I believe healing is too strong in this game, and is causing a variety of problems.
The first problem is that defense doesn’t scale in a healthy way. Imagine one character of a class builds full glass, and another builds full defense, and they do nothing while someone attacks them. The character in full defense will last maybe twice as long. At the same time, having a “bunker” player is very important to the success of the team. But what allows a bunker to last on the battle field is not the base stats, but the amount they can heal. The defensive stats only allow you to live long enough to use your healing abilities when they are off cooldown.
This effectively creates a dichotomy of situations when facing a bunker. Either you can kill them, or you can’t. I once watched a bunker ele fight a bunker guardian for a good minute or so, and it was obvious that neither one could truly threaten the other. Their combat would have been eternal if teammates hadn’t joined the fight. I have also seen bunkers go down almost instantly to 3 people, because their tanky stats don’t let them last long enough to use their healing skills when facing that much damage. This destroys ambiguity in decision making, and limits player choice when facing a bunker. A player can think, “Can I kill this bunker? If yes I should, if no I shouldn’t engage unless a teammate gives me an advantage.”
The second problem is the high amount of burst damage many classes can deal before most people can be reasonably expected to react. This problem is directly related to the first. High amounts of damage in short time-frames have to exist, or there would be nothing to stop the aforementioned bunkers from being immortal. But being stopped from being able to play the game without any possible choice or counterplay is demoralizing, and worse, uninteresting.
The third problem is the lack of resource management as a direct result of two things: low cooldown self heals, and extremely fast health regen out of battle. This means that if you win a fight, you will have lost nothing. By the time you fight another opponent you will be at full health with all your cooldowns back. Again, this eliminates choices from the game. If you can fight and kill someone, you should, because it won’t cost you anything. If you can’t kill someone, you shouldn’t fight them, because it won’t cost them anything. Unless, of course, you are a class that can simply run away from the fight, because once your out of combat you’re back to square 1 with no appreciable losses. This does not promote good decision making, because there is only one good decision, but it does promote bad decision making, because you are not punished for your bad decisions. (It doesn’t even matter if you down someone, if you die after that, they come back at full health.)
I actually think this is one of the reasons dueling is popular. Fighting other low defense builds as a low defense build is one of the few interesting engagements in the game. Because both of you can kill, but will also be killed if you mess up, and because the fights happen within the timeframe of one bar’s worth of cooldowns, you actually have to pay attention to what abilities your opponent uses and when, whether to interrupt them or save your cooldown, when their abilities are on cooldown, how much dodge each of you has left, etc.
In conclusion, I think it would be healthier for the game if self healing and regeneration effects were significantly toned down, and if out of combat regeneration was removed.This would allow defensive stats and offensive stats to scale in a healthy way, and would foster more and more interesting decision making in game. Instead of “can I kill them, if yes I should, if no I shouldn’t engage” choices could be more like, “can I kill them or will they kill me, if I can kill them, how long will it take and how much will it cost me, how will the costs of this engagement effect the next” etc. These choices are more ambiguous and meaningful, and I believe would create a better gameflow. Thank you for your time.
