Dampening / Healing Changes in Arenas Coming in Dragonflight Pre-Expansion Phase 2

PVP Arenas
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Recently, some changes were made in the Dragonflight beta which increased player health by 40% at level 70. We have been evaluating what effect this would have on the power of healing in PvP and we wanted to provide an update for that.

In internal playtests, we have seen the healing has been too powerful in PvP scenarios. Alongside the above player health change, we saw that talent trees have a lot of disparity of power that some abilities have in PvE vs PvP, such as Overgrowth for Restoration druids.

With that context, we discussed several options for tuning healing, including using PvP multipliers on an enormous number of abilities, but we felt that adjusting via a flat value would be the easiest to understand from a player point of view due to its consistency and would also target personal survivability abilities at the same time. This would also give us the option to address outlier abilities with PvP multipliers.

For instanced Arena, matches will now start at a flat 10% decreased healing above what they were in each mode. Along with this, the Dampening timer (when dampening starts to increase) now starts earlier in 3v3 Arena matches to reduce the game length in match ups where there may be a stalemate without the added pressure of higher Dampening. What this means is the following:

  • Solo Shuffle - Start at 10% Dampening and after 1 minute, ramp up at a pace of 25% per minute
  • 2v2 (double DPS) - Start at 10% Dampening and immediately ramp up at a pace of 6% per minute
  • 2v2 (with a healer) - Start at 30% Dampening (up from 20%) and immediately ramp up at a pace of 6% per minute
  • 3v3 - Start at 10% Dampening and after 3 minutes (down from 5 minutes), ramp up at a pace of 6% per minute

Additionally, we have changed the Dampening debuff to show the number of stacks on the debuff itself to improve visibility.

We will continue to monitor PvP pacing in various content to evaluate any further adjustments we should make either with Dampening or the PvP trinket set bonus.

We’ll see you in the Arena!

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Awesome! Thank you for the update, we appreciate the clarity and insight provided in posts like these. Keep up the good work :slightly_smiling_face: :+1:

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What about other content, particularly battlegrounds but also world PvP and duels? Won’t healing remain too powerful in those other modes with these changes?

One solution would be to make dampening take effect in all PvP combat.

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As someone who plays a spec with virtually zero healing (self or otherwise), this should hopefully help diminish the gap? Interested to see the difference.

More importantly, it’s really great to see devs more focused on arena and PvP in general. Thanks!

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No, dampening applies to all forms of healing including absorbs. This will affect your soul leech, dark pact, omega buffed life drains, and healthstones the same as any other class with self-healing.

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So what you mean is instead of using a Scalpel you decided to smash it with a hammer. if resto druid was already outperforming others classes how is a flat 10% going to help the other healers that were already below it by nerfing them with druid…

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I don’t like the idea of things (healing in this case) being scaled differently in instanced arenas compared to other forms of pvp. I would much rather like PvP multipliers on specific abilities that work everywhere instead of making arenas a different game.

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I second this, blue posts like that are very welcomed.
We can deal with lack of balance as long as the game is worked on.

Keep it up, Thanks for your work !

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They already answered that just not being straight forward about it. The answer was to go through and fix the PvP multipliers on the abilities which would then work in all PvP content … but they ain’t doing that because that would me too much work for them, so they use the excuse that the players are too stupid to understand it.

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honestly, y’all should do away with all the self healing tanks and dps have in pvp settings. this would make healers needed and more prominent to actually have to heal, rather than do damage because their teammates can keep themselves up… not to mention this would also help with balancing in the long run.

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With this change make eyes spawn 50% faster, and also make it so it doesn’t obfuscate health bars when you have the buff.

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So healers are just going to be immortal in BGs and WPVP then, where there is no ramping dampening effect?

Having immortal, overtuned healers in BGs is going to be incredibly tedious to deal with, and lead to so much trolling and toxic behaviour as former DPS roll up healers and go off to solo nodes, thinking that this misplaced power you are handing them right here somehow equates to skill on their own part.

I think the backlash to Ranked Solo Shuffle showed how little the vast majority of PVPers enjoy having to deal with tedious livelords (tanks) in PVP, so why are you going out of your way to create more tanks in PVP?

In BGs in the past we could largely ignore tanks, swap targets, kill their healers and then them. What… what is the play here when the healers, of which there will be 3-5, healing each other, what is the play here for randos in a random BGs? Coordinate cross CC chains? That can only happen realistically in Premades. You are handing them even more power here. Jump over to the BG forum and see just how many people love dealing with Premades as it is. Or how many left last xpac specifically because of having to deal with Premades.

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I’m overall a little confused, if anyone here could answer this? So, there is automatic 30 percent dampening in 2v2 when there is a healer. Does there have to be a healer on both teams. Or is there still 30 percent dampening when one team has a healer, and then other team has two dps. I’m curious about that. I’m curious if both teams in 2v2 need a healer for that 30 percent damp or just one team needs a healer.

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Why can’t he game be balanced without dampening?

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Because the alternate to dampening is who can oom the enemy faster.

Both are putting people on a timer but playing around dampening is arguably higher skill and isn’t bias towards classes that can get drinks off with no effort(rdruid)or classes that are extremely mana efficient.(MW)

Also if there was no damp then classes with no ms would be almost unviable in healer dps 2s

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Wrath doesn’t have dampening and the game appears to be doing fine. Lots of comp variety and I guess that is the reason live is so dead in terms of arena play. Eternal Gladiator was one of the hardest rank 1 titles to get because of its rarity due to people playing arena in wrath over shadowlands. Hopefully they know what they are doing in the next xpac or the riot mmo that has been in the making for the last 10 years will put wow down. Riot has yet to fail with a game, so we will see

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Idk if you have played much wrath 2v2 but from my personal experience of playing 40 minute hpal warr mirrors or fighting hpal ele sham for over an hour I’m glad we have dampening now.

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Its really getting old that this company hasn’t found a better way to balance arena than to forcibly nerf healers (something people already don’t want to do) until they can’t do anything.

The fact this is applauded is /lol

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Completely agree tbh