Midnight Changes

It is important to keep in mind that Midnight represents a big change in the design philosophy for healing, combat and class design. A lot of things are changing or going away and there is not a lot of new stuff added, but all of this is done in the context of a simpler and more straightforward game. There are a lot of things that were cool or nice to have but not really super important for moment to moment gameplay, and there where some effects that seemed interesting on the surface but ended up being chores during actual combat.

Everyone is losing things, but a lot of those things we are better without. Remember that specs are balanced according to the tools they have, losing an effect that increases your healing sometimes doesn't mean that you are now weaker, it just means that your baseline should be brought up a bit to keep you at the same relative level of power.

Removed Spells

With that out of the way, this is a list of the spells being removed in Midnight:

• Ancestral Protection Totem
• Earthen Wall Totem
• Cloudburst Totem
• Healing Surge
• High Tide
• Mana Tide
• Spiritwalkers Tidal Totem
• Master of the Elements
• Tidebringer
• Undulation
• Wellspring
• Totemic Recall
• Stone Bulwark Totem
• Thunderstorm

Spell Changes

And these are some of the existing things receiving significant changes:

• Chain Heal and Healing Wave have been rebalanced, they now have a 2 seconds cast time and their power has been adjusted so both spells heal for a similar total amount. Chain Heal is still very expensive mana wise and Healing Wave is still very cheap.
• Ascendance has been significantly reworked. Instead of replicating a percentage of your healing on allies around you it now makes Healing Wave always crit and heal a second target at 50% strength, Chain Heal bounce three additional times and only reduce 10% after each jump rather than 30%, and both spells cost 25% less mana during it.
• Ascendance and Healing Tide Totem are now on a choice node.
• Healing Rain base duration and cooldown have been increased to 18 seconds up from 10. Surging Totem lasts for 25 seconds with a 25 second cooldown.
• Unleash Life now only works on Riptide, Healing Wave or Chain Heal and it is always just a flat healing increase and cast time reduction. It can no longer be used with Healing Rain or Downpour.
• Therazanes Resilience and Reactive Warding have been moved to the class tree.
• Coalescing Water is now weaker but also works on Healing Wave casts.
• Downpour no longer increases the health of the players it heals.

New Additions

While there is not a lot of new things to talk about, there are several notable points that deserve mention. Some of these are key to how the spec will play out during Midnight and some others help us see what the new vision for talent and spell design is.

The main new thing is our apex talent, Stormstream Totem. As with all apex talents the effects are spread across three nodes:

• The Stormstream Totem Proc gives every Riptide you cast a chance to upgrade your next Healing Stream Totem into a Stormstream Totem which heals for 10% more, heals one additional target, and also heals several players for a higher amount as soon as you cast it.
• The second point, the Stormstream Totem Healing Increase, buffs all your Healing Stream Totems and Stormstream Totems by up to 40%.
• The final node is Stormstream Totem Swiftness which gives you a guaranteed proc of Stormstream Totem every time you use Natures Swiftness or Ancestral Swiftness and makes your Stormstream Totem casts not consume a charge of Healing Stream Totem. This means Totemic gets a guaranteed proc every 60 seconds and Farseer every 30.

Downpour got a couple of new talents that directly affect it in the form of Water Expulsion and Double Dip, Farseer got to keep some of the current tier bonuses in the form of Mystic Knowledge and Totemic got new effects like Primal Catalyst.

Most of the new talents that fill out the spec tree are passive and not super high impact, things like Calm Waters, Crashing Waves and Earthen Accord are not very exciting but still decent filler points to round up the tree. There is also some quality of life improvements in the form of Instinctive Imbuements.

What does it mean?

While the highlight definitely goes to the removal of Cloudburst Totem, all of these combined do represent a decent shift into how shaman is meant to be played. With most of the temporary buffs from talents gone or affecting both fillers equally your pick between Healing Wave and Chain Heal is not based around what you have active at the moment but only about what type of healing do you need to do at any given time and how much mana do you have. Healing Wave is very cheap and much better at single target healing while Chain Heal does more overall healing spread across more targets but is considerably more expensive. Properly managing between the two is a big focus for the gameplay moving forward.

Most of the short cooldowns have been changed to reduce the impact of timing them properly and instead simply focus their power on using them frequently. Healing Stream Totem doesn't care as much about the specific second you drop it at and does better when you just send it as often as possible, similarly the new Unleash Life doesn't give you as many options as to what spell to improve so you just let your normal casts use it up.

The end result, as expected, is that as long as there is healing to be done you just want to press your short cooldowns as much as possible and fill all the rest of the time casting whatever filler spell is stronger at the moment without even thinking about the other. A very simply and straight forward "just heal" reactive spec.

Restoration remains a spec with a very simple core that doesn't take a lot of time to learn. It does have some finer details that improve its performance as your skill level increases but the truth is that most of your output does come from the very basics of healing, rather than some deep intricacies exclusive to the spec or convoluted design and interactions.