I don’t normally watch “E-Sports” but somehow I found myself watching Team Liquid and Echo_Sports grinding the undermine raid and ho boy…
Top healing was Disc priest ahead by a solid 500k+ absolutely destroying the charts followed by Monk with Resto Druid and Holy Paladin struggling to see who can be the most garbage.
It ain’t right that Disc Priest does more healing than Holy. IMO, if we assume at current item levels that a DPS can do 1m DPS and a healer can do 1m HPS than Disc Priest should do 250k DPS and 750k HPS, Holy should do 1m HPS, and Shadow should do 250k HPS and 750k DPS. The purpose being to establish Priest as THE healing class. Never a top tier DPS class. Let it fit the theme. Playstyle choice and talent choices could alter the balance but that would be my ideal situation.
All Priests heal to some extent. Discipline Priest should be primary healing with some damage added in, Shadow should be primarily DPS with healing added in, and Holy should be pure healing.
That’s my unpopular opinion, I’ll see myself out now.
They did try this in legion and quickly gave up on it because giving disc damage made it more desirable over holy. Because if it does enough healing but still does that damage, then there’s no reason not to take it. But if it doesn’t do enough healing then it just shouldn’t exist as a class.
Blizz’s approach since late shadowlands has basically been to make all healers fairly capable in 5 man groups HPS/DPS-wise (and what ends up setting them apart is mitigations - which they still haven’t solved). And in raid, there’s HPS healers and healers with a slight damage mix (disc and the melee healers, basically).
The issue is usually the pure HPS raid healers are not doing the best raid HPS till they’re fully kitted out in tier - and at that point you’ve probably cleared. But it’s kinda gone back and forth between a lot of specs in the past few tiers so 
.
To the OP’s point though, I don’t think that’s actually true. I’ve also been watching the race and the Disc priests are only doing insane HPS on pulls where they die during/just after a ramp. Which is kind of what you’d expect since they do all their healing in ramp windows (at a high level). It’s like if a fight starts and a holy priest is assigned to Hymn the very first damage event - and no other healer CDs are going off - and the raid dies at that point, the holy priest is going to have some wild HPS. But it doesn’t mean they’re going nuts.
What the current log data seems to actually show is that Evoker, Hpriest and Pally are very far behind, while everyone else is doing pretty fine.
Which healer does the most is less about performance and more about where CDs are assigned and how the fights play. HPS metrics do not mean anything. There’s still only one disc priest to three mistweavers.
What you say have some logic but thats not how disc work, ofc they are overtuned, but their attonement (convert damage into healing) is based on stats… their damage conversion into healing can go easily into 60% of dmg becoming heal.
I have to agree that Disc priest is godlike RN, paladin and Holy are fighting for the most garbage position
The argument against Holy is if Disc Shields and Hybrid Healers can make up for Holy’s pure healing then Holy isn’t needed even if it has the strongest heals. Such a specialized healer becomes a net-DPS loss for raids.
The argument in favor of Holy is that Holy’s stronger heals allow you to replace a hybrid healer with a pure dps. Pro raiding guilds are using 1 disc and 3x mistwalkers instead of 1x holy 2x mw and 1 xtra dps. So there’s your answer.
Copying top raid groups just doesn’t make any sense when it comes to healing anyways. There’s so many factors going into the whole raid strategy, you can’t just pull out healing specs and analyze that in a vacuum.
It’s almost like the decision to force healers to DPS was a stupid design decisions that should be discontinued immediately so they can actually properly design and balance healing as a whole.
You have to understand that healing isn’t like DPS in which HPS really matters. To put it another way what is the difference between 1million HPS and 750k HPS, when 500k HPS is what is needed to complete the content? Effectively nothing. Both will successfully over heal which means you still start looking at what else the healer brings, and in your example that would still be Disc pretty much every time because it brings extra and higher damage other healers don’t have.
Blizzard, and frankly the MMO world as a whole it seems, has forgotten that there is another element to playing a healer, the most important element in fact, and that is mana management. Instead of actually making that a proactive part of the kit that has to be managed during and in between heals they just throw a long/semi-long CD at you and call it good.
The closest WoW ever got to making you actively manage your mana was during Vanilla/TBCs 5sr which while rough as hell, considering it was mostly based around stacking spirit and canceling casts and possibly trinket procs/actives depending on the ones you picked, at least required you to think about it. Now you don’t think about it near as much as you just use your mana CD on cooldown and generally that is enough.
Healing by default should be about pushing up health bars, making a finite resource last as long as possible(mana management), and proper use of utility(damage reduction/movement/dispels/interrupts/CC/perhaps damage buffs to DPS/etc.) The longer blizzard keeps trying to force healers to literally do the opposite of what they are intended to do the longer they will struggle with unhealthy designs.
The problem with this is in mythic+, that “effectively nothing” HPS difference is the difference between healers timing a +17 and timing a +13.
The DPS the healer brings will impact that far more than the HPS will.
Healers do damage so that they aren’t standing there doing nothing while they conserve mana. Unless they have mechanics that cause them to heal by dealing damage.
I really don’t think this is much of an issue. They made healing dps so straightforward and easy to weave in that it’s not that big of a deal. There’s also ways to not dps as much, like pulling more in M+ or less healers in raids. The whole concept of healer dps is way overblown. This isn’t FF14.
