Mechanically I think that all three priest specs are cohesively designed and thematic, and I do enjoy playing all three of them. That said, playing a priest and then switching to evoker is like driving a horse drawn carriage versus a car, or playing the game on hard mode and then switching to easy. I’ll break down why this is:
- You completely ignore mobility skill checks by spending half of your time with a leap/hover speed bonus, leap to ally, and a charge that takes you across the map and can’t be interrupted. It’s hard to even put in perspective how much mobility Evoker has compared to priest with no real tradeoffs in any other category.
- Your heals are all instant cast, different schools, and you have at least 4 reactive party/raid wide heals that are as strong or stronger than holy words. You can outheal mechanics without learning when any of those mechanics because of how strong and fast the reactive healing is.
- You can get equal to or greater than the amount of damage of others healers out without hard casting outside of hovers. You can almost always deal damage while moving, and your heals, while instant, reactive, and large are also hots that let you spend globals not healing.
- The damage rotation requires almost no spinning plates (dot management) or ramp up. You are almost always free to start healing or doing damage without spending precious seconds settings up PtWs or VTs.
I have stuck with priest since TBC, and seen a lot of bad times. I’ve seen many season were even with two healing specs, priests weren’t taken because of issues in our utility and mobility. In BfA for example, many of us will remember the dominance of rdruid/hpal. And indeed, evokers have become something of a neo-rdruid. We’ve also watched as precious utlity like brez has gone to hpal that could have helped two healing specs have more m+ relevance instead of one.
Overall, the issue isn’t with priest but with the relative power gap Blizzard has created by removing the limiters on new classes. In order to fix this it will require large reworks, and we all know that isn’t likely to happen mid-expansion. It’s depressing to think that we will continue to suffer for 2-3 more years without addressing the disparity between healers.