Dragonflight Season 3 Healer Changes Reviewed - Healing Problems Solved?
Heading into Season 3, Blizzard implemented a series of healer changes intended to address considerable feedback that healing in Dragonflight felt more frustrating and less fun than previous expansions. Blizzard sought to make resources matter more, improve single target heals, and modify raid survivability cooldowns. Did these changes improve healing or make it worse?
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
