Less healing makes for a more interesting game.

I also really love playing support characters, but that's one of the big reasons why healing needs to be well balanced. If everyone needs healing to be playable at all the demand for healers actually goes down drastically. In a perfect system it's simply incredibly hard to build support around keeping people alive without creating situations where they are either mandatory or useless.

 

Perhaps this is short-sighted but what about a solution that involves "spell-knockback" when hit. That way if you're tanking mobs and healing it will be less effective (takes significantly longer to heal and you're getting hit more times which brings down efficiency vs just fighting) yet does not punish support players?

I do agree with the general direction of this thread - I for one would love to see more inventive ways to heal in more places than just a healing tree. I think self regeneration skills or something would be great for warriors who don't want to have "Magic" in their themed build would be cool. It could be seen as a sort of "Adrenaline Rush" type of heal instead of the traditional magic.

Personally I believe that Guildwars 1 had some of the more creative ways to heal than most other games. Skills like "Vigerous Spirit" where you could cast it on yourself or allies so everytime they attacked or used an action they would heal a little, regenerations, heal on next hit (sort of a Riposte heal), Life Steal (Magic and from your weapon attacks), shouts/anthems that inspire you and your team to regen, mitigate, or temporarily boost hp.

Ultimately I wouldn't want to see healing or support go away, but perhaps giving alternatives to everyone needing to delve deep into Life magic would be a nice compromise. I'm not suggesting everyone being able to instantly heal, but more maintain when fighting a reasonable foe. For the life tree I agree with as others have mentioned, giving a bonus to "heal other players" would be better to keep them as more support instead of self sustain until they run out of focus.

-Wodin

 

The pushback on spells with the rationale that heals are very powerful but trivially easy to interrupt always has the side effect of making healers into PvP tanks because the whole enemy team will be on them non-stop.

 

I agree with the OP.

I hate to keep bringing this game up but I think Port can learn a lot from it: World of Warcraft.

In WoW's PVP, healing classes can run and heal forever. There is so much healing that a DPS cannot kill a healer 1 on 1 unless there is a substantial gear or skill discrepancy between the two combatants.

I'd limit healing in some way. Here's just a shotgun of ideas: put healing skills on a long cooldown . Limit it to combat. Reduce its effectiveness while in combat. Healing spells have a high focus cost compared to attack spells. Things like this.

Let's not have a game where if two players fight each other, one can just sit there and spam healing on themselves ad infinitum until the person attacking dies of boredom.

 

The problem is that regulating the power of healing spells up or down doesn't solve the issue of healing spells creating absolute results, where they either heal so much that you can't die, or so little that they aren't worth building a character around, it just shifts the point where those absolute results kick in.

In order to really solve the problem we need a whole new paradigm for how support works that can scale along with the multitude of different fights in MMOs without ever becoming broken or useless.

 

I agree with Aetrion that interrupted heals only mean a constantly mauled healer. But I still think there should be heal/support builds that are functional and desirable...but at a cost. Make a group NEED to rally around and defend a healer who has sacrificed personal survivability for group welfare. In exchange that healer should have skills that a single-survivability build would not have. I would love to play such a role. I'll keep you alive if you keep me alive trade off, since neither can do that alone.