I'm done trolling let's be honest and constructive about MW

[Toixic-burning-blade]

TLDR: Don’t blame class imbalance on your inability to make it work. Outside of the top .1%, you can play anything in content and be fine.

@Botán-proudmoore

Right now if you want to be more offensive from your healing you run Frost shards particularly for the winds of Winter bonus. That bonus contributes anywhere from 25 to 40% of your overall damage. With that set bonus going away we are going to lose a decent chunk of our damage.

Realistically without a rework (which is what the spec needs) the only thing they can buff for our damage is SCK because we need to understand that we are one of the higher damage healers in raid, next to Hpal and Disc priest, even without our dom sets. (see: Castle Nathria) If our ST was buffed, we would be in a situation that Hpal was in for a while because of Ashen Hallow where it would be leagues ahead of any other healer in damage and healing. We can agree that this was bad and we don’t want that to happen again thus the only thing they can buff damage wise, outside of a rework, is SCK. Our single target in keys is not good compared to other healers (avg 2.5-3.2k depending on RSK resets/healing needed) In raid the reason our damage shows up so “good” is because during the boss encounters we actively have to dps to do healing, just like Hpal and Disc priest, who also have good healer damage in raid. While Rshaman has higher potential damage, in raid they are pretty much global locked with healing spells and won’t be doing as much damage as they do in keys.

@Botán-proudmoore

The biggest issue we have is in Mythic Plus. There’s such a gap between us and most of the other specs that it’s a bit concerning. Raw healing throughput is pretty useless and while we do have pretty good utility we don’t have that snap quick healing the other classes have or any kind of way to reduce damage coming out.

There’s a few reasons there is such a gap between Mistweaver and other healers.

1. Due to past performance in raid and other forms of content, MW is generally underrepresented in terms of people playing it. Players like to play what’s considered meta and MW hasn’t had it’s time in a while, and in keys it’s short lived bursts (think MDI in BFA, Way of the Crane, etc).
2. Community perception is probably the biggest culprit in MW’s current state. Mistweavers, like I’ve shown, can do content higher than a majority of the community is capable of doing even on meta classes, but because there aren’t a lot of us doing the content, the community tends to think the class is incapable when in reality it’s the player instead or they think that meta is the only way they can time their +20.
3. Niches. Mistweaver has an insane amount of throughput and unfortunately this doesn’t translate well to BFA or Shadowlands M+. If you took the time to do any Timewalking Legion M+, you’d see there are dungeons more designed around throughput on high keys (last boss Court of Stars, 2nd boss Court of Stars) where Mistweaver excels.

Infinitely scaling content will ALWAYS contain a “meta” and just because Mistweaver doesn’t happen to be it, it doesn’t mean it’s incapable of content close to it.

Is Mistweaver damage, in keys, significantly lower than other healers? Yes.

Will this become even more apparent going into 9.2? Yes.

Does this matter to someone who is doing 10, 15, 20 keys? No. It doesn’t start to become a significant problem until 25+.

Could a Rsham or Hpal double avg MW dps in keys? Absolutely, but again, unless you’re doing 25+s it really doesn’t matter, and at that point you make the decision to play a Rsham or Hpal.

(Edit: first time posting on forums, had to fix a few formatting errors)