New Interrupt Philosophy Showcased in Midnight's Mythic+ Testing

Mythic+ testing has shown the changes that Blizzard has made to Interrupts in Mythic+ for a world without kick trackers and computation addons!

Midnight Overview

Changes to Enemy Casters in Midnight

On the Midnight Beta, Mythic+ testing has begun and there appears to have been some massive philosophy changes to enemy casters in Midnight which should make coordinating interrupts easier:

Fewer enemy casters overall.
Longer casts and cooldown times on important interruptable abilities
Bolters nerfed massively

There are many pulls where there is nothing to interrupt, but you can combine multiple packs to still have some priority kicks to hit. All major trash abilities that are “important” to kick appear to have been standardized at a 25+ second cooldown and have a 4+ second cast time.

Bolters also seem to have a new philosophy and gone are the days where you must stop every cast, or die. Bolters are more like archers that you can interrupt, and deal triage damage that needs to be healed up before the next major damage event. You no longer need to have interrupts or stops for every cast, and letting some go off is perfectly fine.

Overall, coordination has been made much easier for interrupts as you only need one interrupt (one person) per important caster, making it much easier to coordinate and determine how many free kicks you might have for bolters or other reasons.

Bolters

Before we begin, we’re going to define a Bolter. Bolters are an enemy caster that will prioritize casting a single target spell on a random target. Usually these spells end in “bolt”: Shadow Bolt, Arcane Bolt, Frostbolt, etc.

With that out of the way, Bolters are receiving some major nerfs in Midnight, with some having previously been announced and some other things to mention now that there’s testing:

With the removal of interrupt capabilities from healers, we’re making an effort to change the behavior of enemies that use spells like Shoot or Frostbolt. We want enemies with these spells to more evenly spread their targeting to different players of your group, which should reduce cases where a single player might take a large spike of damage while others receive none.

Blizzard

CLASSES

The Global Interrupt duration has been increased:
- Developers’ notes: We would like players to have more effective tools against caster enemies, particularly in dungeons. To that end, we are increasing interrupt durations across the board in PvE content.

In addition, there are also a lot less bolters in these dungeons, and there’s a maximum of 2 bolters per pack. Bolt damage appears to have been reduced as well, when comparing the damage of a bolt to the max health pool. We’ve compared +12 damage bolts across various dungeons in Midnight and Season 3 of War Within and the damage appears to have been nerfed by about 20-25% or ~9% max health on a +12.

With 418k health in Myth 2/6 gear:

With 14.4M health in 709 gear (just under Myth 2/6):

Lastly, Bolters cast times have now been standardized at 2.5 seconds; no more 1.5 second bolts (looking at you Holy Smite).

There’s been a concern over “Boltslop” in Midnight, but that word doesn’t exactly have a clear definition from person to person. If your definition of “Boltslop” is “there are casters that cast repeatedly”, then yes, these continue to exist in Midnight. If your definition of bolters is a caster where every interrupt needs to be kicked, then this this seems to no longer be a problem in Midnight and a dungeon like Priory shouldn’t happen again.

Overall, these are the nerfs that Bolters are taking:

Bolters now seem to be more in the line of an archer (with benefits), as the bolts are just triage damage that a healer needs to heal up. You can of course interrupt them, and should when available, but it should no longer be required to interrupt many, if not all of them, until super high keys.