#2 - Sept. 30, 2025, 9:30 p.m.
Balance
The design of how you enter and maintain Eclipse is changing in Midnight. We’d like to introduce more gameplay to it. Eclipse before Midnight is so important that you immediately drop everything to refresh it when it ends. There’s no timing or strategy to it, and it can be a struggle during phases with high movement. In Midnight, Lunar Eclipse and Solar Eclipse are an active ability that instantly enters Eclipse for 15 seconds, has a 30 second cooldown, and can be talented to have two charges. The goal is for Balance to prepare for each Eclipse and choose the perfect moment to activate it. Depending on talents and the pacing of a fight or dungeon, you might have an Eclipse up 60-80% of the time. You’ll want to spend your time in Eclipse spending Astral Power and dealing damage, and your time out of Eclipse building resources or refreshing DoTs to prepare for your next Eclipse.* *Balance’s Mastery has been changed so Sunfire and Moonfire no longer increase damage targets take and Waning Twilight has been removed. This allows Balance to start dealing damage faster and improves its strength in split cleave fights. Moonfire and Sunfire’s damage will be tuned to keep them as strong, efficient damage dealing spells, but the damage of your other spells will be less conditional.
Feral
Feral Druid is changing in Midnight to address some important mechanics that are based on information that is hidden to the player. Bleed snapshotting, where the damage a bleed deals is increased for its entire duration, is now applied only by Tiger’s Fury and Prowl. The icons of empowered bleeds change to show they’re strengthened. Bloodtalons has been removed. These changes also aim to reduce the complexity that could go into choosing the best builder to use in the moment, putting more of Ferals’ focus on maintaining bleeds and building and spending combo points. While some abilities like Brutal Slash and Adaptive Swarm have been removed, Feral has gained some new tricks that lean into their flavor as deadly hunting cats. Frantic Frenzy is a multi-target upgrade to Feral Frenzy and Blood Spattered makes them even stronger at taking down a primary target while fighting many enemies.
Guardian
Guardian Druid’s Rage economy is very oversaturated, particularly during cooldowns and in multi-target contexts, resulting in excessive APM and unintuitive resource management. We’re aiming to smooth out Rage income and provide healthier outlets. Additionally, we’re pulling back in areas where survivability feels contingent on having multiple layers of defensives, and improving a smaller set of baseline abilities instead.
Restoration
We are significantly reducing the number of buffs Restoration Druid can apply to allies to make raid frames and target frames easy to parse and always show your important effects. Restoration Druid’s Mastery will also be much more effective per healing over time effect active, as they can now only apply up to 5 heal over time effects to allies. We are also streamlining several cooldowns and actives we felt were redundant with other tools in the kit by either removing them or combining them with other abilities. Finally, we are reducing the amount of maintenance buffs by making targeted changes to Lifebloom talents and offering a way to maintain Efflorescence automatically on your Lifebloom target.
