Healers have a lot of decisions and resources to manage that change depending on the type of content you are doing. At its core, we want healers to have interesting abilities and choices to make while healing, and we want you to have to manage your mana pool. We’re hoping our changes reduce the amount of overhealing and make mana matter slightly more, which should make healing across the game a more enjoyable experience.
Single target healing spells currently don’t feel like they move the health bar enough. We want these heals to be impactful and have a purpose, and hope this makes healing a Mythic+ dungeon less stressful for healers.
Group healing spells have seen a lot of modifications and increases to their total throughput over the course of Dragonflight. These spells often feel like they are rapidly increasing a raid from a damaged state to a full health state. We plan on adjusting the effectiveness of many of these spells.
Raid survivability cooldowns feel like they have all entered the territory of making your raid feel nearly invulnerable when being used. While it’s a great moment for everyone to stack in a Power Word: Barrier and reduce damage taken and stack a few healing cooldowns, we think the combined power of these has escalated to a point where they make the raid slightly too sturdy.
Mana generation is a problem that’s related to all of the above. We want mana to feel like a finite resource and for the few ways you can still generate mana to be relevant, but want your spell choices during a raid fight to matter. We’re reducing the effectiveness of many mana restoration class abilities and specific items.
Please test healing in the Guardians of the Dream PTR and use this thread for any general feedback you have about it.
Enjoyable for who? If you want to make single target healing stronger, make single target healing stronger. Why do you also need to reduce mana generation, CDs, AND AoE healing. There are already plenty of fights where a lot of healers are struggling with mana by the end, doesn’t that mean that the mana curve is perfect? Not to mention a lot of healing classes already struggle with mana in keys - “We’re buffing single target healing to make keys less stressful…but also, we’re nerfing mana regen to make ALL content more stressful”.
A big problem related to this is how each healer is designed. Some healers have a much harder time matching the performance of others, so the end result is often some specs struggling to perform(holy priest right now) on the same level as others(Holy Paladin).
I’m not saying you should make all healing spec same, but you should really try harder to make the gap between healer specs as small as possible to avoid all this problems to begin. Otherwise, there’s no choice as its “play holy paladin or bust” if you wanna heal M+ and push as high as you can, for example.
That’s because of the way some mechanics works in M+. When you have a boss who can kill someone in less than 3-4 seconds with little counterplay other than getting topped off or using a inmunity, its a a big problem. Brackenhide 1st boss, Vortex Pinnacle trash dot, Last boss of that dungeon whenever boss chain lightning someone at same time as a star is up. It’s too much damage in a short window that can murder people.
While of course you should aim to have cooldowns ready for situations like this, not all specs have them. It’s the exact same problem as Odyn tyrannical high keys in Halls of Valor on S1: you could cd 1 rune but 2nd rune wave you either needed a external or you were likely dead.
I think you need to make unavoidable damage in M+ less spiky and likely to 1shot someone. Make it require constant healing and healer attention yeah, but don’t make it so gross and punishing that a subpar healer spec, a dps with little to no personals or both will result in death.
While understable, you need to also understand that some situations pretty much demands this big cooldowns to begin. Just like mass dispel in M+: its too useful to not bring it but its also because of the way the content is designed. Maybe design content in a way that this utility is not mandatory but still kind of useful instead of making it a must-have.
One more thing i’d like to add: You need to remember that for M+ you only have 5 people as opposed to 20, so designing punishing mechanics with unavoidable damage components that require a specific class or classes to beat is just awful. Scrap this mentality for M+. It makes sense for mythic raiding when you should have all or most of the classes so you can afford it, but if you push a key with a dedicated group and then roll a dungeon that requires X or Y class for example but you just don’t have one in your group? Thats just frustrating.
This is going to make a lot of people reroll and steer clear of healing. What this says to me is that you plan to make healing super hard and unfun. Please…just keep that in mind. This patch plus aug has me really not wanting to heal content as it is.
A very problematic thing this patch is that healers overall don’t feel fun to heal. Several of my btags rerolled or just went elsewhere because they hated how healing works in DF. A big issue is making this “1shot if you can’t top that person or cd them in 2 seconds tops” stuff with specs that clearly don’t work that way or struggle to keep up in the end makes the gap between “meta” and “non-meta” wider. Healing is fun…as a holy paladin. Rest of specs range from meh to “painful and horribly bad”.
Yep! I agree.
After getting nerfed x4 then getting gutted, healing on a pres was just not fun. I preferred the druid because it had a lot more tools to deal with the m+ dmg spike.
Imo raid healing is fine and should remain as is. I really don’t see a need a need to change how it is currently. If there are big changes…they also need to change some natures of boss fights.
im sorry, but you took away all the wrong conclusions to the issue surrounding healing.
further nerfing healing isnt going to make it feel more impactful, its going to be painful for anyone that isnt a holy paladin or resto druid (druids being the only class you consistently tune every major and minor patch)
Respectfully, this is the worst decision I’ve seen blizzard make in a while. Forcing healers to focus on mana as a resource, is boring and excessive. We have enough to worry about in a competitive mythic scene as it is. Can we maybe give healers a break, even if for just ONE tier?! Literally NO ONE likes the concept of mana as a resource on healers. And the top 0.1% of players shouldn’t matter in decision making.
Are you sure? we had plenty of that in Shadowlands.
Joking aside, they need to think this through. Because it’s already a problem when most healers refuse to heal S2 due to how bad it is, and this will only exacerbate the issue even more.
Healers in Season 2 of Dragonflight are underpowered, and have become not only the rarest role to find, but the role most likely to result in failed keys or boss wipes. The role requires buffs. You may be increasing single-target healing, but when you’re also reducing multitarget healing, AND raid defensives, AND mana regeneration, this seems mostly like nerfs, which is the absolute opposite of what needs to happen.
If single target heals are being buffed by like 50% across the board, and the nerfs are like 5% nerfs each, then it might be ok. This seems pretty unlikely, so it sure seems like Blizzard is failing to properly design healers.
The only thing you got right here is that single target healing needs to be buffed. As a healer that timed all the 20s for portals in S1 and S2, this set of changes makes me not want to bother getting beyond KSM in S3. Do you want people to heal or not?
Nerfing healing also means they can nerf damage intake. When heals can top an entire raid instantly, the only way to threaten the raid is with mechanics that instantly kill you for a single mistake. If you tune healing down, then damage can come in smaller increments, giving you more time to react to it instead of instantly being punished with death.
Or at least that’s how it should work. If they tune down healing but don’t also tune down damage intake, then yeah that’s gonna suck.
Are you sure? this season they nerfed healers and doubled down on harder than before 20s. The end result was the first week of this season being a complete trainwreck overall, and even post-nerf, the dungeons as a whole are a lot spikier and much less forgiving compared to S1 and before. And while its true that healing could be somewhat strong, they def did not need to insert unavoidable damage that 1shots you in 2 seconds unless healer reacts fast. That was completely uncalled for and is a big reason as to why healing sucks so much this season.