Healing - the worst imbalance in PVP history, in it's current form

I'm sure this will cheese off a lot of people who play healing classes. I'm well aware of the arguments that healing classes are weak, easily killed or otherwise countered.

Hogwash.

There is one inarguable fact regarding pvp healing. That is maximum potential health.

When you boil down PvP it becomes, at it's core, an issue of scaling.
Who does more damage. Who does more damage in a shorter period of time. Who has better gear. Who has a better build. Who has more health.
I might be able to put out 20k damage in 5 seconds. You might be able to put out 22k. I might have 23k mitigated health. You might have 19k mitigated health.
So we evaluate our battles, you decide to trade some stat or build choice over another to achieve 23k worth of damage in order to beat me. I then change my decisions somehow.

DPS and health are very relative numbers. They live in the same realm. You might get 2k crits, you might get 4k crits. You might have 15k health, you might have 20k health.

Where does healing factor into all of this? It doesn't factor in any sensible way. The reason it doesn't is because heals can achieve numbers in the hundreds of thousands of health over time.

To illuminate this point, lets look at PvP another way. Imagine we are in a foot race to see who is faster. A very common and rudimentary bit of human competition.
I declare to you than I can run 30 yards faster than you can run 25 yards, because I am naturally faster. Or we make a straight up equal distance challenge.
Perhaps another competition might be that I can run a further distance than you in 1 minute, or 10 minutes.
We can all agree that these are reasonable challenges that can and are made in the normal course of life.

A challenges which is never made however; is that I challenge that we see who can run farthest in a minute's time, with the exception that I am allowed to pause, reset or simply give myself more time on the clock than you have. So that when your minute is up, I can continue to keep running as I give myself extra seconds for however long as I wish, indefinitely.

While that competition would be ludicrous, it is exactly the competition that healing in PvP gives us. Now of course there are the responses such as: "this is what interrupts are for", "out-dps the healing", "focus down the healer", ect. Yes, or course these are valid tactics. These responses do not answer the real issue at all however, which is that healing is indefinite. It is like saying we will have our footrace where I can manipulate my clock, but you are allowed to try and steal my clock during the race. Sure that is a solution to the ridiculous nature of the race, but it still remains that I have the potential for unlimited time and can achieve it. Why even have such a rule in the first place?

To answer why is not difficult and goes to the history of the current MMO. The current MMO design of course stems from a PvE model. (Yes the early MMO's like UO had a far different design including pvp, swtor doesn't follow that model, it follows the PvE-centric model). In a PvE-centric MMO model, healing is used to keep tanks alive in boss fights. These fights last periods of time where the health of a tank is replaced numerous times by the healers. You can have a boss with hundreds of thousands of HP put out hundreds of thousands of damage. While a DPS'er might put out 200k in damage into a boss, a healer might put 200k of health into a tank. Healing generally has no limit over time and conceivably you could keep a tank alive indefinitely if it were not for things like enrage timers or regen limitations of energy. That is all well and good and easily understood by any MMO player.

Where things go incredibly awry however is when this design is then taken over into the PVP world. Players do not have the health of PVE bosses. The ability of a DPS'er to put out 200k of damage over time is meaningless when players only have 15k worth of health. This is our footrace of limited dimensions. Yet while a DPS's damage output ends when my healthbar reaches zero, a healers heal output is still unlimited, it never ends.

Yes, it can be countered. Yes, it can be balanced out with both sides healing. This isn't the point. The point is that you have one side of the equation which is unlimited.

To put the argument in another light. Take a great pvp game design like DOTA, HON or League or Legends. These games are actually quite similar to an MMO's pvp in that there are levels and gear for the players. Characters in these games can heal, but no character can heal for any length of time. In most cases, healing is limited to one, two or three heals during any fight. In other terms, any given character only has a potential of two to maybe three times his max health; and twice their health is a stretch. In SWTOR, if you heal someone for 100k and they never die, they are achieving 5-8 times their health.

So after all this analysis of the bad philosophy of the problem, what is my suggestion towards the solution?
The best way to balance any PvP system is to balance against maximum potential health. I.E. the limited footrace: we will only judge competition at a max distance of so many yards or so many minutes. The quite simple math to it would be that a character could only receive twice their max health in a 3 minute period. To even out the lower DPS potential that healers have, they might have that limitation reduced by their comparative healing or lack of dps. Hence a healer might be able to achieve 3 or 4 times their health in a 3 minute period.

This would mean that healing would still be able to save lives. It could still be just as powerful. But it would not be unlimited.

A very simple scenario to illustrate all of this is a duel. Yes, duel's are not entirely representative of group pvp. That argument is beside the point for this illustration of the philosophies involved.

DPS vs Healer. Healer has 15k health.
How does the DPS win? We all know. He must do enough damage, fast enough and counter the heals.
DPS does 14k worth of damage.
At this point 2 outcomes are possible.
1) The healer prevents his death and heals himself. Say he stuns the DPS and casts a 2k heal, then a 3k heal, then a couple 1k heals. At this point the DPS has lost the battle and can never recover. While his health continues to decline over time, the healers continues to increase over time. He can now never win.
2) The healer fails to overtake the DPS and eventually dies.

A better scenario is that at 14k worth of damage
1) the healer manages to prevent his death and heals himself up to his max potential health, giving himself a new 16k worth of life. That's the highest potential he can reach. Now the DPS must kill him all over again, but once he completes 16k worth of damage before his own death, he wins.
The healer can win, but so can the DPS.
2) The healer fails to overtake the DPS and dies at 15k health loss.

In the second scenario the healer has still prolonged his life. He has still healed, and healed for a lot. He has basically given himself a second life. The DPS cannot heal himself and has his same original health pool. You could argue over who has the advantage or disadvantage but the meaningful component to the balance of the equation is that the healers health pool is not potentially unlimited, it is instead very grounded and in sight of his enemy.

To put the argument in another light. Take a great pvp game design like DOTA, HON or League or Legends. These games are actually quite similar to an MMO's pvp in that there are levels and gear for the players. Characters in these games can heal, but no character can heal for any length of time. In most cases, healing is limited to one, two or three heals during any fight. In other terms, any given character only has a potential of two to maybe three times his max health; and twice their health is a stretch. In SWTOR, if you heal someone for 100k and they never die, they are achieving 5-8 times their health.