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How Echo of Soul Handles Dungeons in a Healer-Less Game

Games lately have been attempting to break the “healer, tank, DPS” cycle, with varying amounts of success. For example, Guild Wars 2 technically does have healers, although there isn’t anything that is set up solely for that role. Echo of Soul is the latest game to join this idea of a healer-less game, but it’s quite a bit different than a lot of players might expect. After going through the first group dungeon, things start to become a lot more clear, and you start to get a greater understanding the strengths and weaknesses of this play style.

Echo of Soul


The Group Setups

Echo of Soul has dungeon queuing for both normal dungeons and raids alike. The setups differ between the two as follows:

What you’ll notice here is that it’s just tanks and DPS – there are no healers. And the reason for this is that technically, everyone is a healer. But how does this work? Through the use of consumables.


Consumables for Healing

There are three different consumables that work for healing: bandages (for healing out of combat), potions (for self-healing while in combat) and scrolls (for healing yourself or others in combat). In the case of dungeons, the two most used are the potions and the scrolls. So the general idea works like this:

Essentially, what this setup of consumables does is allow all players to both heal themselves and heal others. In essence, everyone is able to help heal the tank.

Requiring More Organization

Echo of Soul guide


A big downside to this method of handling heals is that parties must become a lot more organized. You can only heal so often from scrolls, and if everyone is spamming theirs at the same time it can be detrimental to the group’s success. Instead, players end up having to work out who is going to heal who, and at what point others are going to help heal the tank. While not an absolute necessity in the beginning dungeons, progression pretty much requires it. Otherwise groups are going to wipe because their healing is timed wrong, leading the tank(s) to an untimely death.

How it Affects Queues

A pretty big positive for a lot of players is that queues are decently fast. Rather than having to wait for a healer, for example, it’s just 4 DPS and a tank. The end result of this is that DPS can get into dungeons a lot quicker than they would be able to otherwise. It is worth noting, however, that the dungeon queue does not seem to separate it into two ranged and two melee, or even between specific classes. It seems to just throw random players in together, which can lead to complications on some of the bosses within. That said, a group that works together – regardless of being ranged or melee – should be fairly successful since they watch each other’s backs.


My Opinions

I think the developers did a good job at thinking outside the box on how to handle breaking the “healer, tank, DPS” setup, but I think it brings some problems to the table.


First off, it leads to issues when using the LFG tool. One thing people need to remember is that a lot of players are going to ignore chat completely when in dungeons. As a result, there are only a few that are going to know their jobs outside of the norm (i.e., DPS should be attacking things once the tank has hit them). Adding on dynamic roles by adding in required healing just throws this out of whack and causes a decent amount of headache when dealing with other players. Having strict roles helps fix this by allowing healers to know what their job is before they even enter the dungeon. Same with DPS and tanks.


Echo of Soul guide


The other major problem that arises is when it comes to creating challenging content. Having dedicated roles allows for content to be based around the idea that a group will be formulated with those roles in it. For example, in most games – even those that allow players to heal each other using non-healing roles – the content simply can’t be done without dedicated healers, due to game mechanics and damage output of bosses. While we can argue that there is some content in both Echo of Soul and Guild Wars 2 that is pretty tough, the fact is that they are in a completely different category than other games, like World of Warcraft, TERA, and so on. There is a huge difference between healing people by using a scroll and having to actually set up a rotation just for heals, as well as look out for everyone else in the group to ensure they’re always topped up on health.


All in all, I think that Echo of Soul handles the situation decently, despite the glaring flaws behind not having dedicated roles. That said, I am really looking forward to giving raiding a shot (once it’s added to the game), to see how they end up tackling the difficulty equation.


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