Blizzard has failed with healing "updates" to reduce burst in TWW once again

Community General Discussion
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https://www.wowhead.com/news/healing-updates-in-the-war-within-more-sustained-healing-profiles-344934

Hello, healers of Azeroth.

In today’s new Beta build, we’re making some significant changes to healing that we’ve outlined in the development notes. Health pools are increasing (relative to their Dragonflight values), which has changed how it feels to heal other players in a variety of content.

Most notably, we’re reducing the strength of percentage-based healing spells to keep them in-line with their intended power, and we’re increasing the effectiveness of hybrid healing and single target heals to ensure they remain an effective means of defensive power.

We hope with these adjustments that healing doesn’t become any easier or harder. We intend to shift some of the challenging moments from overwhelming bursty damage to a more sustained healing profile.

Does anyone think they succeeded in this goal of reducing “overwhelming bursty damage”? M+ feels burstier than ever to heal IMO, honestly even worse than dragonflight season 1 was.

And it’s a reoccurring pattern too, they said the same thing about reducing burst in dragonflight, this isn’t even their first attempt at reducing burst.

https://www.bluetracker.gg/wow/topic/eu-en/398854-changes-to-player-health-and-creature-damage-at-level-70/

Throughout raid testing in the Dragonflight beta, we have noticed that healing has felt too powerful in level 70 content. This has largely been the result of the impact that 10 additional talent points can have on player damage and healing throughput at level 70.

Generally, we increase player health at the same rate as throughput. This ensures that the pace of the game feels relatively consistent across all levels. One recent example is the covenant renown reward, Deepening Bond, that increased player Stamina by 10% to offset the power gains of Covenant abilities, soulbinds and conduits. After further analysis and playtesting, we have decided that in an upcoming build we will bake the 10% increase to Stamina from Deepening Bond into the base stats of level 60 characters to offset power gained from the new talent system and change Deepening Bond to an increase to movement speed in the Shadowlands.

When damage mitigation abilities and healing are too strong relative to player health, the only way to threaten players is to make enemy damage very high and spiky. If healers can very quickly top off their teammates and mana isn’t a limiting factor, enemies have to be tuned to have the capacity to do burst damage that kills players before healers can react. That isn’t very satisfying gameplay. Increasing player health gives players more time to react to incoming damage, and it make players’ choices about cooldowns and mana management more meaningful.

To address this, we are increasing player stamina and creature damage by 40% at level 70 . This has an effect on the power of healing in PvP, so we will subsequently evaluate and consider adjusting the PvP trinket set bonus values and the tuning of Dampening in Arena. We’re also looking at how this change affects the balance of percentage-based healing versus other healing spells, and we’ll make targeted adjustments there if necessary.

We look forward to your feedback and experiences with these changes on the Dragonflight beta. Thank you!

Theres other problems with M+ too, but this is the biggest IMO.

Every time they claim to do something to “fix” burst damage it gets worse than ever.

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Surely the devs play their own game, and have successfully run 12s of every dungeon, and had no problems with any of the mechanics. Gave it their stamp of approval, yes?

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It is more bursty now than it was in DF.

If you don’t have 2 insta-heals someone is going down.

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Idk why they keep adjusting our health and healing to change this versus adjusting encounter design. Isnt that what decides how healing feels?

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That is what I am seeing as well. People just get hit for so much damage that you need burst healing more and more. Doesn’t help that people also expect healers to dps. I mean, in ff14, that is doable. You are mostly dpsing and healing in ff14 and can manage it, even the mana doesn’t become an issue if you play well.

In wow, bursty damage needs bursty heals and no time for rest. Also leading to mana problems.

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The burst damage is at such a high level that the percentage of the time you’re 1 or 2 GCD away from people dying is at an anxiety-inducing all-time high. That’s not fun, it’s exhausting.

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at what key and gear level, though?

surely we can all agree that if damage scales indefinitely as key levels increase, there’s going to be a point where it’s bursty no matter how they tune things… right?

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I wish they’d say what m+ level their tuning is based around, because at the 10 range, it’s just as bursty as ever.

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Anything over a +5 is bursty in a way that makes me want to close the game.

DF S4 was burst the group down to 40-60% health, give you 20 seconds to get people up to 90%, repeat.

TWW S1 is burst the group down to 40-60% but give two people an DOT that rots them down to 10% every tick for 4 ticks and give you 10 seconds to get everyone to 80%+ before it happens again.

