Healing in World of Warcraft will be further restricted. Now it’s also the PvP healers who have to accept heavy losses.
Healing in World of Warcraft has always been a difficult subject – especially in PvP. With a good healer breathing down your neck, victories sometimes seem nearly impossible. The joy of matches in which one team can fall back on a healer and the other not is usually very limited.
Blizzard recently announced that character life points are increased by a whopping 40% at level 70 to weaken healers. Now new, drastic changes in PvP follow.
What will be changed? Blizzard is increasing the “Dampening” effects in the arena. This debuff causes healing and absorption effects to become weaker. The effect increases over time, making healing increasingly difficult and ultimately impossible. This forces matches to eventually come to an end as both sides can only lose HP but can’t gain any more. The changes are:
In addition, the debuff is now stackable. However, this is only an improvement to the display, so you can see at first glance how strong the dampening is without having to mouse over the debuff first.
Why is Blizzard doing this? Blizzard is trying to limit the effectiveness of healers while making sure that PvP matches don’t stretch out forever. Arena games in particular can last 10 to 15 minutes in the higher ranks.
The developers are trying to find a balance here in which healers are quite useful, but their effect gradually decreases. At the same time, you don’t want players to be killed “within a global cooldown”, which is why the life points were increased so drastically before.
Here’s how the community is reacting: The first reactions from the community are quite positive. Most seem to like the fact that Blizzard is making an effort here and has ideas on how to make PvP more interesting and fairer. A few opinions from the official WoW forum and from wowhead:
What do you think of the PvP changes to healing? A good step in the right direction? Or is healing just not fun anymore?
You can also see in PvE that you don’t always need a healer. There, a small dwarf defeated a current raid boss all by himself.