Just some background, I am currently ranked 146th in the world for Damage as a MW Monk and somewhere in the 1500 in HPS. So I have some credentials to speak on this topic.
Unlike other healers, we rely on the frost set and this does anywhere from 30-50% of my damage typically. The unholy set is usually a 15-20% overall boost in damage, maybe less for healing. As it stands, we are actually the lowest DPS Healer in the game when looking at Guardian Logs:
H Pally: 8.8k
R Shaman: 7k
R druid: 5.9k
H Priest: 5.5k
D Priest: 5.4k
MW: 5.3k
Sure we do insane HPS but when did HPS actually matter? Sure when you’re pushing the race to world first, but then you want good DRs which we lack. Our 2 & 4 pieces set bonus gives us more of something that frankly we don’t need. We don’t need more raw HPS, we are already way ahead of everyone else. What we need is either more damage or a DR at the least.
So we will need direct buffs to our damaging abilities and something that works better with our kit. A stationary 4 piece for a mobile healer seems awful.
It’s borrowed power, this honestly isn’t a big deal because all the other classes also to some degree rely on the sets to boost their dmg. Hpal dmg has just been incredibly strong with max paragons and ashen, but any dmg parse you see for a healer is either using blood link or winds of winter, so the other healers are also gonna be affected.
None of these numbers are realistic for progression raiding. These are all dps parse numbers where the healer is spending over 90% of their GCDs purely on damage. They are all meaningless.
You need to look closer to 75% parse on warcraftlogs to get a valid look at what progression healer dps is like
The problem is, I’m parsing 95% healing throughput while doing 99% damage. On my resto shaman I can do about 85% healing and do double damage of my MW. I was doing an M+ on my 239 resto shaman, did 3.9K DPS and did insane healing. My monk struggles to just keep everyone alive (#puglife) and she’s 248. My highest DPS fight as a MW is Soulrender at 4.2K, my resto shaman can easily do 6-7k and maybe 1-2k less HPS.
But these aren’t realistic numbers. In actual prog I would hope you aren’t using the frost gems. The rsham in my guild only does big dmg on fights he doesn’t have to heal, when he does end up healing his dmg is low. MW can output pretty solid damage while doing great healing in raid.
There are pallies doing that much dps as holy. With that being said its a gimmick imho. Normally, with high dps healers, you’ll see logs where they are doing a raid boss significantly faster then designed for, getting multiple buffs (like PI), are out gearing content, and are doing little to no healing as a couple examples.
Its interesting to see the potential of a healers dps, but doesn’t fit most normal scenario’s.