Healing Dungeons in World of Warcraft Dragonflight is a Broken Gameplay Design, and Here’s Why

Picture this: you’re healing a dungeon in World of Warcraft, and things are going well, when the boss stops to cast a huge party-wide damage hit. You’ve got people near topped off, everything seems okay, and then the party-wide blows up. BAM! Everyone except the tank, including yourself, is dead. What happened? The tank wipes, you go again. You top everyone off going into that same ability, you know the horror that awaits if not. BAM! Everyone except the tank is dead, again. How am I supposed to deal with this?

You aren’t – and that’s a problem.

Healing in Dragonflight has hit a wall that has little to do with the actual healing role itself and more to do with the design of fights, the design of the reimplemented talent trees, and a chase for balance. These changes simultaneously make healing far more stressful in the dungeon environment while also making healers, perhaps, a superfluous role in that same environment, to the point where a substantial number of MDI dungeon runs and even live dungeon runs have been done without healers in multiple seasons of Dragonflight. It’s the reason why low-level keys can be hell, why players often need life-threatening levels of damage to learn the mechanical ropes, and why there’s such a divide between what healing feels like in unskilled key play versus skilled key play.

So what is the actual issue? Well, it breaks down in a couple of ways, and let’s get into that.

The Art of Balancing

World of Warcraft presents as trying to be a balanced ecosystem where all 39 specs in the game are, more or less, equal to others within their role. This isn’t always numerically true, sure, but it is generally the goal. A big part of that balancing act has included ensuring that every single spec in the game has some sort of personal defensive cooldown that makes them able to weather a big hit. Sometimes they come in normal forms (flat damage reduction like Evoker’s Obsidian Scales), sometimes they come in weird forms that tie the defensive capability to something else (Priest’s Translucent Image talent making Fade a DR, Fury Warriors using Enraged Regeneration and also getting DR from it), and sometimes it can be a specialized set of choices against specific damage (Monks with Dampen Harm versus Diffuse Magic, Rogues with Cloak of Shadows versus Evasion for direct Physical hits). Everyone has a defensive, and some even have multiple defensives. Hell, my Windwalker Monk was super sturdy in Mythic Plus because I could have 4 distinct defensives that I could rotate through in dungeons to keep my health nice and safe!

Defensives are great in concept, and they’re something that Blizzard can add to give a talent choice without it feeling like it affects balance. There’s just one problem though…they absolutely do affect the game balance in a different way.

Defensives are a thing that you optimize as you improve at the game – most newer and less-skilled players probably never hit their defensive buttons at all when doing DPS or healer roles, and so an easy early distinction between you and those players is knowing when and how to hit those buttons and how to cycle them constantly to keep your damage taken as low as possible. Blizzard has to tune the higher end of the game around the expectation that players will know to hit them and keep themselves alive, because this progression in skill is a part of the experience of going up the ladder of difficulty. That means that as content approaches a higher level of difficulty, one of the challenges that gets introduced is damage that exceeds your full health bar. Why? Well, if you hit any defensive that works on the ability in question, you can, suddenly, survive that. If an ability does 105% of your health in damage and you can reduce it even by like 10%, well, you can live. A big part of the reason that the pre-Season 4 low level keys were bad trainers for these mechanics is that on lower key levels, they simply didn’t hit like that – they did less than your full health in damage and so no defensive was necessary. Of course, good players learned quickly to hit them even in those circumstances, and that learning directly translated into survival at higher key levels, but it took until around an old +10 for those abilities to scale to the point where they were lethal in a single hit.

