Hello adventurers!
As we continue to iterate through the many changes to how the game will play in the Midnight expansion, we’ve seen a great deal of feedback on improving gameplay for healers. To continue that conversation in the Alpha, we’ve designed some changes to diminishing returns, interrupts, and creature behaviors that we want to test out with you.
Diminishing Returns
As a brief refresher, diminishing returns causes spell effects such as Fear or Root, when used against enemy players or specially flagged creatures, to have reduced effectiveness after each successive cast. In The War Within, the first Fear cast on you will have 100% of expected duration, the second will have 50% of expected duration, the third will have 25% of expected duration, and then you become immune.
In Midnight, the diminishing returns for these spells will now go from 100% duration to 50% duration, to immune. We have also reduced the amount of time for diminishing returns to reset itself from 18 seconds to 16 seconds.
Additionally with PvE combat in Midnight, stun effects will no longer ever become fully immune against creatures susceptible to stuns. Rather than the duration changing from 100%, to 50%, to fully immune, stuns will have a lower and lower duration until they reach a fraction-of-a-second duration. In PvE combat, stuns should always cause a tiny stun effect on the enemy, potentially interrupting a cast or its movement.
Interrupts
At the beginning of the Midnight Alpha, we made a change to all interrupt abilities players have, increasing their interrupt duration by 2 seconds each. This change should make interrupt effects more effective when trying to shut down an enemy caster or have them move closer to engage in melee.
Healing can be a stressful role when you must manage several things at once: your own healing abilities, your team’s health, and the enemy’s actions. We feel that asking the healer to monitor the cast bars of things they don’t have targeted while properly using their interrupts was asking too much.
In the Midnight Alpha this week, we’ve removed access to interrupts from all healer specializations, except Restoration Shaman. These talents will be replaced with other talent nodes for healer specializations in a future Midnight Alpha build. We recognize that this is a significant loss of utility in some circumstances and want to make sure that content available to a healer is still completable, especially considering solo experiences such as the special Delve boss encounters or any other solo challenge experiences.
Restoration Shaman will keep access to Wind Shear, however, for Restoration specifically, the cooldown of Wind Shear will be increased to 30 seconds. We like healers having different capabilities and feel that Wind Shear is an important part of a Restoration Shaman’s toolkit.
Enemy Behavior
With the removal of interrupt capabilities from healers, we’re making an effort to change the behavior of enemies that use spells like Shoot or Frostbolt. We want enemies with these spells to more evenly spread their targeting to different players of your group, which should reduce cases where a single player might take a large spike of damage while others receive none.
And again, we have more to come for classes in Midnight testing. We’ll continue to outline all of this in our development notes with each new build, and we’ll continue to read your feedback as we iterate on class design. In particular, we’re looking forward to evaluating these changes based on the playtesting of content like endgame dungeons and delves when they come to the test environment.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts and for testing with us!