Dampening is restricting the healer meta

PVP Arenas
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(Check the edit, I was corrected!)

Let me preface this by saying I’m not an elite PvPer, I really just got started with serious PvP in Dragonflight so take my opinion with a grain of salt.

It feels like in this meta, especially with how fast dampening ramps up in RSS, if you are not a disc priest, you are at a huge disadvantage. I have always enjoyed Druid healing style but when an arena match starts at 10% dampening and is at 65% dampening within 1.5 minutes, there isn’t much that my heals will do. Again, I’m no elite PvPer, but I feel like I do a decent job trading cooldowns.

At a certain point, it does not matter how good you play if the other healer is a disc priest of similar skill level. Disc priests healing comes from absorbs, which are not affected by dampening. A priest can help their team survive in high dampening with Rapture, meanwhile, I can blow every cooldown, barksin, swiftmend, nourish, NS, etc., and my teammates health doesn’t recover.

I think dampening needs looked at in RSS. There are a few potential solutions that I could see helping out other healers.

  • Keep dampening lower in games under ~1800 MMR. With inexperienced DPS/Healers in this bracket and lower, most games wont last forever because eventually someone is gonna mis-use a CD, LoS their healer, etc. In higher rated games where people can actually survive or avoid dying, then we can look at ramping it back up again.

  • Make absorbs affected by dampening the same way healing is. Why is it that after 1.5 minutes, my NS/Soul of the Forest Regrowth only heals someone for like 12k when a disc priest has the same shield they started the match with?

  • Just remove dampening This is more of a scorched earth solution… We all know that no one likes to watch 15 minute arena games, but in this bursty/crazy high damage meta, is that really going to be an issue?

I would love to not have to level my disc priest, because I really just don’t enjoy that style of gameplay, but it feels like if I’m not disc in RSS, I’m playing with 2 hands tied behind my back.

TLDR; Dampening gives a big advantage to certain classes that heal based on absorbs/mitigation instead of pure throughput. Lower Dampening in RSS and slow how fast it ramps up, or just remove it completely

EDIT: Thank you for the responses. It looks like I was incorrect with dampening not affecting absorbs. The info I had was from watching Absterge who seems to think that his shields were not affected by damp, and some forum posts about cocoon and earthen totem not affected by dampening. What makes disc so strong is that their healing comes from damage, and its pretty strong damage. (Rapture still OP in high dampening tho)

BUT the point of the post wasn’t to try and just berate disc priest, what I was trying to get at was that dampening in general just needs to be looked at.

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Absorbs are affected by dampening

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I’ve heard some people say it is, and some people say it is not (it definitely feels like it isn’t). When I get home from work I’ll try and do some research on it because no one seems to have a definitive answer. Might just have to shield myself at 10% damp and check the absorb, then again at higher dampening.

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This would be kind of awkward.

If anything lower games can drag on forever because nobody does anything.

At last check dampening affected absorbs. It won’t make PS weaker, though.

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Yes, because WoW has never had an inaccurate tooltip before…

Also looking through some forum posts it seems that Earthen totem and cocoon are not affected by damp? So it seems like not ALL absorbs are affected.

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A’ight.

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The solution is to remove SS bounties. For all beginner players to really learn how to play pvp with all of us trained. Shuffle is illusion fantasy. is to cover the sun with a sieve.

3s need to go back. The game is horrible.

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Do you know that dampening affects both healing and absorbs right ??? So stop saying that disc priest are immune to dampening lol that is 100% incorrect it affects all healers. Mistweavers, Rdruids, rshams, pres evokers all can outlast healing against a disc in deep dampening they also have better mana. This is not a “disc” problem its a problem with all healers because they nerfed healers by increasing dampening by a insane amount.

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I think the main issue is that Disc’s CDs (e.g. pain suppression and dome) aren’t affected by dampening. So 2 minutes into heavy dampening, their CDs are still fully functional. On other healing specs, their CDs (e.g. Emerald Communion) might be strong heals that get hugely nerfed by dampening.

Let us know. Maybe you’ll discover a bug. That would further explain Disc’s dominance.

The other issue is that Disc can put out a lot of damage. They’re almost another DPS. That’s a significant advantage in RSS.

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