You win when you do enough damage. It’s ultimately the only number that matters. Healing is just the reverse of it. You can play around with this with damage types and how damage is applied but ultimately its all the same. A solution would be encounters that must be won in a different way, something that would be on par with damage.

I think removing healing would cut down on the variety of things you can do and possibly make the game less interesting. However, you could still remove the healer role, like you said, and push healing onto every class. For example, every class could be responsible for their own healing. LIkewise you could do the same thing with threat. But the classes might all start feeling the same again.

Though it’s a staple of the RPG genre, I’ve more-or-less come to the conclusion that the whole healer mechanic is broken. Your standard fight in most of the RPGs I’ve played goes like this:

1. Party prepares battlefield (or arranges themselves to best effect).
2. Big beefy guy runs in with a big sign saying “hit me”
3. Less beefy, more dangerous guys run in behind with small signs saying “don’t hit me”
4. Least beefy stand back and waggle their fingers, doing all the vital support work.

Any fight that doesn’t play out like this (think of the Magister’s Terrace “arena” match) is considered an abberation at best.

So, you’re a game designer. What do you do to make this fight more interesting to your players? The most straightforward thing to do is make the opponent spit out gobs of damage. EverQuest was wonderful at this — from the release of Velious, and probably as far back as Kunark, end game fights practically always required a group of 3-10 clerics casting “Complete Healing” in rotation. Who does this stress? The tank (usually equipment more than gear), and the healers.

Ok, so let’s try something different. We want to do something which makes those hapless DPSers have to think some… so we add some fun obstacle for them. Now, if there’s not a penalty to the obstacle, it’s no obstacle. So, let’s review our options for penalties. (1) Disable the player (instadeath, paralysis, mind control, fear, silence, etc) (2) Damage the player. Now, #1 has to be handled very carefully, as a game in which a player is constantly finding him/herself incapable of acting isn’t a game, it’s a movie. So generally, we opt for #2. While this does require skill of the DPS (”Flame wreath means don’t move!”), inevitably (especially in larger fights), someone’s going to fail their skill check. And the load for this failure falls back to the healers.

Also, a tank + spank, even with obstacles, has a glaring fault: whereas some portion of your player base play tanks, the classic tank and spank requires only 1 tank. Here’s a definite disparity needing address. So events are designed to require multiple tanks, either sequentially or in parallel. In the first case, we deal with the tank handoff. Vaelestraz in BWL comes to mind, or Moroes, or practically any long fight in EverQuest (oh darn, /disc defensive is down… next tank!). This, not surprisingly, puts more load on the healers, as they have to at some point deal with damage spikes on 2 players, plus any hapless DPS along the way. Oh the other hand, parallel tanks take parallel healing.

Now, naively, it quickly becomes evident that you can solve any game designer challenge by throwing more healing at it. This is the Achilles’ heal of the tank-healer system, in my view. Sure, designers have developed solutions to it, but they’re all the same: put a timer on the event (explicit timer, enrage timer, up-ramping damage, down-ramping healing effectiveness).

The healer role needs to be abolished. If we must keep to the hit-point-based game, make damage enduring. Create fights/strategies that depend on abilities to mitigate damage, not simply replenish health once it’s been lost. Decoys, simulacra, remote control, anything.

But then, maybe what I’m really thinking of is a game of StarCraft.