Recently, some changes were made in the Dragonflight beta which increased player health by 40% at level 70. We have been evaluating what effect this would have on the power of healing in PvP and we wanted to provide an update for that.
In internal playtests, we have seen the healing has been too powerful in PvP scenarios. Alongside the above player health change, we saw that talent trees have a lot of disparity of power that some abilities have in PvE vs PvP, such as Overgrowth for Restoration druids.
With that context, we discussed several options for tuning healing, including using PvP multipliers on an enormous number of abilities, but we felt that adjusting via a flat value would be the easiest to understand from a player point of view due to its consistency and would also target personal survivability abilities at the same time. This would also give us the option to address outlier abilities with PvP multipliers.
For instanced Arena, matches will now start at a flat 10% decreased healing above what they were in each mode. Along with this, the Dampening timer (when dampening starts to increase) now starts earlier in 3v3 Arena matches to reduce the game length in match ups where there may be a stalemate without the added pressure of higher Dampening. What this means is the following:
âą Solo Shuffle - Start at 10% Dampening and after 1 minute, ramp up at a pace of 25% per minute
âą 2v2 (double DPS) - Start at 10% Dampening and immediately ramp up at a pace of 6% per minute
âą 2v2 (with a healer) - Start at 30% Dampening (up from 20%) and immediately ramp up at a pace of 6% per minute
âą 3v3 - Start at 10% Dampening and after 3 minutes (down from 5 minutes), ramp up at a pace of 6% per minute
Additionally, we have changed the Dampening debuff to show the number of stacks on the debuff itself to improve visibility.
We will continue to monitor PvP pacing in various content to evaluate any further adjustments we should make either with Dampening or the PvP trinket set bonus.
Incremental dampening encourages dbl dps teams to run up the clock.
Rogue/rogue donât even open till the crystals spawnâŠ
Making it more profitable for dps comps to hide/kite as long as possible is not a recipe for shorter, more exciting matches ^^
Wish theyâd just pick flat arena dampening values to balance around.
If we are X too powerful in arenas then fairly nerf us by X in the arena.
I doubt healers can ever become truly strong anymore in the design, since if you look at it from a birdâs eye view then Blizzard needs to keep the designs in a way that doesnât make shuffle matches stall for time.
For example, imagine if every shuffle round went into deep dampening and the ripple effects thatâd have on the player base.
So it doesnât look promising that healers will ever become truly strong again. Theyâll be needed, sure, but when your role is to make a match last 1-2 minutes longer and then it ends either way, then it kinda further strengthens that impression people have been saying in the forum the last few days, about how healers are just there to âenable the game for others to playâ.
Personally, I prefer âdomination designsâ with high sustained and low burst, and healing being designed to match that. The game has just gone in the completely opposite direction, which is a real shame.
Seems like Blizzardâs plan is to make healer easy, unkillable gameplay enabler with zero carry potential. Blizzard doesnât care about PvP playerâs fun if they get any casual healer to jump into pvp serving the DPSâŠ
There is a huge difference in RPG between gameplay enabler and impactfull Support magic/taktic. See any classic RPG where Support characters had mayor impact with their magic.
Anyone basically having hardiness is another step into taking impact away from healerđ
Still way too much healing in Solo Shuffle. These games are so boring where the healer presses one button and everyone is back to full health and you need to wait a few minutes for dampening before anyone starts dying.
Nothing fun about using all your cds to get someone low and then healer presses one button and theyâre back at full health. Right now solo shuffle is just waiting for enough dampening to so someone can die unless at low rating. Random teams donât have the coordination to kill someone with so much healing. I would say SS games should start with at least 30% dampening like 2s, 10% is nothing.
Only 10% dampening combined with 40% health increase is going to lead to the most boring solo shuffle games ever. Every game is going to be just wait for dampening so people can actually die.
