Interview with Jeff Kaplan.

[Bolty]

No, I'm pretty sure they don't mean to make healing gear worse at healing. It means either one of two things. They abuse the ^(3/2) rule to have gear with the same amount of +healing and some +dmg mixed in (since +dmg adds to healing and the scaling factor of costs means eventually 1 point of +dmg is cheaper than 1 point of +healing). Or, the simply change +healing to give some minor, free, addition to damage as part of its core ability.

I still don't see how this can be balanced for PvP. Everywhere else in the game, it doesn't matter much; I don't think anyone would consider it unfair to throw healers a bone for soloing gear. A happy healer is a good thing. :) But in PvP, you can't have your cake and eat it too.

Cleoboltra now has 436 resilience and ~1300 +heal, making her a defensive PvP monster. If you then give her +600 damage (just a number I popped out of thin air; I have no idea how much +dmg Blizzard is thinking of adding), you're unbalancing things waaaaaaay out of whack. Just the difference in Shadowfiend mana return alone would change up arena PvP significantly. In all +heal gear, my Shadowfiend returns 150-200 mana per hit on an enemy. In my DPS soloing gear set, around +870 damage, that becomes 400-450 mana per hit. That's a difference of thousands of mana. Or for another scenario, you can't let me toss a Flash Heal on someone for 2400 and then turn around and Mind Blast someone for 1000 - that's just broken.

This is all theorycraft, though. Nobody knows exactly what Blizzard will do yet except insiders. I'd always assumed that the reason Blizzard never had +damage on +heal gear was for PvP reasons. I don't see how you can balance it properly.

And as Quark said, the talk from Blizzard wasn't that they'd lower +heal to fit in some +dmg, it was that they'd add some "free" +dmg to healer gear so that healers walking around in T6 don't have to change gear to blues when soloing. Oh, the humanity. :)

-Bolty