Midnight took interrupts away from every healing specialization but one, and Season 2 filled its dungeons with casters. That single leftover button now decides more invites than any healing number on this page. Everything else in the role is fighting over what is left: a venom-themed pool where poison lands on the party constantly, player health up a quarter, and thirty minutes of mana to cover it.
The placements below come from what healers are actually doing inside keys this week rather than from what a kit reads like on paper, which is why two specs the rest of the field still rates highly sit at the bottom of this one. Boss routes, crest breakpoints and the rating ladder live in our Midnight Season 2 Mythic+ guide; this page is about who gets brought.
Last updated: August 26, 2026.
A tier here measures two things at once: what a healer contributes to a timed key, and how often anyone is actually playing it at the level where timing is hard. Rank on healing output alone and you end up recommending a spec that nobody invites. No group has ever been built that way.
One change from the expansion's launch sets the floor under this whole list. Interrupts were stripped from the healing specs: Skull Bash is gone from Restoration Druid, Spear Hand Strike was removed for Mistweaver only, Quell moved into the Augmentation and Devastation trees, Rebuke left the Holy Paladin talent list, and Silence was already Shadow-only. One healer kept its kick, and the whole role is shaped by that fact.
The second axis is poison. Season 2 is built around venom, and the dispel schools split the field cleanly: Improved Cleanse, Improved Nature's Cure and Improved Detox each add Poison to a healer's dispel, Naturalize covers it with no talent spent at all, and Restoration Shaman answers it party-wide through Poison Cleansing Totem instead of on the dispel itself. That leaves both Priest specs with Purify covering Magic and Disease, and nothing at all for Poison, in the season named after it.
Mana is the third. Player health went up 25% at max level, so the same pull takes more casts to cover, and a thirty-minute key gives you no window to sit and drink.
Affixes matter less than people expect once the keys get serious. Xal'atath's Bargain: Devour is the one week where the healer is the whole answer: it ticks 1% of maximum health per second for 15 seconds and clears on healing or a dispel, paying 4% critical strike and 2% maximum health per stack when the group solves it, and handing nearby enemies 10% more damage and 20% damage reduction when it does not. Then you push past +11 and it stops existing. Xal'atath's Guile revokes the Bargains at +12 and charges 15 seconds per death instead, so the affix that rewards healers most disappears exactly where a tier list starts to matter.
Blizzard is running broad class tuning every week through the opening stretch of the season, and the August 26 pass is already posted, naming two healers for buffs aimed specifically at dungeons rather than at raid. Neither is in the top half here. That tells you where the developers think the problem sits.
Tuning moves through a season, and the letters move with it.
Seven specs, four tiers. Before the write-ups, here is the season as the ladder actually reports it. Score is the 95th-percentile in-game Mythic+ rating pulled from Blizzard's leaderboard across keys +7 and higher over the last fortnight. The share column is ours: we counted the healer in each of the world's top 100 runs in all eight dungeons, 800 runs in total, at key levels +16 to +18.
| Healer | Mythic+ Score | Share of Top Runs | Poison Answer |
|---|---|---|---|
| Holy Paladin | 3016 | 70.4% | Improved Cleanse |
| Restoration Shaman | 2993 | 19.3% | Poison Cleansing Totem |
| Holy Priest | 2964 | 3.5% | None |
| Mistweaver Monk | 2963 | 5.3% | Improved Detox |
| Preservation Evoker | 2940 | 1.5% | Naturalize |
| Discipline Priest | 2873 | 0.1% | None |
| Restoration Druid | 2830 | 0% | Improved Nature's Cure |
Read those two number columns against each other. The score spread across all seven specs is 186 points, which is genuinely close for a role this varied, while the representation spread runs from 70.4% down to nothing at all and is not close by any reading you care to apply.
Groups are not choosing between healers of similar strength; they are choosing one, occasionally two.
Holy Paladin healed 563 of the 800 top runs we counted, and its floor across the eight dungeons never drops below 64%. Nothing about the case is subtle. It clears poison through Improved Cleanse, it carries the deepest defensive kit in the role from Aura Mastery down to Blessing of Protection and Divine Shield, and Blessing of Freedom answers half the snares in the pool on its own. Then there is the part nobody talks about. Blizzard has not touched its dungeon numbers once this season: every Holy Paladin line in the launch hotfixes and in the August 26 pass is stamped for PvP combat only. Six days of tuning have gone past it in both directions. Mana is the honest limit, and Kings' Rest and The Blinding Vale, where it peaks at 76%, are exactly the dungeons that punish running dry.
