Heal the World

(Sadly, I couldn't find a high res picture of my World of Warcraft priest to add to this image.)

GP linked me this reddit thread from /r/overwatch about why there are so many female Mercy mains. I haven't played Overwatch myself, but looking at the wiki page, Mercy sounds like the Medic from TF2, whose healing gun can also boost damage, and her ult allows her to resurrect fallen teammates.

I can't speak to why female players tend to play Mercy, but in most of the games that I play, I tend towards a support role, and I can speak about that.

I think the number one reason is because I'm better at it than any other role. I wrote already about my problems learning to play a mid hero. It's not just about playing aggressively, because you can do that as a support hero, too. It's about the different focus. As a support hero in Dota, there's a lot to focus on: stacking camps, warding, dewarding, ganks, counter-ganks, stealing runes, zoning. A lot of it isn't about focusing on one thing, but trying to see the game as a whole, and I think I'm better at that.

The same applies to playing healers in MMOs. A lot of people complain that you don't get to see the game outside of looking at HP bars, and it is true, but you also get to see the raid as a whole. You see who tends to stand in the fire, who doesn't seem to know the mechanics, who looks AFK / is lagging. I'm not really great at learning a DPS rotation and executing it with incredible precision, but I am good at looking at falling health bars and prioritising who needs to be healed now and who can wait a bit. I am good at working out whether I need to cast a quick, but expensive heal, or whether I can time a longer cast.

One of the arguments in the post is that boys were raised on shooter games, and so they gained transferable mechanical skills. My favourite games were management sims, where it was the same kind of skills - prioritisation, big picture outlook.

I do agree that I was taught to be more nurturing, by the people around me, and that probably did contribute to wanting to play healers or support-type characters. But I think that was at the start, and I found that the role suited me, so I kept doing it. The first class I played in World of Warcraft was shaman, and I picked it because I knew I wanted to play an orc, and they were listed as being able to heal, DPS, and tank. I wanted to be able to cover whichever role my cousins needed me to play. Well, the tanking ability of shaman was greatly overrated, and I tried to do damage, but kept falling back into the healing role. I actually struggled a lot while levelling because I picked all the healing talents, and that meant it took forever to kill something - but I never died! That's not true because I died all the time as I ran out of mana...

For a while, I was a bit worried about falling into the female stereotype of playing a healer, but to be honest, I don't really care. It's what I enjoy doing, and I like to think that I'm good at it.