I’m mainly a Mythic+ player, and overall I think Blizzard’s general direction for healers hasn’t been too bad.
However, one thing that really stands out is how healer damage has been steadily declining since the start of Dragonflight.
Early Dragonflight: Healers were doing around 75% of a tank’s DPS.
TWW launch: That dropped to ~30% of tank DPS.
Now: We’re down to around 10%.
Healing in dungeons is pretty binary — you either keep the group alive or you don’t. Once you can reliably do that, the logical next step is to help the group by dealing damage.
The problem is that we’ve reached a point where, once you’ve stabilized healing, you could literally be AFK for the rest of the pull and no one would notice. Pressing your damage buttons doesn’t feel rewarding anymore.
When playing your DPS rotation perfectly and utilizing everything in your toolkit, compared to just spamming one damage spell only gives ~200k DPS more, it starts to feel pointless. That difference might shave maybe 10 seconds off the dungeon timer — hardly worth the extra effort.
This isn’t about making healers top the meters, but there should be a noticeable reward for playing well and using your full kit. Right now, it feels like the game doesn’t care if we even try.
my unpopular opinion is that the content should be tuned around the concept that the tank should always do less damage than the DPS because their sole purpose is to maintain the aggro and prevent anyone else from taking vast amounts of damage. The three DPS should be doing the Lions share of the damage since that is literally their job. Healers should actually be doing less damage than the tank because their job is to keep everybody healed. Content should be designed around that basic concept so that everybody stays busy, nobody gets bored, and the fight isn’t contingent on whether or not the healer can out DPS the DPS.
And if the content was designed properly the way it was back in the day healers didn’t have to worry about helping pump out damage because they were scrambling to keep people alive. It’s the only reason add-ons for healing really became a major factor and earlier expansions. People needed something to help heal larger groups so that they could do things like remove toxins or dispel things like curses. If the content were more engaging and tuned appropriately so that the tank took the damage, the DPS did the damage, and the healer had to stay on their toes to make sure nobody died, things would be a lot more interesting.
The problem is most healers prefer DPS and they only really queue as a healer so they can get into instanced content faster. That’s just my opinion, but I feel like if the content were actually created for a purpose and not just to entertain folks who are bored with the open world they might actually enjoy playing their role more.
While I always disagreed with that statement, I understand the sentiment. There is a world between feeling required to do DPS and feeling like you doing DPS is not even noticed. I think 30%-40% of tank damage is the compromise between feeling rewarding for those who want to do damage, and not feeling required for those who feel pressured by DPSing.
No one saied they should do more damage tank the tank.
I know that. The only comment that’s been made so far is that healers should do as much damage as the tank. My comment is, they should be doing less than everybody including the tank because their primary purpose is healing. Content should not be created and geared toward relying on healer DPS in order to get through a fight. The fight should be created so that the tank can handle holding the attention and soaking most of the damage while the DPS does the grinding down and the healer has to stay on their toes so that nobody dies. Healers should not have to do DPS at all and when they do decide to do some DPS instead of healing, it should be minimal at best.
Good. The less DPS healers can do, the less incentives there is to DPS as a healer, which means we are closer to putting healer-DPS fad to the dirt, as well forcing the tourists to leave so WoW can get back on track. Preferably either Wrath or Cata if you ask me.
Not to be that guy, but so is DPS. You’re either killing things, or you’re not.
If you want to talk about nuances, there’s nuances in healing too.
Tbf, this issue here extends further then Healer DPS.
I just think the game thinks going fast = challenging, when it has to accommodate so much of that, that it starts to feel overwhelming. And when you circumvent it, it doesn’t go any deeper then that. And i ain’t talking about addons, but how it feels to solve the obstacles to begin with. If the best they can do is RNG, then it’s a system not worth refining if you ask me.
I always find it funny how mostly DPS players talk about what healers should or should not do in a dungeon when they have no idea of how healing is feeling in M+.
The thing about it is like for a lot of healers you have to do damage to heal or you have to use your damage abilities to empower your heals in order to heal.
It’s a good deviation from the classic sir around and spam 1 heal button but it doesn’t feel very satisfying that half your button presses are dmg abilities that do t do much dmg that you have to press just to activate interactions to put out good healing.
this is the continued consequence of tank and healer nerfs while DPS goes pewpew through the roof.
this ever-expanding dps scaling and nerfing of tanks and healers ends up with DPS players thinking you can out-dps all mechanics making healers try to do things that are likely impossible yet they get blamed, and tanks have threat problems.
the end result is pretty much everyone is unhappy in some way or another:
-dps wants bigger pulls
-tanks fight to keep threat and manage their defensives
-healers have a very difficult time keeping up with incoming or potentially avoidable damage
i think blizz does this to throttle the top end of the game, but the negative effects on the average player, I think, are substantial.
This is not even remotely the same. You always have something to hit, if you’re not hitting anything, you’re not actively in the middle of a pull and nobody is doing anything in that scenario
Honestly I think it’s part of a larger issue which is how much effect a healer can actually have on a key. How deterministic the role is in other words.
A dps player has tons of ways to effect how a key plays out between planning their cd usage, using interrupts, and various stops, focussing down targets etc. If a dps player is playing well you can instantly see it on the meters and maybe skip a mechanic or 2 as well.
Tanks also have a ton of tools to effect the flow of the dungeon. They choose how much to pull, what cds to rotate when, they also typically have tons of stops and at least an interrupt each (many in the case of paladin). And if played well they can make a noticeable impact on dps and keep some of the less skilled dps players on their toes.
Now we have healers. You don’t choose the pace of the dungeon (at least in pugs, guild groups and preforms will typically listen and pull around everyone’s cds). You don’t have a meaningful impact on dps meters so you can’t help skip mechanics. Hell a decent amount don’t even have interrupts to stop damage before it comes out. If I had a dollar for every time I saw a cast bar fill all the way on my priest when all I have is psychic scream that the mob is immune to I’d have many tokens. On top of that dispelling is a healer job, but you can’t even dispell everything that goes out on one healer because they want the dps and tanks to pitch in. On priest I can do magic and diseases, anything else I have to blow a cd to heal through it because you know a pug isn’t going to help dispell. Healers in their current iteration just don’t have as much of an impact on the success of a key and low dps is just one way that it shows up and evokes that feeling.
While I agree with most of your post, the impact of a good healer on a key is huge. You can (sometimes) save people from there own mistakes. And you have to keep the group alive during the heal checks. A +14 key can be timed with a bad DPS, but you cant time a +14 with a bad healer.
I will never understand that take. “There’s absolutely nothing to heal right now, so I’m just going to twiddle my thumbs, maybe browse the internet on my second monitor.” Nah - contribute to the damage and make it go faster. I love being up there in feral form swiping away, competing to get the most interrupts by the end of the dungeon.
