Every single tier you have like one or two healers that uses
mana as a real resource and everyone else has infinite mana
at all times. And then the tier ends, you go
to the next tier, you rotate for the Forsaken.
For Lauderon. For the Karen Tour for Pandaria.
For calendar to the. Burning region for Gilnaeus, but
has not died, for the Lich King, for the Sindora, for the
Alliance, for the Horn for Azeroth.
Hello and welcome back to another episode of For Azeroth.
I am one of your hosts, Manny, AKA the Trueven Manny, and I am
joined by a very special guest today, Volk.
Volk Hello. And how's the World of Warcraft
been treating you? Hello and hello everyone.
The World of Warcraft has been treating me well, but we've had
a big week and we've got some big weeks ahead, so I'm pretty
excited. Yeah, like there we are in week
one of the alpha, about to hit Week 2.
But already there have been some seismic changes on the alpha.
People's heads are rolling in terms of add-ons a little bit
more literally than others. And of course, there's been
tremendous changing changes that have hit healing for all specs
and all classes. And so I really do want to talk
about that. Can you introduce yourself for
people who might not know who you are?
Yeah, so I am Volk. I do healer stuff and Wow, I run
the healer gearing and guide site Questionably Epic and
Questionably Epic Live. I write the Wowhead guides for
Preservation of Okeh Resto Druid, and I also do some
classic stuff. I run the classic disc priest
and Resto Druid guide over there as well.
And I basically just get involved with all stuff healers.
Yes. So it's always good for for
getting a pulse on healing to check in with you.
So I'm really glad that that we've got this opportunity just
from the get go. We had these massive patch
notes, 125 pages when I put it into APDF and it a lot of that
was changes that either directly or indirectly affect healing.
We've had the interrupt changes which adjust things in Mythic
Plus and a little bit in Raid, but we've also had every class
being hit by this sort of, I don't want to call it pruning,
because pruning immediately goes back to the Warlords of Draynor
where they were just straight out taking out abilities.
This seems more like a concentration and consolidation
of abilities, especially in the case of defensives.
In terms of your thoughts and how it affected healers, what
did you think about what we got on Just like the patch notes and
with this initial Phase 1 testing?
They've been talking about a larger healer event for a while,
right? Like they've acknowledged the
healing has had some problems, which we'll talk about soon as
well. And so studying in Dragonflight,
they said, OK, we're going to try and make healing less
bursty. And so they made a few changes
in that area. They buffed our Max health.
They shredded resto Druid at one point, which was a a big
cooldown healer, but they never really made it work.
And their goal was kind of diluted by adding even more
healing cooldowns to the game. Like Preservation got Flame
Shaper and the War Within, which is a massive cooldown tree and
and stuff like that. This is their first, what I
would call a real swing at fixing the problem that they
think exists. And so as a result, we lose a
lot, or rather a lot changes. A lot of the big bursty call
downs are either gone or their call downs are longer, or their
choice nodes now with other cooldowns.
So you kind of have to decide which kind of cooldown you want
to bring instead of just bringing both.
And so I think that it's pretty fair to say that healing as we
know it has changed. Yeah.
And with all these stuff being like choice nodes or the
aggressive changes with cooldowns, how does that exactly
affect how they can balance healing?
Because a lot of people look at that and they're like, I can't
do it. But like, obviously healing in
Midnight is going to be different than healing as we see
it in the War Within or in past expansions.
Because you're sad. This is like the first time
they've really made this adjustment.
So like, what do you think the goals are?
And do you think they're like getting towards those goals from
like what they're doing with the cooldowns?
If you play as a high end healer right now, you quickly feel like
that you are basically just acting out a spreadsheet right?
Like you, you use the viserio sheet while Util's great site to
plan your cool downs before a fight, and then you have a weak
horror that basically just reads it out to you.
Press this button now, press this cool down now, and
everything you do in between barely matters.
You're basically just pressing cooldowns against big bursty
damage. And there's only so far you can
take that gameplay while keeping it interesting, right?
Like it's satisfying to press your big cooldown and bounce
health bars from 10 to 100, but it's difficult to be a great
healer in that kind of environment, right?
Like pretty much everyone can just follow that same pattern.
And so with the removal of all of those big cooldowns and of we
core as apparently you will focus a lot more on your base
rotation. Will that be as fun?
I hope so. I think it's difficult to tell
from the alpha notes alone because we don't really have any
content to test on yet. You've just got like normal mode
dungeons, which are fine, but we're never really a good healer
stress test. And so I think that on paper,
this should still be very fun, but it's still on Blizzard to
make each spec actually play well without these big cool
downs. Now healing cooldowns do a lot
to differentiate 1 spec from another.
How you would use like Apotheosos, how you would ramp
and use those cooldowns as a disc priest makes you a
completely different healer than what you would see with let's
say a resto shaman and how they they use their cooldowns.
So without these cooldowns, does the base kit feel different
enough between each healer, or does something further need to
be done to like, actually make healers seem different from each
one another? I think that people have worried
that healers would end up too similar for a long time and
expansion over expansion it just hasn't really happened to.
