Limit the amount of healers in a party in frontlines

[Liselsia]

Limiting number of healers does nothing to address issue of their impact on frontlines. Healers will till determine flow of battle. If your healer dies, your entire army dies. If your healer is immortal, your entire team is immortal. Skill Ceiling is to great that difference between a good and a bad healer is monstrous.

It gets so bad I sometimes just stop dpsing and just watch where two giant armies spend 5 minutes doing no damage to one another. I ask myself, so whats they point ? We just waiting for one of the healers to lower their guard and burst them down ? Can this even be considered fun ?

[MentalMidgit]

Limiting number of healers does nothing to address issue of their impact on frontlines. Healers will till determine flow of battle. If your healer dies, your entire army dies. If your healer is immortal, your entire team is immortal. Skill Ceiling is to great that difference between a good and a bad healer is monstrous.

It gets so bad I sometimes just stop dpsing and just watch where two giant armies spend 5 minutes doing no damage to one another. I ask myself, so whats they point ? We just waiting for one of the healers to lower their guard and burst them down ? Can this even be considered fun ?

That's because chasing the same target around for 5 minutes straight isn't going to get you anywhere. The way teamfights work in this game could be very fun if groups were actually coordinated and a metagame developed. I come from Guild Wars 1, which arguably, had some of the best pvp ever in an MMO. The way it worked is you either got kills through pressure or through spiking. Pressure meant just gaining small advantages, like disabling a skill or hitting a key interrupt which caused the enemy healers to just not be able to keep up with the damage anymore. Spiking was everybody converging on one target, doing enough damage to kill, all in about 1-2 seconds.

It made for very fun game play as healers weren't just kiting melee and spamming heals anymore. They were watching the enemy melee, seeing which target they were running towards and trying to prepare for the spike. This was done either through pre prots, shutting down the enemy damage or just relying on reflexes to hit that key infuse. If you watch this video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EFWvdyCk1Uo) you will get a better sense of what I'm talking about. You'll see that they are constantly spiking different targets, not just healers, in order to keep the enemy guessing or just to take pressure of off their own healers. What I see in FFXIV is people just continuously training on the same target for 5 minutes straight. This makes it very easy to just fire off heals without thought.

Another issue is their is no real shut down in this game. Guild Wars had the mesmer and to some extent, the ranger. The mesmer was able to shut down the other team through skills like debuffs that caused the next spell cast to have a longer recharge or make melee miss 50% of the time. They also had just straight interupts which could be key in stopping that life saving heal. It made for a very reactive and fun mechanic where casters were cancelling skills half way through the cast to try to draw out the mesmer's interrupt. It was a very intricate dance that made skilled players able to stand out from the crowd and it was a way to gain small advantages that led to winning a fight.

Having no reliable shut down in this game is part of the reason I think that people are very frustrated with the state of healers. I believe that a class like that and a little coordination between groups could go a long way in this game.