Guild Wars 2 - Page 109

I can give some insight too I think...

In GW2, or at least from what I've seen + what I know about GW1 you have a lot of damage mitigation even without heals. Things like "block next attack", "reflect next projectile", "daze opponent causing their spells to take longer to cooldown" all mix up how damage is dealt. On top of that you have the dodging and other factors that allow for damage to be avoided. Then even again on top of that you have all sorts of different status conditions (deals more damage to burning targets, deals additional damage for each condition on target, etc.) that can reward coordination over a DPS race.

Now for how healer-less PvP works. Well AoC has a very similar setup to how GW2 looks. Basically you could be a healer which meant you offered sustainment. You'd protect against occasional or unfocused damage, but wouldn't be able to provide dedicated healing to keep someone alive if they were targeted in a dedicated strike (of note, healers in AoC did pretty decent damage and I mean a strike that's not mitigated by CCs and other support). So the dynamic it created was that you still had to protect healers because without them you'd be at a disadvantage and would far apart to the more minor damage that would become a credible threat without supporting heals. Yet the healers weren't a cornerstone. Locking down or targeting a healer wouldn't be a key to victory and the melee/mage roles had their own importance that made them worth targeting as much as the 'healers'.

GW2 is likely to be the same way. You'll probably have people providing support/sustainability to your team which if they die exposes a vulnerability to the rest of the team, but they aren't a piece of the puzzle that will keep an entire team alive indefinitely if not dealt with.