Like if I'm playing a rest or druid it still feels very
distinct from a preservation of ochre, even in tears where the
preservation of ochre was like hot heavy or something like
that. So I'm not too worried about
healers all feeling the same. I actually think with fewer
cooldowns in the game you have more room to make them distinct
because if every boss requires you, you ping pong the raid back
up to 100 immediately before the next hit that does 90% of their
health. Then every healing cool down
either has to be able to do that or isn't really useful.
And so cool downs that were longer duration like Tree of
Life weren't really that effective unless it meant you
could cover multiple of these big spike windows with them.
And so I think with fewer cool downs, maybe they can be more
interesting, honestly. That is amazing to hear.
I guess along those same lines, it's one thing to have like that
sort of difference in a raid where you could have different
classes that kind of cover different roles.
But in Delves or Mythic Plus where it's one healer, do you
find that the this sort of disarmament is going to allow a
greater variety in like the Mythic plus meta if tuned right?
Or what are the things that they need to look for to make sure
that we get like more representation of healers?
Yeah. It's going to be interesting,
isn't it? Because since Mythic Plus came
out, every healer has definitely needed to be able to hit all the
different kinds of healing right?
Like we're not back in Rath, the Lich King, where some healers
basically had no single target at all.
Every healer is expected to be able to do like a baseline
performance level and they haven't necessarily hit that.
I know Holy Priest in particular has had some difficult tears
healing Mythic Plus, but at that really top level, the speck that
ends up meta isn't necessarily the one that can do the most
healing right? Like it's the one that brings
the best red buffs or that fits in better with the DPS in the
group who are the real main characters Of course.
And so I think that being able to bring different kinds of
healing will be valuable, but at the high end, which tends to
trickle down to everyone else, you'll still be picked for non
healing related reasons a lot of the time in mythic plus in
Delves, which I'm a huge fan of by the way, big delver.
I think that it depends on how the companion will work as well
and how well delves are tuned in general.
I found this season in particular, if you do delves as
a healer, their way of challenging you was just to give
mobs way too much health in my opinion.
And so it kind of ended up as a slower slog.
And so I'm hoping that Delves with this healing revamp can
focus more on on how you heal. I know you can run tank Bran
right now and kind of just start slapping with single target
healing until he does damage. I don't know if that's my ideal
gameplay for delves though. Yeah, Delves have been
constantly evolving through the War Within and Tank Bran only
came in part way through this this expansion, so I'm hoping
that they find a better footing. The change of defensives and and
cooldowns I hope will mean that they won't need to have of
course damage so spiky like it was in season 1 where unless you
were a tank that damage was too much to for non tanks handle in
a spike or. I just.
I'm hoping that there is a greater variety of gameplay, but
I. Wonder.
Yeah, I do wonder if Delve should just focus more on like
mechanical complexity instead of just having mobs that do.
They have a lot of health and might one shot you if they reach
you. Like I think there should be
more room to like duck and dive and kite and all of that stuff
that makes solo play really fun. Yeah.
And they kind of did do that right?
Like Kai Vezza, especially on question mark.
Question mark was just a really good mechanical fight and like
it had a little bit of ADPS check, but mostly you would just
do the mechanics for X amount of time as a healer.
X did equal 14 minutes doing it on week 0.
But it was fun because it felt like I just had to do the
mechanics well and it could die, whereas in regular delves I
don't really get that as a healer.
I, I think that regular delves is a strange one because it
feels like, like you were saying, like damage is so such a
thing in delves where if you're a high damage healer, then
you're in a better position where let's say your disk and so
you're doing the damage, you're keeping Brand brand up your they
had to change atonement so that you actually had to like think
about Brand to get his, his damage up versus perhaps healers
that just purely focus more on healing and definitely have to
opt to change their throughput in order to do the damage.
It is a very different game there.
Bran himself just didn't scale that well either did he?
Like in season 1 when I was doing Zekfir or whatever I feel
like Bran was doing like 300 KDPS and now I'm doing Kai
Vezzer and he's doing like 400 KDPS but like everything else in
the game has gone up by 5 times and Bran still just not not
doing much. I just recall in season 1 he
would basically get one shot and be stunned for forever and I
would just ignore picking him up just to do the damage.
Hopefully with our new companion it'll it'll be better testing.
So far she's she's buggy so we will will hold back judgement on
that. In terms of actually with
healers doing somewhat more damage or or less damage
depending on that. Do you find that that isn't as
important because the, as you said, damages really the star of
like the DPS rolls and I guess to a lesser extent the tanks?
It's just awkward, right? Because Once Upon a time,
healers did a little bit more as a percent of your keys DPS.
Like you might be doing 11 or 12% of the keys DPS.
But now, because healer DPS is tuned quite low, being able to
bring a buff that increases your DPS players DPS by 3% just tends
to do a lot more than optimizing your personal DPS.
And I'm not sure if that they never really talked about it.
So I'm not sure if this is something they did intentionally
or if over time here the DPS just wasn't prioritized much and
so it went down as a percentage of the key.
I'm not really sure which of those two it is, but it
definitely leads to meters where you just bring whatever healer
brings like a good buff. Yeah.