But surviving with 5% health isn’t great, right? Sure, except…

Blizzard Has Failed At Balancing Healer Gameplay To Goal The Entire Expansion

Dragonflight carries with it an admitted failure on Blizzard’s part – healer tuning. Blizzard, generally speaking, prefers when healing is a triage game – where the healer has agency and choice to pick efficient and slow spells to bring players into tolerable HP ranges instead of constantly needing to blast everyone to full health. When they’ve stated publicly that healer design is where they want it, this is the general idea – you get to play an efficiency game to preserve mana and resources, the party plays in a high but not 100% health total, and mechanics have a proactive element (planning shields and mitigation around incoming damage) and a reactive element (people will generally survive if you did triage correctly, so now choose the spells you use to recover and re-triage to a safe range). To me, this is generally a good healing model – it gives room for choice, for error, and makes it so that healing is less of an all-or-nothing scramble and more of a careful skill check where you can flex your knowledge by holding big heals and even holding healing at all until you know a mechanic is coming that demands it. This kind of design also incentivizes smart uses of self-healing from non-healers and cooldowns that convert damage into healing (which is a topic we will revisit in a moment, oh boy). Generally, the healing game benefits when it skews in this direction.

But Dragonflight has been marked by incredible burst healing, and while Blizzard tried hard to slow that in Season 2 of the expansion (increasing health pools on players massively, increasing incoming damage from enemies, keeping heals roughly the same or even nerfing throughput), it has simply not really helped. Every healer has some sort of capability to summon on-demand burst healing to top everyone off in a couple of global cooldowns, and a second pass at the tuning levers (nerfing mana economy significantly for most healers in Season 3) didn’t really get them where they wanted to be either. Dragonflight is defined by burst healing in the dungeon setting – where players will routinely take damage higher than their health bar, use personal and group defensives to cover the overkill, and then rely on a healer doing a big burst combo to bring everyone from 10% health to 100% before the next major bit of damage starts coming out. It’s stressful, mostly because there’s not a lot of personal prep work you can do as the healer to help this unless you have some form of groupwide damage reduction (Power Word Barrier, the Evoker shield orb thing) so you’re just hoping everyone hits their personals and then preparing for a massive healing demand to appear for you to fulfill.

This directly feeds into two separate and related problems with the talent system and healing talents, both for healers but also and especially for non-healers.

Healing Taken Increase Talents and Hybrid Damage-to-Healing Talents Are Generally Bad and Too Good, Respectively

A lot of the class and spec trees in Dragonflight have talent nodes that help you live by increasing your healing received. Cool, this isn’t an awful idea in theory – and if the game’s own balancing targets around healer gameplay were met, this would be an exceptionally good thing to have. However, in the current world, where healers have high burst throughput and where most healing is needed in response to fatal damage spikes that have to be smoothed through defensive capability, this is less ideal. These talents, despite my header choice here, are not necessarily bad – they have clear applications and can help a healer a lot, especially in situations where you have a HoT-heavy healer blasting you with healing over time effects. But in the current damage profiles of WoW’s dungeon game, they also end up being kind of irrelevant.

One type of talent that is less irrelevant, however, is the hybrid-spec damage-to-healing talent. We’re talking about Druids with Nature’s Vigil, Shadow Priests with Vampiric Embrace, and Shamans with Ancestral Guidance. There are also edge cases like Protection Paladins using their amped-up Word of Glory to heal-bomb a party member to full in their own right. Generally, hybrid healing in Dragonflight, even after the Season 2 nerfs it got due to healer-less keys in Season 1 using them extensively, is very strong. Can it carry a group for an entire dungeon? Maybe not on its own, but as a component of an overall healer-less healing strategy, it can definitely work. That’s without getting into the ability most hybrids have to just cast heals – not for long, mind you, but every Retribution Paladin can spam a couple Flash of Lights, every Shadow Priest can hit Flash Heal, and every Balance Druid has Regrowth and potentially even Rejuvenation to put maintenance HoTs onto players. Couple that with hybrid conversion talents and you can get over 100,000 healing per second from a party without ever even needing a healer.

