They absolutely have comps. But every one of those comps would be better off with literally any other healer.
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My Doomer take is that healers in WoW are dying off.
Healing Shuffle/Arena:
Dampening is the most toxic mechanic and pathetic approach to game design I have ever seen in any game. I had to explain to a friend that there is a debuff which ramps over time which reduces his impact on the game to 0% because he is a healer. He thought I was joking. It literally removes two players from the game. If I had a way to make my opponents inputs as player be reduced to 0% I’d be banned for hacking and be called a cheater but when a billion dollar company does it to a whole archetype of players it’s called ‘game design’. It’s embarrassing.
Healing M+
Is actually fun and engaging content for the most part but it’s also an environment where I spend most of my time playing as a psuedo 3-button DPS rather than as a healer. Is also wildly imbalanced so if I enjoyed playing Holy Priest or Mistweaver I can’t really play keys unless I’m willing to reroll or troll my groups.
Healing Battlegrounds
Healing is the least impactful role. I can top healing by tens of millions and lose every game. I have zero capacity to ‘carry’ my team and I am at the mercy of the DPS on my team. If my DPS are good, my healing doesn’t matter because they’re going to steamroll the opposing team with or without me. If my DPS are bad, my healing doesn’t matter because there is no amount of healing I can do which will allow my DPS to get kills or take objectives or win games. Keeping weak DPS alive all game doesn’t help win games.
Conclusion
If I want to play a healer and have an impact on the outcome of games I don’t have any content in the game that is suitable for me. Great work Blizzard. If I want to play a DPS with some healing on the side I can play M+. If I want to clock in for work so that 4 other players can have fun I can play 3’s or Shuffle. If I want to roleplay Ralph’s “I’m helping” meme I can play BG’s.
There are so many other problems with the game and healers specifically that I doubt Blizzard can right the ship before healer participation dies. We are already there for Shuffle. I wonder how much longer it will take before we are also there for M+ and BG’s.
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But what you forgot to mention is, that only 30 people play prevoker, so basically ALL of them are above 2400?!
I hope this little fake news showed you how important context is. Pure numbers are meaningless! Some better context, data based on check-pvp.fr:
| spec | > 1600 cr | > 2400 cr | ratio in ‰ |
|---|---|---|---|
| Disc | 5617 | 39 | 6.943 |
| MW | 4428 | 114 | 25.745 |
| Rdruid | 3079 | 150 | 48.717 |
| Hpala | 5965 | 188 | 31.517 |
| Hpriest | 4003 | 57 | 14.239 |
| Rshaman | 3132 | 44 | 14.049 |
| Prevoker | 1599 | 30 | 18.762 |
That leads us to the conclusion, that prevoker isn’t as bad as you are trying to make it. It is just not as popular.
The most popular but worst healer by far is disc. The most broken healer by far is Rdruid!
MW seems to be in a balanced spot. Upper midfield, means high to mid A tier.
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The only way to fix the healer problem is for healers to stop playing, leave shuffles if they need to, and do what needss to be done.
Not all the healers are balanced against one another. Blizzard’s balancing design pushes people to move to the FOTM and leaves players behind. Meanwhile, they’re losing subs and more and more healers don’t want to heal or play.
But of course, no significant updates will be released until the next expac and they’ll slowly bleed features into the game that should have been present 2 expansions ago or gate old content because old content can be new content if gated (cough, timewalking). This game is utte garbage at this point.
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Interesting you point out numbers without context are meaningless then proceed to use more meaningless numbers to make a point. Spec complexity is probably one of the most impactful contributing variables when it comes to the percentage of players achieving a certain rating threshold for a spec. It is also one of the most difficult variables to quantify. Disc is an easy spec to play and attracts a lot of bad players which is definitely a contributing factor in the crazy low ratio of high rated disc rep to rep overall. Not saying disc is good right now, just making a point. On the other end of the spectrum hpriest is insanely good, but is difficult to play. Looking at your data one might think hpriest and rsham are in a similar state in the meta… they are certainly not. So basically, just looking at charts and all that can give you kind of an idea of how well off a spec is but it doesn’t paint a complete picture. Add in the fact that certain healers just do well with more comps/more of the classes that are prevalent in the meta, and you have enough variables to completely discount almost any set of data you can pull up. This is probably part of why blizz has a difficult time balancing. Making decisions based on data leads us to crap like 12% damage buffs to secret technique coming in 10.2 lmao.