And I know this well since like Preservation of OCA does not
have a good buff. It's a very good key healer and
this season in particular it does insane DPS, like way more
than any other healer. But when you start including
Mark of the Wild or or Wind Fury then your personal DPS isn't
really moving the meter as much as those would.
Yeah, the the fist comp is definitely a different beast.
Are there like what is the healer that fits into the fist
comp? Can you remind me again?
Like I think that people like resto shaman with it right since
you bring wind fury totem and honestly just the mastery buff
it brings is good anyway. Resto druid is fitting into a
lot of comps right now since 3% versus just always good as well.
Yeah, I find that in terms of buffs, when you're early in the
season, people like to have those, those buffs that kind of
give you a little more wiggle room, a little more of a chance
to make a mistake. Ancestral giving that extra
health or being able to give that power word Fortitude just
for the the extra bump in health Shields in terms of this priest,
just so if you're veering into one shot territory, the ability
to survive a mistake and not lose the 15 seconds at the high
levels is so valuable. But are there are there buffs
early season beyond that that you think compete?
Because when I think of that, that just immediately goes to
priests, immediately goes to shaman.
The verse buff you said can help a bit, take a little less
damage. This is also just damage, right?
Like you're, you're giving everyone 3% damage basically or,
or somewhere around that. And that's just really powerful
as a buff considering you're already a healer that does
fantastic healing, you do moderate damage, and then you
also bring a good buff. I think the raid buffs just
don't fit great in Mythic, Plus I think they're really awkward
to play around, and I think that the evoke buff in particular is
just so horrendously bad that you're never bringing in Evoka
to a group for that. So do you believe that for
healers or maybe for mythic plus in general the buffs need to be
addressed to not? I actually think it's a semi
major issue. Yeah, I think that you could
make an argument that resto druid or resto shaman or even
priest brings the best buff. That's all fine.
Those all are uniquely good in at least one scenario, and then
preservation just does not have one.
Basically like no one is bringing preservation because
they want quarter reduction on their heroic leap or whatever,
right? Like it's it's OK in raid you've
got 20 slots. Preservation is OP 50% of raid
tiers so far, Fantastic. But when you can only pick five
people, it's really hard to justify spending one of those on
a spec with no boss when you could easily take someone else
in the queue that gives you 3% bursts or health or whatever
instead. I'm actually surprised that a
monk in Mystic Touch hasn't come into this conversation,
especially when we were just talking about like a physical
buff. It what?
What's the reason for that? Is there a particular reason
that that monks are being held back despite having something
that might be considered a desirable buff for particular
comps? So I haven't looked into this in
detail but a lot of melee specs now do a lot of non physical
damage if that makes sense. Like if you look at a ADK or a a
demon Hunter's breakdown, how much of that is even scaling
with the the monk buff? Some percentage sure, but it's
not like it's nowhere near as good as Chaos Brand is for
casters and it has a slightly higher percentage on it.
But yeah if you look at most malaise breakdown, if you're not
like a warrior then it's way more magic heavy than you'd
expect. Like I think red paladin is the
same. Yeah definitely red paladin
splitting their damage between holy and physical, shamans doing
elemental damage and then physical as well and so forth.
Even like a a hunter has like their arcane shot and a
different things that are doing nature damage as well.
Just a lot of points against it isn't it?
Whereas like shaman buff for example mastery.
Some specs might like it more than others but everyone's
getting some benefit. And then you also get the wind
fury effect on top it just it's just a bitter buff than monk.
Honestly. Shaman is also just a very
comfortable healer in mythic. Plus you often see it played a
lot earlier in the season and then sometimes it falls off in
the middle later on, like I think season 1 of this
expansion. It was huge for the first half
of Season 1 and then this priest kind of displaced it in the
second-half. Actually with like comfortable
healing and and so forth. What are your hopes for the
change in the matter as they make these changes?
I think that we will need to see what their new dungeon design is
before we can kind of start talking about what healers would
be good in it. We know that with all the
healers losing their cooldowns or at least being reduced in how
they can handle Bursa damage, that dungeons 2 need to adjust
right? Like you wouldn't want to go
into one of the current dungeons with midnight spec design.
Which is going to be funny because some dungeons are coming
back of course. So it'll be interesting to see
how they change those. Hopefully Pit of Sauron in
particular is completely different, but.
What was the nightmare in In Pit?
Remind me again? It's been it's been a while
since I've even done time walking.
Yeah, it's been a while, hasn't it?
There's just there's a lot of parts to that dungeon and it's
very long. I'm sure they'll do a great job
of it, but I don't have the fondest memories.
I just remember running it a bunch of times trying to get the
hilt and never got the hilt. Yeah, I never got the hilt
either. I think we got scammed on that
one. I think there's that like
gauntlet at the end, right where you're running through The Cave
with like The Cave caving in on you.
That that she sounds pretty fun. Yeah.
Maybe the hilt will be back. Maybe we'll finally get out of
time. If it does drop, that would be
wonderful. I that's one of the things that
I spent a lot of time farming back in the day and just gave up
on. But Peterson, obviously they'll
make some changes and won't be exactly the same.
And they always do this. Even when we saw things coming
back from Season 1 being shifted into Season 3 for the War
Within, they made changes to fit the current the current meta.
