Healers are way too strong in large scale PvP.

[RiyahArp]

uh..no they can't kill you one on one. They can't make you stay to be killed. The problem is that they can tank 2-5 DPS per healer, which means they can hold objectives very easily. If SE thought that was a fix, then honestly, they should just stop bothering with pvp altogether. I'm expecting healer potencies to drop, or MP costs to rise. This would also help in Feast too, since so much of that mode is whether or not you can defeat the healer.

[Awha]

uh..no they can't kill you one on one. They can't make you stay to be killed. The problem is that they can tank 2-5 DPS per healer, which means they can hold objectives very easily. If SE thought that was a fix, then honestly, they should just stop bothering with pvp altogether. I'm expecting healer potencies to drop, or MP costs to rise. This would also help in Feast too, since so much of that mode is whether or not you can defeat the healer.

The thing about trinity based pvp especially healers. It is simply not truly possible to balance healers, since it is hard to find a middle point.

Healing is one of those things when it comes to PvP that even experienced devs have a hard time trying to balance, so it is no wonder that SE is having a hard time with it. Though as someone mentioned before making healers more of a support role instead of pure healer would be interesting.

[Zojha]

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.

[Awha]

Snip . . .

Thing is as you mentioned the very design of healers makes it is you they cannot truly be balanced in MMO pvp based around the trinity. On paper sure balancing healers is a easy, but a game is more then just that. Perspective and enjoyment are also something the devs have to take into account when it comes to balance and that point alone makes it so when healers are brought into the picture they have no real viable option. While I am not sure what the devs think, but when it comes to game balance I always view it as two parts, numbers and community perspective. Sure you can make a balance game by tweaking the numbers but if the community does not support it and stops playing what is the point. As a dev striking and a balance between game play and the community is not a simple feat and when it comes to healers it is nearly impossible. Since the healer fantasy will always be a thing in a trinity based game.

In my first post I should have gone into more detail since I do agree numbers wise it is easy to balance healers, just personally I have always thought balance was more then just a numbers game when it came to game development. That is the tricky part, how do you balance your game around a trinity while maintaining the fantasy of each role yet persevering some semblance of competitiveness without trivializing the content. To be fair SE has missed that mark if they were ever truly trying to hit it. In the end I still stand by that I do not think it is possible to truly have a balanced pvp in a trinity based game, since numbers are just one piece of the pie.

In the end though we both do agree that healers are difficult to balance, in an ideal world sure balance would be solely based off numbers, but sadly other factors have to be considered when it comes to game balance, and those factors are what make finding a middle point rather difficult if not impossible.

[uvuvwevwevweonyetenyevweugwemu]

I remembered in Shatter, there was one guy botting 6 ASTs with him being synastry-ed. He's practically immortal, he spent all day switching jobs because we decided to take the other 2 teams on his GC and he kept losing. He would lose anyway in 8v8v8 simply lack of ice dps. Now its not bots, they're the meta. Imagine if a GC own an ice and if that ice worked like mammets, he would've won easy. The fix is simple, remove healing mammets. Put healer back to healing people. Damage per second have to include mammet's damage during its route, idk why SE didn't include that math.

ps. This was just before SB. Anyone botting like that would be easily spotted now with the leaderboard showing per team.

[Wintersandman]

snip

If you were to equate 1 dps vs 1 healer vs 1 tank than yes you could balance it. But healing is balanced around 1 tank, 2 dps vs 1 healer. Damage against said healer should exceed the maximum damage dealt by the opponents they are against. 2 DPS can burn down a healer. Where this is becoming a problem is in RW only where there was no incentive to have more dps than healers. But I can tell you I took down several healers last night and my 19 kills in RW proved it was possible (for the record I never stepped foot in a mech).

If I have group A is 1 tank, 2 dps, and 1 healer, and group B is 4 healers. Group A is going to by and large eliminate the effect Group B is going to have. Sure Group B may not die but they will not be able to keep their mechs up and they will have a lot harder time burning an enemy mech down. Group A will destroy Group B mechs and complete objectives much faster. The only advantage is Group B can control generator faster than Group A. But with the rate CE spawns now generator isn't the only thing. It is who can eliminate Mechs faster than the other.

[Decoy_Wolff]

There are groups of people just set as healers and they take so long to kill because their heals are too damn strong. If you got two WHM, fucked. Even one AST is hard enough to kill, same goes for SCH (Though SCH is kinda on the weak side).