I’ve been a lifelong casual PvP healer. Healing has always been what I enjoy most: keeping people alive, reading the flow of a fight, and making small, strategic decisions that turn chaos into a win. But in the current game state, that kind of play just doesn’t exist anymore.
Every match feels less like strategy and more like triage. My decisions aren’t about timing or positioning; they’re about which massive heal or cooldown I can throw out the fastest before someone gets erased by a 6-million crit. Once those cooldowns fade, the team collapses in seconds. Zero room for recovery or adaptation anymore.
The result is that healing has lost its identity. DPS are rewarded for pressing high-impact burst buttons, while support play, coordination, and crowd control barely register in the outcome of a match. The skill expression that used to define PvP feels replaced by raw damage throughput.
This imbalance pushes every healer toward prevention rather than reaction, favoring absorption and mitigation classes, especially Discipline Priests, who can preload safety before damage even lands. They are overtuned to the point that traditional healers who rely on timing, triage, and mana management just can’t compete.
I’m not here to rant; I’m here to say that the game’s current pacing doesn’t support what made healing fun. Strategic decision-making has been replaced with frantic cooldown trading, and that’s not healthy for the long-term PvP experience. Blizzard needs to rein in burst damage and reintroduce breathing room so that healers and teamwork can matter again.
Mostly just writing this has made me feel better, but I guess… chalk it up to another healer throwing in the towel until something changes. Guess I’m rolling DPS and adding to the queue times. Cool.
There is a stat squish in Midnight. You can watch alpha pvp duels right now on youtube. It’s alpha so I try not to be too critical but it looks pretty bad gameplay loop wise just like the last stat squish, which made low levels able to beat max levels in duels in seconds. History probably going to repeat itself once again.
I think this is the philosophy they’re moving away from, the cooldown trading.
And how weak all our spells innately are without 2-3 conditions being met from talent interactions and CD stacking.
I for one would enjoy seeing a healing spell cast, and big HP go up. Or HoTs and PoM to be dinging big chunks of healing for example, without 5 talents needed for it.
But they are moving away from spiking health pools, for PvE and PvP. And rolling alot more power back into base abilities.
Not even close to true.
I mean maybe in random BGs where people are flailing wildly with little to no attempt at coordination or game knowledge, but the team that coordinates and disrupts the enemy team will definitely win more than people who are just doing their DPS rotation.
Do you want good coordination to allow teams to set up 30+ seconds of uninterrupted crowed control or what exactly?
Preservation evoker does fine with probably the least absorption / external mitigation of any healer.
What does “strategic decision-making” look like in your mind? I feel like that accurately sums up what we have now.
The only thing I sort of agree with is that sometimes spike damage feels too high from a couple of specs. But that’s usually things like a hunter with zerk and saltwater or a destro warlock that your team just keeps donating precog to.
I used to really enjoy healing when it had a flow to it that included unique resources, required mana management through spell selection and was dictated by timing make or breaking performance.
Rotational gameplay used to be king because of these nuances. Really good healers had muscle memory for timings and excellent second by second decision making for spells, targets and positions.
Now all of that skill expression takes a back seat to pressing X CD into Y CD.
I’m hoping the cooldown pruning going on in alpha is going to address much of this, for all three roles.
DPS need to do more than press their 3 minute CD to land a kill or overwhelm healing and games need to be more than just CD trading windows 2 minutes apart where everyone is just trying to live until their next swift macro.
I feel like the OP did an epic bg and couldnt grasp the idea that when 40 players engage one target… they are going to get deleted no matter how much healing you got.
Everyone wants control and as you put it “strategic decision making.” You cant strategize your way out of every fight.
I will agree that right now the game does favor absorption/mitigation classes. Its obvious priests are top tier. HOWEVER… that doesnt mean you can not be successful as other healers. I am quite good in big fights as mistweaver or rdruid. Different healing, but you just gota know how to react in those big damage bursts from the other team.
I delt with it ALOT during DF and preservation evoker was really good at stopping those damage spikes. Some could point out a possible skill issue. Different situations require different healing. You cant control all fights and simply power through it. Sometimes you will be overwhelmed. It happens. In that case you can switch up tactics and move to other flag/nodes or start kiting their team. Perhaps just draw attention by charging into their back line as a healer and pop everything on yourself to draw attention giving your dps time to win the battle (I do that, it works).