Peterson is very old too, right? Like, this must be one of the
oldest dungeons they've ever brought back.
It is in fact the oldest period. And so you just assume that it's
going to change a lot. Like in Wrath, the Lich King, I
hit, I healed with two buttons. And so, well, in midnight, maybe
I'll heal with two buttons as well.
But I think that there's going to be like giant changes to some
of those older dungeons. But hopefully if we heal for
less in our cooldowns, hopefully the base healing requirement at
all other times will be increased.
Like hypothetically, there's really interesting gameplay
here. Right where people aren't topped
all the time and they're hovering between 50 and 70%
life, and you have to make good decisions about what spells you
cast to stop them from going much lower than that.
That reminds me of Cataclysm. But it's such a dream, right?
Yeah, Cataclysm is definitely the closest they've come to it.
But back in Cataclysm, you had mana efficiency as this big
system, right? Since you had Spirit as a stat
still on gear and all of that stuff.
And so I don't know if we're going back down that minor
efficiency track, which we we might, I'm not sure.
But you still have stuff like efficiency and how you spend
your global cooldowns, making sure you're using your short
cooldowns like Wild growth regularly.
So I think there is the potential for such good gameplay
there, but it's very difficult to tune well, very difficult to
tune well. And so I'm very curious as to
how well they'll do. I hope they know they've got a
massive project ahead of them, but I think that it is doable.
OK, let's talk about that healing efficiency because that
like I, I remember it back from Kata, but obviously there's many
people who haven't been playing Kata Classic when it was around
just a few years ago or even way back when Kata was the new, the
new expansion on the block for healing efficiency.
There was a very real risk that healers would run out of mana
part way through through a fight and that would cause a wipe.
Was is that something that you would find as interesting
gameplay or something that maybe if it came every so often in
fights would be interesting, or is that something that you
wouldn't want people to touch at all?
So the, the secret that has been half buried about some of these
older expansions is that for some specs, because modern
efficiency was so important, you would spend half the fight AFK
so that you could spend your limited resource on the moments
where healing mattered the most. And not all healers were like
this, but certainly the one I played resto druid was and I'm
not sure that was better gameplay than what we have now.
And so I, I think mana efficiency can still be in the
game, but I think it's better when they give you ways to play
around it more right? Like resto druid for example has
abundance now for every redo you have out.
Regrowth is faster cast and cost less mana.
That introduces a really interesting healing pattern
where you put rejuvens up to make your regrowth cheaper.
That's a fun way of playing around mana, right?
Or if you have a really high HPS spell that also costs a lot,
then you can use that as kind of your throttle.
If you're behind, cast the expensive spell, catch up.
If you're falling behind too often and casting your expensive
spell too often, well, you might get screwed on mana.
And that can be good design because you're making choices,
but you don't want to end up in this situation where the correct
decision is to cast nothing for more than brief moments in the
fight. Because I've been there, it
ain't that fun. Mana.
Mana in particular the last few expansions has been weird.
Every single tier you have like one or two healers that uses
mana as a real resource, and everyone else has infinite mana
at all times. And then the tier ends, you go
to the next tier, you rotate two other healers get their mana
tune. Now they have mana problems and
the original ones have Infinity. And I don't think I've seen a
time for a long time, maybe ever, where all healers had to
care about and manage mana. So if they are going to make it
central, they don't have to. But if they are going to make it
central, then they're going to have to work out a way to make
all healers play the same game. Yeah, when I look at changes, I
play shaman. So when I look at changes where
they're taking out healing surge and just leaving the basic
healing wave, it feels like mana conservation is less likely to
be the game unless they are going to like force you to like
keep dumping chain heels. It works well as a light
resource, doesn't it? Like if I play preservation
right now I mostly don't have mana issues, but if I spend my
expensive spell on cooldown then I might start going oom near the
end of the fight. I think that's reasonable
design. It's not a big driver of my
decisions, but if I run oom when the boss is at 10% I might
adjust a few things for the next pull.
I think if mana is sticking around, I think that's fine.
OK, And what about particular abilities that refund mana?
Mana Titotium was a big one. We had abilities where you would
do some DPS and that would restore mana, or abilities that
are on other classes that would then give mana.
Most famously Druid being able to allow for a casting without
consuming mana for a short period of time.
Do you find that those abilities have a place, or do you think
that they're too polarizing? I was a big fan of the everyone
may not share my opinion on this one.
I'm a big fan of the lightning bolt restores mana reth restores
mana master shapeshifter kind of design where you might spend a
bit more mana but then during downtime you can get it back by
spamming your filler DPS spell. I'm a fan of those kind of
designs. I think they're really
interesting. They give you a way to get mana
out of haste, which is quite interesting since you can cast
more of these filler spells. In terms of the other ones you
mentioned, Innovate Monotide, I think monotide is fairly benign.
I think it's, it's fine stuff like Innovate where you're
picking someone tend to be more awkward because most of the time
the druid themselves want to keep that.
