Phase walk, among other things, is breaking most matches.

The problem with sorc heals is that while they are very strong by themselves, when they get any support, they are -way- better than the other healers. It is MUCH easier to shut down a guarded merc or op healer than it is a sorc.

A tank can just throw a guard on a sorc healer and /follow them without actually doing any other form of peeling, and the sorc will be nigh immortal against 3-4 DPS. Well, assuming the tank pops defensive cooldowns at least, otherwise he'd die from the guard after a bit.

Additionally, unlike the other healer specs, a sorc healer can pretty much ignore 1 DPS whacking on them (without a tank, I should mention), which should at the very least require a good portion of their attention so that they're forced to focus more on themselves than the team. If an AP PT, MM sniper or fury mara sticks on an unguarded op or merc healer, that op or merc will pretty much need to give that DPS like 75% of their focus to stay alive. With a sorc, it's simply not the case. An occasional stun or KB, boom use your instant selfheal and you're fine.

So the best tactic for ranked arena is to fight teams that dont sport sorcs? Care to elaborate how to find such teams?

imo, the big advantage to a sage in trinity (other than his obvious hps advantage from the defacto superior burst and aoe) is that an intelligent tank doesn't have to babysit him. having the guard is actually much better for the merc and the op. what I mean by that is the latter ACs see much higher gains from it as compared to going w/o a guard. the thing is...when you swap guard for a focused dpser, the sorc is ok on his own and and can still keep up his hps whereas the merc is going to be interrupted and stunned while the op is going to have to escape/retreat -- neither of them are going to do much in the way of effective healing.

don't get me wrong. the guarded sorc is the hardest guarded healer to kill b/c he can literally just stand there in the face of 2 dps for quite some time. but the presence of trinity does a lot more for the op and the merc.

Not to mention that even if the sorc is focusing on their selves, they will still heal their team inadvertently. this doesn't work for the other healing specs.

Yeah, haha. If you start getting focused as an op, you basically have to say, "welp, i'm out!" and kite around like an idiot, try to spam hardcasts on yourself, no chance really to keep your hots up on allies. I can't speak about merc because I haven't tried merc heals recently, but I assume it's even worse.

I second that. As an op healer I've been chased around a void star by persistent Jugs and maras. Might take 2 minutes or so for them to run me down totally, but I always die and while I'm running nobody on my team is getting healed. It makes for very frustrating games when you start out marked and just get put in the gy every time you try to heal.

That said I don't think nerf sorcs so they can know the pain too is the answer. I'd like to see op heals restored and merc healers hard cast heals made instant casts. They already have ammo as a limiting factor so no need for cds or cast times.

I don't think you're going to run into multi healer teams that have enough dps to get a kill in ranked arenas...

2 sorcs 2 tank jugs ought to do it

Um, wut? Are you trolling?

thats a stall till gas team. keep in mind in yolo you would get matched against another 2 healer team and in team ranked you won't be killing any competent teams with that comp.