Resource Economy, Ability Tuning, Buff & Support Tracking – Evoker Must-Haves for Midnight

Top 5 Midnight Wishlist

Preservation is mostly very happy going into Midnight. Outside of UI issues that the Evoker developer has little influence over there are only a few points that I’d like to see improved before launch. If the expansion went live today you’d find a well designed spec with two competitive hero trees and ample variation in gameplay.

Midnight Healer User Interface Issues
Healers were particularly vulnerable to the Midnight user interface changes since the Blizzard default raid frames have been very bad for years and custom frames were a forced target of reducing what information you have on other players. Unfortunately, the frames have improved very little over the Alpha / Beta cycle and essential requests like being able to filter which buffs you see, and being able to set locations for specific buffs are still missing. As a result, it is difficult to quickly parse who has an Echo buff and you will overwrite a lot more Reversion casts. Simplifying gameplay while making healing more frustrating from a technical perspective is a risky approach and I hope they prioritize this with the time they have left.

Talent Tree Improvements and Fine Tuning Power
This will likely end in a nerf, but in an expansion trying to reduce cooldown power it is odd that we currently have Rewind (arguably the best healing cooldown) on just a two- minute cooldown due to Temporal Artificer. Speaking of the talent tree, the path through the middle of the tree remains filled with talents that have seen little to no play because they just aren’t very good – chiefly Power Nexus, but Font of Magic also finds itself outdated in a world without Spiritbloom. We have other viable ways to path so they can be avoided but our talent tree is otherwise extremely competitive and the two duds in the middle have been there too long.

We don’t have a ton of bugs left, but there are a few that affect how much healing high ranks of Dream Breath do, and some of our multi-charge spells like Obsidian Scales can use more than one charge per spell cast under some conditions.

Mana
Preservation is losing one of our chief mana tools in Midnight with Emerald Communion’s removal. Energy Loop also restores less of our mana pool than in The War Within. We’re also in a position where our most efficient casts also cost the most and we don’t really have any gameplay to restore mana. Healer gameplay is very different in Midnight and it is possible this level of mana tension is intended but I always felt mana played better as a concept when you have some related decision making or optional talents. Our only optional mana talent is now Energy Loop which requires casting a lot of Disintegrate but this competes with Echo and now Emerald Blossom for our Essence and Essence Bursts. Trying to include it, especially in raid, can make the rotation unnecessarily complex.