And I think that it can make for awkward social situations where
someone else thinks that they should maybe have a little bit
more. And so I'm a fan of those spells
just giving it to both people. Like power infusion is like this
right now where the priest gets it and whoever they give power
infusion to gets it. I think stuff like Innovate
could be the same way, where you're encouraged to give it
away without any personal loss. I don't know if Blizzard
necessarily agrees with me on that one because I think they
like seeing that kind of stuff used socially, but I don't think
you'll find many resto druids that are happy to give it away.
It's a bit of a different thing when it comes to like boomkins
and stuff since they have no personal attachment anyway.
But yeah, I I'm more of a fan of the DPS to get mana back kind of
design. And it doesn't have to be that
like Miss Weaver has mana T I think that every healer could
have their own unique interesting mana mechanic.
Like Shaman gets mana back on crit, stuff like that.
But right now they don't. So I'm curious as to whether
they'll care about mana at all. Honestly there hasn't been any
great indication that they will yet, but if they do, I think the
best result is that each healer has their own kind of mini mana
mini game they're playing. OK, well, from the if, from the
initial things that we've got alone right now, who do you,
which healers, which of the healer specs do you feel is
currently looking best on paper? Again, we've only had normal
dungeons, Dells, we haven't had anything to really stress it.
So it's it's mostly speculative at this point.
But which healers you feel have benefited or come out mostly
unscathed from the this pullback?
And which are the healers that you feel need more more
attention? So in terms of the bad ones, I'm
not a resto Sharman expert, but I've heard from resto Sharman
experts that that spec might need another look and I believe
them. I think there are a lot of specs
that have come through mostly in a very good state, or at least a
state that could be good if tuning is really good, but they
have like one or two core issues that they would like solved.
I think that's a pretty good place to be in.
And week 1 of alpha, since the specs that eventually go live in
four months or whatever will probably be quite different than
what we have now. The ones I'm particularly
intrigued by are Preservation because that spec got almost
remade like Midnight Preservation and the War Within
Preservation have very little in common except that they're both
weird gangly Dragons. I think that Resto Druid is the
most untouched. Like Flourish is of course gone,
which is a major change, but currently convoke the spirits
can still proc A flourish like effect and so I think it ends up
playing quite similarly to now. You've still got your core,
rejuve, regrowth, abundance engine going.
The big change for resto druid that is causing some tension
right now is the removal of skull bash, which is the resto
druid interrupt. I kind of agree with the people
who think it should come back, so I'm curious as to whether
they give any reason for that or if they bring it back further
through. Alpha Disc Priest I've been
mostly happy with. I think Avenge needs sorry
Evangelism that is needs a second look since they're
clearly trying to make the spec easier to play, but I think they
haven't quite nailed the design down on that one.
And then again, Holy Priest, I wouldn't consider myself near an
expert, but I've I've heard good things from people that are much
more knowledgeable in that area than me.
Did I leave that Miss Weaver again?
I've I've done that many Times Now.
Yeah, unfortunately Miss Weaver was the the the missing link in
this. How do they look right now?
They've got, it's weird, isn't it?
They've got this like half dragon half crane kind of choice
you have to make tough to balance that kind of choice.
And I think if one plays way better than the other, they've
always had this kind of paradigm for quite a while, right?
Like even in the War Within you've got Qigi builds and Yulon
builds and like Yulon's been better for most of the
expansion. But the when the one you enjoy
less ends up meta, that can cause some tension.
But I think it's bold to try and introduce what is basically 2
specs in one. Right where you're making a
choice is to which aspect of the spec you want to play.
I think it's interesting. I'm not sure this version 0 is
going to be similar to the final version we get, but it's it's
interesting. Yeah.
I mean, again, we do have a long way to go, but just based on
where they are right now, that seems like a good, that's a good
start. And we are once again saying
that we don't have incredibly challenging content to really
stress test the rigors of what changes have happened.
It might, we might find out that as we get into ray testing and
like actual key testing that things that we didn't really see
at first become glaring problems.
So. We just don't know, right?
Like we, we know the encounters will change, we know the healers
will change, we've seen some of the healer changes already,
we've seen none of the encounter changes.
And those are going to be really important for defining what the
future of healing is going to look like.
And I honestly, if I were Blizzard, I'd be trying to roll
the stuff out sooner rather than later because it's not just how
healers will play into it, it's how the new UI will play into it
as well. And the new UI is going to be,
dare I say, more important for healing than any other role.
And so I think they should really focus on giving us
something to test that isn't normal mode levelling dungeons.
I know we're on week 1, but it takes a long time for feedback
to go up the chain and then to see changes based on it.
And I'd hate for them to leave it too late.
Like they have some new expansion features in the past
like as a right? Yeah, that was a big one.
So then looking at UI, give the first glance that we've had of
these things, of the conversations that we've had
about how a lot of the things in combat and in instances are
being locked down. What do healers need in general
just to have a proper functioning UI in the base game?
Let's say we can't use any add-ons.
Let's say it is pure nuclear. If you walk into an instance
there is not a single add on that can help you.
What do healers need in order to function properly?
Or what if? I guess a better question is
what are the stresses in the war within that they need to avoid
by either adding it to the UI or not designing that way?
So there are two like key pieces of your interface as a healer. 1
is particularly important in raid, but in mythic plus a
little bit too. That's boss timers.
You need to know when healing is going to be severe so you can
prepare for it. That kind of preparation is not
going away in the midnight designs.
