I came to this game from Warhammer Online private server (named Cemm Enn), where healers are literal unkillable gods… and I think healing in this game is in a good spot.
Use CC after the healer is less than 50% if you want to kill him. If he can freecast. he can heal himself.
if healing was truely too strong, then everyones offhand would be a staff
spear rend/CC can kill heavy healer players
vg’s entire kit is built to kill healers
if you don’t have any of these, you need weapons with rend/empower and plagued crits/strikes
last option is don’t engage a healer in 1v1… you need co-ordinated hits to kill someone if a skilled healer is behind them.
If everyone has a healing staff offhand and they did not suck. No one would ever die. Legit.
I don’t have a solution but the way it works now seems kinda bad. Especially as they add more and more DPS weapons. They need a big overhaul on how it works IMO. That would also rethink pots.
I used plagued crits for about 20 hours in OPR. It does nothing. The application requirements are very restrictive, so it doesn’t trigger often, and the debuff itself is too weak/short that it can be out healed easily.
In my opinion for OPR its like mentioned: If a Team have more/better healers you cant do that mutch if they know how to play/dodge. Then ad the meta with GW/IG/VG and you cant even reach them properly or stick to them if you got recognized by some dps. For Wars its on the organizing people to make lineup’s/group comps/tactic’s.
Im honest i got no real solution in my mind how to balance all that 
just trying to adapt to the meta’s / playstyle’s . That’s all i can do now.
This is balanced. Consistently applying Trenched Rend and 30% disease and you just can’t kill him. Forget about the composition of the group trying to kill him, there should be no scenario where a healer can’t be downed by 5+ people even if we were lacking more powerful crowd control like the Ice Shower. He wasn’t even running away half the time, he was keeping 4-7 of us entertained on point.
its not the healing keeping him alive, its his mobility from the rapier, not healing as much
Well yes, but they’re hardly exclusive. Rapier is the common choice for a healer. I’m also aware that this one is medium which gave him extra dodges. Still should not be able to survive against 5 of us even if the other 4 members were not lock down or dps type builds.
Understand that this game isn’t completely full of OP players and the majority of healers out there are still struggling to learn their class. Just because you got your ass handed to you by a healer whose playstyle was above and beyond doesn’t mean you should nerf the whole class. I’m really tired of hearing from horrible players that every weapon should be nerfed.
Confirmation bias? This healer survived so he must have played above and beyond and the others were horrible? Be a little more critique if you want to add anything of value, please. If you believe that healers like this should be unkillable then that’s fine. I went out of my way to chase this healer for 5 minutes to debate whether or not this is considered balanced.
If you consider the situation above as normal, i’m really scared for the future of NW
Plagued Strikes has neither of those conditions. You’re talking about Plagued Crits.
1:
You hit him once or twice over the course of several minutes. That won’t kill anything.
2:
You misused a lot of your CC, didn’t bait dodges (which is the real reason he lived- dodging+rapier NOT lifestaff)
3:
You wasted your time chasing 1 healer who can’t do anything by themselves when you could have been playing objectives that actually matter. So the healer didnt die? Who cares? He can’t kill anyone and can’t take the point from you. He’s effectively dead/useless.
4:
That healer is medium/heavy weight armor and has a TON of damage mitigation + fortify. Again, this is armor/dmg mitigation balance, not lifestaff or healer specific.
5:
They were a good player timing flawless dodges and flawless evades. They saved their riposte, didn’t waste cooldowns, timed their heals, never let themselves run out of stamina, etc.
6: you got caught on map geometry and didn’t successfully bait, predict, or counter anything they did
TL;DR
While i agree dmg mitigation in this game can be crazy with nearly infinite dodges, many different sustain/heal potions, health regens, escapes, fortifies, gems, etc (I could go on)… the lifestaff itself is not the problem.
If anything we need more incentive for healers to play light armor. Maybe nerf heavy armor OR reduce healing potency while in heavy armor, keep medium neutral and let light remain as-is.
Agree with above post, lifestaff isn’t the problem. It’s the amount of fortify you get which makes it a problem if the healer is wearing med or heavy armor. They shouldn’t reduce healing numbers it’s fine as it is. My suggestion would be to reduce the amount of fortify and damage mitigation while wearing med or heavy armor.
I agree 100%, fortify is a huge part of the problem.
Leave healing alone its been nerfed enough already. Much prefered the 1.0 healing. At the very least add modifiers to pvp only and leave pve alone or better yet buff it.
Well that’s why I stopped to play. People are too dumb to kill healer and come here to complain about it. And this is pure l2p issue.
I don’t think it’ll matter. This game’s balancing is in an endless spiral of “I can’t win” nerfs that the torrent will keep going until there’s nothing left to gut. Once everything that stands in the way of dps getting their TDM fix, the “I can’t win” nerfing will consume each other as it already has been doing.
They need to separate PvE & PvP. Appeasing both in union is suffocating everything. Healers die in pvp to coordination. They live to LMB spam. They get punished in both PvP & PvE when the echo chamber demands more nefrs.
Man, above anything else you can say about that guy, he played spectacularly.
He heals now and then, but most of the time in that video is a bunch of people attacking him, and he is not even being hit.
He is in heavy armor and has a total control of his little dodges, rapier evades, escapes with fleche…
At times, he drops a healing circle and he doesn’t even bother to stay on it because the amount of incoming damage per second is not enough to even scare him.
I am not going to say that you all were crap. You seem like average players, just like most of us are. But that guy is a pro.
My point is that there are people that are better than the rest, while using the same tools all of us have. Not only in this game, but also in everything else in life. But also in this game. 
I am a healer, and I couldn’t have lasted even 10 seconds against that same group, with the same build. Some people are THAT good.
I mean, you cannot balance a build with the aim of handicapping the awesome top 1%, because then you make the rest of the 99% of the players of the same build hopelessly powerless.
It would need a nerf if, in addition to just squirrel around like he does in the video, he had killed you all and taken the outpost. Sure, that would have be outrageous.
But what he did was just bullet-time dodge your attacks by his own skill as a player, rather than his build being broken.
I insist (check the video) he was not overhealing your damage. He was just ,most of the time, not being damaged!
He could have done exactly the same with just potions and food.
I’m a light healer and I die to everyone who I can’t outdodge in seconds no matter the healing I get, the challenge for you dds is to communicate and time your ccs, so I can’t escape or cast my spells. I don’t think healing should be nerfed in any way, I mean, come on, we are already forced to play a super passive playstyle, don’t do damage, so now we get nerfed again? i also agree to the point someone mentioned before: Why would you chase a single healer and expect them to die, while I’m running away you already stopped me from doing the one thing I’m good at: healing my group. Maybe the change of mindset should shift from: I need to kill the healer to I need to get them away from their group.