You will do your work on water
An' you'll lick the bloomin' boots of 'im that's got it."
Rudyard Kipling - Gunga Din
So here's my party in Baldur's Gate 2, in roughly descending order of toughness:
Fans of the game might recognize portraits and spot the only non-non-player-character in the list. For everyone else, here's a hint: that's me bringing up the rear.
Honest now, I started out Chaotic Neutral. Korgan and/or Viconia's just a bad influence is all...
But yeah, even the gnome could take a punch better than me. Nothing says "ascendant demigod" like a skinny little nebbish hiding behind my teammates, right? In fact, I have a little meta-game for you:
Not pictured: my NWN1 elf abjurer and my NWN2 pure caster halfling druid with a strength score of 6 (had to buff himself just to be able to wear his own armor... hilarious every time I remember it.) Were I to count the number of times I've broken the back row elf druid / wizard mold... not many. Even without classes being obvious, health numbers and the rest of the group's composition give me away. In fact, I only wind up relatively tough in party-based single-player RPGs whenever I load the entire team with squishy casters, forcing myself into a melee caster role as an ersatz "tank." Only way to fly, baby. Optimized builds are for chumps.
The only true tank I've played in these fourteen games was in Dead State, for the sake of its highly satisfying "fortify" combat action allowing me to retaliate enemies to death. Neither do I use spellcasting for direct damage. Abjurer, diviner, summoner, divine caster buff-bot or especially crowd control, that's me! Let NPCs lead the way to center stage while I fluff up the red carpet.
"Holy inferiority complex, Batman! How low is my self-esteem that I'm the sidekick in my own fantasy?"
Naturally, my tendency toward support roles translated even better online. Ever since Y2K, it was a given that everyone and his grandma on any server in any game will want to play a damage dealer, and only a damage dealer, all the time. Not only is "hit stuff" the most direct power trip, but it's the simplest set of instructions for the innumerable 30-IQ degenerates sludging the internet with their sickening presence. They measured e-peens while I kept them alive... and I was fine with that. My guild's tanks certainly learned to appreciate my druidic self "critically touching" them from behind.
Whether in PvE or PvP, I've always loved securing a win by having the lowest score. Been doing it since grade school, when I learned I preferred playing a defender while kicking a ball with the rest of the shrieking brats. I liked being able to see the whole playfield while remaining mobile. The Loremaster class in Lord of the Rings Online (before the game got dumbed down to irrelevance) epitomized this mindset. Low health, low damage, low healing, but capable of several varieties of crowd control, buffing, debuffing, stealing mana from enemies and redistributing it to teammates, initiating group maneuvers, and even off-tanking via a pet. So many tricks up my sleeve, and so few worthy adversaries...
Unfortunately, both crowd control and "hybrid classes" have long since been excised from online games to better suit the mass market's lack of taste in entertainment. Still, for a while, I clung to my remaining simplistic badge of "healer" to fill my support quota. Yet the average idiots' tastes have been shifting over the past decade. It used to be that nobody wanted to play as Alfred the butler, as a healer or other support. The role of tank was slightly easier to fill, especially in PvP games where players just wanted to protect their K/D ratio. The ratio of Heavy Weapons Guys to Medics on any TFC server in 2001 was heavily skewed in favor of the former. By the time I quit TF2 couple of years ago, the situation had reversed: healers were still unpopular, but tanks.... even less so. Nobody wanted to play as a big fat slow-moving target, no matter how much defensive cover fire they could provide. More and more I found myself shoehorned into playing heavy weapons simply because no-one else would do it.
Partly, this stems from design choices. Developers were aware of support roles' unpopularity and gradually simplified and empowered them to attract more players. As mana pools became functionally infinite or disappeared altogether, healing also became a matter of simply spamming one or two buttons endlessly. For the same reason, rewards for healing are sometimes disproportionate to other roles. Ask anyone in Planetside 2: the fastest way to farm experience points is to play a medic and spam resurrection grenades. Other times the "healer" role is promoted via flashy visuals or social surrogates. My recent look into Heroes of the Storm amused me to no end when I found all characters automatically play bonus lines of audio thanking their teammates for healing received.
Now that's just fucking insulting. Thankless jobs should be thankless. I don't want retarded little bitches flocking to a role because they want to hear (imaginary) people thank them. If they're too stupid to figure out the team's necessities for themselves, they should live and die in their bog of self-imposed ignorance. It is entirely natural for support roles, for defenders, for low-ranking pack members, for betas, for quiet, reserved tacticians, to be despised and badmouthed even as they nudge their team toward undeserved victories. Masking that all too human drive to misconstrue cooperation as subservience does nothing to eliminate it.
Either way, all these game developer tricks to make healing more appealing have worked... for a certain definition of worked. Except it didn't put the slightest dent in the ratio of huntards to worthwhile players. Sadism and narcissism are still their defining traits and every team game is filled with worthless cretins who think every other player on the map exists only to make them feel big about themselves. Instead, the swell in healers has been drawn from the ranks of tanks. Whether in MOBAs, MMOs, FPSs, whatever, nobody wants to be a front-line fighter anymore. Not even for all the wrong reasons, like they used to. Granted, taking punches has never been a popular activity, but I'm finding myself increasingly forced to take up the mantle myself for lack of alternatives.
I hate that damn mantle! Tanks are de facto team leaders, centers of attention, foci of the battlefield, stalwart knights in the shiniest armor. That's not mangy old me. If I ever dive into the fray I shouldn't expect to survive. I'm a skulking moon-beast on the edge of civilization. I'm your best enemy, your worst friend, your despised guardian, your Boo Radley! I am perfectly fine with carrying someone else's water or taking a bullet for you as long as the act gets put to good use and recognized by the informed few. I am the superior intellect balancing and unbalancing the fight from its edges or sacrificing myself for a positional advantage, the critical influence easily ignored, the despised servant whose worth only the worthy may judge. Bruce Wayne knows damn well how valuable Alfred is, and that's all the recognition Alfred needs.
And damnit, I just know whatever the least popular necessary role on a team is, I'll just end up doing it anyway. My Dead State screenshot features a red skull icon next to my character portrait. Early on, I decided the most efficient way to handle the danger of zombification would be to let one teammate get infected and just stave off that one character's infection indefinitely, designating a token bite victim from that point forth. And of course, if anyone was going to get zombitten to shreds through the entire campaign, it should be myself.
"I 'ope you liked your drink" sez Laika Din.
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