- Author: Shadostruct
- Date: September 8, 2023
- Updated: September 8, 2023
- Expansion: World of Warcraft
There’s been a lot of back and forth with healers this expansion – from certain specs being oppressively good and making content trivial, to healing as a whole being so stressful it’s hard to find them at all. Blizzard has been trying to be on the ball this expansion with balance changes, and so healers have seen everything from reworks to large number tweaks. In the next large content patch healers are going to see another set of sweeping changes that may drastically change their playstyle.
There are a few key points brought up in this post that I’ll detail:
- They want to reduce overhealing
- Single target heals are less impactful currently than they maybe should be
- Group healing spells are going to be adjusted down in power
- Defensive raid cooldowns are felt to make the raid too sturdy when they’re active, and will likely be adjusted down in power
- Mana is too abundant, and so they’ll be adjusting down abilities/items that generate mana.
- They want mana to be a finite resource, so there may be tweaking done to mana costs and values as well
Are these changes trending in the right direction? Is healing going through too many changes too quickly? It’s tough to say right now, but as we learn more hopefully it’ll become clearer! Read on for the full post on the matter.
Healers have a lot of decisions and resources to manage that change depending on the type of content you are doing. At its core, we want healers to have interesting abilities and choices to make while healing, and we want you to have to manage your mana pool. We’re hoping our changes reduce the amount of overhealing and make mana matter slightly more, which should make healing across the game a more enjoyable experience.
Single target healing spells currently don’t feel like they move the health bar enough. We want these heals to be impactful and have a purpose, and hope this makes healing a Mythic+ dungeon less stressful for healers.
Group healing spells have seen a lot of modifications and increases to their total throughput over the course of Dragonflight. These spells often feel like they are rapidly increasing a raid from a damaged state to a full health state. We plan on adjusting the effectiveness of many of these spells.
Raid survivability cooldowns feel like they have all entered the territory of making your raid feel nearly invulnerable when being used. While it’s a great moment for everyone to stack in a Power Word: Barrier and reduce damage taken and stack a few healing cooldowns, we think the combined power of these has escalated to a point where they make the raid slightly too sturdy.
Mana generation is a problem that’s related to all of the above. We want mana to feel like a finite resource and for the few ways you can still generate mana to be relevant, but want your spell choices during a raid fight to matter. We’re reducing the effectiveness of many mana restoration class abilities and specific items.
Please test healing in the Guardians of the Dream PTR and use this thread for any general feedback you have about it.
Thank you!
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