After 35 minutes you need a hair transplant.

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WoW healing has been so bursty for so long, always the strat just becomes avoid those mobs. Then Blizzard says we want to do better, followed by putting out a raid where the boss does 70% of the raids life 5x in 7 seconds.

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As someone who’s been hanging out healing in +2s and +4s, they failed hard at the goal of reducing bursty encounters. Every mob and boss mechanic chunks the group for massive damage. Puddles of bad tick for 1-2 million damage, curse and poison damage ticks for massive damage, and meanwhile my Riptide HoT heals for 40k. So at best, I’m hanging on by the skin of my teeth popping my two charges of Riptide and pumping Healing Surges into the group while trying to find a spare global or two to lay down surging totem and healing stream totem for the small bit of passive healing they provide.

Healing feels a lot worse than it did in Dragonflight Season 3 and Season 4. The increased health pools just feel punishing because damage still chunks players for 50-80% of their health, but it takes a ton more spell casts to bring them back up only for them to get chunked again. It’s not fun. Healing still boils down to whether or not your group avoids all damage and uses their own defensive cooldowns.

I don’t know why Blizz is against the idea of letting healers be powerful. If I want to carry a group with my healing, why isn’t that a good thing? It means my group can make more mistakes, can learn from them, or it means my dps can finish a cast or two before moving out of the puddle of bad and I can get them back to full easily. Why is that gameplay not okay? It sucks to pop cooldowns and still feel like you’re failing because you can’t keep anyone topped off, or you just barely top them up before they get chunked 80% of their health again by the next mechanic.

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You’re having fun. That’s what fun is, riding a bicycle with one leg and one arm on the same side.

I’ve been kind of sad lately when I recall how much I enjoyed DF S4 and how little I want to engage with TWW S1.

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I miss the “just one more” feeling of running Dragonflight Season 3 +6 to +10s. I can barely manage one or two mythics a night now, when I used to be able to crank eight to ten in a gaming session and think nothing of it. It’s not a great feeling to finish a mythic+, even with a good group, and basically need a break and not want to do it again.

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They’ve made similar statements every beta since BfA. Probably longer. And they never actually deliver.

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Not only did they not succeed, they clearly have not even tried.

It is extremely easy to do some simple math and make every ability that hits for 70%+ of a health bar and turn that down. Not doing so is an active choice, and it reaffirms that they have been lying through their teeth about wanting to reduce spiky incoming damage every single time they have claimed to want to.

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I laughed a bit since your post is on a shaman. But yes, the healing is disheartening.

Not really sure how their current “fixes” are going to do anything. Have to run some keys soon to find out.

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Shaman is the most played right now because of utility. My Holy Priest has better raw output and mana efficiency. But having the ranged spell interrupt and aoe stun is awesome. So yeah, even playing the “OP Healer” still feels bad. I can crank up my output with cooldowns, but I’m often OOM and scrambling afterwards. I’m hoping the mana cost reduction in the 4p set bonus will make that part feel better.

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Sure that’s fair and yes, you will absolutely scale to reach that point in an infinitely scaling system. But let’s take the previous 2 seasons, dragonflight seasons 3 and 4. Completing the minimum level of keys in those that gave mythic crests/vaults — the burst damage and healing required for those key levels was significantly less than what is required to do a +9 (gives mythic crests) or a +10 (gives mythic vault) today in TWW S1…

And thats before we even get into the uneven difficulty scaling, where +7 is a significant jump due to the death penalty being so severe, and +10 is even more since you have both fort and tyrannical on that level. Dragonflight scaling was much smoother IMO as you went up in key levels.

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At this point I think we need to start asking if the devs are really that incompetent that they can so consistently miss the mark in the exact same way, or if the changes are working exactly as intended and they simply lie about wanting to reduce burst because they know saying they want the game to be sweatier and more miserable than ever will just result in backlash.

It’s always the same excuse, and it never happens, no matter how much they pinky promise that this time it’s really not gonna make things worse, we swear!

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ill be honest i think this was their goal all along, they wanted to push the casual audience that used to live in +10 and below into delves. that is why the squished the old +10 into m0.

the only people who want to push past +10/m0 now are the sweatiest of the sweats and casuals are relegated to doing hyper boring delves.

the thing is they made delves far too rewarding so doing m0 through +6 is essentially pointless for gearing

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