You clearly dont understand how their mastery works. Also light of dawn has a 15 yard range btw. No one is talking about what is “popular” here either, but that is not the debate here though. MW and Holy Paly have always been “melee” healers. Ignore that fact if you want but it is stated literally everywhere.
hpal mastery is the shorter distance from yourself or your beacon target, so being in the range stack is wise to ensure all targets you might need to heal are affected strongly by mastery without having to walk over to them. with the volatility of melee stack positioning, it’s probably better to be behind melee to hit them with light of dawn, rather than IN melee blasting just the tanks with it. i dont play hpal enough anymore to tell but thats what my gut says about cone healing
hpal has not always been a melee healer. early on, the only reason to melee was for slow mana recovery, but it was too dangerous to use extensively, and long cast times meant you probably needed to be precasting instead. in bc and wrath, you never go to melee since the mana problem just went away from the addition of shadow priest mana battery, divine plea mana cooldowns, and just tons of int for crit based mana regen while casting. at this point, “healer dps” still did not really exist since dps still cost mana rather than recovered it, and mana still kind of mattered. i didnt raid in cata, and switched to mistweaver in pandaria, where we recover mana based on channeling mana tea instead of melee attacks. jab-jab-uplift was a strong way to play efficiently but it wasnt the only choice. by siege of orgrimmar this was removed from the kit.
to restate my last point: generating healing resources by using melee attacks was removed from the game in mists. nowadays hpal and monk can do it all day long, but there was a deliberate effort by blizz devs to remove this playstyle. healers didnt belong in melee for extended periods of time.
It’s a talent for burst/movement, not throughput
thats what im saying. you can fast vivify quickly with soothing. not instant, but still pretty fast, and can easily transition into more healing if the one vivify isnt enough to do the job. you can just as easily waste your instant vivify while soothing a target than use it on the move. even if they add 15% throughput on the cast consuming the proc, it’s a talent better spent elsewhere for me
3 minute cooldown that only works at the end of a fight
adds exist on most fights. currently with fated raids, touch of death pretty much always has a usable target. my favorite is to kill one of the first chaos motes that come out. it respawns as two motes instantly, so cleave is that much more efficient for the entire raid. i see it as pushing the raid forward one “cleave kill wave” by skipping the first one, resulting in tons more stacks of the buff. so, you can usually get more than one use out of it. im not suggesting our baseline dps is impressive, but i find it acceptable so i dont want to put points into it.
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i like your build, i think 3x auras is awesome, but i think 3 points for calming coalescence and prereqs might be overkill since cocoon + free hots aught to do the job, but you can do things with that which i cant, so maybe its worth. all im saying is, you cant call us a melee only class after spending 6 talent points on abilities that require melee. you’re building into it, so of course it becomes true.
when you look at our new dragonflight baseline, we go to melee for aoe dps, aoe stun, touch of death. but nothing about that interacts with our healing unless we talent for it. calling us a melee healer at that point is surely wrong: we are a regular healer with some melee dps abilities. to reiterate: without talents, we have limited dps/utiltiy reason to enter melee, and zero healing reason to enter melee.
i wouldnt say i “miss” interrupts since i dont go for all of them. i build for raid, and i have spear hand in case i see dps missing them, then i can help. i consider my interrupt to be “the last interrupt the raid has” so that when there is no one else, there is me. i dont get tons of them, but every interrupt i get is one that wouldn’t be covered by anyone else. at that point, it’s a raid cooldown, since it negates a punishment from missed interrupt.
i think our utility and defensives ARE insane. transcend + tiger lust + momentum or celerity is just over the top mobility. our defensives are only outclassed by channeled defenses or immunities. i intend to always be in the soaks, and put all of them to their fullest use. with our passive 16% increased healing taken and multitude of powerful defenses, and not to mention always being in range of a mistweaver for healing, we are the perfect spec for the job
this is my baseline for mistweaver in DF. of course like you, there is wiggle room for small adjustments but for the most part i have everything i need excepting keystones in the mistweaver tree. clouded focus can swap in for jade bond as needed. i feel cocoon can do its job with baseline absorb + hots. only one i feel missing is overflowing mists but that isnt 100% reliable throughput so it’s waiting just in case. but i have all the mobility, and almost every defensive excepting elusive mists which i pass since i dont want restrictions on abilities to use for a mere 6% damage reduction
the idea with my build is that raids are complicated beasts, and using a mistweaver’s extreme mobility at range to do fight mechanics is vastly more valuable to me than contributing half a tank worth of dps. every time a raid wipes because of a missed range soak, but theres a mistweaver in melee? what a waste. too busy pumping to play the game i guess. not a personal attack since having talked to you some and looked at your spec, i bet you would leave melee to do this, but i see our mobility and survivability as such an extreme advantage in a progression raid environment, im not willing to give it up for single target dps (unless we wipe to enrage with everyone alive the whole fight)
pvp knockback
the knockback portion of cjl triggers when receiving a melee attack from your target, with a hidden internal cooldown. kinda weird but fun to use once you knew how it worked. and yea its an easy interrupt sadly
you just gimp yourself trying to cjl the entire fight… it’s a literal fact monk are melee healers and you can perform better or react faster, by being in melee .
i definitely dont cjl the entire fight, only when theres no healing or mechanics to do, or of something absolutely needs every bit of damage and i didnt talent for melee abilities. if i expect to need to contribute single target dps, i definitely do talent melee abilities. perform better in melee? perhaps, depending on how you define “better performance”. if that means max out dps+hps, perhaps you’re right, with constant high efficiency smart healing and mana regen, and added dps. if it means “make enough allies survive in order to kill the boss”, i think you’re wrong. even considering our melee utility abilities like leg sweep and spear hand, if they’re needed we have no issue entering melee in time to use them, so confining ourselves to melee is just silly. also have to disagree that melee helps reaction time since it limits our vision and requires constant use of global cooldowns. at range, you can see allies making mistakes before the damage hits and have a cocoon on them (or yu’lon prepped and enveloping precasted) ahead of time to save a death (or a wipe). that’s just not happening in melee since allies’ positions are often not even rendered on your screen.
before someone says “just kick people who make mistakes”, i say no. if your healer playstyle is unable to accommodate allies making mistakes, you are probably just trying to score the biggest parse, rather than someone who enjoys supporting allies (and friends) in a co-op video game. with this philosophy, rescuing one extra dps from death is worth way more than contributing your own dps.