Alpha duels are basically irrelevant. People are missing multiple talents points, don’t have PvP gear, and there’s no number tuning. We have 0 idea if blizz wants to keep current pacing or slow it down
Blood sounds like it’ll either be really awful or really good depending on how they tune it.
They took healing out of death strike but put more passive defense into other aspects of the class so the frequency of blood just getting blown up will be less prevalent.
And dance of midnight will either make you nearly indestructible into physical dps or do nothing at all except more damage. Depending on how frequently it procs.
I hope they do away with cooldown bloat as well. I enjoy basic healing, but dislike how it’s expected to blow cooldowns to keep up. It’s much more fun to me to directly heal direct damage instead of trading cooldowns.
It’s also a huge barrier of entry. The game doesn’t really teach you to use cooldowns. You basically are forced to fail trying to keep up until you learn that you are expected to burn cooldowns on cd. It’d be much more natural if there was one longish cooldown and the rest was just about pressing same buttons more efficiently and the skill ceiling was all about positioning and CC.
The bad meleer’s in epics will still be able to feed your ego. The typical epic enjoyers have no idea how tanks function. They just pve rotation into you guys then cry in chat how unfar tanks are.
I torpedo to you, paralysis or kick. I ring the hunter dead center. I drop a port near you. Torpedo toward your target, cocoon them. Port back to you, whichever i used, i use the other for follow up. Start dpsing you and pressure your free cast, while my dps gets their second wind.
This is just one scenario. I get your point but i as a healer have to do my part to stop a double dps combo vs healer and dps. Unless my dps is garbage, it should be an easy win.
I mean, this kind of feeds into the actual reason of what sparked me to post this. Two Destro locks were free-casting at the back of the entire team pack in WSG, my team did not touch them at all and I was healing my brains out blasting every cooldown while massive 6mil crits kept nearly snapping people’s necks.
I kept everyone up, until all the cooldowns were blown and we got decimated, and then the rest of the match everyone gave up and it was a slow painful slog to ultimate loss. The x2 Disc priests on their team didn’t even break a sweat, none of their team died… at all, health bars did not move on their team… at all.
Its just sad because I remember a time when this wasn’t how these pvp matches went. I remember that people didn’t fold to instant death. You could come back and fight again and it was a tug-of-war style of pvp gameplay. Now, its you clash, one side decimates with no chance at overcoming them and the match is basically over and you limp on life support until full demise.
Everything is way too fast and sped up, everything is instant cast, everyone zooms around the field (except for priests lol) and its just and overwhelming over-stimulating mess.
The only time in pvp history were people didn’t die super fast was with templates because templates were horrible.
This is a player competency problem. Different variables. Salty from a previous match. Don’t care mood. Brain turned off.
Classic proved that the red tinted glasses of nostalgia didn’t make pvp great again. PvP has always been horrible in this game since its inception. Now meta slaves make it even worse than it use to be.
Yeh I’ll believe it when I see it! Ion cannot keep himself from creating power systems!! We had the cloak in bfa amulet in sl and conduits and terrible system after system! They create systems that are broken and then create systems to combat their broken systems! That’s wow under ions guidance. World of Systemcraft!
They are called parasitic systems. It’s by design. It’s meant to create frustration. Why? So you buy tokens and turn it into gold. Buy your carry! Buy your achieve buy your mount.
The day blizz lets spells and abilities only be manipulated by gear … those days are over! They don’t create frustration. Letting loot be loot doesn’t generate token sales! Blizz will never allow that. I dont buy any of it
They basically turned pvp into cooldown based system, no longer will casting a frost bolt, lightining bolt, shadow bolt do 15-20 percent of a players hp on crit. So basically big damage only happens during cool downs, this makes pvp alot harder to understand for new people, then factor in each spec now has like 35-40 different abitlies and cool downs, now you need 35-50 keybinds. The pvp the past 3-4 expansions have now turned into a cooldown based pvp game.