The Healer Problem in PVP

[KusoWat]

A common misconception is that as a role, healers are overpowered. This just simply isn't the case.

Healers don't climb so high because they are insanely powerful, they do so because the disparity in effectiveness between a skilled healer and one more green is massive. Plat vs silver, diamond vs gold, you almost never see two good healers face off against each other.

The main reason for this is that healing is extremely difficult, with 4v4 Feast healing being arguably the most difficult content in the game. This deters people from playing it and those that do are nowhere near as good as the veterans they are forced to go up against. They have a very low skill floor and a very high ceiling.

So again, the issue is not that healers are too powerful, it is that they are too difficult to play which leads to massive gaps in skill.

[Zojha]

A common misconception is that as a role, healers are overpowered. This just simply isn't the case.

This just simply is the case, hence why limit break, culling time and medal stacks exist in the first place. That's why a platinum DPS doesn't weigh as heavy as a platinum healer. That's why skill differences between healers matter a lot more than skill differences between tanks or DPS. That's why entire burst rotations of DPS barely deal around as much damage as a single Cure II can heal.

Power times Skill = Impact. Healers get more impact per skill because they have more power. And they have more power because SE doesn't balance them as one out of four equal team members, but against a melee, a ranged and a tank combined, aka the standard Feast comp. Their power is tuned to vie with the power of three other people and therefore by nature is higher than each of the other roles.

That is barely functional in Ranked due to the enforced teamcomp. In modes without an enforced teamcomp, it leads to teams without healers having significantly lower chances to win against teams with.