A Constructive Proposal for Balancing Healing in PvP Encouraging Skill and Strategy

PVP Arenas
1

Hello Blizzard team and fellow WoW players,

I’d like to share some ideas and suggestions on healing balance in PvP that I believe could improve gameplay for both healers and damage dealers, making fights more engaging and fair without punishing either side unfairly.

The Healing Challenge Today

Healing in PvP has always been a cornerstone of gameplay, but many players (including myself) feel that healing sometimes overshadows damage output, especially with modern high-end gear and healing throughput. It’s common for even decent healers to outpace the best DPS, which can make it frustrating for damage classes trying to secure kills

A Balanced Approach: Encouraging Efficient Healing and Skillful Play

Instead of nerfing healing outright, I’d like to suggest a system that:

  • Allows healers to react quickly during burst damage without immediate penalty.
  • Encourages healers to avoid reckless overhealing, rewarding thoughtful, efficient heals.
  • Provides damage dealers with meaningful windows to capitalize on healer limitations or mistakes.

Proposed Mechanics

1. Overheal Margin

Heals that push a target’s health slightly above 100% for example, up to 102-105% — would not trigger any penalties. This gives healers a safe margin to react without being punished for minor overhealing.

2. Scaling Overheal Debuff

When overhealing exceeds that margin, a debuff would stack on the healer that gradually:

  • Increases healing cast times, making heals slower and easier to interrupt, or
  • Reduces healing effectiveness, making each subsequent heal restore less health.

This would apply both to healing others and self-healing, but:

  • Self-healing would have a larger margin (e.g., 5-10%) and slower penalty scaling to account for clutch survivability.

3. Alternative for Self-Healing: Defensive Cooldown Tax

Another option for self-heals is to allow unlimited overhealing but increase the cooldown duration on key defensive cooldowns (like shields or invulnerability spells) when excessive overhealing occurs on the healer themselves.

This creates a trade-off where healers can spam heals on themselves but lose access to critical defensive abilities for longer periods, encouraging resource management and timing.

Why This Could Work

  • For Healers:
    • They maintain freedom to save allies and themselves in burst damage scenarios.
    • They must still play strategically, avoiding reckless spamming to prevent debuffs or cooldown penalties.
    • Adds a new skill element managing healing output alongside debuff/cooldown management.
  • For DPS:
    • Creates clearer windows to pressure or kill targets when healing is less effective.
    • Reduces frustration of burst damage being negated by infinite healing.
    • Encourages strategic timing and target prioritization.

Final Thoughts

I believe this system respects the core strengths of healers while addressing some current PvP frustrations around overhealing and burst damage. It opens room for more dynamic fights where skill, timing, and decision-making shine on both sides.

Thank you for reading and considering! I’m open to feedback and eager to hear thoughts from the community and developers alike.

2

Wheres the part that mentions balancing healers rating gains in shuffles to be equal with dps instead of getting less and worse to make progress

5 Likes
3

This looks like chatgpt.

My tldr for healers is.

Nerf them in world pvp/bgs because they are literally immortal.

Revert the current pvp meta to shadowlands season 1 so healers stop complaining about being useless or less impactful.

3 Likes
4

Why even equal. We need more healer = inflate it over dps to lure people into playing healer.

Idk, I love playing healer/ support in every game, but in wow being dps is so much easier that even waiting 28 minutes for a que is worth it. + No one rage whispers

3 Likes
5

why do people keep saying that if it isnt true to any degree lol

yes but unfortunately healer babies keep crying that they are useless and cant heal any damage even when the game is at the state like it is now
all the changes needed to achieve balance in healing/dps is prune micro ccs(garrote silence/gouge are first that come to mind) and make healers actually cast instead of spamming instants
that way if a player is good he fakes the cast and keeps his team alive meanwhile if he doesnt fake his team dies which is fair
right now any 2k doge feels impossible to kill with if your class doesnt 100-0 anyone in a global until dampening ramps up at least a little bit yet they still cry how they cant heal which is hilarious

6

True, it wouldnt likely even be enough anymore at this point. Having it less for past 3 years has done a number on shuffles and anyones will to heal it. Even made lots of healers just straight out quit the game cause of this mode, and some of the rest went dps.

Since shuffles the game is in such state that anyone playing healer as main has no reason to play healer anymore, if shuffles are worse to progress for healers and give less rating than for dps and if arenas are deflated then what is there for healers other than blitz. They can heal blitz and thats all, other than that theres no point playing a healer if its so much easier and more rewarding just playing dps in shuffles, everyone knows this. It’s bad that blizz has not done nothing about it for 3 years now and until they do its the only thing that will get healers in game, fixing shuffles for heals and fixing the rating system in general, otherwise its ppl playing dps or healer only for blitz simple as that. Nobody will do the role that gets less reward in any competitive rated game. Shuffle aint even that fun to play, playing with random ppl is terrible and its design is terrible with this 6 round shuffling.

Ppl doing random things 90y apart, hitting all 3 targets and lining heals other side of the map and blaming everyone else than themselves after pressed all cds in opener and died on a stun chasing a guy behind wall later. And then they went and separated healer mmr from dps and if the heals dont go 3-3 cause the one guy somehow always going 0-6, the heals gain less rating anyway cause healers mmr is more deflated. Some genious designing on this mode, why would anyone play healer as main for this is beyond me. You are right, only way is to make them gain more now to have anyone come play this mess as heal.

7

ChatGPT/10

2 Likes
8

Basicaly if you play 3 times more games as healer and gain less rating than playing just 1 and being afk, able to do some RL stuff and get more for the few mins of effort, why would one ever pick healer, right? Not even counting in the fact that playing more games gives you huge chance of getting muted or banned on top of that. With these conditions healers should at least get free sub or even be paid to help this game not to die.

1 Like
9

could say that about tanks in pvp but tbh its true its WAY too difficult to kill a healer

10

What are you even talking about?

I was coupled with a moonkin in one shuffle when playing feral and when we were together the enemy teams just melted all at the same time. I did 1.3 mill dps and he did 1.7m, we were going everyone at the same time. Like, that’s not healable, once healing CDs were over people died. We didn’t even CC, we just pressed on damage buttons and won before we even hit the 1 minute mark both rounds we played with each other. Meanwhile the 2 other DPS in the game were doing 200k(a demo lock that was just free to freecast btw) and 500k.

Ofc you’re not going to kill anyone before dampening ramps up if you’re doing like 200-500k dps.

edit: And now I’m in a shuffle with a ww monk doing 2.3 million dps while im doing 1.4 million, rounds are closing in less than a minute and nobody is dying in a global, they just can’t be healed.