It's been historically proven that attempts to reduce effectiveness of healing through blanket healing nerfs has the reverse effect of superimposing healing/tank metas on the player base instead.

Paradox of Blanket Nerfs
In general, when a blanket nerf is used to address issues within certain builds/contexts of play, they tend to harm the average build and indirectly buff their intended targets. This is because those targeted builds still meet the minimum requirements to perform after the nerfs as they exceeded those requirements before the nerf. On the other hand, builds that were meeting the minimum requirements before the nerf now need to reallocate resources to the nerfed aspect of gameplay resulting in an overall nerf for those builds.

We saw this in the Defile meta with the introduction of Befoul, which continued until the proposed Durok change to reduce duration (but not uptime) and again with the current stamcro meta that allows for 100% AoE Major Defile Uptime.

A blanket nerf to healing is actually an indirect buff to high mitigation and high healing builds due to the fact that those builds tend too over mitigate or over heal while the average builds meets minimum requirements in regards to mitigation and healing within the context of PvP. This results in those builds sacrificing either damage or sustain in order to build into mitigation and/or healing in order to continue to survive incoming damage while the high mitigation and high healing builds are not required to make any sacrifices in their builds as they have already invested in the required aspects of gameplay to deal with the reduced healing.

The Issue
The largest issues in relation to the excessively high time-to-kill (TTK) are the cost effectiveness of passive survivability tools and the over-performance of cross-healing in group play (again solely within the context of PvP). The proposed change of the increase of healing reduction from 50% to 60% (a 20% nerf in comparison to live, refer to Quick Maths Spoiler) aims to address TTK but fails to consider the the aforementioned issues.

While a decrease to healing does have an impact on passive survivability it is again a blanket nerf that disproportionately hurts builds that rely on active survivability (Defensive CCs, offensive pressure preventing opponents from going offensive etc.). Within the context of group play, the reduced healing has a smaller impact than other forms of survivability such as high health pools and damage reduction stats. For high mitigation builds, healing tends to be lower in general since they build for damage reduction stats and not heal boosting stats outside of health % based heals. Based on this we can assume that the proposed healing nerf is not done to address high health/mitigation builds but rather to address the over abundance of healing currently in PvP.

Of course the nerf addresses cross-healing directly as those cross heals are nerfed by an additional 10% additive to the current 50% in Battlespirit. However, the issue is that it also harms self healing. If a player is unable to heal themselves on their own than the importance of cross healing rises significantly, having the unintended reverse effect of requiring cross-heals even more. Right now, a lot of healers build for supportive stats such as Major Courage or utility boosts such as higher ultimate uptimes. The healing nerf means that instead of Spell Power Cure for example, these builds will opt to run sets like Sanctuary instead. Assuming group-play runs the minimum number of healers (they tend to run more) what this means is that they will actually further invest into healing while sacrificing damage/utility that is used to help their allies secure kills. Alternatively, groups will run an additional healer. Ultimately, this simply serves to increase the overall healing done, thereby increasing TTK.

Quick Maths:

Solutions
Cross healing is the issue that should be addressed with the healing change to Battle Spirit.

A very simple solution would be to include a new buff in Battle Spirit that increases Healing Done to Self equal to the increase to the Healing Received reduction.

So using the proposed value as an example, the revised Battlespirit would reduce Healing Received by 60% but an additional Healing Done to Self Buff of 10% would be added in order to avoid nerfing builds that are more sensitive to healing nerfs, i.e. low mitigation/healing builds. From this point, self-healing outliers could than be adjusted to the new standard.

A more extensive solution would be to continue with a blanket nerf but buff self healing abilities such as Vigor and Rally but create new conditions to heals such as Resistance Flesh and Breath of Life that heal the caster for an additional % equal to the healing reduction nerf.

Conclusion
Blanket nerfs tend to harm builds in the middle of the spectrum more than the over performing builds. In order to counter-act blanket nerfs to healing, self heals need to be compensated either directly by buffing the abilities or by introducing a new Healing Done to Self Buff into Battle Spirit.

@ZOS_GinaBruno @ZOS_RichLambert @ZOS_BrianWheeler @ZOS_Gilliam