I’ve also had to manage my mana this expac, in both M+ and of course shuffle. I’ve had to ask the tank for a sip etc., although it’s not often so far. I had to alot as a totemic Rsham especially. Many builds have mana regen talents you can choose to spec into or not also.
I don’t disagree with your healing vision but right now isn’t anywhere as dire as you seem to be saying.
That is what wanding, or throwing an occasional DoT was back when WoW was still young. Before disc had to do it to heal, before people realized that giving a healer significant DPS in a dungeon made things faster, and as a result everyone expected healers to start doing damage and now we have druids kitty weaving, fist weaving, lightsmith, etc etc with pretty much every healer not only having noteworthy DPS in some way but often being expected to make use of it.
I’m not saying healers are in some dire “nothing is playable the game is ruined” doom and gloom silliness. I’m simply referring to what has been a perpetual and consistent thorn in Blizzard side and pain point for healing as a whole since it was implemented, honestly back in MoP when atonement really first got going, effectively gutted in WoD when they first realize it wasn’t healthy, and then they attempted to revamp it for Legion and it’s been creating issues every sense.
As for managing mana I am not talking about “hey I need the occasional drink” which should honestly be expected especially as you do harder and harder content. The entire reason healing and DPS simply don’t mix is healing is taking a finite resource and making it last as long as you possibly can, while DPS is using an unlimited resource to generate as much damage as you can in a small window of time.
The idea of blending those two polar opposites is extremely foolish. It’s why when they used to make the DPS side of the disc kit cost mana you would expect heals to cost it was considered one of the most mana inefficient healing specs in the game, but when they reduced those costs, and gave them what was effectively permanent uptime of shadowfiend/bender/voidwraith suddenly you can just ignore mana as long as you are able to heal through atonement because they have effectively given priest the infinite DPS cheat code.
The design inherently clashes with itself resulting often times either in a class that struggles way to much with mana, because it must always be casting like DPS with the finite resource of a healer, or one that never has to worry about it, because it’s designed around always casting and it’s mana becomes largely irrelevant to support it.
The major factor was making healer’s damage abilities mana neutral or mana positive. Which was a good change in my view.
Giving people something to do when they don’t need to heal was a good change.
I think managing mana would bring a whole lot of headache for healers. Imagine trying to balance that on top of everything else? And it’s another way for dps to mess up and blame you. I just don’t see how it adds much to the game if it’s more than something you need to be aware of and drink water or a mana pot when needed.
Just play shuffle to see how not very fun it is, or how mana imbalances across healers is unfair.
I’m just mostly confused about the whole healer dps thing. I’ve done high M+, mythic bosses, high rated pvp on multiple healing classes and very, very rarely do I actually think about dpsing. Imo this is only a top 1%, rank 1, thing to care about. And I don’t see any reason to care about what they care about.
I agree they need more to do in between healing, which is why I said they needed to make mana management a more proactive thing that healers did during “down time” when people didn’t need healing. This is the key difference between healing and DPSing, that Blizzard, and really no MMO imo, has actually sat down and legitimately thought about. DPS has no down time but healers do, what should a class that is designed around making a finite resource last be doing during down time?
Sadly instead of actually thinking about it most seems to just say “to heck with it, let them DPS to” which imo is both lazy and boring. I didn’t pick a healing class to be a DPS light. I don’t care about doing damage, I care about being challenged with resource management and triage to get people through difficult content and that is what the healing classes should be doing.
If you add actual mana management that requires thought, they should be removing the DPS expectation as a whole. That is the switch I am stating needs to happen to fundamentally fix the design flaws in healing. So to give an example off the top of my head imagine taking the Mist Weavers mana tea, but instead of it being a one button channel that just gives a ton of mana back, it requires smaller “sips” through-out the encounter, all of which used the GCD, but required smaller amounts on an ability with no CD.
I’ll admit no that isn’t the most engaging gameplay but it’s an off the top of my head example of what I am talking about to give you an idea. It is SOMETHING that you have to actually think about, manage, and actually do instead of just waiting around on the 5sr. I see no reason that if blizzard, or every other MMO it seems, can design all these abilities that combo together to create complex rotations for DPS, or even healing combos that they couldn’t make something engaging and fun for mana management as well if they actually put some thought into it, and respected it as the single most important element of being a healer that it is.
You effectively said “go play with bad players and see how hard the class is” which is honestly true for all classes in all content, and isn’t relevant to discussion about class design.
Because sadly that 1%, rank 1, etc, stuff doesn’t just stay there. There is a reason the meta forms based around what those people are doing. I’m glad you have found good groups that have no/limited expectations(I know this sounds harsh but I don’t mean it that way I’m genuinely glad you found people like that), but sadly that places you in the minority of what people experience in the game.
Ok but mana management isn’t always relevant. What if you don’t need to heal and you won’t need more mana?
Or should healer mana bars be bouncing up and down like a yoyo?
Damage is always going to have some degree of relevance.
That should really only be happening at the start of an encounter. Once the encounter starts damage should be doing out both unavoidable and avoidable, with phases of higher and lower HPS requirements to make it through. The challenge of a healer would be to triage them through the low periods while managing mana so you have enough resources to meet the HPS requirements when they are high.
So should mana. If a healer does DPS it should be a known trade off. “Can I afford to spend the mana now, or do I need to conserve it for a HPS check later” should be the general train of thought.
Your desire for how healing should work does not work with how raid healing progression works.
Current content is designed around current class designs. This is a moot point.