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:
What healing spells feel like they don’t ever have a situation to be used in?
Are there healing spells you still feel like you must have a bunch of specific criteria met to effectively use the spell?
How does the pace of healing feel in Midnight compared to your experiences in The War Within?
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.
How does PvP healing feel with these changes?
Thank you all for reading and participating in our Midnight alpha and beta testing phases.
Im not a big fan of the changes.
A few small changes will make the new healing setup acceptable.
Ive been working with it an hour now.
The raid frames are too big still even at the smallest setting. They need to be yet another 50% smaller than the smallest possible setting. The healthbar doesnt need to be bigger than their name.
Healing an epic pvp or 40 frame encounter just clutters up the entire screen at its current size. I dont know if all healing addons went opaque/transparent to some extent but the healing addon i used did. I was able to see what was going on behind those health bars. I need to be able to see behind those health bars with the Blizzard UI.
Those 2 things and this is “acceptable”.
I would rather just keep the addon ive used for 20+ years.
Holy and Disc Priest: We’d like one interrupt please.
Blizzard: Well now you made me mad. All healers lose their interrupts, except Resto Shaman who loses everything else.
I wasn’t in the Alpha and with the instability of the beta at present, I haven’t had much opportunity to feel out healing. What the blue post says makes me concerned because losing our ability to quickly and proportionately respond to massive and highly variable damage is going to suck hard if everything else isn’t rebalanced around that loss.
My main problem here is with the interface. I’m doing some testing on it tonight and there are several things that stick out to me as needing improvement… or just needing much more customization options. The keyword for healing is triage.
Raid/Party frames:
Health color, current options are RGB 0/255/0 100% GREEN or class color. Neither of these help me triage. What do I need? To have a darker, more subtle green for healthy frames, and progressively more urgent, yellow to bright orange and red colors for lower health. I’m sure other healers have their own preferences, too, but this seems like the most basic, necessary customization option.
Dispellable debuffs. Ok, so having an icon is nice, but you know else uses an icon on these party/raid frames? Everything. This makes it incredibly difficult to quickly parse. I’d personally like to utilize the bar color once again to highlight which players have a debuff on them. I know you want to make healing less fast? Debuffs less consequential? Less brain use maybe? But this, the current upper-right icon that practically blends in with the health bar, will give me a headache even with the changes to simplify healing. I don’t need my team to yell at me for leaving them polymorphed for five seconds. I can’t see that icon fast enough!
Tracking my applied buffs/HoTs: again, icons are nice, but these also add to the parsing triage burden. I’d like to customize them down to simple color squares so that they can be made very small. An icon is necessarily large (say, at least 16px) in order to convey information. A simple color is limited only to one’s combined visual acuity and screen resolution. It can be half that size and still convey what I want to know, because I know my own buffs & HoTs and a simple color is all I need.
Groupwide buffs: Mind boggling that it needs to take up one of the buff icons in the lower right corner. Makes me want to pull my hair out, oh my gods. I don’t even want to think about this stupid buff unless someone is MISSING it. Look, if it can’t simply be an aura that I exude, if you simply must make me press the button, just show me the button when someone is missing it.
Click Casting:
We should really call this something other than “click” casting because it’s been taken to mean literally click casting and only click casting. I hate that I can’t assign any other buttons to this otherwise awesome feature. But what’s the difference you might say, to making a macro and plopping it on your hotbar? Because people run under my cursor all. the. time. The Click Casting window is this awesome space that is special to healers because these spells affect only unit frames. You may have taken away some of our spells, but we still have more than can fit in two mouse buttons, even with modifier keys! And only a few of the modifier key combinations are actually comfortable to use. I get my ctrl / alt / shift muscle memories crossed all the time because the motions are too similar. Too much crammed into one mouse button.
Spells/Cooldown tracking, not necessarily healer-specific:
I dislike that someone else has decided which spells are “essential” and which are, for some reason, not even included in the cooldown tracker. I can’t put echo in there? Or disintegrate? Does this have something to do with them being essence abilities? Well, I’d like to know when they’re ready…
Cooldown tracker is very cluttering, yes, which is why for ages I’ve used cooldown tracking in my own way that hides unusable spells. Why do I need to see it until it’s ready? Especially for very short cooldowns. Longer or medium cooldowns are nice to show a timer on, or even better, have a threshold option.
I’m sure there’s more, but I’m afraid my post is already too long. Thanks for reading if you made it this far.
As someone that has been healing in this game for a very long time across many classes, I am pretty excited to see these changes and really hope they work out. I plan to provide feedback as I am able to actually jump into dungeons/raids and try the changes over time.
I do have one feedback that is related to healers that I wanted to share. I believe it is long past time that all healing specs are given a battle res. It just naturally fits in a healer’s toolkit and would make pugging raids/dungeons much better. The amount of times I have been healing on a priest and the ret paladin doesn’t know someone died or that they even have a battle res so we wipe is too many to count (not picking on ret pallies here as this is true of many dps specs).
