I don't really see how protection is that revolutionary of different. I don't play many MMOs so I probably am not one to talk, but it's just an obvious concept in defense. Heal damage (ok), prevent damage with skill (better), prevent damage to positioning (best).

Let me explain some of the (little) knowledge of other MMOs i know and you can judge for yourself how revolutionary it is (if people know more about the game feel free to explain it your own way or correct something I said):

WoW: A few different healing archetypes (druid, shaman, priest, paladin). I dont know much about the game's end pve, but I dabbled in a pvp server. I also have not played a priest or paladin, but the skills seem pretty straight forward. Basically, there are the fast cast low heal high mana skills, as well as longer cast lower mana higher heal skills. Shamans got "jumping heals" (think chain lightning) and druids got "heal over time" (think spirit light weapon) skills. From my understanding, priests had the party heals and crowd control and paladins were the tough tanks with AoE buffs and buffs in general. All had basic healing capabilities.

In short, none had any sort of active protection prayers type skills.

RO: There are two (somewhat) healing classes, the priest and the alchemist. But in reality, pvp consists of speccing as much vitality stat for as much health as possible so that you dont get completely demolished by one enemy attack, then spam pot-like items to regain health. Healing is really quite useless overall unless in a party situation in pve with a dedicated tank. Priests received the buffs and a small heal and party heal over time, while alchemists have a much better, lower cooldown, single target heal, and an underused aoe heal.

Overall, theres only two real protection like skills, the first being Kyrie Eleison (think pre-change life sheath, but actually useful damage reduction), which usually only saves a person from one attack. Here, the sheer amount of damage done over a small amount of time repeatedly by one person would make introducing prots pretty worthless (Shield of Absorption) or totally overpowered (prot spirit, guardian). The other is Safety Wall (given to a few different classes, not just priest), which basically gives one tile of ground a 100% dodge for the person standing on it for the next 11 attacks at the expense of losing inventory space for an item needed to use the skill, thus taking away the amount of potions you can carry. But it is easily thwarted seeing as most classes have a knockback attack and can then just kinda steal your own protection. And it only stop physical attacks. However, it is still widely used and useful when dealing with one hit killers like assassin crosses or champions.

This thread is just too many walls of text from me, but thats my explanation of a few other games, people can explain more or use other games as examples.

tl;dr:
WoW =/= prot. RO = too many people to be use prots efficiently.

*Rant about how you're wrong*

It's certainly better than playing life-bar-whack-a-mole.

Well, in WoW the priest has Pain Suppression: for 8s, target takes 40% less damage, Prayer of Mending which heals the next time a target takes damage, sort of like Reversal of Fortune, and Power Word: Shield, which preemptively absorbs some damage. Pallys have Blessing of protection: Target is immune to physical attacks for 15s but cannot attack. But that's really about it as far as I can remember.

In Guild Wars the power of prots encourage target switching, but in WoW, outside of pain suppression and BoP (and BoP can be dispelled), both of which are on long cooldowns, they rarely do, so you end up with tunnel visioning being quite viable, which is bad.