https://i.imgur.com/uJMj3SO.png Solo shuffle is currently suffering from a massive healer drought.
Healer is already an unpopular role among the playerbase in all game modes, but this is especially true for solo shuffle.
Why does nobody want to play a healer in solo shuffle, and how can we remedy this issue?
The problem:
Climbing the ladder as a healer is significantly more difficult: https://www.reddit.com/r/worldofpvp/comments/15idy4u/not_a_single_healer_in_the_top_100_solo_shuffle/
The weak player situation.
If often happens in solo shuffle that one player is “the weakest link” and goes 0-6. When this happens, the other DPS players in the lobby, who only have to play with that “bad player” twice, win the solo shuffle game with 4-2 and therefore gain rating. Healers, however, heal this “bad player” 3 times, and this game is a 3-3 draw: they gain 0 rating. For that reason alone, climbing as a healer is harder.
Skill expression for healers is reduced because of dampening.
Dampening ramps up very fast in solo shuffle, which means that once you reach a rating where all players know how to rotate CDs properly, every round goes in deep dampening - where healers no longer have an impact on the outcome of the game since their healing is reduced by 65% dampening + a mortal strike effect.
This effectively turns every round into a 2v2, rather than a 3v3, and since the outcome of those 2v2 is often the same, the healers once again end up with a final score of 3-3 and +0 rating.
Healing is stressful.
This one is a combination of two problems: extremely fast burst (S1 Ret Paladins, current season WW Monks) means that you must always be on edge and ready to press big CDs at any time to avoid someone going from 100% HP to 0% in the blink of an eye.
Add high dampening to this, which makes your spells useless, and you’re now in a situation where your allies’ HP bars go down really fast, but you can’t heal them back to full because your healing output is massively crippled.
The solution:
Cap dampening at 30% or 40%
Healers want to heal. It’s honestly that simple. Nobody would be playing this game is there was a forever increasing debuff that reduced DPS. This is not fun. Dampening is an anti-fun mechanic for healers, and is the N°1 reason people don’t enjoy healing in ranked PvP.
Reduce the threshold for PvP rewards by 100 rating for healers.
As demonstrated above, climbing the ladder as a healer is harder for several reasons. There is no easy fix to make climbing as a healer as easy as climbing as a DPS - however, allowing healers to earn PvP rewards 100 rating earlier seems like a fair compensation for their troubles, and could maybe serve as an incentive for DPS to try out this role.
These 2 solutions should be enough to massively increase healer PvP participation.
I’m counting on you Blizzard. Do not let me down.
the poor balance of classes also doesnt help, like people can see what of a powerhorse hpaladin is right now and they see it being #1 on 2100 and 2400 healers with 32% and whopping 42% of healer representation for 2100-2400
now if the person doesnt have of this current fotm favored by the recent tunings then they likely are not incentived to play so much as they know their task is of so much harder than these hpalas that are currently so broken that it is the variant of the retocalypse from season 1 but for healers
I agree with everything on the post but I wish to add that blizzard need to start do tuning with smaller numbers instead of these huge swings from bad to completely broken op and the like
Do they buff other healers so that they feel as powerful and satisfying as the current #1 healer?
No. They instead nerf the #1 healer, and make it as miserable as all the others.
that is completely true and we have seen that incur in the past, but i dont want to sidetrack more with this. Your post contained alot good points and I wish people concentrate on those more than this which also is of an issue ofc
What sucks about healing in PvP is that you don’t get to play half the game because stun into fear into horror into incap into poly into stun into…oh my allies are dead gg.
Crowd Control duration has been nerfed across the board in Dragonflight.
Besides, solo shuffle is a chaotic environment where people aren’t coordinating their CCs until the higher ratings - at which point you should be able to dodge those CCs thanks to your better positioning, mastery of your toolkit, and peeling from your team mates.
Third thing to consider: the enemy healer is playing against the same DPS players as you. The enemy team isn’t the only one to have CCs.
Yes, so what? It hasn’t changed anything. As long as the only strategy to win is to chain CC into the healer there won’t be healers willing to play this crap game mode.
That could happen in 2s or 3s but in SS I don’t think so.
Which is why there’s no healer neither in your team or the enemy’s
I think SS is a great idea but PvP in general needs a big change IMO, it’s been this CC bullcrap since forever and people just don’t like staring at the CC timer doing nothing because that’s not fun.
I’m not sure why you’re even posting here.
This is a thread about ranked arena. Your account doesn’t even have the “Step into the arena” achievement, granted for winning literally 1 arena at any point in time.