Tank Self-Sustain Is a Hell of a Drug

Tanks in Dragonflight are close to the Legion model, which means that when played properly, they almost never need direct external healing. Each tank has a weak spot of sorts that can hurt them big time (most of the time it is either large hits of magical damage or bleed effects causing constant chip damage), but most tanks also have tools for those edge cases that can keep them largely self-sustaining. I’ve gone back and forth over the 8 years I’ve been writing here about how I feel with tank self-sustain, and I think I generally land on the side that tank self-sustain is a suitable skill groove for tanks to learn to be in – a good tank can separate themselves by being self-sustain machines while bad tanks will need a healer babysitting them – but I also can’t deny that this does take away a niche for single-target burst healing that some specs used to shine at. It feels like no coincidence to me that Restoration Shaman has been in the dirt a lot of Dragonflight because their mastery and whole niche are targeted at strong burst on a single target and maintenance for sustained incoming damage like a tank would take, between things like Earth Shield and Riptide. Sure, their mastery works for multi-target burst too, and that is great, but it feels like the original idea of that strong tank healer has been lost in the current healing game.

Even tanks that allegedly need some level of external healing, like Protection Warrior, aren’t in a place where they need much of it if at all, and even then, played well, you can mitigate most of that – Ignore Pain does a lot of work!

Stats and Stat Inflation Have Made Everyone Tankier

Dragonflight’s secondary stat economy has meant that everyone gets a boatload of every secondary stat, taking their preferred stats to a first or even second diminishing return cap, and then taking the others as well, often even being able to get them, in current season gear, near or at their initial point of diminishing returns. One of WoW’s secondary stats is Versatility, a stat that increases your damage, healing, and damage absorption shielding effects by a percentage, while also reducing damage taken by half that same value. For most players, this means an average current-season damage reduction of 10-18%, just completely passively. A lot of specs actually currently stack Versatility because they scale poorly off of other secondary stats, so half of the specs in the game are closer to 20% flat DR from Versatility alone.

Dragonflight also added enchantment effects for Bracers and Cloaks that increase the tertiary stat Avoidance. Avoidance in the past wasn’t much of a factor, but in the current game, a player with two 3-star level enchants can gain 10% damage reduction against AoE effects specifically, which means that most party-wide hits are already being muzzled pretty hard by the average player without that player even having to hit anything. The end result has been that most specs lean on Avoidance enchants, since the only other options are Leech (whose healing is less substantial in a metagame where damage is a pass/fail mechanical check on killing you outright) or Speed (and while Speed is good for certain specs with mobility troubles, it also tends to be taken less, especially since you can get a Boot enchant that offers Speed instead while still taking Avoidance on these two other slots).

So players will often come with 20-30% passive AoE damage reduction, have defensives to take even more edge off, and then have powerful hybrid healing utility that can take the edge off on recovering from those big hits. There’s one other factor to discuss before we wrap up, which relates closely to stats but also is its own problem…

Augmentation Evokers Increase Group Survivability Further

Augmentation Evokers aren’t a huge part of this problem, but they are a part of it all the same. Augmentation Evokers have two major buffs that influence group survival in a measurable way – the first being Shifting Sands, which causes their Empower spells to grant a random ally a Versatility percentage-increase buff. This buff seeks out damage-dealers primarily and is, at baseline, an extra 3% Versatility (and thus a 1.5% damage taken reduction) for 10 seconds, with a lot of duration extension coming from proper Aug gameplay. The second, for tanks specifically, is Blistering Scales, which gives a large Armor buff to a target of your choice and can be talented to also give an absorb shield. This can be targeted on non-tanks but will usually be used on tanks, given that armor is only generally useful against direct physical damage hits.

These two abilities grant Augmentation Evokers a substantial ability to keep a group healthy by adding further damage reduction, on top of their passive Black Attunement, which buffs the health of the group by 4%. These effects, taken as a whole, increase survivability by a healthy margin, and it is part of why they were the lynchpin of the Season 2 Mythic Plus “god comp,” because the changes made to health and damage profiles in Season 2 made a party benefit heavily from having an Augmentation Evoker to smooth through them.

