Healing Changes for Arena in Dragonflight Pre-Expansion Phase 2

dragonflight healing changes prepatch

With recent changes to overall health pools, testing has revealed healing to be too strong in PvP scenarios. A new framework has been laid to reduce healing and introduce dampening effects earlier.

Depending on group size, dampening will begin at 10% and increase an additional 6% every minute until the battle is over. Read on to see a complete breakdown of the healing balance and dampening effects.

Bornakk – (Source)

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:

Solo Shuffle – Start at 10% Dampening and after 1 minute, ramp up at a pace of 25% per minute
2v2 (double DPS) – Start at 10% Dampening and immediately ramp up at a pace of 6% per minute
2v2 (with a healer) – Start at 30% Dampening (up from 20%) and immediately ramp up at a pace of 6% per minute
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.

We’ll see you in the Arena!

About the Author

milliondollarpuppy

I am an avid WoW Classic player and love Druid, Priest, and Rogue and look forward to maining a DK in Wrath. When I'm not gaming or writing, I'm catching up on reading and spending time with my family, my parent's dogs, and my pet snake, Gloria.

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