This sounds like a terrible idea.
You mean… Dampening?
No thanks.
No suggestion is going to ever make Dampening palatable in WPVP. “Levels of Dampening” is still Dampening that didn’t need to exist.
Dampening reduces healing done over time in arena, so no, that’s not what I meant.
Personally, I’m against flat nerfs to healing or damage in WPvP—it tends to feel bad when you’re playing the role being nerfed. However, tanks take increased damage in WPvP due to their baseline damage mitigation, and healers essentially have similar mitigation through their powerful healing output.
For the average DPS player, killing a healer often boils down to outlasting their mana pool before they can kill you, which just isn’t realistic in today’s game, more so during a 1v1 scenario.
That’s why I suggested, if anything were to change for healers in WPvP, it should target the cost of their spells or slightly reduce their mana regeneration instead of directly nerfing their healing output. It keeps their role impactful without making them feel completely neutered.
I get that… however, the result of Dampening is the same: forcing the Healers to OOM.
It feels just as bad losing a fight in PVP because you went OOM, and not because you misplayed/got outplayed.
At any rate, I’m not altogether sure just why anyone would suggest such pointless changes to begin with. Most WPVP skirmishes last at best 1-2 mins - not least of all when most WPVP skirmishes are unfair fights to begin with. A Healer ever going OOM in that timeframe is very unlikely - and yet those skirmishes end all the same. Do we really need to make them OOM faster? Is that going to change anything, outside of making even less players want to play a Healer?
They shouldn’t, IMO.
They’re hardly even “Tanks” anymore. Can’t call them a “Tank” when a DPS (casters especially) can sneeze in their general direction and do 6M damage to them - non-crit, mind you - with the press of a single button.
This is not true - Healing != Mitigation. Healing heals damage (even proactive healing). Mitigation prevents damage. There’s only so much healing can do to save someone, whereas mitigation can even save you from certain death. Healers != Tanks, even though we might consider Healers to be equally “Tanky.” They’re “Tanky” in an entirely different way.
(Note: Not only that, but their “Tankiness” is relative. Not all Healers are built the same.)
While it was easy for the community to convince Blizzard to - essentially - gut Tanks in PVP due to how little impact they have on PVP, they’re going to find it very hard to convince Blizzard to gut Healers in the same way.
For instance: how many DPS realize that a nerf to Healers is also indirectly a nerf to themselves? That’s the thing… they don’t pay attention to what’s going on, and how they’re being propped up by the same Healers they love to hate. While it might be nice to have weaker enemy Healers, one wonders if it’ll be equally nice to have weaker friendly Healers. In my experience, players who ask for such handicaps don’t tend to think too deeply about the large-scale repercussions of their wishes. Blizzard knows this, too - which is why Blizzard rarely listens to the outcry of such people.
Perfect example: a while back, I was in a crate farming group. Someone got bounty and was knocked out of the sky. Only 2 people came to his rescue - me and a Ret Pally, IIRC. The fighting on the ground was intense. It was 2 DPS and me, as the sole Healer. Thankfully, we were able to stave off the assault and gave the poor guy enough time to relog and clear his bounty. We headed back to the main group and the stories began in Discord.
“It was just the 2 of us out there!” (bounty referring to himself and the Ret Pally).
“I thought I was going to die multiple times, but I guess I didn’t!”
“Yeah… we took on all those Ally!”
In other words… it was like I didn’t even exist, yet I sure as heck was healing like mad to keep them alive against a throng of Alliance head-hunters! They didn’t notice my healing. They just noticed their “Big dam,” and sincerely thought that they were just so good.
Healing is thankless. We are the silent agents who stand behind you, keeping you alive, letting you have your fun… we let you get all the accolades, all the attention, all the fawning - but without us? You’d be a flagged corpse.
Be careful what you wish for.
You shouldn’t be trying to 1v1 a Healer, anyways. They’re literally built to live-lord; after all, if they can’t even keep themselves alive, how can they keep others alive? Why do people keep expecting Blizzard to balance the game around 1v1s? Is this really what this thread is about… another scrub whining about the fact that they can’t 1v1 a Healer?
(Note: Just so we’re clear, I’m not referring to you when I say, “Another scrub.”)
Here it is… the truth comes out: the DPS players that fight Healers because they aren’t good enough to fight other DPS players are salty because they can’t EZ clap a Healer. Isn’t that what this whole thread is about?
And here I thought we were talking about WPVP, while - the whole time - we were just talking about 1v1s.
Sure, but Dampening and increased mana costs affect fights very differently. Dampening reduces healing output over time, while increased mana costs or reduced regeneration directly target a healer’s sustainability.
For example, in 2v2 arenas, matches start with a baseline 20% Dampening if a healer is present in the match, which immediately weakens healing across the board. Now compare that to a 20% increase in mana costs—while both may lead to a healer running out of resources, higher mana costs would force healers to think more carefully about their spell usage from the start rather than simply being punished by a healing reduction as the fight drags on.
Dampening just passively affects healing output, while increasing mana costs actively pressures decision-making and resource management. They aren’t interchangeable mechanics.
It depends on the context though. In a group WPvP setting, if a healer goes OOM while their group is still alive, isn’t that just a failure of team coordination? If the other team’s healer stays alive with mana while yours goes OOM, it often means the other group did a better job interrupting or controlling the fight. Running out of mana can be an outplay, especially when it’s the result of pressure, proper CC chains, and target swapping.
