Dampening is the number one reason why nobody wants to heal in PvP.
Imagine a game mode with the following rules:
The goal is to kill an enemy player, any player, before the timer runs out.
Each team has a healer. They’re both able to heal at 100% efficiency for the whole game.
“DPS dampening” reduces the damage you inflict the longer the game goes on. Eventually, you hit like a noodle, while healers can still heal at maximum power.
Does that sound fun to you? Would like to play such a game mode as a DPS player, where you would feel completely and utterly powerless?
No, you would not.
And yet, this is exactly how it feels to heal in arena.
Your victory depends on your ability to keep your team mates alive, but because of dampening, the impact you have is reduced and eventually, you can no longer make a difference - victory is then decided only by the skill of your team mates.
This is the reason why healers keep going 3-3. Past a certain skill level, it doesn’t matter which healer is the best - if both are decent, they’ll stay alive for ~3 minutes, at which point dampening becomes so high that they both become useless and the worst DPS dies.
The solution is simple.
Make every decision matter. The healer who’s better at both keeping their team mates alive and saving their mana wins the game.
In other words:
Delete dampening
Prevent players from drinking in all arena game modes
Increase the mana cost of all healing spells
Equip all healers with skill based mechanics to manage their mana pool throughout the game (spells like Mana Tea, Innervate, Water Shield, Mana Tide Totem, etc.)
Arena matches had a chance to take waaaay longer before dampening and eventually the match would just the cancel if it had no winner after like, what was it? 45 mins or so?
Then they came up with “The crowd chooses you” (Google it) for a short period which was ridiculous and not really fair or rewarding.
After that, they came up with dampening which isn’t all that bad compared to the alternatives above. Pesonally I think it’s a good mechanic tbh.
Instead of “Dampening” have “Tireness” which reduces your damage resistance the longer the match goes on.
Someone has to lose in the end, right? So why not make it so the longer the match goes on, the more mistakes made will be punished because you die faster.
It’s an even worse idea because it promotes 100-0 in 1 GCD gameplay, which has 0 counterplay.
There’s no point playing in a competitive game mode where there is no counterplay, and death is random.
only good solution i ever saw as a healer main is by double the rating for healer , so even in 3-3 cases and cases were you want to pull your hair out because random dps hide behind pillar and cry about no healing , your chest will still cool with getting high rating more than the dps , which is 100% fair , consider your job is much much more harder than button mashing dps
If both teams play in the middle of the map and only press damage and healing buttons, yes.
However, this is PvP, not PvE.
Positioning, CC, purge effects, interrupts and setups exist.
Removing dampening would also increase the importance of hybrid specializations’ off healing, making them more versatile and increasing their skill ceiling - instead of now where, even though they’re hybrids, they play like pure DPS specs because there’s no point hardcasting a spell that will restore 2% of the target’s HP.
that already happen with dampening anyways , after sometimes has passed and dampening kicks in , the team that deals more damage will wins anyway , its same result
you talking about numbers, i talk about design philosophy and fun , also again OP mention mana management too , which what will separate boys from men healer skill wise
You’re kind of contradicting OP by implying that “Positioning, CC, purge effects, interrupts and setups” don’t matter once dampening has disabled the healer, but whatever.
I agree mana regen should basically be removed in arenas so healers need to decide whether to play the long game and use efficient weak spells and risk someone dying, or play it safe and risk going OOM too soon.
But this still leaves the problem of the healer becoming disabled (sometimes not due to their own fault) if his team causes him to burn all his mana.
This still seems more fair than dampening since the healer who runs OOM first is probably part of the weaker team, but considering how hard it is to balance small gang PvP in an MMORPG with so many specs, this situation is just as likely to be caused by imbalances.
100% agreed. After Cata mana stopped mattering. We need that meta back and tools & skills to mana regen. Resource gameplay was ruined because of retarded raid dps.
No. There are many different healing spells and some are more efficient than others, but also more risky. A good healer will know when he can be efficient and when he cannot. A good team can lock the players down in ways that make it far more risky to be efficient.
Slapface has this 100% right. Which is rare for me to say, but he does.
Healing resources must deplete, unlike DPS ones. If they do not the game cannot end. It’s the same reason there are limited minerals in SC2.
Punishing both healers the same regardless of early game efficiency feels bad, which is very important, and it also promotes excessively reckless gameplay early on.
i do not play arena but if i would i would be very angry when game takes 10 minutes to end because there is a HEALER
I hate healers in PVP and i hate tanks
my perfect pvp vision is just 2 dps smacking each other and who is faster wins…
something like cowboys shooting at each other
They could just lessen the dampaning to the healer only, and dps would get a lesser defensive/healing effects, making the mid match harder, and for the ending to happens more easily. Just a thought.
The issue with your suggestion is that, even though I focused more on healers here, they’re not the only ones to suffer.
Dampening also forces hybrid DPS into a pure DPS gameplay. In a way, dampening forces homogenization:
all healers become pure healbots who can’t spare a GCD for offensive play (purge, CC, damage) because they heal for so little that they must do it 24/7
hybrid specializations become pure DPS specializations, they no longer support their team mates and instead focus on maximizing damage output
That has obviously always been blizzard’s goal. Dampening wasn’t added because it’s fun, but as a last resort to make arenas playable.
Healers in any PvP game must be given serious handicaps otherwise the fight would never end. In WoW recently you had to drown them in CCs to achieve that (which apparently wasn’t welcome by the community who dislike losing control over their character for 90% of the battle’s duration).
Severely limiting mana regen seems like the right choice, but I have a feeling this will affect classes differently so be prepared to deal with major imbalances and dominant metas for a while if blizz ever does this.
DF S1 was all about Disc Priests for the first half of the season.
Then, they buffed Fistweaver, and then it was all about Fistweavers.
In DF S2, it’s Priests again, and caster Mistweavers second, both being very overwhelming compared to the rest of the healers.
There will always be META shifts and balance issues, no matter how the game is designed.
Might as well design it to be fun.
i do not play arena but if i would i would be very angry when game takes 10 minutes to end because there is a HEALER