The Full Picture (So Far)

So in Mythic Plus, you have these compounding sets of problems that all feed into healer gameplay lacking. Players are innately tankier than ever – high passive defensive through Avoidance enchants and Versatility creep, strong self-protection cooldowns that are reliably available, high health pools and decent amounts of self-recovery through self-healing and healing received increase talents. To counter this, Blizzard makes dungeon mobs and bosses do the only thing that can reasonably overcome 30%+ levels of passive DR – everything important hits for 100%+ of your health pool and it is the job of the party as a whole to use personal and group damage reduction. This means that you have to have on your on-demand burst healing ready for these spikes to top people off, since even through proper play, they’re gonna hurt – but in a less-skilled group, players will take extra damage that will spend these resources early and will also not likely use their defensives, so they’ll just die, and at that level, the healer is likely to catch flak for it, undeserved though it likely is. Meanwhile, in a skillful group, players can dance so elegantly as to take almost no damage from anything but unavoidable party-wide hits, and it’s not that much further out of reach for a group at that skill level to then plan to use hybrid healing, self-heals, and consumables like health potions and healthstones, to top off and move on.

In a group where a healer is definitely needed, the healer is constantly stressed, running low on resources, begging for basic attention from their DPS and being blamed when the model of today makes it rarely, if ever, their fault, and every dungeon completed feels like this uphill battle against the dungeon, the party, and the general ignorance of the party to the healer’s struggle. In a skilled group, on the other hand, a healer may not really be necessary, because smart group play, planned use of cooldowns, and healing abilities available to non-healers can do as much or more healing than an average healer in that same bracket of skill. If your niche is a dungeon healer and that’s the mode of gameplay you enjoy the most, it feels pretty fucking awful to be in this boat, but here we are! In a skillful group, an Augmentation Evoker tends to offer similar or more value to a healer, because they increase the DPS of the group by a lot, have a talentable dispel (non-magic but covers a lot of debuff types and heals too), and one of their major rotational abilities is an AoE stop that is an Empower spell, so it also grants Versatility and increases survivability even more.

If you look at the Season 3 MDI pool, nearly every party was Vengeance Demon Hunter, healer (usually Mistweaver Monk or Restoration Druid), and then Shadow Priest, Fire Mage, and Destruction Warlock, because Shadow has Mass Dispel, Vampiric Embrace, Power Infusion, and good damage output, while Destro locks can dispel magic with an imp pet out, and Fire Mages gets mass barrier to put their mage shield onto the whole party while also having a personal shield, Cauterize for self-survival, Alter Time, and two different ice-themed defensives. The healer choices both are down to doing strong sustain healing while doing damage – Mistweaver for fistweaving and Resto Druid for catweaving while HoTs and Grove Guardians do work, and then in many no-healer runs, you could slot an Augmentation Evoker or even a Balance Druid or Ret pally into the spot and it would work well. Granted, that’s at the MDI level where every run is a extreme time-trial, but it has happened in live keys even at lower levels successfully. At the top end of pushing the highest possible keys, you most often take a healer who has strong damage throughput while healing, or even a class that can zone in as healer, do the hardest pulls as a healer, then zone out and respec to DPS to run the rest of the key in a 4-DPS composition.

To this point, I’ve tried to be careful here and talk specifically and directly about dungeons, because…

Raid Is Actually Mostly Okay?

In the raid setting, Blizzard is far more comfortable with triage gameplay design, since multiple healers mean that you can put out consistent maintenance damage that requires upkeep without it always needing to be fatal or hugely overtuned, and the ability to lean on multiple healers means that the niches each present can be used to better efficiency. While fights can and often will have differing damage profiles that lean into the favor of one or more healers at a time, a raid of 8-9 encounters has more room to offer unique design that pushes in other directions and each healer often has a fight or two that they are pretty good at. Preservation Evokers can blast Fyrakk healing adds like few other healers, while a Discipline Priest with Ultimate Penitence can single-handedly stem the bleeding of a consistent focused raidwide burst like Volcoross’ phase transition raidwide pulsing damage. Raid also offers the opportunity to have more healing targets outside of the raid – Amirdrassil had two fights with NPCs that required healing which offered unique challenges to healers outside of just playing whack-a-mole with the raid frames. These mechanics aren’t perfect options that make their fights distinctly better, but they are a direction that Blizzard could take to add new healing mechanics to fights.

