Healing in World of Warcraft is becoming increasingly restricted. Now it also affects PvP healers, who will have to face significant losses.
Healing in World of Warcraft has always been a challenging topic – especially in PvP. With a good healer backing them up, victories sometimes seem nearly impossible. The enjoyment of matches in which one team can rely on a healer while the other cannot is generally quite limited.
Just recently, Blizzard stated that they have increased the health points of characters at level 70 by a whopping 40% to weaken healers. Now new, drastic changes in PvP are following.
What is being changed? Blizzard is increasing the “dampening” effects in the arena. This debuff ensures that the effectiveness of healing and absorption effects weakens. The effect increases over time, making healing progressively more difficult and ultimately impossible. This forces matches to eventually come to an end, as both sides will only lose HP without being able to gain any back. The changes are:
- Mixed Singles: Starts with 10% dampening, and after one minute the effect increases by 25% per minute.
- 2v2 Arena (Double DPS): Starts with 10% dampening and increases immediately by 6% per minute.
- 2v2 Arena (with Healer): Starts at 30% dampening and increases immediately by 6% per minute.
- 3v3 Arena: Starts with 10% dampening and increases after 3 minutes by 6% per minute.
In addition, the debuff is now stackable. However, this is just an improvement in the display, allowing players to see at a glance how strong the dampening currently is, without having to hover over the debuff with the mouse first.
Why is Blizzard doing this? Blizzard is trying to limit the effectiveness of healers while ensuring that matches in PvP do not drag on indefinitely. Especially arena matches can sometimes last 10 to 15 minutes in the higher ranks.
The developers are attempting to find a balance where healers are certainly useful, but their effectiveness gradually decreases. At the same time, they do not want players to be “shot out of life within a global cooldown,” which is why the health points were previously increased so drastically.
This is how the community is reacting: The first reactions from the community are quite positive. Most seem to appreciate that Blizzard is making an effort and has ideas on how to make PvP more interesting and fair. Here are a few opinions from the official WoW forum and from Wowhead:
- “As someone who plays a specialization with almost no healing (for myself or others), should this help balance things a bit? I’m looking forward to seeing the effects. More importantly, it’s really great that the developers are focusing more on PvP and arena. Thank you!”
- “Great stuff, I didn’t expect this considering Blizzard’s past, but this is just good.”
- “I’m glad they’re implementing dampening earlier in the 3v3 arena. The games could last forever.”
What do you think about the PvP changes to healing? A good step in the right direction? Or does healing no longer bring any joy?
That you don’t always need a healer can also be seen in PvE. There, a little dwarf managed to defeat a current raid boss all on his own.
