Healers Suck To Play, But I Play Them Anyway

Team Fortress 2, as far as I'm aware, popularized the "magnetic piss beam" method of dispensing heals, through the Medi-Gun of the Medic class. In TF2, this worked, because it was the counterpart to the unique Ubercharge mechanic that granted you and the teammate you were attached to temporary invulnerability. Elsewhere, however, this loop servers as a testament to the developers' laziness and lack of imagination.

This may make me sound like the kind of erotophonophile⁶ edgelord that was rock-hard while playing Hatred, but aiming a neon tentacle at someone and scratching my ass while their health bar fills, only to watch it empty immediately after detaching is just boring compared to the rooty tooty point-n-shooty of the front lines.

Meanwhile, the Sisyphean nature of your role as a healer makes even the non-piss stream characters sucky to play, and this is compounded by the next issue.

Healers are squishy. This is a universal constant, largely because if they weren't, no one would ever play a dedicated tank ever again.

Healers are also low-damage. This is another universal constant, because if they weren't, no one would ever play a dedicated DPS ever again.

The combination of these two, however theoretically sound they are, make life very difficult and annoying during gameplay. The fact of the matter is that most players⁷ solo queue in the casual mode of whatever game they're playing. Ranked players are a minority, players with a pre-selected, communicative team are a minority, and ranked players with pre-selected, communicative teams are the smallest minority of all. Unforunately for the rest of us, they're aso the group that the games are most often balanced with respect to, either because they whine the loudest, or because the game publisher wants to cash in on the ever-stupid eSports market.

The key difference between the majority and minority here is the overall skill level of the team combined with the members' alertness to threats that don't immediately apply to them. For example, a good, communicative team will have an eye on the medic, and will listen to and respond to a request for assistance under fire⁸; most teams, however, have members solely focused on pursuing individual glory, with all other teammates functioning as glorified NPCs that need to be carried, which means that a medic under attack will have to fend for themselves, and more often than not die horribly. They are then bitched at by the rest of their team⁹, which leads me to the third issue.

This is a social thing, so there's no technical fix that developers can do, but it's important anyway because humans are emotional beings and video games are for catharsis and stimulation, and assuming people will act in a manner independent of how they are treated is moronic.

Healers are not the hardest class to play, and thus get no respect from anyone who plays a harder class. Healers also have little direct impact on fights; while you might have survived an aim duel because Mercy was shoving her staff up your ass, you're unlikely to notice or acknolwedge that in the heat of the moment¹⁰. However, their macro impact is massive, and a good healer can make the difference between an overall win or loss¹¹.