I've been playing COH for two weeks now. I started with my husband who was an Everquest/WOW player. He is a natural leader and he always starts his own team. At first, he was looking for healers, too. He is a scrapper/regen, and now we both know that you look for a DEFENDER for your team, and they will keep you out of trouble. Didn't take that long to learn.
The other day we did a mission with a force field defender. 7 people on an invincible - half the mobs were red to me, the rest half orange/half purple. We went through and nobody died - and we only healed a couple times.
I have a fire/rad controller and I can heal a bit but now that I played the game for a while, I really only use it when I am hurting (usually if hte tank doesn't draw the aggro). If I keep the mobs immobilized/debuffed/held, and AM everybody, we rarely get hurt.
One point people are forgetting to discuss here is leadership. I am very lucky because my husband plays a good leader and we almost always get our own team to do missions - so he sets the style of play. I'd say 3/4 of our teams are excellent. We almost always have a couple people who do stupid stuff - run ahead and pull 4 mobs with 6 purple bosses in them - but they usually get it after a couple times being told what to do.
If you don't like the RUHEALER people - start your own team. I got a new character and after being on a team that was a total disaster, I just started mine. The first battle sucked - we split up and got hammered - I told them to stick together and just fight one group at a time. That is all they needed. We did the mission just fine with noobs.
So I guess my 2 cents are:
1. You don't need heal if you have good defenders and controllers, but it is nice to have a backup heal for emergencies.
2. Leadership makes the biggest difference in a team - if you don't like the team leaders, start your own team.
