World of Warcraft will nerf all its healers at the same time. The developers do this through a trick: They simply massively increase the players’ health.
The latest expansion of World of Warcraft, Dragonflight, is about to be released. Currently, the endgame is still being tested on the beta server, and some issues have emerged. To fix these in the short term, Blizzard is taking a radical step: At level 70, all players receive an additional 40% stamina, but enemies also deal 40% more damage.
What is the problem? In short: the healers. They are already very strong in the (still) current content of Shadowlands, but the problem becomes even more pronounced at level 70. This is because there are 10 more talent points available, leading to a massive increase in the performance of healing characters.
In other words: The endgame content is currently simply not challenging for healers, as there are virtually no decisions to be made. Healers can heal all characters far too quickly and only rarely need to manage their resources (like mana).
What Blizzard wants to change: Once you reach level 70 in Dragonflight, you should feel a sudden increase in your health points, but you will also notice that enemies hit harder now. Because your stamina increases by a whopping 40% with the jump to level 70, while all enemies in the world also deal 40% more damage. What sounds like a zero-sum game on paper has significant effects for healers, who now have to deal with larger HP pools of their teammates.
Why is Blizzard doing this? The developers want to make the gameplay exciting for all roles – including healers. Currently, this is hardly the case in the beta of Dragonflight in the endgame. The reason for this was that healers could too easily “top” their group members, meaning they could fully heal them.
One possible solution could have been to increase the damage from mobs so much that “one-hits” are again a threat – however, that is not very fun. When split seconds determine whether the tank and then the entire group is wiped, it rarely leads to meaningful decisions.
The larger health pools mean that healers must use more mana to fully heal the group. At the same time, there is more room for abilities that deal a lot of damage without instantly killing a character.
Blizzard is aware that this will also have a significant impact on PvP battles and wants to balance this separately to avoid problems.
What do you think of this solution? A good step to challenge healers accordingly? Or should another way have been found?