Healers are literally staring at the health bars and know as soon as someone dies and can instantly get that tank back up to save a pull. Sometimes the dps with a battle res needs to gain resources, shapeshift, or try to stay alive as they have pulled aggro with the death.
Off the top I can tell you raid frames are horrible in their current state. We have options to view layouts per group size but they all anchor to the same spot, making this function useless.
Please change the way groups populate or allow us the option to decide how we want this to happen ourselves or have the anchor points operate independently for group sizes as they do for a 5 man vs a raid. In other words, an anchor point for 5-man, 10-man, 25-man and 40-man, along with separate sizing settings for each.
This will at least allow some control over our field of view since you have killed all addon functionality that helped with situational awareness (the crap on the ground)
Healed a few instances of the Windrunner dungeon via the random finder today.
Healing groups of geared randoms is kinda of snoozy, just keeping PoM and Flash Heal casting, with an occasional dip into a Holy Word Serenity or Lightweaving some Prayer of Healing casts. Didn’t really need Apotheosis, Hymn, or Halo. Mana was no issue, which was nice. It can be a bit of a challenge keeping an under geared character alive in the same environment, lost an undergeared Chinese named player probably due to high latency being experienced on his side along with just not enough health. So it felt like a party of 4(Midnight) with a tag along of one TWW like experience, just not strong enough tools to keep him alive through the regular damage in the dungeon, looked very spikey too.
The Blizz frames coupled with the addon Clique… will turn out very nice I think. Still some stuff needed as others have mentioned, but its certainly sufficient to allow me to continue healing.
100% This. I’ve been healing since Wrath of the Lich King and I’ve always used an addon to heal. First Healbot, now Vuhdo. The raid and dungeon frames are way too small for my 51-year-old eyes. Having larger health bars (without the overlay of numerical health numbers blocking the majority of it) would be an absolute MUST for me. I would also like a way to remove another player’s personal resources or at least a way to make that bar smaller. It’s just more clutter and blocks me from tracking what everyone’s health is at a glance.
I additionally greatly miss having something like a heal over time bar for selected spells (or I guess a countdown bar) like I could have in Vuhdo for hots or time left on spells/buffs. Looking at tiny little buff icons is not something that I’m going to be able to keep track of during combat as easily as a visual bar at the bottom/top/middle that runs down as the duration ends. A timer on a small spell/buff icon is much harder to glance at and comprehend instantly. As an example, how are we supposed to track who has Atonement as a disc priest? Maybe there is something I’m missing, but so far, the only way I can see that is to click on that player’s nameplate and hover over the buff area and wait for it to pop up. Tracking that in a 20 man group in the middle of an encounter is going to be nearly impossible.
Healing (especially at higher levels of gameplay) already has a lot of responsibility to it, having to parse out buff/debuff/hot icons along with keeping track of everyone’s health, where I’m standing, and what is going on around me is going to be a lot to keep track of. Maybe I’m just getting too old, or I may be in the minority, but having simple visual tools right there on the health bars (yet keeping those health bars easily interpreted at a glance) is really important to me.
I hope someone from the development team looks at all of the healing feedback very closely and actually listens to those of us who have played for many years. Because if this goes live as it is right now, I’m not sure if I will even want to heal in serious content.
I’m not sure if this is the ideal place to ask, but as a healer who relies on Clique, I’m concerned about its future compatibility with the upcoming addon changes. The built-in click-casting system works similarly, but there’s one major issue: the spell restrictions.
Right now, a large portion of my spellbook is marked “Not available for click casting,” including core utility spells like Cleanse. If possible, removing or revisiting these restrictions would make the built-in system far more practical for healers.
The weird thing about this is that Priest Cleanse is for some reason not “allowed” so you have to use a macro to put it on. I think it’s a bug. Pres Evoker’s Naturalize and Cauterize both go on easily.
At this point, can we please remove the class-specific cleanse? Healers should be able to cleanse whatever is afflicting a player, regardless of spell classification. There is no reason that a paladin, priest or mistweaver shouldn’t be able to remove curses. There is no reason for a druid to not be able to dispel disease. These design choices may have made sense back in the day, but with Mythic Plus being the way that it is, there is no reason that a healer should have to rely on another class to do that job.
Healing Shamans really got a raw deal here. Please bring back a few of the things you took away. Shamans whole thing was the totems and their buffs. I loved healing on my shaman, but now, eh, boring and not that great. Blizz took away way too many things on Shamans compared to other healing classes.
I just did my first dungeon as a resto druid. I was not able to shield my tank, and I had no control over my efflo. Resto druids were pruned too much, IMVHO. We and all the other healers are going to have to rely WAY TOO MUCH on the other party members to do stuff they normally have not done, namely, use defensives, health potions, and interrupt stuff.
In other words, play perfectly.
If I cannot get my cenarion ward back, can I at least have back control over when & where the efflo circle goes? Please?
Pretty please?
