Blizzard’s latest round of changes in the World of Warcraft Midnight alpha will have some huge ramifications for healer specs. The new expansion is finally tearing off the combat add-on band-aid, and that means grand redesigns to the way encounters are designed across the various activities the MMORPG has to offer. For this week’s WoW Midnight alpha update, community manager Randy ‘Kaivax’ Jordan explains why Blizzard is taking interrupts away from healers, increasing diminishing-returns effects, and adjusting how enemies decide which members of your party to target.
Interrupts are a very powerful tool in World of Warcraft, allowing you to stop many enemy spellcasters in their tracks. In a lot of cases, doing so also prevents the target from being able to follow up with another cast for several seconds. The Midnight alpha actually bolstered this secondary effect across the board, increasing all of the durations by two seconds to make it easier to shut down hostile casters. However, Jordan says that with this change implemented, the team is taking the opportunity to try removing the burden of interrupts from healer specs.
“In the Midnight alpha this week, we’ve removed access to interrupts from all healer specializations except Restoration Shaman,” Jordan writes. He says these talents will be replaced with other talent nodes in a future build. “Healing can be a stressful role when you must manage several things at once,” he explains, “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.”
Blizzard’s dramatic reversal on combat mods will certainly have impacted this decision, but Jordan says the team is aware of knock-on consequences. “We recognize 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.”
Having implemented this adjustment, Blizzard is now “making an effort to change the behavior of enemies that use spells like Shoot or Frostbolt” so that they spread their attacks more evenly across different targets. The goal here is to “reduce cases where a single player might take a large spike of damage while others receive none.”
Finally, spell effects that have diminishing returns with repeated uses (such as Fear and Root) now fall off more quickly. Previously, successive casts would have 100%, 50%, and 25% duration, before the enemy finally became immune. Now, the 25% mark has been removed, meaning you’ll get just two uses, although the time for this effect to reset has been slightly reduced from 18 seconds down to 16 seconds.
There’s good news for stuns, however. During PvE, creatures that are stun-susceptible “will no longer ever become fully immune,” instead seeing their duration gradually decrease each time. This means you’ll always be able to get at least “a tiny stun effect on the enemy, potentially interrupting a cast or its movement.” Jordan teases that there are plenty more class balance changes in the works while Midnight is in testing, so stay tuned.
We might be losing combat tools, but the best WoW addons will still be a must-have for plenty of other reasons. You can also check out the latest new MMOs in 2025 to keep you busy until Midnight arrives.
What do you think of these healer changes? Drop by the PCGamesN Discord and let us know whether they make you more or less likely to play the role in Midnight.
