WoW Midnight Beta Healer Tier List — Best Healers for Season 1 M+

February 2026 | Mythic+ Beta Rankings | Patch 12.0.1

The healer landscape in Midnight is taking shape, and while there are no massive upsets compared to the end of The War Within, the gaps between specs are growing clearer with every tuning pass. Based on 4,400+ beta parses from Archon.gg, expert testing from Icy Veins, and community analysis across high-end beta keys, here's where every healer stands heading into Season 1.

⚠️ Beta Disclaimer: These rankings reflect beta performance. Blizzard is still actively tuning. Treat this as a direction, not a final verdict.

What Matters for Healers in Midnight

Midnight's dungeon design rewards healers who bring more than just raw HPS. The key factors this season are healing throughput, personal DPS output, external defensives, utility (CC, dispels, interrupts), and survivability. Because most Midnight dungeons have minimal Curse and Disease dispels — and only one dungeon requires Poison dispels — healers with strong Magic dispels have a natural edge. The meta is leaning toward specs that provide steady, predictable output rather than specs that spike during big cooldowns and struggle in between.

S Tier — The Uncontested Best

Restoration Druid

The strongest healer in the Midnight beta by a significant margin, and the most-played healing spec in the dataset. No other healer comes close to its combination of sustained throughput, CC toolkit, and group utility. Restoration Druid's core strength is its Mastery (Harmony), which amplifies all healing based on the number of HoTs active on a target — the more HoTs you maintain, the harder every individual heal hits. This creates a snowball effect that other healers simply cannot replicate.

The Apex Talent makes the loop even tighter: Swiftmend procs Soul of the Forest, spending that buff on Regrowth or Rejuvenation creates a powerful healing chain that keeps the group topped without burning mana. Outside of throughput, Resto Druid brings Disorienting Roar, Typhoon, and Ursol's Vortex — one of the strongest CC packages of any healer — plus Mark of the Wild for 3% group Versatility, a battle rez, and Poison dispels that are uniquely valuable in Ara-Kara. Mana management is excellent throughout long pulls. If you want one safe healer pick for all of Season 1, this is it.

Discipline Priest

A strong second place and rising. Disc has historically been one of the best M+ healers, and Midnight's tuning is reinforcing that. The spec's value comes from its proactive playstyle — preemptive absorbs through Atonement and Oracle shielding remain extremely powerful in high-damage scenarios, and Power Infusion is one of the most impactful group buffs any healer can bring, directly boosting a DPS's output for a key pull or boss fight. Power Word: Fortitude adds passive group survivability, and extra Penance charges from Oracle make the rotation more forgiving. Disc rewards encounter knowledge — the more you know what's coming, the more you can pre-heal through it.

A Tier — Strong, Reliable, Highly Viable

Restoration Shaman

One of the most well-rounded healers for all types of groups, especially PUGs. Resto Shaman's utility package is arguably the best of any healer in the game: Wind Shear is a personal interrupt (still rare among healers this season), Capacitor Totem gives AoE stun, Poison Cleansing Totem is uniquely useful in certain dungeons, Skyfury adds group DPS, and Ancestral Vigor gives the party a passive health buff. Outside cooldowns, single-target healing can feel average, but Ascendance is a powerful burst cooldown for dangerous moments. Its versatility and ease of integration into any group comp make Resto Shaman one of the safest picks for players who pug a lot.

Preservation Evoker

Some of the best burst healing in the beta when things go sideways. Preservation excels at reactive healing — when the group takes a massive hit, no healer recovers faster. Temporal Anomaly adds solid absorbs, and Dream Breath is a powerful group cooldown. The spec's weakness is range: Evoker's spells have a shorter maximum range than other healers, which can be punishing in spread-out dungeons with chaotic pathing. Still a top-tier pick for organized groups where positioning is controlled.

Mistweaver Monk

Comfortable and familiar, with minor talent updates this expansion. Mistweaver still delivers strong throughput through its unique fistweaving hybrid playstyle, and it remains a solid performer across all key levels. The biggest drawback is the loss of healer interrupts for the spec — Mistweaver no longer has a personal kick, which hurts its value in uncoordinated groups where you can't rely on DPS to cover interrupts. In organized play where interrupt assignments are locked in, Mistweaver is fully viable and very smooth to play.

B Tier — Playable, But Outclassed in the Current Meta

Holy Paladin

Major changes this patch — larger Light of Dawn radius, adjustments to Divine Toll and Holy Prism — but the throughput numbers haven't quite kept up. Holy Paladin's strength has always been its utility package: Aura Mastery, Devotion Aura, blessings, and strong CC make it genuinely valuable, especially in poison and bleed-heavy dungeons. Holy Light hits hard but demands good mana discipline. The spec is competitive in coordinated groups that build around its cooldown windows, but it struggles to match the raw consistency of S and A-tier healers in high-pressure situations where throughput wins.

Holy Priest

Functional and comfortable to play, but doesn't bring enough to compete with the higher-tier options in Midnight's M+ meta. Lacks the proactive tools of Disc, the utility of Shaman, and the throughput of Resto Druid. If you enjoy the spec and know it well, it will get the job done in lower and mid-range keys — but for pushing high content, there are better choices on the roster.

Healer Hero Spec Rankings for Beta M+

Hero talent trees add another layer to the healer meta. The table below is based on 95th percentile data from high-end keys — a smaller but more elite dataset than the main tier list above.

A few things jump out immediately. Wildstalker Resto Druid is the dominant hero choice with 94.3% adoption and the highest max key (+21) in the entire table — the community has completely solved this pick. Interestingly, Keeper of the Grove tops the score column at 3892 despite only 5.7% adoption, which makes it an emerging niche worth watching — fewer parses, but those who run it are pushing extremely high.

Lightsmith Holy Paladin stands out with a jaw-dropping 41.3K DPS — the highest damage contribution of any healer hero spec in the table. That's a number some DPS specs would be proud of, and it explains why Holy Paladin punches above its raw HPS weight in group output. Conduit of the Celestials MW Monk similarly impresses at 24.7K DPS with solid throughput, making it the go-to for Mistweaver players in organized groups.

On the Priest side, Oracle Disc is the overwhelming choice at 86.3% adoption, while Voidweaver — despite flashy 46.8K DPS numbers — is stuck at 13.7% and only reaching +17 max key, suggesting it's a low-key specialist pick rather than a serious high-end option.

The Big Picture

The healer meta in Midnight is more stable than DPS, but the gap between tiers is real. Restoration Druid is the clear answer for anyone who wants the strongest possible healer pick, and Discipline Priest is a genuine alternative with a different playstyle that rewards planning over reaction. Restoration Shaman and Preservation Evoker fill the A-tier comfortably, each with a distinct identity — utility vs. burst recovery.

What's notable is that Midnight's philosophy of "uptime over spikes" applies to healers too. Specs that maintain steady healing loops and contribute to group damage between big healing windows are outperforming specs that rely on cooldown-driven recovery. The dungeons are built around sustained pressure, and the meta is reflecting that.

M+ Season 1 launches March 24, 2026. Expect further tuning between now and release — but the hierarchy at the top is unlikely to change dramatically.

Sources: Archon.gg Beta Healer Rankings · Icy Veins Midnight Beta Healer Tier List · Community analysis, patch 12.0.1