Quote Originally Posted by Awha View Post
It is simply not truly possible to balance healers, since it is hard to find a middle point.
It is actually extremely easy to balance healers, because the healing is nothing more than undoing damage, which makes a healer nothing but an anti-DPS. DPS make health bars go down, Healers make health bars go up, Damage is Current Health - X, Healing is Current Health + Y, therefore balance is when both are equally strong at that, when X equals Y. It doesn't take a genius to figure out just using common sense.

The issue isn't balance, that's almost trivial in theory and not even that hard to do in practice.
You can approach balance in various other ways to get to the same results if you don't like common sense. For example you can start in a world with only a single DPS and then replace damage skills with healing skills one by one, each time checking the numbers to check whether they're still in balance and only proceeding if balance is maintained. That's an inductive approach.
You can also simply put up random numbers for the skills, throw your jobs in a pit and then buff/nerf classes more or less arbitrarily until they all have roughly 50% winrate against any other and do the same with teams so that any teamcomp has roughly 50% winrate against any other. That's an empiric-iterative approach and by far the most comfortable for game devs, because they only need their internal data and a suitable pit (which Feast isn't due to role lock).
You can also do long-winded excel calculations to simulate fights and team fights and check for effectiveness, which are prone to overlook factors to consider however and generally require you to give things without a numerical or situational value (such as movement) a numerical value. Prone to error, but requires little data.
You'll get to similar, though not identical results either way. Balancing healers is not just possible, it's actually one of the easier things. Melee vs Range, now THAT is a hard thing to balance, because there's loads of things you cannot quantify in the equation, especially in teams. Healers are easy in comparison.

The actual issue lies in healer design as such, in their very premise. And that's why trinity devs are so very reluctant to actually balance healers and usually don't: They'd have to admit having healers at all wasn't such a great idea in the first place.
If healers are actually balanced, then that means whenever there are more DPS than healers, they are pretty much bound to lose their little health bar up/down minigame simply because they are outnumbered - and DPS are several times more popular than healers by nature. They will pretty much always be outnumbered and always lose their role defining minigame, there isn't much else to healers after all. That isn't very fun for the healers, but since that minigame is all they do, they start to think they'd be entitled to be able to keep up with the damage of several DPS. That in turn defies balance. And through that, you get an innate clash between healers and balance.

There is no way to fix that. Devs only get to decide between balance and healers and they usually favor healers. It's as simple as that. They don't have a hard time balancing it, they simply don't bother in the first place.

Duly note that if healers don't suddenly start to feel entitled, there is no clash between the two. No League of Legends player in their right mind demands to be able to heal against an AD carry, an AP carry and a Support as Soraka, their dedicated healing champion, everyone knows that'd be unbalanced as all heck and back and thus their healer isn't a big issue. You don't find people making such crazy demands in other games either, like saying a medic should be able to keep up against a heavy, an assault rifle and a sniper unless they coordinate their grenades and headshots or something - this insanity is something rather unique to trinity games.

That ultimately means that in order to balance healers, you'd need to get rid of those expectations first. All I can say is: Good luck. That's a helluva lot of egos you'd need to flatten in the process and whichever dev would have the guts to do so would make himself veeery unpopular among the healer playerbase.

Nah, healers will just stay broken. Let's be realistic here, they aren't going to change anything substantially. We can talk about it, but it's not gonna change, it never does in trinity games, there's simply too much political force behind it.