And I miss my treant grove guardian buddies. I have had tanks say they know no one is gonna die if my trees are out. In this dungeon run I never knew when/if a tree buddy was gonna come out, or who they might target.
Also, where do I see what spells are on my party members? Nothing appears in the raid frames.
As a Holy Paladin main for … 20 years, I do not like new Holy Paladin. It feels awful and frantic to play.
The changes feel bad and it’s the worst the spec has ever felt to play. I do not like the weird Word of Glory spam. Let me hard cast huge Holy Lights. Make Infusion not useless.
Give me back my interrupt. The playerbase is not good enough for me to live without it.
The click casting settings are not ideal, why can’t you put Cleanse on Click To Cast? Very disappointed with holy paladin… why does Avenging Crusader even exist anymore? Without Crusader Strike it’s just a complete joke and goofy out of place feeling talent.
None of the holy paladin talents are even remotely interesting. Why - nay, HOW is Light of the Martyr still in the game? It has never been useful at any point since it was created. Not a fan at all. Hope to god Prot Warrior or Frost mage isn’t this bad.
I definitely agree. Just hopped on the beta to check out the customization and was very disappointed with the ability (or lack thereof) to edit on party/raid frames:
which buffs appear
where buffs appear
size of the buff icons
Issue: Healing buffs are all smashed together in the bottom right corner, plus icons are super tiny. Absolutely do not need to see my party/raid buff 100% of the time on those frames mixed in with the healing buffs.
What I want: The ability to assign buff A to always appear in the upper left corner, buff B to always appear in the upper right corner, etc.
Issue: Unable to choose which spells can be tracked with the cooldown manager and/or which section they’re tracked in.
What I want: Just let me choose which cd or spell is tracked and which section it’s tracked in.
Issue: Personal resource display isn’t appearing when out of combat (Edit: it only appeared after I mounted up) I do not have that box checked) and I cannot adjust the personal resource display.
What I want: Ability to adjust size and to see the display out of combat.
So far testing resto druid and it mostly feels like an improvement for healing (just in healing, the utility and interrupt loss still suck).
The damage is more triage focused, tanks take just enough damage to make them feel worth healing a bit but without it being a panick spam to keep them alive at all times. my casted heals feel more reliable without 4 other micro hots to manage on the dps but theres still a consistent amount to do in a pull. The fail damage feels high, i dont want keys creeping into SL oneshot territory or tww season 1 again but in normals there was still time to heal people back up without to much stress unless we really messed up. Cooldowns feel okay, even if tranq is a bit more niche with its movement lock they were still reliable.
On the other hand this was the same for tww normal dungeons and heroics during its beta and then that all fell through season 1 keys because if scalling.
The new UI is still lacking compared to live. Can’t manually move raid icons, buffs jump around as other fall off on frames, icons are tiny even with the raid profiles scaled massive, click casting is limited in binds for some reason, interrupts are still pretty subtle, the ingame cooldown tracker is way to stiff just in icon display compared to what addons can do.
And on a semi related note; I remember it was mentioned that key mechanics like interrupts and defensives were getting added to the new player and returning player experiences, but what about the exsisting players who never learned in the first place. They dont have to take the tutorial or level through exiles reach cause they’re already max level, nothing in the open world is dangerous enough while leveling to need them so, leveling dungeons are steamrolled to where most mobs never even get to start a casts. The gamble of mechanical compency going from group to group was what I consider the worst part of healing most expansions at it doesn’t seem much is being done to fix that for already maxxed players besides simplifying dps and hopping that leaves them bored enough to do mechanics.
I want to expand on this just a bit as a resto druid main. Life bloom is a great spell… attaching everything to it is not so great. Lifetreading can be great when you are constantly moving around, but if you need to move life bloom to different people, efflorescence can be put in some pretty awkward places temporarily. AND its not really an option to not take it because that is a 30% increase on efflorescence healing
The other thing, our whole apex talent situation revolves around life bloom being our bread and butter heal… but rejuvination is and has always been kind of the bread and butter healing outside of regrowth. I know that double life blooming has been a thing, but imo that gameplay was more the result of life bloom being forced into that position over several expansions and required in difficult content. I would love to see resto druids return to a more hot-focused game style vs heavy reliance on regrowth. I mean, when I started playing my druid in Vinilla and then started maining him from BC onward, Rejuvenation and Regrowth were the spells that called me to that class interest-wise.
What I think I would do is redesign regrowth. Make it more of a hot and have its healing over time effect have an increased chance to pop life bloom. I would remove the cap on Life Bloom and have its bloom act as the primary source of major single-target healing. Then for rejuvenation, I would figure out some way to attach the apex talent situation to it instead, because in both 5 man and raid, rejuvenation is pretty much a core part of the bread and butter of the spec. Then for the whole efflorescence situation keep it manually placed but have the increase healing be applied to targets with life bloom. Make resto druid game play more of a situation where they set up “healing glades” and the players + hots are those glades (and to be fair resto druids kind of already play like this just lean into it further)