The newest healer class seems to be missing from everything: raid logs, M+, etc. Has the class completely fallen behind all the other healers at this point with its range limitations, quirky spells, etc? With shaman, disc, druids, and monks, why bother with an evoker? What are folks thoughts?
I don’t really play healers much, but from my experiences playing with most of them, my main thing I would think of is: do they even have any sort of niche they excel in? Like every other healer seems to have something they can pretty much say they excel in, except for Preservation Evoker, but that could also just be my inexperience with seeing them.
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Pres’s healing is very, very good. That isn’t the problem.
Preservation’s problems are 1. its damage is absolutely abysmal compared to other healers, when it’s absolutely a healer’s duty to contribute meaningful damage once the healing output’s there and 2. that 30-yd range is a massive restriction on how the spec can perform on certain fights, depending on the fight design, in both raid and M+. On M Gallywix, for instance, for every point during which you’re stacked and in need of an absolute boatload of burst healing (Total Destruction shield) there’s an entire 4-6 minutes of the fight where your raid is spread out across a massive area and it’s genuinely hard to reach everyone without doming your melee with the Mayhem Rockets. It’s certainly playable, and workable, but it ain’t as good as stuff like Disc or MW or RDruid.
Now, if you wanna see a tier where Preservation was incredibly dominant, look at the earlier stages of last tier. Pres was completely gapping everything else because you could just hit Engulf and effectively use a raid-wide Lay on Hands to counteract any sort of high-healing windows (i.e. Ansurek green circles, Broodtwister canisters, Nexus Princess suck-ins). Preservation was legit doing north 2.6M HPS on Nexus Princess (a 5-heal boss during 11.0) before we even got much of the weekly 2.25% buffs and would genuinely be doing as much healing last season as it does now with significantly worse gear if guilds started 4-healing Nexus before Preservation got nerfed HARD. You play it when the damage profiles work for it and it windmill dunks on everything else.