Raid

Preservation has been historically a ramp healer, which means its gameplay is divided between setting up Echoes across the raid followed by consuming them for high burst damage at a specific timing. This identity has been diminished lately as these days Preservation plays in a much more fluid and dynamic way: While Echo is still a central component of the spec, you constantly go from applying it to people to consuming it with a spell in short bursts rather than large coverage.

The result is that you still follow mostly the same principles as before, but now you go from Echo spreading into consumptions much more often and repeatedly, resulting in a more consistent healing output that also requires properly reacting to procs.

The Source Of Your Healing

As Echo is still the centerpiece of the spec the majority of your healing will still come from properly utilizing it to replicate spells across the raid. Your strongest option to consume Echoes with is Merithra's Blessing. The combination of the high upfront heal from Merithra's Blessing and Golden Hour plus the heal over time of Reversion and the increase via Grace Period make this ability the ideal choice for every time you need to consume Echoes.

New to Midnight thanks to Twin Echoes, Emerald Blossom now also represents an important part of our healing. Going into season two with the swap into Flameshaper which brings Consume Flame, the importance of properly utilizing blossoms has risen, making it another of the key points to getting as much healing as you can out of your character.

These two points combined mean that the central thing to focus on is proper essence management. Utilizing all your Essence Bursts for Emerald Blossoms to avoid the high mana cost, while maximizing the value of Twin Echoes and your natural essence to apply as many Echoes as possible before consuming them with Merithra's Blessing will be your focus.

Important Things to Know

• Temporal Anomaly and Dream Breath are very potent tools at your disposal that you should use pretty much on cooldown. Temporal Anomaly enables most of your Echo spread and gives you more casts of Dream Breath via Nozdormus Teachings, while Dream Breath does a lot of healing by itself, gives you casts of Merithra's Blessing, and is needed for Consume Flame to work.
• Verdant Embrace has fallen off a bit in the latest seasons. It is still an ok tool for spot healing but it can be very dangerous to use as most raid builds won't run Dream Simulacrum. It should still be used often but mostly on yourself as an Essence Burst generator via our tierset 4-piece bonus.
• It can be important that you target different players that are hurt with each of your Emerald Blossom casts. While before this didn't matter as the blossom simply picked targets inside its area, our tierset 2-piece bonus will cast free Living Flames to your target when spending essence which means using it on someone that doesn't need that much healing at the moment makes you lose some value.

Gameplay

You will use Temporal Anomaly and Dream Breath pretty much on cooldown, use all Essence Bursts you generate to cast Emerald Blossom and the Twin Echoes procs you get from that to apply Echo to the raid. You will then consume these Echoes with Merithra's Blessing and keep repeating the cycle depending on what resources you have available.

1. Use Temporal Anomaly on cooldown, this will apply Echo and shields to your raid as it passes through them, and also reduce the cooldown of Dream Breath and Fire Breath by 5 seconds each time due to Nozdormus Teachings.
2. Use Dream Breath on cooldown but avoid consuming Echoes with it. You have two charges of this spell so you can bank the second one for specific situations where you need more healing. Using Dream Breath gives you a Merithra's Blessing proc so you should use it before spreading Echoes to guarantee you can consume them with your apex.
3. Use all your Essence Bursts on Emerald Blossom. Blossoms are very expensive mana wise but Essence Burst makes them free, so you want to maximize this in combination with Twin Echoes. There can be some nuance in how to choose between a blossom and an echo depending on specific circumstances and resources but the general rule of thumb that you can't break is to always use Emerald Blossom with Essence Bursts and never with natural essence.
4. Use all your essence to apply Echoes, this will consume your Twin Echoes stacks to apply several Echoes at once every cast
5. Consume your Echoes with Merithra's Blessing.
6. Use Fire Breath. The Leaping Flames buff you will get is another relevant source of healing and can each Living Flame can generate Essence Burst.
7. The rest of the time, cast Living Flame on an enemy.

Major Cooldowns

Rewind

Rewind is a press-and-forget raid healing cooldown that simply restores health equal to 30% of the damage your raid members have taken in the last 5 seconds. The ideal usage is right after a big wave of burst damage has hit the raid. Note that the healing from Rewind comes in the form of a 5-second heal over time, that will do all the corresponding healing spread across these 5 seconds.

Taking more damage while the Rewind hot is active won't increase its healing, the amount is decided at the moment you press the spell and it is simply delayed over the following seconds.

Dreamflight

Dreamflight is a raid cooldown that does an inital wave of healing to everyone you fly over and applies a strong heal over time effect to them. The initial wave of healing that happens as you fly is an important part of the power of the spell so you need to use it after damage has already happened and not before.

One of the drawbacks of the spell is that it requires you to fly across your raid with no control of your movement so a miscalculation can make you go face first into dangerous boss mechanics. To compensate for this while dreamflying you will get a shield equal to your maximum hp, but you can still be in danger as the shield will drop off as soon as you land which might still be in a dangerous position

Stasis

Stasis is a very unique spell to Preservation: After using it it will record your next three healing spell casts, and when you press the spell again it will do free full power casts of these spells again. The most common sequence of spells you will use for Stasis is:

Dream Breath, Temporal Anomaly, and Merithras Blessing

While the Merithra's Blessing cast at the end can be a bit flexible and replaced with a second Dream Breath or Emerald Blossom, the initial components of at least one Dream Breath and one Temporal Anomaly are the most important parts to store in Stasis.

Conclusions

Preservation currently lives in a much more simpler and approachable format than what it has historically had, there is less complexity in the way you have to manage ramps and timings and you can mostly react to your resources and cooldowns as they happen in the moment. This doesn't mean that the spec is easy by any means and you still need to keep your focus and remember how to handle different scenarios with a very specialized kit.

One thing Preservation does maintain is the deeply rewarding feeling of mastering its mechanics and executing properly. A well player Preservation Evoker is one of the most fun and interactive things you can do in this game, and that has remained true over the years. This will still be the case for Midnight Season 2, where Preservation looks to be in a very good spot power wise.