And at the end of the day, healers aren’t meant to be self-sufficient tanks—they rely on their group just as much as the group relies on them.
That’s fair, and I’m not entirely convinced either—like I said before, I’m on the fence about this. I mained Discipline Priest for years, and I know firsthand how frustrating it can be when healers are nerfed too harshly. But if something had to change, I’d rather see adjustments to mana management than making healers take more damage.
The goal shouldn’t be to make healers miserable but to encourage a more balanced dynamic in WPvP, where a single healer isn’t effectively unkillable without heavy focus or mana drain pressure.
The issue with tanks in PvP comes down to how Blizzard designed them—tanks are balanced around PvE content, where their role is essential for mitigating massive amounts of damage. In PvP, that kind of passive damage reduction doesn’t translate well, which is why they take increased damage in those settings.
Healers function differently since their tankiness comes from their healing output rather than damage reduction, which is why I’m more hesitant about applying a similar damage-taken penalty to them. However, mana management could still be a lever to balance them without making them feel as frustrating to play.
You’re right in theory, but in practice, healing and mitigation are often treated similarly in the game’s mechanics. Abilities like Power Word: Shield and Ignore Pain are both affected by healing reduction effects like Mortal Wounds because they technically count as absorbs, which Blizzard considers a form of “healing.”
That said, I agree that the way healers are tanky isn’t the same as tanks in PvE, and it’s why I think increasing their damage taken in WPvP is the wrong approach.
Trust me, I get it—I played Discipline Priest for most of my time in WoW, and the thanklessness of healing is all too familiar. It wasn’t until Dragonflight Season 3 that I switched to playing Survival Hunter, so I’ve been on both sides of this debate.
You’re right—healers shouldn’t be balanced around 1v1 scenarios. But even outside of 1v1s, the issue still exists in group WPvP fights where a healer can survive almost indefinitely if not heavily focused or mana drained.
The problem isn’t that healers are hard to kill; it’s that mana feels almost like a non-issue now compared to how it was in older expansions. When I was playing Classic WotLK and even SoD, healers went OOM much faster and felt way less tanky than they do today. The tradeoff was that they felt more rewarding when they could keep a group alive under pressure, but they couldn’t endlessly sustain without some level of resource management.
Overall, I’m not advocating for drastic changes to healers in WPvP. If any adjustments were made, I’d prefer subtle tweaks to mana management rather than outright increasing their damage taken.
jeez guys you don’t have to write novels.
no one’s going to read the last two comments.
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Complex thoughts require more than two sentences. If that’s a problem, maybe stick to picture books
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Nah. IN the real world. You have to fight for real. Not some fancy arena with rules and dampening… lol
Dont get mad, get even. Its Wpvp.
It’s readily possible to kill even a good healer with only two people if they aren’t getting peels and aren’t super buffed. It’s just a matter of (1) knowing how to do damage, (2) knowing when and what to CC and interrupt, and (3) exhausting cooldowns useable in stuns.
If you have more than two competent people, it becomes simple to just brute force them down with damage as high as it is.
The stories of healers tanking a raid of people are indicative of nothing so much as the incompetence of said DPS. Sure, I’ve done that… against players who were in greens, feeding me constant precog, failing to interrupt the correct school, etc.
Well, I agree that the mana paradigm shift over the years has been decidedly for the worse.
It was better when we all – DPS and healers both – had to actively manage mana, especially when the ways to do so involved potential counterplay (e.g. CC Shadowfiend, dispel Divine Plea/Innervate, destroy Mana Tide, etc.).
Game design has changed, though. It is what it is. Healers aren’t invincible until OOMing, and doing high pressure leads to them OOMing more quickly.
Love being invincible don’t give them ideas :3
Yea like back in orignal WoTLK when a healer could just stack to full resil and you could have the best players in the world wacking away at them for 40+ minutes straight and their HP would barely even drop. And that was in an eclosed space where you could keep on them, now in open world, my drac or pally heals can do the same if I so want. There was a guy who tried to kill my toon, he did all the right things, had far better gear but I was in my healing spec at the time so he could not kill me. On a guy toon so I say it was a he. And so they finally just left me alone and another time, my Hpal killed a super well geared rogue even though my gear was the same and he didn’t even put a dent in me. I killed their toon they used a very poor rotation this rogue player did but still zero reason why they should have done so bad vs a heals open world PvP. Seemed to be anew player by looking at their profile.
But I view those two cases as unique. Lots of you out there could clear me out fast when I am on my pally in healing spec. 630+ ivl in WPvP on a healer toon vs other people who got equal or better gear… still not as unkillable as I was back in previous expacs.
bahahaha! it’s a gaming forum but go off then.
Every healer feels killable this xpac.
I def think they should. Its always been a problem with wpvp with bad players playing specs like healer and tank in wpvp content to hide behind how “godly” said specs can be. IDK what they could do to even the scales more all around but WoW def should do so at somepoint. I think a rock-paper-scissors type approach can be heavy-handed though so I really don’t know.
Bingo. I completely agree.
Exactly. And on forums sometimes posts are longer than two sentences.
The picture books are that way ----->