Restoration Shaman is here for one button. Wind Shear survived the cull that took the kick off every other healer, and in a dungeon pool this thick with casters that turns a healer slot into a fourth interrupt. Its 4-second lockout is the shortest in the game, well under the 6 seconds a Rogue gets from Kick; it is also the only one a healer can contribute at all, which is a different kind of value entirely. Around it sits the utility that keeps pugs alive: Spirit Link Totem cuts party damage by 10% and levels everyone's health while it runs, Bloodlust arrives free, and Poison Cleansing Totem strips venom off the whole group rather than one target at a time. Murlok's independent sample of top players ranks it first outright. It also went untouched in PvE on launch day, same as the Paladin above it. Where it gives ground is raw throughput on a fat pull, which is why it trails on the 95th-percentile score despite leading elsewhere.
Holy Priest is the placement this page disagrees with the field about, and the disagreement is a date rather than an opinion. Every written tier list still rating it near the bottom was last updated on or before August 18. That is the day Blizzard quadrupled Words of the Wise, added 55% to Prompt Prognosis, moved Preventive Measures from 15% to 40% and multiplied Enlightenment's mana regeneration by two and a half, all of it PvE-only, with the stated goal of making Oracle "a competitive option against Archon". The live ladder has already moved: it now scores third of seven, one point ahead of Mistweaver. The field has not. Mass Dispel and Guardian Spirit are genuinely hard to replace. The reason it is not higher is the season it landed in — Purify covers Magic and Disease, so a Holy Priest in a venom pool watches poison tick and heals through it.
Mistweaver Monk does its best work where the room stays busy, spreading Renewing Mist and cleaving Vivify across everything carrying it, which suits a pool full of rot damage. Blizzard added 8% to all its healing on launch day and sped its four-piece up by a third, saying outright that the spec had been underperforming. Improved Detox handles the poison. Life Cocoon is one of the best single saves in the game and Ring of Peace buys a pull back when a pack lands wrong. It is also third by play rate at the top, ahead of both Priests and the Evoker, which is the practical answer to whether groups take it seriously. The catch is the same one it always has: give it a single target under real pressure and it offers nothing special, and losing Spear Hand Strike cost it the utility that used to paper over that.
Preservation Evoker is the widest gap on this page between what a kit can do and how often anyone does it. Naturalize covers Magic and Poison with no talent spent, which is the cleanest dispel profile in the role for this season. Rescue, Time Spiral and Cauterizing Flame are answers nothing else in the role has. It still healed 12 of 800 runs. Range is the reason people give, and it is a real one in dungeons that spread the group across a room, but the honest version is that triage on a spec this short-armed asks more than most players want from a healer slot. Blizzard agrees, and has said so in writing: the August 26 pass raises Verdant Embrace by 25% and Living Flame's healing by 20%, explicitly "to help them keep up with other healers in dungeons". This is the spec on this page most likely to move up.
Discipline Priest appeared once in 800 runs. Once. The spec itself is not broken, and what it prevents is still elite — Pain Suppression and Power Word: Barrier decide pulls that no amount of reactive healing saves. The problem is everything around that. Blizzard cut its damage by 30% in PvE because it "has been overperforming compared to other healers", raising Atonement from 32% to 46% to keep the healing whole, which leaves a spec whose main draw was damage doing less of it. Add a Priest's poison coverage of nothing, no interrupt, and a ramp that punishes you when the pull goes differently than planned, and you have the least-taken healer in the game right now.
Restoration Druid did not heal a single one of the 800 runs we counted, and it sits last on score as well. That is a strange thing to write about a spec holding an A slot on our raid list, so here is why the two pages disagree: Blizzard says the same thing, in the same sentence. The August 26 notes describe Rejuvenation and Wild Growth as "feeling weak in season 2, particularly in dungeons", then apply "slight nerfs to their raid healing to keep them around the same power in raid while increasing their power in dungeons". Rolling heal-over-time effects reach more of a twenty-player room than priority healing does; across four other players they tick the same and cover nothing. Mark of the Wild still guarantees a Druid a seat somewhere, and Improved Nature's Cure is the widest dispel in the role at three schools. Neither has been enough. Rejuvenation goes up 15% on August 26 and the four-piece doubles Genesis to 8 seconds. That is the first real attempt to fix the dungeon half of this spec, and it is worth a second look once it lands.
