Incentives for healers in PVP

[Zojha]

When was the last time you did a dungeon/trial/whatever without a healer?

PvP and PvE function quite a bit differently, missy. Do I really need to explain that?

The whole point of PvP is to kill each other. In PvE, the point is to kill the scripted enemy. Healers and tanks exist to delay death caused by damage, DPS exist to create death by causing damage. As such, healers and tanks rely on damage to exist in the first place and your attempt to try and turn the logic around is doubly stupid - once because you neglected the different premises, twice because tanking and healing are roles derived from damage. In PvP, the damage comes from other players, in PvE, it comes from the scripted AI.

What does that mean? It means that PvP works perfectly well without healers and tanks. You are supposed to kill each other and die anyway, so the function of delaying that is counterproductive. It only slows down the pace of the match. PvE doesn't, because PvE demands tanks and healers, as you are unable to kill the enemy before he kills you without them by design. That isn't the case in PvP. It would be broken if it were. Can you imagine playing as Alexander Prime in Frontlines? That'd be dumb, as whoever plays it would have a hugely higher impact than any other player who doesn't. And because that's dumb, players are supposed to be balanced against each other in the impact they have on the match. And thus, any job or role being required or shunned implies an imbalance, as it implies a difference in impact.

And the course of action when such an imbalance in impact exists is not to incentivize people to play that job/role/whatever, but to balance it so that the impact is equal to that of other jobs/roles/whatever. In PvE, we simply live with that imbalance, because it cannot be used against players. In PvP, it can.