yeah apparently you're just naturally expected to deal out your own sparks of life or you're the one ruining the experience for the entire team. and then if you don't use sparks of life to heal yourself because you'd rather confide in the skill of your teammates, you get indirectly called a slacker and made fun of for an hour for all the mistakes you made.
i'm not as pissed about it right now, but my advice is that if anyone goes through a tough map with some friends (or other anonymous knights), set your steam profile to private and tell whoever you're helping that you don't have any sparks of life. unless you actually want to spend them on people.