Warlords of Draenor to tweak healing mechanics

World of Warcraft's upcoming expansion, Warlords of Draenor, will feature improved healing mechanics and gameplay, as explained by a recent dev blog on Battle.net.

According to the post, the game's current system for resilience and battle fatigue makes players "feel much weaker" in PvP than PvE. In order to fix the disparity, Blizzard plans to increase player health. Critical damage and critical heals against players in PvP will also be reduced 50 percent.

"On its own, that increase in health would make players more survivable in the world at large, so we're also increasing creature damage and the effectiveness of healing spells to balance things out," the post reads. "The net result of these changes is that individual attacks will knock a smaller chunk off of a player's health pool in PvP, but your survivability in PvE won't be affected."

Low-mana heals such as Holy Light and Healing Wave will be removed from the game. Other spells, such as the Greater Healing Wave, will be renamed.

"We think that while they do add complexity, they don't truly add depth to healing gameplay," the post reads. "... However, we still want healers to think about their mana when deciding which heal to cast, and so the mana costs and throughputs of many spells are being altered to give players a choice between spells with lower throughput and lower cost versus spells with higher throughput and higher costs."

For more nitty-gritty details on the changes to Warlords of Draenor's healing spells, check out the full post. Warlords of Draenor, World of Warcraft's fifth expansion, was announced at BlizzCon 2013.