News
WoW Midnight: a Murder Row boss deals damage that is not real
Health bars fall to 1 and nobody dies. The green barrels never actually hurt anyone, and healers have spent a season healing a number that was never true.

The 2nd fight in Murder Row belongs to Zaen Bladesorrow, who throws barrels into the arena. The green ones are supposed to put out area damage that piles up until the group breaks them. Players running the dungeon through the season have worked out that the damage is not there at all: the bar drops, the scrolling text says you are being hit, and a character can sit at 1 health taking barrel after barrel without ever dying.
What is wrong is the interface, not the fight. For everyone except the tank the only real area damage in the encounter is the boss's big hit; the rest of the time the health is quietly kept topped up underneath. The bar only corrects itself when something real lands — a melee swing on the tank, that big hit on the group, or a self-damaging ability like a warlock's own speed buff. This is why every bar in the party snaps back to near full at the moment the real damage goes out.
The consequences land on the healer. Smart heals work from the true numbers rather than from the bars, so they go somewhere other than where the raid frames are screaming; a health potion or a healthstone refuses outright, because a character cannot drink at full health even if the bar says otherwise. Logs show the same split: the damage is recorded, and the health bars in them never move.
For a group chasing a timer the practical reading is that the healer only has to cover the one real hit and can stop between them, however alarming the frames look. This comes from players reading their own logs rather than from an announcement: Blizzard has not written about the encounter, has not said whether the display will be corrected and has not said whether the damage is meant to exist at all.