A summary of healer issues

[Shurrikhan]

For the record, the role in Overwatch is explicitly and solely called Support, not Healer.

The difference is that while virtually all heroes in Overwatch have something that can be leveraged as support (a sniper, if otherwise uncontested, denies potentially the largest amount of space in the whole game which can then split or funnel the enemy to the advantage of flankers/divers/CQB heroes, and even when removing the hugely synergetic value of damage profiles... there's CC, ally-affectable healing, shared sight, barriers, etc., etc.), the Supports offer the least amount of value by themselves / are generally the most dependent upon others to exploit their full potential.

(Arguably tanks are just is bad in encountering a team capable of countering them, but, there's no more reason for a tank to 1v5 without some compensatory advantage than for Lucio to specifically hunt down a Tracer, etc.)

I.e., over there, every difference in profile actually matters, because TTK is tight enough, the undermechanics are many and varied enough, and the environmental contexts are significant. That's your biggest part of allowing for support (varied value based on coordination) in a general sense.

Of course, a healer in such a place --who taps into those allowances significantly-- especially when deaths are possible, as to allow for decisions of "Keep up A, over B", is pretty much bound to become a Support, not just a healer /heal-bot, if exploiting their kit to full effect.

But, that's also a PvP game. Having player-versus-player levels of available depth is PvE is... not easy.



Sidenote: I wish we could kind of scrap the clear-cut role breaks in FFXIV in favor of more of a spectrum, or at least allow greater divergence and versatile spread from those starting points.

Sure, every tank pair ought to be able to survive whatever tankbusters are thrown at it with, at most, a non-CD-gated barrier or a preemptive heal (landing after TB but before the AA immediately following it).

But, is there anything wrong with a Summoner being able to half-tank or half-heal by spending more time in and resource on Titan or Phoenix, respectively? A Monk rushing the CD on an empowered Mantra to allow for solo-healing? A healer with minimal 'free' healing being truly able to pump during raidbuff damage windows? Is there anything wrong with having a Stagger system (in the sense of suppression, not likely XIII/XVI damage multipliers) that could allow physical and magical damage each to suppress the enemy's physical movement or magical capacities, so that even Ifrit and Garuda, Drill vs. Empyreal Arrow, would feel different from each other, in a greater sense than just their relative potency?