Hello healers of Azeroth, there are some significant changes coming to the pace and flow of healing in Midnight that we wanted to discuss and share our underlying philosophy and goals for these changes.
In The War Within, healing is generally very fast paced and healing spells can rapidly shift your raid from a severely damaged state to nearly full health in a matter of seconds. It is stressful to react to rapidly changing health bars, and is very intimidating for newer healers to grasp what they should be doing at any moment. Healers have a large variety of high power cooldowns they can rotate through to handle basically every major damage event they encounter.
In Midnight, we have made some changes with a goal of slowing down the rate at which you can heal up a party or raid from a severely injured state. We want healing to require less pre-planning of knowing which cooldown to use at which precise moment. We want there to be less ramp-up of complicated ability sequences to get effective throughput for your healing spells. Here’s what we are changing for healers:
Talent Choice Nodes
- Several major healing cooldowns are now mutually exclusive in talent choices, such as Restoration Shaman choosing between Healing Tide Totem and Ascendance, or Discipline Priests between Ultimate Penitence and Power Word: Barrier
Short Cooldowns
- Iconic buttons like Prayer of Mending, Wild Growth, or Healing Stream Totem still exist and should still be potent abilities on their own. Several modifiers to these types of abilities have been adjusted, baked in, or removed.
Consistency
- Core healing spells like Chain Heal or Flash Heal have significantly fewer temporary modifiers that greatly increase their power. We have increased the base throughput to maintain their effectiveness.
Time To React
- We want to shift your focus away from rotating through several high power cooldowns to selecting the right spells for the right situations.
There are a lot of changes across every healer specialization that we encourage you to read through and experiment with. We know we still have tuning to work on, and some Apex Talents are still being drafted that will impact healer capabilities. The most useful feedback right now for us would be in these areas:
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What healing spells feel like they don’t ever have a situation to be used in?
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Are there healing spells you still feel like you must have a bunch of specific criteria met to effectively use the spell?
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How does the pace of healing feel in Midnight compared to your experiences in The War Within?
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Are there situations that feel like they are not reasonably able to be healed with the changes in Midnight? Please list specific boss encounters or abilities where possible.
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How does PvP healing feel with these changes?
Thank you all for reading and participating in our Midnight alpha and beta testing phases.