+healing should be removed from the game because:

a.) It leads to a self-perpetuating cycle where content is balanced around healers having +healing, and thus it is the only thing they want.
b.) This leads to healer roles being restricted to healing and healing only.
c.) This leads to scaling of incoming damage that further increases the stature of warriors being the only tanks.


+healing is 96% more effective than +damage/healing. A healer prioritizing +healing will be much more effective than one who prioritizes damage/healing. Skill being equal, of course. This is such a large difference that game designers must design content around healers having +healing gear. To do otherwise would create trivial encounters. In the absence of +healing, designers would have to design around healers having half as much, and nothing would really change. My point here is that the efficiency of +healing on the stat budget is so huge that it affects design decisions. +Fire/Ice... etc do not have the same concerns because fire is not always useful while healing always is, and the designers made +damage schools only 20% more efficient than damage/healing.

Because +healing is so good, because healers all want it and almost nothing else, healers end up decked with it. Shaman.. the Caster/Healer hybrid.. has a Tier 3 suit that has 0 points of +damage on it. ZERO. And we all loved it because it allowed Shaman to do their primary job of healing. However, they would have never needed all that +healing if content hadn't been designed to need it. The result is that uber shaman in T3 do not have the capacity to do good secondary damage.. any mana usage issues aside. Shaman damage does not scale at all, because to keep up in the healing race they have to spend their itemization points on +healing. This is a concern that will not go away in the expansion.

The fact that +healing ramps up so quickly affects the incoming damage that a main tank can take. Fights like Twin Emps, Patchwerk.. etc are all based around a certain amount that can be healed. Warrior Tanks are the best at damage mitigation and avoidance. As damage levels increase and increase, the ability for other classes to tank decreases, because the absolute difference gets larger and larger. Now, this argument I have thought about the least, so I may be a bit off on it.


So, to sum up. +healing is a massively overpowered stat that has distorted the balance of wow and vastly contributed to the shackling of healers to just +healing and not damage/healing. I don't think anyone would miss it if it was removed or toned down. In fact, quite the opposite, I think healers would enjoy it a lot more.

I'm not quite sure why you think this belongs in wow general. I may have used a slightly inflammatory title, but I think the point stands.

It's an interesting argument but what would you have take its place?

Yes, you tried, but I really don't think it makes any sense. What design model would you create wherein every class won't just compute the optimal stat choice for what they want to do, and then min/max for it?

Because it's been posted a number of times in the WoW General Forums? I think Snowfox is the usual offender there, though I might be wrong.

Why isn't healer gear all +damage/healing? For the same reason that druid gear isn't both feral and healing and balance stats.

Not to mention if healer gear was all +damage, you'd either imbalance PvP in favor of healing or in favor of DPS - the current situation is relatively balanced (barring some very extreme cases) in terms of balancing out equally geared players with respect to "Can I burn this person faster than they can heal themselves?" Removing the ability to differentiate between DPS improvements and HPS improvements would break that.

Shut up and let your healers have some damage gear from your farm instances (or, at this point, Naxx: how are you today, Crystal Webbed Robe? I didn't think I'd be seeing *you* again for the 3rd week in a row, instead of my goddamn dagger that never drops) and everyone's happy.

I would advocate just +damage/healing. Healers are in a conundrum. They must get +healing to increase their primary effectiveness. However, the +healing stat is just too efficient to ignore at the moment. I suppose +healing/shadow and +healing/holy could be created, but that might be too complex.

I'll try to address some of the concerns.

One, I don't read wow general at all. Ever. I rarely read the class boards. I read blue tracker and that's about it. So if someone brought it up there, I didn't know about it. They may have taken a different take on it. I'm coming at it from the perspective of a guild leader at 4h horde side.

Two, I hope that it is not read that healers should not get upgrades or +damage gear. I let my healers take +damage gear. I'm just dissapointed that in a lot of fights they don't get to use it. Or.. put it this way. My mages get +damage/healing. They are mostly fire, when they need to use frost for something.. the damage is still there. My shamans are in T3, they mostly heal, when they go to do some dps.. they get no use from the healing. When I asked my priests how much their SW:P did 2 years ago.. it is the same answer they gave last night.

Three, my intention is not to call for a nerf to healers, and yes, I understand that this affects pvp. I belive that, in general, a reduction in +healing could be balanced around in the pve game. I'm not 100% sure what this would do to pvp. However, it doesn't seem like a huge distortion.

This isn't a bad thing. There are people who play healers who really like the fact that since they specialize in healing they're better healers than people that don't specialize in healing. Your argument may as well be that +defense should be removed because tanks that specialize in +defense are locked in to tanking and are poor DPSers as a result. All it takes is a gear swap to be effective in either case.

You could make the same argument around any purely PvE stat - defense, spell hit (past the PvP minimum), or even extend it to entire specs.

Specialization will exist in gear. Are you arguing against that or only the item budget cost +healing is too low? What would be a more appropriate value - 50%? At what percentage difference does out of raid versatility overcome raid efficiency? I suspect the answer would be different in every guild environment, making any attempt to objectively arrive at a value pointless.

Haven't we learned our lesson with Warriors about people who get to have two classes at once?

Let me jump in real quick and say that I was probably too inflammatory in my original title. However, I would say that +healing is at least too cheap by half.

Asking for +healing to be nerfed is just a convoluted way of asking for Priest damage to be buffed. That's why this is WoW General territory.