Why are you arguing for or against something that doesn’t concern you, in a field where you have quite literally 0 experience?
cc and using your trinket and toolkit and team in general paying attention on cc being used and counter react on it is what makes pvp, without it it becomes essentially pve where dps fight on middle and heals heal on sides and it became a m+ instead arena
now i kinda wish i sidetracked the topic with the balancing matter of classes as that were atleast related to the matter of healer drought and pvp
actually I can use his comment as example, he mentioned he do not like cc in pvp and wanted its removal in general. He plays a rsham which bit strugges with cc more than paladin, monk or priest does
Now if the shaman played hpaladin right now he could throw sac on people with short cd constant which act not only as wall but also makes him immune to pretty many cc in the game by taking dmg constantly, seconly as he would now play hpaladin if he happens to trinket something wrong or well he still would have the option to just bubble the next
These hpaladins are making double their lifetime records currently what they havent seemed to be able break in past 10 years but now they are magically higher on this hpaladin than they have ever been with any other they have tried to play for past 10 years, it speaks volumes of the state of balancing related this hpaladin
This also causes healer draught in manner of other healers not bothering to play
Listen, if you really want to get into pvp right now, try hpala in that shuffle. Im sincerely trying help you and not flame
Anything other as of now is not kinda worth for even the people who know what they are doing, because the balance is so bad and then the healer mmr system and the design of shuffle top of it makes it not worth of their time
You can watch r1 hpriest eu on stream lose 10 lobbys row 2-4, 0-6, 1-5 etc to hpalas to players that are severely less experienced than he is, he is literally awc player also but is losing to these hpaladins who have barely even took duelist few times to their lives
This is the balance of the healers in the game as of current and your trying to play rsham on it
now i feel you, i also play rsham, my advice for you if you want to jump into pvp now as less experienced player than these people mentioned I suggest you try hpala
I agree with this tbh, I tried to heal as disc priest in solo shuffles, I was literally spending my entire time in CC’s until my teammates eventually died, was warlock rogue and priest agaisnt us, I’ll let you imagine the amount of CC’s, it was basically infinite with what felt like absolutely no diminishing returns, I used trinket and was met with like 3 CC’s behind it and it was just a constant flow of cc’s, I was basically unable to do anything
check out this my friend, check it on 2100 and 2400 and you see why you struggled on disc
now also as bonus top of being the most broken being on planet when you go hpaladin you also get to have 2 trinkets with bubble kinda like fool proof mechanic which allowes you to trinket “bad” and the short cd sac allows you to keep this wall on people which damages you constantly and makes half the cc’s in game unusable on you
I only mention this cause cc was mentioned by you two
i mained rdruid, disc/hpri, rsham. there isnt right now kind of nothing worth than hpala there but you can still make mw and hpriest work ofc but I wouldnt say its worth it
the awc player priest who streams shuffles keeps constantly losing against hpaladins with severely less experience and you can really see the effect of this. theres reason on it why its 42% representation for heals on 2400 and 31% on 2100 its just completely broken now after blizz overbuff it
Its time to accept the fact that healing SS isnt enjoyable and never will be. Even if blizzard tried everything which they wont, it wouldnt matter. Healing 2s/3s is one thing, but healing complete randoms for 6 rounds straight at high damp where the end goal is for someone to die, will never be fun. Why healer shortage didnt matter as much in the past is due to the large population it had. The ratio to dps might vary a tiny bit from 10 years ago, but that doesnt change the fact that the overall population is lower which inturn create an enivorment where u notice these issues even more. If 10 people out of 100 went home, u wouldnt notice, if 1 out of 10 went home, u prob would.
Edit: There isnt a way of fixing it, even if they increased MMR for healers specifically, it wouldnt do enough to noticebly see a difference in que times. What people dont understand is the fact that SS fundamentally isnt enjoyable for a healer, its fun for DPS not having to think and just do dmg, not for the healer running after them half the game. In 3s and 2s, u usally know the people ure playng with, u can voice, make strategies, it gets more fun and rewarding, thats not the case for SS, if u won its not usualy because u deserved to win, it might be as simple as a dps just trolling away a round. Not to mention the fact that SS creates bad habits, thats not actually how PvP should be played.
Every new system we try doesnt have to be good, just scrap it and try smthn else, theres no point to beating a dead horse because some aspects of it were good, its a flawed system that isnt getting enough attention to ever be decent. Let it die and just admit that it was a bad system. The sooner we accept that the better. Whatever way u look at it, more and more people will quit in time, and the ques will get longer and longer until the bracket dies on its own, theres no light at the end of the tunnel. Theres also the obvious issue of balancing, realistically u cant balance seperately for 2s/3s and SS, so its always gonna be very hard to balance SS, it doesnt work, u cant have 2 different balancing for the different brackets, blizzard wouldnt pay for it, and even if they did, it would be hella confusing.
