Shadow utility

Healing is always just worse than mitigation in scaling environments because mitigation scales with the amount being dealt while healing stays the same. Same can be said for AoE stops and other methods of prevention.

Yeah, I guess the scaling of even a beefy ve would eventually be problematic. It would just be cool if it was noticeable. Maybe in raids a few spriests using ve is meaningful or even one could be scheduled as a healing cd? I havenā€™t raided mythic so Iā€™m not sure. Just speaking from experience in m+ it doesnā€™t feel valuable at all. I have a friend who also plays disc and shadow at a high level, and earlier in the season I ran some 22s and 23s with them. Even when they lined ve up with a healing check (say the double dragons in rise or the aoe during and after stonecracker on iridikron) it just didnā€™t feel meaningful. Like if we look at the logs Iā€™m sure it contributed some healing, but it isnā€™t enough for me as a healer to say, ā€œcool I can just send bender for dps or hold it for the next check.ā€ If it doesnā€™t allow me to save my cd or use it some other way as a healer, it kind of feels like itā€™s probably just wasted healing since Iā€™m covering it anyway, you know?

I guess Iā€™m confused. You encountered a bad player that didnā€™t utilized their toolkit. How does this implicate priest utility?

This describes VE in raids too.

High keys are more about surviving stuff as I stated before. That mage boss in EB is especially brutal because you have to deal with 300k * 4 unmitigated fire bolts being fired at back-to-back about 8-12 times the whole fight. As a healer you canā€™t even properly heal the group because you have to move to avoid one shotting fire puddles.

I have 14% leech on my Priest and it doesnā€™t equal out to a survivability increase like having 20% avoidance or 20% versatility.

For whatever itā€™s worth on Sol on the first cinderbolt storm and any cast of it paired with the arcane orb the puddles donā€™t end up in melee range. The ones paired with frost are still kind of an every man for themselves situation.