Going to start this off with a quick synopsis: Using heavy, quick stacking dampening to artificially rush matches is bad for the game, and likely gets healers to quit playing the healing role / quit the game period.
Background: I came back to the game to specifically try out solo shuffle. While it’s fun at times, I quickly realized that each game is essentially the most stress ever, constantly as a healer. In a normal 3v3, it takes the point in a match where normally DPS has failed to do its job well enough, to then put extra pressure on the healer… but in solo shuffle it doesn’t wait for DPS to have been shown to be ineffective before ramping it up.
What effect does this have? It’s putting a handicap on the healer’s already difficult role, and putting very little of that pressure on the DPS. The dampening knife starts cutting into healers the second we enter the game, and cuts into us quicker in quicker in order to rush the rounds artificially.
And what stacks with the Dampening Knife? Mortal Strikes. Not only do you contend with an insanely quick stacking dampening, and wild damage outputs, you get slammed with mortal strikes on top of both those factors.
It took me watching my friend’s normal 3v3 games to realize the difference. I hadn’t done much 3’s upon getting back since I was specifically interested in solo shuffles, and 2’s starts at 30% dampening so things felt even worse there. It suddenly clicked to me while watching why the healing experience in solo shuffle is so miserable. It puts the healers in seemingly no win situations every match up (at least it feels like it every game) in order to hurry games along artificially by abusing what the dampening mechanic was meant for. What would normally be decided by well executed burst/CC windows and mana usage and healing efficiency, is almost solely decided by the dampening (which can abruptly oom you even if you do manage to keep up).
Summary: Rushing the pacing of solo shuffles is why healers hate it so much. It’s taking a mechanic that’s meant to be used as a last resort to end a stalled out game, and makes it the main factor of every match - which results in some healers inherently being way better at handling it than others. The deck is just continually stacked against those healers harder and harder. They’re expected to just handle situations that just aren’t reasonable to handle- every. single. round. The healers that handle it best rarely have to face mirrors because of how the matchmaking is done, so it incentivizes playing the FotM healers so you don’t have to face the class you play yourself. Then upon losing (sometimes even winning), the healers are just about always the point of derision and blame for the end results.
In conclusion: Dampening’s pacing is poison to solo shuffle’s healer situation, and is likely solely responsible for the situation.
That is all. Thought I’d give my feedback on the feature before unsubbing. Isn’t an angry unsub, I just don’t want to play a game for the sole purpose of stressing myself out- and that’s all WoW has become to me.
just ideas to encourage healers to want to play the game.