Patch 5.2 PvP healing changes
Within the PTR Class and Set Bonus thread, which is now on part two thanks to its gargantuan size, it's easy to miss things, which is exactly what I did with this little gem:
We're making a change to the way damage-to-healing conversions work so that the healing is not affected by resilience. The healing will be based on how much damage would have been done as if the target had no resilience. If you hit an opponent for 10K and have a mechanic that converts damage into 50% healing, your hit may land for 6K because of resilience, but the heal will still be 5K (50% of the unmitigated damage). This only applies to resilience, not to armor, Shield Wall or other forms of damage reduction.
This change currently includes Atonement, Glyph of Battle Healer, Ancestral Guidance, Vampiric Embrace, Nature's Vigil, Glyph of Siphon Life, Eminence, Glyph of Flame Shock, Leeching Poison, Death Siphon, Feral Spirit and Soul Leech.
Related, we have read feedback that certain mechanics, such as Retribution's mastery, Hand of Light, are double-dipping from resilience. If this happened, then your attack would be mitigated by resilience and then the mastery proc (which is supposed to be a percentage of the main attack) would also be mitigated by resilience. However, we can find no evidence that this is actually happening. In our testing, Hand of Light is never mitigated by resilience a second time. If anyone has additional information, please share.
So what are the implications of this in PvP? With the exception on Atonement, this is a decent buff to off-spec healing, so retribution paladins, shadow priests, warriors, elemental shaman, rogues, death knights, warlocks, monks can all expect buffs to their healing in PvP from this. This may be an attempt to aid the nerfs to offspec healing, which meant that offspec healing didn't benefit from PvP Power.
The change to Atonement is an interesting one, as Atonement is only used very occasionally in arena PvP. Perhaps, since it is now a baseline ability, Blizzard is trying to improve its viability for PvP healing. What do you think?