Maybe they are meaningless from your point of view, but the reason therefore is most likely that you don’t understand them!
So since you are missing deeper knowledge, let me explain it in short an simple. Number of r1 spots are completely depending on how many players a spec has in total. The more spots for r1, the more players you should expect on every rating.
The ratio itself was just to show how many of the > 1600 players are also > 2400. The higher the ratio, the better a spec performs on higher ratings.
Sure, other indicators come into place as well. Is the spec just mostly played by alts but barely anyone mains it? Could be the case for dragon. But that doesn’t change the fact, that Disc is totally underperforming currently based on the ladder.
The table I posted doesn’t say exactly of how much a spec needs to be buffed or nerfed, or if the skill cap is too high to handle it properly. It just shows what is currently performing too good or not good enough. Simple as that.
So based on the ladder we could say, the healer tier list for shuffle looks like that:
Rdruid >>> Hpala > MW >> Prevoker > Hpriest = Rshaman >> Disc
Would you disagree with that?
Both have basically the same R1 cutoff with nearly the same amount of players for that spec. So your personal opinion is maybe just not objectively enough, hmm? 
Yes. Hpriest is much more difficult to play well than rsham and mw but is better (if played well) than either of those specs.
i mean according to ven its like less than 2k
Like I already said, RShaman and HPriest have both nearly the same R1 cutoff. So are you trying to say, that even the top rated HPriests can’t play their spec at the maximum possible level?
And even if that is what you are trying to say, how does that change anything? When both specs are quite similar popular and HPriest players are performing like RShaman players in the end, how exactly are they different?
I mean, theoretically that might be true, I have no idea. But practically they perform equally, so there is no difference.
Yep, and its even worse when you consider most of them arent even queueing anymore
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No that’s not what I’m saying. Disc r1 cutoff is only ~30 points behind the two of them, but r1 cutoff in solo shuffle is not the only metric to describe the overall capability of a spec. Otherwise, we’d be in agreement that disc is in an okay spot too. R1 cutoff is simply a measure of what the top ~10-20 players of that particular spec have bothered to push to so far this season.
Hpriest is perfectly fine, bordering on being a bit overturned. Pretty sure it currently has the best variety of compatible comps in the game.
Rsham is actually pretty strong, just plays terribly into rdruid and hpal which is basically all you see in shuffle.
Disc is seriously hurting in throughput though
No, because we would need to see a lot more Discs on higher ratings based on their lower rated popularity. So it seems they aren’t performing well enough on higher ratings.
But that isn’t the case for HPriest versus RShaman. The ratio for both is the same, the cutoff for r1 is the same, so chances to reach higher ratings are for both specs equally based on the ladder. The reasons therefore don’t matter.
Then how exactly are you explaining that their ratio is identically, that they have nearly the same amount of r1 spots and also nearly the same cutoff. Their spec is better but they can’t perform better? So in terms of balancing, aren’t they equally then if their better spec don’t give them an advantage in the ladder?
Remember what we had before dampening? Forgot what it was called but it gave a huge damage boost to whoever has done the most damage.
You could argue it’s not popular because it’s harder to play. I feel like healers gravitate towards whatever is easier
Could be, or maybe just because its the newest healer spec.
However, it performs okay on higher ratings based on its lower rating popularity. Could be better, but right now it seems to be the median healer spec.
That is only one way to look at it of course. To get a deep look into it, you also need to look at winratio and so on.
it’s WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY harder to play than any other healing spec global for global
rsham and rdruid both have really high skillcaps and a ton of creative ways to use their tools
but the actual gameplay of pres is significantly harder to be rewarded in different ways than being any other healer sitting back 40 yards
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melee sp rsham is good at killing some teams but its trash vs most of what is good.
Why would you even play melee sp rsham in the first place when you can play melee sp hpal or melee sp rdruid. Even MW is better.
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i didn’t say it was bad, i said it was under represented you literally linked the same data that i found on drustvar and are somehow using it to negate an argument that there are 3 healing specs far and above all the others in terms of representation
I used the data to make a point that absolute numbers are meaningless and to show that evoker isn’t as bad.
To argue like there are only 30 evoker but over a hundred mws doesn’t help, because it let evoker look like its the worse healer while it isn’t. It is midfield, basically the median.