I can’t tell if it’s because I’m still working out how best to heal with the class, if it’s tangibly missing something, or a mixture of both. Some of the content I’m healing may also be a factor. PUGs do not seem to understand our range limitations, and when fights go south it can be very difficult to reposition and reach them.
Naturally, that is entirely my fault. 
Mostly, everything heals like a sponge, and I don’t seem to have any “oh snap” buttons that can help my raid out of their respective jams. That the raids are so much easier only amplifies this for me.
Is it just me? Or is our toolkit woefully incomplete?
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I may be new to the spec, but what it seems is that they redesigned Pres’ strenghts with the 3 apex talents in mind. I didn’t actually test them on Beta, but they do read super strong especially for Flameshaper’s more constant Dream Breaths.
I wouldn’t find suprising if they rebalanced Pres like that, since they practically did the same thing for Devourer Annihilator - a hero spec that only feels whole with the Apex talents. I say that but I don’t really agree with it. No spec should only feel good just because of level capped talents.
The main issue comes from the loss of Spiritbloom, not having a burst AoE empower spell that doesn’t require positional targeting is a big loss. I do believe the apex talents will help with some of the burst / AoE as Merithra’s Blessing procs a lot adding a chain heal-like component to Reversion casts quite often, also 125% increase to initial healing on Dream Breath will help a bit on the burst healing front (assuming players don’t position themselves in stupid ways).
I’m hoping we will continue to see some tweaks and buffs, at this point though I don’t think we will see the return of Spiritbloom. I think Chronowarden needs more love than Flameshaper currently but I’ve gotten used to changing up from the focus on casting empower spells moving from Chronowarden to Flameshaper.
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I thought that this burst aoe component could be better designed if Dream Breath’s max empower would actually transfer all healing upfront with no HoT. Still has the positional ailments, but to my experience DB is easier to aim, unless the ranged person is really working against you.
What currently bothers me the most is the “jump to” from Verdant Embrace, as it not only forces me out of my positional setup, but also potentially puts me in danger. I’ve had the advice to use VE on others via echo only, but feels bad to purposedly gimp a spell just to fix a bad design, since I can’t double dip on it to do a big healing on the same person.
In the end I just forced into take Dream Simulacrum to avoid all of this. 
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The shift in focus towards Dream Breath really amplifies one of the single biggest drawbacks to healing as Preservation—with range being a close second:
We are now the only healer in the game with the hard requirement to have our healing targets directly in front of us. That seems like an oversight, and makes us far less versatile than other healers.
And I’m not going to lie, it has me very seriously reconsidering my main for Midnight. 
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You’re not missing anything, and unfortunately if Midnight goes live the way things are currently, we’ll be seriously struggling moving forward. We have pretty great AoE, but our setup time and positional requirements make things difficult for some situations and make pugging even harder than it otherwise would be. Couple that with our lacking single-target priority/split-cleave healing being gone (with the removal of Spiritbloom, generally) and we come out pretty much dead last in terms of M+ performance.
In a Raid environment we’re looking pretty good, but that’s not my primary content (if I even raid at all), so… Blizzard really just wants me to stop playing Evoker (or dracthyr at all, I guess, since Disc is also suffering and I haven’t played Holy ever) and roll Druid.
Now, if they just gave us dracthyr Druids…
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What I’ve been struggling with is without spiritbloom or aoe lifebind you really need to use flame as a direct heal wayyyyyy more. It’s also weird thinking of verdent as being a big spot heal rather than a combo set up.
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I kind of don’t agree. Breath is what it is but the pumper has now is verdent and flame spam. It’s weird after years of lifebind but it is still quite strong.
Dusted off the Shaman last night, and the differences are stark.
100% confirmed to me that Pres is broken, and is handicapped with limitations that apex talents are unlikely to address.
My tin foil hat has been telling me for a while that there are preferentially weighted classes and specs. They don’t dominate numbers, but their quality of life is significantly better. It’s far too off-topic for me to delve into why, but this seems like an inexplicable series of design choices that make no sense.
YMMV, of course.
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Who knows man. They effectively ignored all the feedback in the beta forums and decided to move forward with their new design instead.
I’ve reached the stage of acceptance. Either play a different class you think is fun or quit entirely.
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Yep, think that’s my plan. Hanging up the evoker and going shaman instead.
Which sucks. I really loved this class. 
This is my biggest gripe for sure.
You can’t fundamentally change a spec and then not action on any of the feedback. It’s wild.
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Every now and then I’ll pug with a range DPS who positions like I do, which is to be the tail end charlie of the group.
In those situations, playing Pres feels awful because I’ll move back to cover everyone with Dream Breath and the lock/hunter (seems to always be pet classes) will move back behind me.
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Echo them so they get DBs/etc and if they die, letm know why 
@OP
I’ve been playing other games this past week, but I was playing pres otherwise in prepatch.
Mostly keys - raids are too under tuned. I spent one afternoon in a mythic raid pug, enjoyed myself bit more, but the logistics of getting a group for harder raids isn’t worth the time for maybe 1-2 hours of game time.
I’ve been doing flameshaper. Always preferred it. It feels fine for me. If I buy the expansion, I already decided on my build with the new talent points, and I wouldn’t taking the apex talent. I’m using those points for the emerald blossom buffing talents, that way both my echoes and blossoms can be strong, seeing how they removed engulf and made consume flame scale from emerald blossom. I can handle not having reversion turn into a spike heal, I just use it for the +10% buff it gives and it proccing instant living flames (with appropriate talents taken).
I’ve also been using the talent where casting EB gives a free echo, and honestly the bonus to casts per minute is super nice.
For keys, Fire Breath is a big hps source. I couldn’t imagine playing keys without the talents that cause fire breath to heal, cause fire breath to make living flame cleave, and makes living flame instant every now and again. And maybe not for the direct heal talent, but the other ones are valuable even in raid.
I’ve also been using Dream Flight. It’s healing coefficient got buffed. Especially when the raid has to soak something, or some other mechanic corrales them all together, it feels really good to get a full raid blanket heal with it. Then there’s that talent that gives essence generation afterwards which is fun.
Not gonna say I don’t miss old life bind, or spirit bloom, or engulf. But it’s still been feeling fun enough, at least for me.
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This annoys me personally, that you have to spec into making one of your main healing CDs not have a chance to just insta kill you.
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Right! And since it’s literally a capstone talent, it severely limits the builds you can make if you want that “QoL”.
I wouldn’t mind as much if Dream Simulacrum was a tier 2 talent somewhere in the middle of the tree.
In fact, with the current design, I’d rather VE be the Dream Simulacrum effect by default and the current talent is either a) Just ake VE stronger or b) Give 2 charges but you now leap to the target.