World of Warcraft indirectly nerfed healing feats in patch 10.1 by buffing almost every other ability. This will make the job of a healer in World of Warcraft much harder than it is now.
The public beta area for Dragonflight Patch 10.1, Embers of Neltharion, is currently working to finalize the details of the upcoming content update. Over the past few months, World of Warcraft has been fine-tuning the patch through raid testing, feedback, and internal tweaks ahead of the May 2 Ember of Neltharion release.
In a recent PTR build, World of Warcraft decided to test a major change that would make healing much more difficult. According to Blizzard, healers don’t perform well in their role, making it difficult to challenge players in new World of Warcraft raids and dungeons without bosses dealing high, sharp damage. To compensate, World of Warcraft increases player health and enemy damage by 25%. Self-healing and healing abilities for DPS and tank characters will also be increased to facilitate this change, and PvP gear is being adjusted appropriately to minimize the impact on competitive modes.
This is actually the second time in recent memory that World of Warcraft has done something like this. Shortly before Dragonflight launched, World of Warcraft increased player stamina and creature damage by roughly 40% for the same reason. As player item levels increase over the lifetime of Dragonflight, World of Warcraft seems to decide that the first adjustments are not enough to properly challenge players.
Many players were not happy with this change. Many WoW players have misgivings about epic dungeons and actually think healers don’t do well in them. They claim that many of the best Mythic+ dungeon strategies have replaced their healers with extra DPS, since some tank specs’ offhealing abilities are enough to survive without a healer. 10.1 gave them more HP and heals, and many worried that playing heals would become less viable.
Fortunately, this change hasn’t been fully nailed down yet. This stamina and damage increase is currently on the PTR, which means players and developers alike have time to see how much it changes the game in real play. Most expected this major change to have a positive impact on gameplay, rather than simply removing World of Warcraft’s final level compression in Shadowlands. If it does the other way around, hopefully World of Warcraft can revert the changes, or make further tweaks to make sure each character’s character isn’t outdated or outdated.
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