The Midnight Alpha is overhauling healer gameplay across all classes, and the theme? Simplification.
There will be fewer buttons, more passives, and less buff/proc tracking. Many specs now have to choose between major cooldowns, reducing the total number of abilities you actively manage.
Ramp healing is also getting hit hard, with Evoker and Discipline ramps heavily nerfed.
Druid ramping will now be baked into Tranquility, since Flourish is no longer a separate spell.
Here’s a helpful infographic by Redx303 breaking down all the Midnight Alpha healer changes:
Tooltips and talent trees are still in early Alpha, so details may change as testing continues. If you’d like a more detailed class-by-class breakdown of how things are currently, check out this Reddit post.
Interrupts Are Out… Mostly
In a blue post last week, we also learned that healers will be losing their interrupts. Blizzard has made this change to reduce complexity and make healing more manageable. Blizzard will replace the removed talents with new options in future Alpha builds.
Restoration Shamans, however, will keep their Wind Shear, which now has a 30-second cooldown.
Updates to Healer Specializations in Midnight
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.
Streamlining for Console Play?
Overall, this wave of simplification—fewer buttons, more passives, and the new Single-Button Assistant—appears to be paving the way for a console-friendly experience, with Xbox players potentially seeing WoW on their platform in 2027.
Will these changes make healer gameplay more strategic and accessible, or will they fundamentally alter class identity?
Source: Reddit