Plenty of specs are still going to ramp for incoming damage, so
you need to know what's coming up.
The second part is a good healer frame.
You need to see everyone's health, you need to see their
debuffs and you need to see which of your buffs you have on
them. Now currently Blizzard wants to
do both of these things themselves at midnight.
Like of course we already have in game frames, they are
terrible. And in midnight we will also
have in game boss timers. I haven't done like the demo
raid boss on alpha yet. Boss timers hypothetically
aren't very difficult to do well, so I do trust that
Blizzard will have a decent package for us come live.
You really just need the ability and the timer and at least
something like that is already in place.
It'd be nice to get some customization being able to
choose between the timeline that I think is in currently and some
kind of bar timers which are Bigwigs and DBM default to.
I think I use the timeline anyway, but yeah, I think that
you need some customization there.
The default RAID frames, though, need work, and currently on
Midnight Alpha, we do not have any changes to the helo frames.
They're the same as the wall within.
I believe there will be some stuff coming here soon based on
interviews I've read. I don't have any secret
information and there's a few things that they kind of must do
to make these usable. We need more than three buff
slots. Right now it only shows 3 buffs.
That is not enough. Almost every healer spec in the
game will use more than that. Some, like Resto Druid, are
particularly bad, and so if you cast more than three buffs on
someone, one will disappear from your frames.
And I don't even play resto druid that much, but I thought
the mastery was that you stack these?
It is. And they removed some so that
you have to show less on frames, but they certainly didn't get me
down to to three or fewer. They also mentioned that they're
not going to show one on frames, but they're keeping it in the
game. The weird thing is it's the
strongest hot in the kit, symbiotic blooms.
It does the most things. No idea what they're thinking
there. I will have that in my feedback
post. But OK, so I have the default
frames. I need to see that more than
three buffs. I need to be able to change
where I see them on my frames so that I can put rejuve in the
bottom left, echo in the bottom right, whatever debuffs in the
middle perhaps. I would love some customization
in terms of how it looks. Some of us like class colours,
some of us like dark frames that go red as people get injured.
That's not me, but respect to those people.
Currently the Blizzard options are class colours or the ugliest
green that you've ever seen, so we need that to change.
And then something healers have started doing a lot in the past
five or six years is to actually colour the frame differently if
they have a key buff on them, right?
So if my frames are black by default, maybe it goes yellow
when I have atonement on them, or echo or Rejuve.
It's extremely nice and makes playing a healer much nicer.
You can't do that on the default frames right now without weak
cores, which won't exist. So that would be very good.
And then the last thing I'd like to see, this is the only one
that's more optional but would be huge, is some kind of
highlighting when they have a particular debuff that you can
set, especially in Mythic Raid or high keys.
Right now, we will write in some debuffs that like glow the frame
with like a nice border that makes it really obvious when
someone is being targeted by something that's likely to kill
them. It's very nice since there's a
lot going on in raid and it's useful to know who needs
priority healing, and just showing a debuff in the middle
of the frame doesn't quite do the same job as that.
So I think those are the big things the default frames need.
Half of those I wouldn't really describe as optional, I think
they're pretty key, like only showing 3 buffs.
It's honestly amazing that we got to the year 2025 without
that changing. Players right now use different
weak cores or add-ons to get past that.
Like there's an add on called bigger debuffs that shows like 6
I think or something like that. And so I think most of these
should be easy wins that we should have by midnight, but I'd
definitely be very concerned if midnight starts and we haven't
seen these changes. Yeah, I'm, I'm actually
surprised that unit frames aren't being adjusted income in
conjunction with the cooldown manager.
The cooldown manager, as it is on the alpha right now, allows
you to have some things tracked as like essential, then major,
then just like blacklisted, and you can actually change the
order in which they appear. So the same thing, same sort of
functionality. Seems like an easy lift into
your rate frames or party frames you would think.
So. But here we are.
I'm also not sure what kind of customization add-ons will be
able to do the frames. Like I think some of them, and
I'm, I'm not speaking from expertise here, but I believe
some of them are already just reskinning the default frames
rather than creating their own, whereas others do just create
their own frames. The ones that reskin the
Blizzard frames, I don't see why that shouldn't still fit their
new philosophy. But yeah, I I have no idea where
that will end up by the end of alpha since I think a lot of add
on stuff is going to be in flux. Yeah, you're right.
It's oddly in flux. I we've seen obviously big thing
is weak or is saying that they're calling it quits.
We're seeing that DBM has already said that they're going
to release something that changes the timeline into bars
that people are used to. So different add on authors are
going in different directions. But again, that can change as
things get adjusted and what allowances are there in the API
once things go live. So it at this point, it is kind
of the Wild West. We're all going with speculation
and hopes, which is why I definitely think that the key
question is what do we need out of the UI if it comes straight
from Blizzard or is allowed through add-ons.
Either way, I know that players who are resourceful and
dedicated are going to get that. But if Blizzard doesn't put it
in the base UI, that creates the same skill gap that they're
really trying to remove with these these changes to add-ons.
