Do Healers = Victory? (FL)

[Nyteryze]

I thought it would be interesting to take a kind of Poll.

Do you think the Alliance with the largest # of Healers wins in FL...

A) around 50%
B) below 50%
C) above 50%

No rage, No QQ, Just thought it would be cool if that Stat was kept to examine balance. I personally do not know the answer to this as I am not even done ranking up in PVP.

So, i figured I would ask for your guys' thoughts.

Cheers!

[Slib]

I've been in a group where we had noone die at the manors due to having 5 healers in the group (post regen stacking nerf).

We claimed the base and held it while they wasted their time trying to kill us and we couldn't kill them either. This lasted the whole match. So in this case, I think the more healers, the better chance of winning due to being able to hold bases better. Scholars would be the best for this since they have an AoE knockback to get control of the base easier.

[AstralKaos]

Yes, in most cases.

Grab a flag with three or four healers with half a brain, maybe with the help of B depending on the other team or your DD's, and the flag will be very hard to be taken from you. It's not impossible mind you, though given the "skill" level of most FL players (pfft), it will be an annoying task depending what side of this you're on.

[Kyuru]

IMO, you can't really boil it down into a statement like 'the team with the most healers wins x% of the time'. From a pure DPS standpoint, it's quite easy for a good group to take an all-healer or mostly-healer party down, especially if those healers don't have much FL / PvP experience and/or don't know how to play the healer role effectively. Bad healers are paperweights.

It depends on:
a) Healer skill / cohesiveness - do they know who and when they should heal, or are they sitting there trying to spamcure themselves while being melted down by an opposing group?
b) DPS coordination - stacking healers reduces group DPS. Can the remaining DPS correctly focus down a target and follow the correct kill order, or are they spending 60% of their damage output chasing 2 tanks around?
c) group / alliance strategy - are you in the right place at the right time, or is your team spending valuable time chasing down 10 points worth of kills when you should be somewhere else?

To answer your question, I think it's easily below 50%. Wins are more about strategy, skill and timing than anything else.

[Nyteryze]

Well of course you have a more than valid point that there are many variable outside of simply "whoever has the most healers losses/wins".

That being said, if it were possible for us to examine 1000 games (for example), then see how often the team with most healers won or lost, there would be some information gained from what that Trend would show.

Since we don't have any statistics that show this, the only other option I could think of was to ask experienced players which way they thought that "Trend" would point.

So i guess i should add that, Please consider the quality of teammates/opponents if your giving an example of a specific match, because of course the better Team should almost always win.

In any case, thanks for the input so far guys and for keeping it classy!

Cheers!

[Buff_Archer]

For the kind of objective comparison you're looking for, I'd recommend standardizing whatever variables you can, knowing that the team with 'mid' as their objective is fighting a combined PVP/PVE type battle, I'd prob base the comparison on being in a flag cap based party A or C traditionally. Also it's possible to do extremely well and never lose ground but have a weak alliance and lose to the GC your party isn't up against which skews the numbers.

So based on the hundreds of matches where I was in team A or C fighting for a flag, in both Healer and DPS role, I'd have to say the optimal number of healers is 3. It can be done with 4 healers or 2, but not nearly as well. I don't have much experience with 4 healer parties because it's hard enough getting 2 if you're in Adders, and 3 (especially 1 WHM 2 SCH) makes it such an easy win and yet it's hard to get a team like that outside premades- it feels like a lot more people just want to play NIN or run around getting kill shots and can't handle an outright battle of any duration.

My opinion for flag teams (numbers are out of 8 Full Party members with a goal of capturing and holding flags)
Best- 3 Healers (WHM/SCH mix): Kill off opposition faster, hold objective easily while staying on offense, or defending against >1 party.
2nd Best- 2 Healers (1 WHM/1 SCH): Both healers have to be really good, and it's probable that the party will get killed off at some point. But a good party with this composition can beat a 3 healer party that's inexperienced/uncoordinated.
3rd Best- 4 Healers- If a party needs 4 healers the question to ask is why. If a couple of healers are new to PVP/FL this might make sense. If it's 4 healers to hold off > 1 Party- then one of those 4 healers could be a DPS helping take underdefended secondary objectives.

So ideally between 25% and 37.5%.

Revision- Second best choice would be 4 healers on a flag team, over 2 healers. So order of preference for flag teams only- 3 healer team, 4 healer team, 2 healer team. Pugged into a 4 healer team today and we held out against much larger parties. That was with me on Summoner putting out over 200k damage though, if the team had weak DPS it wouldn't have been so easy.

[MomomiMomi]

I'd agree with the above. I've had the best experience with 3 for flag teams, especially with 1-2 SCHs.

[Red_Wolf]

In my experience so far, having the team that can focus the other team's healers instead of their pallys is what wins the game. That and a B team that can watch the timer.

2 Healer minimum for every group though.

[Saiyakupo]

I agree with buff archer and red wolf.
I ran with 4 healers one time going around capping bases and winning. But that setup is only good if you can trust your DPS to be super amazing or your foe to be super dumb. Too many healers has problems stacking and no dps to get kills (and thus less score). No healers and you will 98% of the time fail horribly.
Some people argue that having no healers on B team is ok, but, it's not. Only if again, you're super amazing or you have maybe a summoner or everyone tries to take care of themself will having no healers on your B team be ok, but that's almost never the case.
Healers = victory!

[SeraviEdalborez]

3 healers for A/C, 1-2 healers for B.

Having 2 healers for A/C is doable, 0-1 is almost guaranteed failure. More than 3 is mainly only successful at outlasting, meaning you need to claim the flag first and then zombie it forever.