Our guide writer, Theun, reviews the Season 3 healing changes and provides some additional resources that may point to the underlying issues that led us to the current state of healing.
Impact of Healer Changes in Patch Season 3
The Problem with Healing in Previous Seasons
If you’re a healer in Dragonflight you’ve probably heard a lot of talk throughout the expansion about the overall state of healing. Last Season, Jak and Theun covered a lot of the popular talking points about healing, what has changed in Dragonflight, and what we had hoped to see changed going into Season 3. You can go back and check those articles out here and here if you’d like.
Thanks to Jordan / bansheeirl we now have some wonderful charts comparing what healing has looked like since Antorus, the Burning Throne. Here is the original post, which helps paint the picture so many healers have been trying to describe throughout Dragonflight. One thing to keep in mind is overhealing numbers aren’t the only metric we need to look at here, but is a great quick representation of healers being too powerful in a Raid environment. For example, encounter design can also play a key role in these numbers (for example, Kel’Thuzad in Sanctum of Domination). It’s always important to understand why we’re overhealing as much as we are.
These graphs are looking at the overhealing numbers on the top 50 public kills of each boss since Antorus. This is important, as overhealing goes up significantly during farm when you are generally overgearing the content. It’s also important to note that between the top 5 kills of each boss, ~92% of the bosses had an overheal variance of under 5%, which means it wasn’t just a few groups massively overhealing these encounters to drive up the average. See notes in the bottom of the first image for more details.
As you can see, all 3 of the raids in Dragonflight have been the highest overhealing has been since Antorus. This is consistent with the feeling that healers are too powerful in a Raid environment.
Blizzard’s Goals for Healing in Season 3
Blizzard tried to combat some of the issues healers were experiencing with a few changes heading into Season 3.
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.
I recently made a video going over these changes, so we’ll quickly tackle each of their proposed points after having been in Season 3 for almost 6 weeks now, and see whether or not they were successful.
- The changes to single target healing spells I think was the one big win, with the one exception of Holy Shock. I think the overall healing of Holy Shock is fine, but too much of the weight seems to be in things like Glimmer of Light. A small adjustment on where the healing is coming from goes a long way in how good a spot-healing spell feels to press. That said, almost all other single target healing spells feel like they’re in a much healthier spot now, and you can actually see a healthbar move when you press things like Riptide!
- Trying to tackle a lot of the AoE healing cooldowns in the game is a fine adjustment to make mid-expansion, but I think a large part of the problem isn’t necessarily the power of individual cooldowns, and moreso the abundance of healing cooldowns in general. I’ll have another section on this below, but I think there will need to be more work done here heading into the next expansion.
- The change to Raid survivability cooldowns is mostly directed at things like Rallying Cry and Power Word: Barrier etc, however I think classes in general have been power crept a bit too much defensively on their talent trees. Very similar to the throughput cooldowns change above, I think the issue here isn’t necessarily that Rallying Cry was way too strong on its own, but rather the fact that you can layer other self defensives on top of it (and for nearly every damage event in a fight) is why it feels so powerful.
- The mana changes were the worst change coming into this patch. Not necessarily because limiting mana is a bad thing, but because some specs like Mistweaver Monk and Discipline Priest have nearly infinite mana in Season 3, and other specs like Restoration Druid and Holy Paladin (among others) are struggling to not be out of mana before the encounter ends.
How Does Healing Feel in Season 3?
Mythic+
The changes to most single target healing spells has gone a long way into making Mythic+ overall more enjoyable to heal compared to Season 1 and 2 of Dragonflight. You don’t seem to run into a lot of the problems with the current M+ tuning until the keystone level gets quite a bit higher, and as long as you plan your cooldowns well you can generally heal most of the bursty damage that happens on some of these encounters. You also don’t typically run into the same mana issues in M+ as you do in raid, as you’re able to drink between pulls (although there are some times where the mana changes are certainly felt).
It’s still not perfect, and you do unfortunately run into scenarios where the damage is simply no longer healable which is never fun, but for players who are focusing on +20 keys I’d say this season is a lot better.
Raid
How good or bad healing in Raid feels depends a lot on what class you’re playing. If you’re a Mistweaver you generally aren’t running into mana issues, you have good healing for almost every important damage event, you’re labeled as melee (important for Tindral) and can use Smoldering Seedling to turn a lot of your high single target healing into efficient, low overhealing, group healing.
The same is mostly true for Discipline this tier, although they really do want access to a few externals like Blessing of Spellwarding or Spatial Paradox on the last few encounters. Mana issues generally aren’t a concern though, and they can have very short and very high burst healing thanks to their tier bonus with Mindbender.
For pretty much every other healer, however, Season 3 feels worse. All other healers have varying levels of mana concerns and aren’t able to burst heal as much (or as often) as either Disc or Mistweaver. For Restoration Druid it feels even worse, as their burst healing potential was really hurt with the changes to Flourish. Holy Paladin was nerfed in ways that made the class much less enjoyable to play rather than largely relying on aura nerfs instead. And Preservation Evoker has been in this weird area where most of their throughput comes from spells that simply do too much healing (resulting in very high overhealing). The only healer that feels okay has been Restoration Shaman, but the spec definitely runs into mana issues and despite doing very good throughput, is simply not played because it still doesn’t have a raid buff like every other healer.
Abundance of Healing Cooldowns – Problem for The War Within?
Healers feel too powerful whenever you have a button for every situation. This is, in my opinion, one of the main reasons why Preservation Evoker felt so powerful in Season 1, why Holy Paladin felt so good after their rework in Season 2, and why Disc and Mistweaver feel so strong now. We have access to more cooldowns that have a cooldown of 1:00, 1:30, and 2:00 than we’ve ever had before, which allows us to either layer cooldowns on top of another cooldown to create really big burst healing moments (like you see in this log or simply spread out all of these cooldowns to cover multiple damage events back-to-back.
On Smolderon, for example, a Restoration Shaman can cover all but 2 of the damage events in the entire fight by simply spreading out their healing cooldowns. Paired with a Mistweaver having Invoke Yu’lon, the Jade Serpent on a 1-minute cooldown, and a Discipline Priest ramping (literally) every 30 seconds with Mindbender, you can easily cover every single damage event with not only 1, but multiple throughput cooldowns. This is even before you’ve looked to using things like Rallying Cry or Power Word: Barrier or Spirit Link Totem.
There’s a few ways they can go about fixing this.
- Cut back some of the Healing Cooldowns (or increase their cooldowns) so we have less CD coverage.
- Reduce the potency of Healing Cooldowns relative to their cooldown. For example, if you want to have Invoke Yu’lon, the Jade Serpent on a 1-minute CD (normally 3-minute) then it should probably be close to 1/3 of the power.
This isn’t necessarily something I think they could have done in the middle of Dragonflight, as it’d require many changes to every healers talent tree. I’m bringing this up here because I’m not certain they’ll be able to completely fix the issue we’ve had in Dragonflight without trying to fix this issue in one way or another. Trying to instead design encounters around the potency of current healing cooldowns will likely yield the same result – with our health bars either being full or dead, and that’s a space I’d like to try to avoid.
About the Author
This page is maintained by Theun, Restoration Shaman for Infinity on Area52 (US). I’ve been playing the spec since Nighthold and managed to achieve up to world 4th playing for BDG in Shadowlands! I am also an MVP/theorycrafter in the Restoration Shaman specific Discord Server and Moderator in the Shaman Class Discord and am very active in both communities. For questions you can find me in the aforementioned discord servers or during my very rare streams on Twitch or babbling mindlessly on Twitter.