Something I did notice when setting up the new quarter
manager, like a lot of the arguments against all this week
or stuff is that if you're a new player, it just like you have to
start the game for the first time, you have to learn what
add-ons are and import stuff. All of that stuff is probably
faster than setting up the quarter manager for me, I will
say. I think it's faster because when
you download Hikelly or you download a week or a pack for
your class, it's usually set up based on the tier and what you
should be doing in that tier. And with Blizzard now assuming
that responsibility because they're supplanting these
add-ons, they very much need to do the same thing.
The rotation highlight needs to update based on your talent
choices based on your current current rotation, which can
change if you're switching between tier pieces based on
your, again, the talent choices based on like whatever hotfix
came around that might completely shift things.
And so Blizzard has to take that responsibility on and it needs
to be front loaded. It should be that you hit level
80 or maybe even before then, but I would think that you hit
the level cap and it goes, congratulations on on hitting
80. Do you want to enable this?
And you could just opt out of all of them and but that is your
choice. I think that if they're going to
make it that you don't have to go outside the game.
It can't be that like yes, it's on, it's in the game, but you
need to go to an outside resource just to figure out how
to set it up, or even that it exists itself.
Yeah, I could see you in it because you can't export import
called our manager setups, right.
And so I could see it being similar to now where you just go
to Waggo and you download the the pack or whatever for your
called our manager instead, which is still an improvement in
terms of usability for newer players.
But it is funny that you kind of end up in the same place.
Yeah, I that is, that is true. Should do you believe that the
base UI should have import codes of what do I want to track and
what what do I want to ignore? Do you think that that would be
an improvement versus the current situation where you need
to go through all those buffs and debuffs and so forth
yourself? I do think export import is a
good idea because I think that the cool down manager shouldn't
try and guess what is relevant for me.
If my class can put up a buff, it should be on the cordon
tracker. Right now it's not that right?
Like I can't. I don't have one for abundance
as resto druid even though it's my most key buff.
And so I think Blizzard should actually be hands off with that
stuff. Offer everything.
Let me pick what I want to see instead of guessing what I want
to want to see and maybe being wrong.
Because if if they are wrong I have nowhere to track it right.
I can't track it with a weaker anymore and so my only option is
my massive list of buffs, which is currently the top right of my
screen and can't really be centralized since that isn't
very customizable and includes a bunch of stuff I don't want to
see like my raid buffs. And so I think they should just
offer everything. Let me pick what I want to see,
and if someone just wants to borrow my import, that's 100%
fine, They can still move it around, right?
Like, they're basically just looking to me for a list of
what's useful to track, which they're going to do it anyway.
Either they grab my import or they're going to ask in the
discord, hey, which of these do I need to see?
And so one just cuts out the middleman.
Fair enough, but how granular do you think it should be?
Because there are times where I am changing things per fight.
I go from one raid boss to next and then I'm changing my
talents. I am I have a week or that's
tracking a very particular debuff or give me a reminder of
a particular event. If Blizzard has like let's say
you're in Midnight and there is a dominar that is throwing
curses on people, that's very important to track in the base
UI. Should I be able to highlight
that particular, that particular thing separate from everything
else on my unit frames on the the of encountering encounter
warners, that sort of stuff? Or do you think that that is the
mental thought process that should be left to players where
it's like, no, no, I need to recognize that and act
accordingly and the UI shouldn't have additional help for me on
that? I think for the most part you
kind of have to offer it because it's always been part of the
game. And if it's a curse, it does a
lot of damage, then your healer has to know about it anyway,
right? So it has to be communicated
somewhere. I'm not looking out into the
world to see which characters have like an angry purple mask
above their head, right? Like I need some way to see who
has that debuff, and if it can show on my frames, then it has
to be accessible to all other parts of the UI too or it just
doesn't make sense. Otherwise everyone would just
have to get their rate frames out so they could see that.
The purple mask debuff however, I think it's rough for them to
be adding and removing this stuff every tier.
So I think it should just work like add-ons where you can just
input the spell name or the spell ID and then track it and
then you can remove it when you're done with it.
Yes it's a step towards needing to mess with your UI more, but
also this stuff can just show by default right?
So they're just giving you the opt in to not show stuff if
you're not interested in it. I'm going to make a suggestion
here fast dev of your listing. When people speak about spell
IDSI immediately think of third party sites.
Spell ID's are not something you see in the game normally The way
that I can. Only way I can think of
circumventing that is by when you are reading through stuff on
the encounter journal, the dungeon journal, raid raid
journal, being able to click or right click on a on a buff and
then say track as important or something And that changes what
your UI, how your UI handles it. I think that's the best way to
keep it in game because otherwise you're immediately
going to 3rd party sites. I think that when you talk about
making the game more accessible to newer players and then we
talk about like this very fine-tuned level of
customizability, I think both can exist, right?
So long as the newer players don't feel like they have to do
it. Like filtering out debuffs is
probably not something I need until Mythic raid high keys
where it's expected that those players will be using every
resource available to them anyway.
But I agree that you don't want people to have to interest spell
ID for something they need to see.
But I think if it shows it by default and you can just type in
a spell ID or a name to opt out of it, that's fine.
But I also like your idea about like adding right click and then
add to add to filter buttons and stuff like that.
