Effective HP is basically how much HP someone can have without their health actually being that value. So for example, a tracer without any healing effects on her only has 150hp, any damage she takes is permanent, but if that tracer has inspire/brig pack/bap shift/or just a pocket in general their effective health is increased as even if they take damage the damage doesn’t stick. This allows the tracer to stay in fights longer because she has more health.
The reason I bring this up is because back when OW was first released we only had Mercy, Lucio, and Zen. Two of these heroes could only heal one person at a time, as well as not being able to heal themselves. This means that the amount of people with a higher effective HP pool was very limited. The result of this was any damage on anyone without a pocket healer was very impactful and people had to be more careful depending on their resources. It also meant if a tank was being pocketed and the other support took damage, the healer had to make a decision on who got heals from that point on.
But, with the addition of Brig, Moira, and Baptiste, there isn’t as much decision in who you need to pocket as strong AoE healing increases the effective HP of EVERYONE. This results in a very different playstyle, where as long as we are grouped or we keep fighting, our effective HP will always be high and if the enemy team does not have the same then they will ultimately lose from a battle of attrition.
This results in either people also having to play these characters to just be able to sustain long enough with it, or we have to relie on BURST damage, because burst damage does not care about effective HP because it chunks at the core too much.
Because of this trouble in effective HP being handed to everyone, damage isn’t as substantial or impactful unless it is bursty, and burst is not as much fun to play against because it feels like you have no chance to react to it, you’re just dead. So it’s either you feel like you have no impact because everyone just sustains it, or you feel annoyed because you die without being able to react.
This results in a cycle, we need more sustain because their is too much burst, and we need more burst because there is just too much sustain. But, this wasn’t that much of a problem back when healers had to pick and choose their priorities because damage was impactful if spaced out or focused correctly. At the same time, healing priority and dedicated pocketing felt more impactful if everyone was using that damage on the pocketed hero. But because everyone can be pocketed at the same time, those feelings are lost.
This result of abundance of AoE healing added to the game increases the effective HP of everyone rather then few which results in more burst needed. So either AoE healing needs a cap or more burst needs to be added and i’d much prefer the former.
Or healing in general needs to be reduced so damage can also be reduced, so damage feels more impactful but does not do enough to burst and feel like there’s nothing to do against it.