Discipline
The primary aim of Discipline’s changes in Midnight is to consolidate and remove cooldowns and damage/healing modifiers to make base spell casts feel strong. With removing Schism, Shadow Covenant, and several supporting talents, we can focus on Mind Blast, Penance, and Shadow Word: Pain dealing solid consistent damage, so you can access chunky burst healing on a more consistent cadence. Evangelism has also been redesigned as a way to quickly apply Atonements to allies in raids, providing a much snappier way to ramp up your area of effect healing. The result should be a smoother gameplay experience that requires a little less planning and aura tracking, but still retains depth.
Holy
In Midnight, we are removing a few medium cooldown spells and tracking aura from Holy and increasing the power of existing spells to improve consistent healing. We’re aiming for individual spell casts to feel powerful even outside of cooldowns.
We are also removing some longstanding casted spells, Renew and Heal. Renew is now only triggered through talents like Benediction and Lasting Words. It hasn’t been an ability that is a priority cast outside of talents like Empowered Renew, so we felt it was a good time to depart with the casted version. We are adding talents for mana management in cases where mana management is important like in raids and PvP. Outside of a couple talents, it was often more of a rotational decision to use Heal over Flash Heal so we feel this is a good consolidation for the specialization.
We’re redesigning the Oracle tree with the intent to provide a more approachable experience by removing Premonition and replacing it with a second charge of Prayer of Mending and other bonuses to the spell. We want Holy to continue to feel like one of the most approachable healers, so these changes are aimed at accomplishing that.
We’re excited to share a new talent that replaces Holy Word: Sanctify to cause Holy Word: Serenity to also heal nearby allies within 40 yards when cast and causes all Holy Word interactions with Sanctify to apply to Serenity instead. We feel this will be helpful for situations where allies are often spread out or wanting one less ability to manage.
Shadow
The changes to Shadow in Midnight are focused on simplifying some of the cooldown launch sequence as well as the frequent number of high priority procs in the rotation for Shadow. We are also updating the fantasy and visuals of their core spells to create a consistent theme of using the power of the Old Gods to haunt your enemies.