WoW Midnight: every melee hit lies to your health bar

The fake damage in Murder Row was fixed overnight, but it left players wondering whether health bars could be trusted at all. They were right to wonder. Theorycrafters have now traced a second, much wider problem: every melee swing an enemy lands shows up on the bar at roughly double its real size before snapping back.

The sequence is always the same. The swing connects, the bar plunges, the low-health warning flashes and the edge of the screen goes red, and then the bar rebounds on its own with no heal involved. The number it rebounds to is the correct one; the plunge was never real. Because the phantom part cannot kill, characters have been dropping to exactly 1 health and surviving, which is what first made people look.

It falls hardest on tanks, since they take most of the melee in the game, but anyone who gets hit in melee sees it, and it shows on raid frames and player frames alike, on the default interface and through addons. Players had been blaming well-timed heals or class passives for health that bounced back on its own. It has been in the game at least since the expansion opened, and in the one before it.

The practical damage is to judgement. A healer watching a bar fall that far reaches for a cooldown that was not needed, and a tank reads a hit as near-fatal when it was ordinary. Blizzard has said nothing about it yet, and this rests on one group of players tracing the numbers rather than on an announcement.