I think you just need to let users customize stuff beyond
templated lists or you're just never going to be able to offer
everything that players want. And maybe that's the idea, but I
really think it's expected. And it's expected because it
ends up and improving your UI by a lot.
That is the 90% conversation that's been happening is like
what is that 10% that could be missing?
And I guess I'll pose that to you as the last question.
What are things that are currently available to healers
that you feel could the game could live without both that it
the game does not explore that territory anymore and that we no
longer have access to it as players?
So stuff that they're removing that I think would be a good
thing. Yeah, or things that you want
them to remove that you think would be a good thing.
I think the game in general definitely feels like it's just
clogged up with a bunch of different things right now.
Right? Like I, I play a raid boss, I've
downloaded a, a raid pack because we're expected to have
it. It does, it does a lot of
essential things that I need it for and then it does 100 other
things that I don't need it for. And players don't notice this
because they're really focused on their character in a fight.
But if you take a video or if you take a screenshot of
yourself mid fight and then look at the information on your
screen, I bet you'll find that you're not even using 70% of it.
And I think that's one of the big highlights of this change is
most of that crap is getting cleared out.
Even these we core packs that a lot of people use and they love
and that's good. Most of those packs are often
not even designed by someone playing the spec right?
And it's like a mix of essential information and stuff that's
just sitting there in the middle of your screen that you never
have to look at or care about. And maybe people will do that
with the Blizzard version as well.
But I think cleaning all of this stuff out and just giving you a
cleaner, simpler experience is good on its face.
Speaking of stuff that's 90% of the way there, by the way, most
healers use like a mouse over or click casting for a lot of their
heels. Blizzard has a version of this.
It's quite good, it's 90% of the way there.
It's clearly missing 10 and I'd love if they added the 10.
What's the 10 there? So it doesn't work that well
with a lot of mouse buttons, whereas add-ons like click do.
And also a lot of people use something called a help harm
macro. Or if they're massing over a
frame that might heal them. If they're not massing over a
frame it might cast your DPS button on the enemy.
You can't really do that well with the inbuilt mouse overs
because it'll just it's basically just one button, one
spell. And so I'd love for that kind of
functionality as well. Because when I was sitting up in
alpha I didn't want to make mess over macros since they are slow
to sit up, but I really didn't want to lose my help palm so I
ended up making the macros anyway.
The pruning or the consolidation of abilities will allow you to
be able to comfortably do either or even if you don't have help
harm, but I do. I did really enjoy Help Harm,
but it. Definitely helps.
It definitely helps us having less buttons, but also it's
about the quality of buttons, right?
Like you've got some key binds that are much better than
others. And so sure, it's true.
My shift 5 button might be free now, but I really like having my
best DPS spell and my best healing spell on the same button
because it's a really good key bind and also they're not taking
help harm away right? Like as far as we know, and I
know everything is in flux. As far as we know we can keep
macros and honestly even add-ons like click might still work
perfectly fine since I believe under the hood they are just
fancy macros. But it would be -1 add on for me
if I could do it using Blizzard's version instead.
Yeah, I believe click voodoo. Maybe not voodoo, Voodoo has
some extra things, but definitely click doesn't use
chat and doesn't and doesn't do read things in combat that isn't
just like your normal UI. Yeah, so I think it should be
safe. And of course how far macros are
easy to to set up. So even if they were slightly
adjusted to work in the new setup, they seem like not what
Blizzard is targeting. Yeah, they seem safe, but also
it's just like writing the macros is slow, right?
I, I don't download click because it has unique
functionality, although it has some of that too with the
ability to bind to mouse buttons, which in game doesn't
do very well. But I mostly download click just
to make the setup experience easier.
And so I don't see why that isn't something that the game
itself could offer baseline, since it seems right up the
alley right now. Is there any final things that
you would like to say before we wrap this up?
I think the healing through midnight alpha is going to be
this like rapidly evolving experience.
I don't think anyone has a good idea of how it'll look in the
end yet. And so if your class is missing
a key ability or you're worried about its play style, then I
would say strap in, write feedback posts, let them know
what you think, and we'll just see how it all looks over the
next few weeks as they give us some real content and as they
roll out the rest of the class changes.
Like I, I think no one assumes that this is the end state.
I think we still have a lot of stuff to come.
Yeah, there are many classes that do not have their Apex
talents, that have a lot of not yet implemented talent points in
their spec class or hero trees. So we are still looking at many
specs still needing to reach their completion.
At this point we've only got to 83, so even with what is there,
we don't have full access to everything yet.
And you know, Wow is all about the end game, so there's still a
lot to come. This was an amazing talk.
I would love to have you back, maybe when we get closer to
release and we can see how things evolved over the course
of the alpha and beta. But thank you so much for coming
up today. Where can people find you if
they want to hear more of your thoughts?
Yeah, I'm keen to catch up again closer to midnight.
We can discuss all of the healer frame changes that made between
now and then. If you're looking for me, you
can find me in most class discords.
I also have a X account that I very rarely use, but you can
find me on there and we'll also put a link to the question the
Epic Discord where I'm a lot more active in the in the
description. Well, thank you again and until
next time guys, may all your hits be good.