A lot of what makes dungeons harder and kind of broken for healers this expansion is what makes raid shine for healers by comparison – the model gives a lot more agency to healer players, allows them to brute force through certain mistakes and misplays, and can enable big-brain strategies like stacking the bosses on Amalgamation Chamber in Aberrus together, causing them to tick both debuffs on the raid and causing the ramping damage to effectively double, but enabling the group to use incidental cleave damage to both bosses to drastically speed up the first phase. Raid, I would argue, shows the best healers at their fullest potential, when they can pace out their cooldowns and buttons in their own way to maximize the benefit.

The Dungeon Difficulty Squish Has Further Hurt Healers

All of the dungeon talk above is fine enough if healers have some low keys they can make mistakes in and watch their groups make mistakes in. The ideal role of the old +2-+9 range was for healers to get their feet wet and practice where the stakes were lower and where mistakes would be far less costly. In Seasons 1 through 3 of Dragonflight, at least you had that – a range where you could learn and grow, get better, feel out the damage profiles and adapt your toolkit to match. In Season 4, however, there’s a problem, which is that no such space exists. Heroic dungeons, while harder, are still not tremendously taxing on a healer’s kit, even played poorly. Mythic 0s, at their new tuning, on the other hand, are brutally taxing for learning and will often punish mistakes with death, which requires the players on the receiving end of the death to review the in-game death recap and determine what owned their face off. Will most players do this? I’m not exactly optimistic!

Look, to a point, I do think that players can generally learn better from failure, and the dungeon squish is something I’ve been largely positive on because of that. Most players that point fingers and act aggressive when they die to not using a defensive are gonna filter out of the pool because they’ll constantly die, hate the experience, and leave, and honestly, an unwillingness to learn and improve is one of those things where I will absolutely wave them goodbye with a smile on my face as they walk away. But I also think to a healer, this is a bigger challenge, because you need to have a good DPS meter setup with a death recap to see what killed everyone else, and in the heat of the moment, it’s rare for a group to stop and do a review session to see what went wrong. People will look for the biggest line item, adjust, and go again – but the healer needs the other players to be able and willing to do their own reflection.

In fact, that is a final challenge point for healers this expansion that has been true through the history of the holy trinity – at the end of the day, healing is a PvP job. What I mean is that you are fighting against the average aptitude and adapatability of the party – I can heal mechanics but I cannot heal stupid, I can increase your current health but not your current intelligence. Healers are constantly made or broken by the groups they play with – and if you play with a Demon Hunter who can’t fucking sit still to avoid a swirlie that will one-shot them, a tank that under-mitigates, or casters who turret and don’t adjust around mechanics or use mobility tools, well, then you’re going to be suffering. This amplifies the current state of WoW’s dungeon healing to the negative state we find it in – a bad group is always going to take too much damage and not be recoverable, a great group is going to take so little damage that you might not even get an invite, and the average group is going to be taxing mentally, where your best hope is that the group average skill is high enough to mitigate the fatal spikes while leaving you enough room to do the job you want to do – healing unavoidable damage in a measured way where you have a lot of agency to influence the success of the run. If your hopes are met, then it isn’t necessarily the worst place for healers to be.

The problem is that all of this compounds so that the average group dies a lot and stresses healers out of the scene, exceptional groups don’t want you, and the bad groups make you actively hate healing (or at least loathe doing it for PUGs/specific players who won’t avoid their own death), and that’s not a good or healthy place for healing to be at.