World of Warcraft is indirectly nerfing healing specializations in Patch 10.1 by buffing just about everyone else. This will make the job of healers in World of Warcraft a lot harder than it currently is.
The Public Test Realm for Dragonflight Patch 10.1, Embers of Neltharion, is currently hard at work hammering out the details for the upcoming content update. Over the past several months, World of Warcraft has been fine-tuning the patch via raid testing, feedback, and internal tweaking ahead of the Embers of Neltharion launch on May 2.
In a recent build of the PTR, World of Warcraft decided to test a significant change that would make healing a little harder. According to Blizzard, healers have been overperforming in their role, making it difficult to challenge players in new World of Warcraft raids and dungeons without making bosses do high, spiky damage. To compensate, World of Warcraft is increasing player health and enemy damage by 25%. Self-healing and healing abilities of DPS and tank roles will also be increased to facilitate this change, and PvP gear is being adjusted appropriately to minimize the impact on the competitive mode as much as possible.
This is actually the second time World of Warcraft has done something like this in recent memory. Shortly before the launch of Dragonflight, World of Warcraft increased player stamina and creature damage by roughly 40% for the same reasons. As player item level increases over Dragonflight’s lifespan, it seems World of Warcraft thinks this first adjustment wasn’t quite enough to appropriately challenge players.
A lot of players aren’t happy with this change. Many World of Warcraft players have concerns about Mythic dungeons and actually think healers are underperforming in them. They claim many of the best Mythic+ dungeon strategies have replaced their healer with an additional DPS since some tank specializations’ offhealing capabilities were sufficient to survive without one. With 10.1 giving them even more HP and healing to play with, many fear playing a healer will become even less feasible.
Luckily, this change is not quite finalized yet. This stamina and damage increase is currently on the PTR, meaning players and developers alike have time to see how much it actually alters the game in actual play. Most hope this significant change has a positive impact on gameplay and does not simply undo World of Warcraft’s last level squish in Shadowlands. If it does the opposite, hopefully, World of Warcraft can revert the change, or make further adjustments to ensure characters of every role are neither overpowered nor obsolete.
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