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

IF you play dps at all, when ur dps'ing a geared healer at 50, you keep an eye on their resource and tell me if you think you will ever out burn that. There's an operative that PvP's I see him a lot, 1v1 we often square off in Ald at a node. He barely uses up the first hash bar of his energy no matter what I put on him. I can get his health pretty low but his energy always stays almost full. You'd need multiple dps to ever really effect a healers resource if they know what they're doing. That's actually one of my gripes about heals in this game, in WoW it was pretty similar that heals could just heal through most anything but in WoW they did eventually go OoM. I've never been dps'ing a heals and have them run out of resource, which is a problem in itself.

^^ this

Healers should not be able to heal through being dpsed. They should cc, or require guard, or require taunts, or require other people to cc crap off them. Standing still while somebody blows all the dps abilities in the box, including interrupts, and just spamming self-heal is not the role of a healer.

As opposed to everybody else saying that it should take two (or more) DPSers to take down a single healer?

I'm saying for a healer to beat a DPS player the healer should need assistance. As I said before, DPS should do 50% damage to tanks, 100% to other DPS and 150% to healers. Healers should require tanks to be brought up to 100%.

Healers can't be able to tank even a single DPS. It upsets balance. When they can it literally means that a full team of healers will always win.

This is a team game, so you can't balance 1v1. When you balance healer's survivability 1v1 in a team game that has PVP Guards and Taunts you end up with god-mode healers.

Healing needs to be balanced around healing a mitigated target. An un-guarded healer is not a mitigated target, so they should self-heal for crap. Once a tank guards them and they are mitigated it becomes just like healing any other person.

IF you play dps at all, when ur dps'ing a geared healer at 50, you keep an eye on their resource and tell me if you think you will ever out burn that. There's an operative that PvP's I see him a lot, 1v1 we often square off in Ald at a node. He barely uses up the first hash bar of his energy no matter what I put on him. I can get his health pretty low but his energy always stays almost full. You'd need multiple dps to ever really effect a healers resource if they know what they're doing. That's actually one of my gripes about heals in this game, in WoW it was pretty similar that heals could just heal through most anything but in WoW they did eventually go OoM. I've never been dps'ing a heals and have them run out of resource, which is a problem in itself.

So you want healers to be useless without tanks. But dps can be fine without tanks/healers.

I am glad you guys aren't developing any games. You will probably be happy with GW2, no healers, then all the bads can rejoice and just dps each other down. But then they will find something to complain about besides improving their play.

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.

The OP’s problem is that it implicitly assumes DPS should be the preeminent mode of PvP. As others have pointed out, in a 1v1, a similarly geared DPS can take down a Healer. A healer that’s self healing is giving up a HUGE amount of DPS.

What’s really odd about the OP and the Healer meme is that this Nerf really benefited PvP Tanks more than Healers, and Tanks needed some love against DPS Surge stacking. Speaking of Tanks, a properly specced Vanguard/Powertek can SHUT DOWN a healer with his 6 second interrupt. That’s a non DPS solution to the so-called healer problem in the OP, which requires a bit more tactics than just spamming DPS. Suffice it to say, in a 1v1, Healers get demolished by VG/PTs, lose to DPS, and are basically the weakest class in the game 1v1 – healers all but REQUIRE groups to shine.

The OP reads like Sour Grapes over the Surge nerf. Here’s the thing – Surge stacked too well and over powered DPS. Now, you’re in balance with other abilities and need to adapt to it taking a bit longer to DPS someone down, but DPS classes still have significantly more burst damage than Healers and Tanks.