Dungeon healing feels absolutely miserable right now because of this level-based healing reduction.
I’m a level 21 Priest. My small direct heal normally does around 213 healing.
In SFK I had:
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a level 22 tank
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a level 24 Paladin DPS
On the tank, who was only ONE level above me, my direct heals were already noticeably reduced and keeping him alive felt way harder than it should.
On the level 24 Paladin, that same ~213 heal was landing for around 130.
That is almost a 40% healing reduction because the target is 3 levels higher.
And no, this is not just floating combat text. I watched the actual HP restored. The healing itself is reduced.
Meanwhile Renew seems to be unaffected, so I ended up depending on Renew because my actual direct heals were being gutted.
How is this supposed to be good dungeon design?
A level 21 healer, level 22 tank and level 24 DPS is a completely normal leveling group. This is not boosting. This is not an exploit. This is just people doing a dungeon together.
Classic WoW never worked like this. Healers regularly entered higher-level dungeons earlier than other roles to start gearing. Level 55 healers healing level 58-60 tanks in Strat, Scholo, BRD and similar content was completely normal.
Being lower level already has natural downsides:
less mana, worse gear, lower stats, lower spell ranks, less room for mistakes.
Why does the game also need to delete another 20-40% of your healing just because your tank happens to be a couple of levels higher?
And apparently healing lower-level targets is reduced too, which makes even less sense.
If this is supposed to be some kind of anti-boost system, then it is hitting normal groups far harder than any actual boosting setup.
Right now the system basically encourages healers to only group with people exactly their own level.
That is ridiculous for leveling dungeons.
Please fix this. Healing dungeons should be challenging because of mana management, incoming damage, positioning and player mistakes — not because the game secretly chops a huge percentage off your spells based on the target’s level.
Upd 17.10.2026. Today I tested healing during a DM run on my level 20 shaman. We had a level 30 mage, a level 22 rogue, a level 17 tank, and a level 17 priest healer. I had a good opportunity to test healing on all of them.
The level 30 mage received about 70% less healing, while the other characters showed roughly the same level-based differences that I had previously seen on my priest.
This test is especially interesting because I had almost no bonus healing and used only max-rank spells. So the issue is still not fixed and looks more and more like some kind of anti-boost system or similar mechanic.
And the DM run was hell, because neither the priest nor I could heal the party properly.