Method Ranking of 8.3 M+ Healers
TL:DR for those who don’t watch it:
- Out of 6 healing specs, Disc is ranked 5th, Holy 6th
- Disc: Just don’t have the throughput
- Holy: Is there anything good about this spec?
See you in Shadowlands.
21 Likes
With 8.3 we can add Shadow to the crap list too
Priests are all around terrible. Welcome to BFA!
21 Likes
oh no! disc is not the best for pushing the highest keys! how i will ever complete my weekly +10 or +15??? guess i’ll quit
/s
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I stopped watching ranking videos because I realized they don’t speak to the average player, only the cutting edge. Sorry if you play there.
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The downside of these sorts of rankings is it trickles down. I’m a lucky disc priest who always has access to a guild tank and usually a full guild group of semi to decently competent folks. These may be rankings for +20, but your average little +5 or a higher +10 or +12 won’t take you because you’re not a resto druid or a holy paladin. The meta for high key pushing and MDI influences the average playerbase, so if you want groups, you end up rerolling—I rerolled resto druid for season 2 when all my friends quit and I needed to pug because no one would take a holy priest, even decently geared with a decent io score from the past season. Sadness.
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I’m sorry you were rejected so much. That sounds painful. I don’t experience that at 5-12 keys, they’re generally so starved for healers. I almost always get into the first group I queue for in that range, and have never been rejected more than twice in a row.
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Well, the sad thing is that, I in fact mostly AGREE with this ranking.
Wanna add another thing to the BFA crap list in general? Huge class imbalance.
“With two healing specs, at least one of them will be viable!” Nope, they can both suck.
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Eh I’ll still play it, mostly because the goal of my friends is to get the mount for doing +15s.
Feel for anyone who pugs though, might as well just swap to one of the top 3 (MW/Rdruid/Hpal) since not much will change until the next xpac.
I mean it does have a lot of impact on how people play the game. Most of the healers who are serious about m+ and also raid mythic just push m+ on their druid alts. There are some amazing raid healers in my guild and the only ones who actually heals high keys on her raid character is the resto druid, and most of the people in my guild who heal high keys are just dps or healers on their resto druid alts.
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Its ironic because the 1 time Priest heals was the best for M+ i thought they would keep it that way for a while considering how good druid heals were for so long but nope they nerfed it immediately. and then just started constantly nerfing it.
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I play mostly Holy. The key words for success in M+ are: survival, mobility, utility, damage, etc. For these, Holy spec scores 2-3 out of 10.
They pretty much need to revamp the Holy spec to make it M+ viable. Angelic Feather at baseline is a mandatory step one IMO.
6 Likes
The ranking is fair and really well explained tbh. The Holy Priest part really exposes the main problem, healing throughput is “fine” yet not the best, and for every other relevant category is by far the worse.
Disc felt great in 8.0 for M+, it was actually No2 overall only behind Resto Druid, but it was extremely overpowered in Raiding (Mythic Raiding mostly). Even then the healing throughput in M+ was not as high as what Druids and Monks were able to do but the spec felt great to play and made up for the slightly less throughput pretty well.
As much as I love how Disc works, I think there’s going to be a need for big changes to make it scale better for smaller groups and not so overpowered in Mythic Raiding. Whatever they do with it I hope they keep the pro-active aspect and the high reward from playing correctly and timing your abilities well.
The Priest class in general also really needs better tools to make it attractive for M+, mostly comes down to utility and survivability we really need more impactful tools there.
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Since it hasn’t been the best to begin with, for players who want to be competitive with disc, it’s a pretty big change.
It’s really not even the cutting edge.
The issue with holy is even they improved the utility and the healing, it still falls behind in damage. That’s why resto, holy pali, mw, and disc were the main competitive healers.
Holy is and has always been one dimensional. Which… honestly sucks. I wouldn’t mind playing it. I don’t get why it’s almost always a forgotten spec.
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I object to the use of overpowered in raiding my friend. How do you characterise that? By pure hps measures they were like bottom often in heroic and not in the top 2 for mythic raiding. What they WERE, is in the meta with hpallies in world first races. Im not sure that qualifies them as extremely overpowered. Just useful in what the world first were trying to achieve. dps, heals, damage mititgation.
I also watched methods vid and agreed with their assessment. I mean if you have a set tank, group etc then sure you can do your 15’s. But in a pug environment mostly you wont get a gig. Pushing 20’s really needs that set group.
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Well you are talking about 8.2 which was after multiple nerfs from how Disc was at the early stages of BFA (I was talking about 8.0 when I said extremely overpowered in Raiding).
I think it’s pretty safe to say that if a spec took nerf after nerf along multiple patches and was still a top2 “meta” choice for Raiding (mythic) in 8.2 then before any of those nerfs it was indeed extremely overpowered for it. Not only that but the other classes had not been buffed yet (Glimmer didn’t even exist back then).
You still didn’t explain how you are assessing that overpoweredness 
It’s nice to know that I am once again wasting my time on this class. Sigh don’t know why I even bothered starting this toon up first for 8.3.
It is OK to be diverse and balanced.
I am personally OK with priest for Holy to be “one-dimensional” - poor mobility, defensive, damage, but then make the throughput ridiculously high. Design it as the “glass cannon of healer”. Some may still have problem with that, but I will consider that as balanced and take it any day.
Right now Holy’s throughput is above average but it’s laying eggs in every other category. That’s when a spec is just totally non-viable.
Just FYI, rerolling class isn’t an option for many, including me. Having been playing my Nelf since Vanilla, I refuse to touch another class as main. I’m approaching the age of 40, and it boils down to playing my priest in WoW or just quitting video game all together.
13 Likes
This. I committed myself to priest for 8.3, because I really do love this class—this is my second priest, one on Horde and one on Alliance. I’ve played Holy, Shadow, and Disc interchangeably this entire expansion, but when you’re a class with TWO healing specs that are both suddenly eating dirt from Blizzard…
The essence system has locked a lot of folks into characters this expansion. Gear isn’t really a hurdle to swapping to a new class, it’s having to redo weeks of Nazjatar or Mechagon dailies again or trying to farm EP in 8.3 to regain the essences you need for your class not to be a brick—because you need all these external items for your spec to play well this expansion.
With what they did to priest, I would reroll to another healing class to be valuable to my team and decent across the board in the content I enjoy. But yeah, not doing that essence grind for the third time.
4 Likes
I have played 5/6 healing spec in BFA (except Resto shaman) and to tell you the truth I rather play the priest because it is fun to play.
The Resto Druid is so boring to play that even with the utilities and good throughput its just so unfun to play.
The Holy Pally is so glimmer depended that you are spending most of your time just farming to acquire the azerite gear. (hard to get the gear when you don’t raid at all and have to rely on RNG from the vendor)
Mistweaver is my second main and has been strong all expansion but can get boring to play because of how easy it is to play ATM.
The two priest spec are the reason I love the priest. I love Disc and Holy equally and I will continue to play it regardless of some stupid tier list.
I am not say the Method video is wrong when it comes to high level keys but I am not going to let some META [Most Easiest (Efficient) Strategy Available] video determine how I play the game unless it becomes unplayable.
5 Likes