Back during the previous expansion (Shadowlands) I could have some fun playing the “dark healer” type sort of by going discipline when leveling priest alts. During this time most of the healing was done with shadowmending, and a glyphed penance to give it a shadowy effect for single target heal. For multi target used power ward radiance in conjunction with shadow covenant and searing pain for some AOE heals from atonement with shadowy spell effects involved.
Then come Dragonflight, they took away shadow mend, and removed searing pain. Shadow covenant is still there as a talent I think but there’s no shadow mend thingy to use it on really… I guess I still have my shadowy glyphed penance, and radiance is kind of “half-shadow” (the spell effect for it shows a glowy holy orb in one hand, and glowy shadow orb in the other hand if you pay close attention).
I figured at first “Meh, give it a few weeks. I’ll get over it.” But a few weeks turned into a month or so. And I still haven’t gotten over the loss of being a ‘dark shadowy healer.’ I don’t know why they insist on all the heal classes being all holy or nature-ish goody two shoes archetypes, while DPS and tank roles can make Death Knights and Demon Hunters if they want to be dark/edgy. At this point in time there’s nothing like that for healers. I suppose you could make a shaman and RP to be a “Dark Shaman,” but they’re just using the same elemental/watery stuff as regular shaman so nothing to really distinguish them or give off the vibe of being a “dark” or “anti-hero/edgy” healer.
Ideas on possible fixes:
The proposed solution from me would be to do something similar to warlocks green fire quest, where the priests have a quest that turns all their holy spell effects to be all shadowy. It wouldn’t require much of any dev time, just graphics artist work mostly (possibly?). And there’s a lot of situations where it would make sense (Undead characters, void elf priests, green orcs since they are green from being affected by fell, humans who do not believe in the light but are still priests, Trolls that channel shadowy powers from Bwansamdi as their Loa etc.) If anything, given how difficult light can be to use and the stipulations behind using it, there’s a lot more cases where such an item would make sense than it not making sense. Likewise though, I suppose there could also be a thing that turns shadow spells to look holy for the Lightforged Draenei preists too so they don’t feel left out.
Another idea I had was to make some sort of dark healer that heals everyone by draining the life force from enemies… warlock life drain on steroids, that heals everyone to the point of being a viable healer. But it’d be easier to just fix priest with quests to change spell effects than to add yet another class/spec to the game, or to change affliction warlock into being a heal-by-drain healer.
Just leaving this post here to vent a bit and leave my thoughts, before going about my day and heading off to work. And hoping some people see it and agree with me (maybe enough to the point Blizzard sees it and adds in one of these fixes)