We've just finished our second week of Mythic Plus and I've just gotten through our first fortified and first tyrannical weeks. I didn't get to play all of the healers as much as I wanted to over the past couple of weeks with the holiday season, Christmas and things like that. It also feels like quite a lot has changed, like the meta is evolving. We're getting a lot of information from streamers pushing keys, RaiderIOs and logs and things like that. Also, just us learning the dungeons, getting more practice on bosses and obviously getting more geared up. So my opinions have changed or evolved quite a lot from the first few days of Mythic Plus to now after the two weeks.

But I wanted to go through some of the notes I've been making, some of the thoughts I've been having while playing all of the healers. Now, I've been running all of my keys, most of them or most of my healers are still gearing up, most of them are in the now 375 to 380 range. So, all quite undergeared compared to being able to just play one character and have it at like 400-405 item level at the moment.

I've been trying to stick to mainly around tens - some eights, nines, tens, elevens, twelves - I've done a couple of 13s, 14s, 15s with friends, but almost all of my keys have just been normal pub keys.

Might as well discuss the two elephants in the room when it comes to healing: Restoration Druids and Mistweaver Monks.

These two healers are much better than any other healer, with Holy Paladins coming close. The reason why these healers feel much better than the rest is because most people, myself included, are trying to push keys in an undergeared state, at 370 item level or lower. We should be doing these keys at 410 item level or higher.

This means that healers with the highest throughput are doing the best and feeling the best at the moment, because they can heal through mechanics that other healers are struggling with. Once everyone gets their two-piece and four-piece sets, best-in-slot trinkets, and is sitting at 410 item level or higher, I don't think any of the healers will have problems with throughput in the normally weekly 20 range.

However, for anyone willing to push or wants to push much higher level keys, these issues we're seeing may still persist.

Now while we're undergeared, this will become an issue again later on. For example, you will need a lot of throughput if you're going to step into a Temple of the Jade Serpent at the end of the season (e.g. at Mythic 25 or 30). So, the healers with the most throughput will be best suited for pushing content at the moment, as it's mostly the healing checks that are stopping people from timing keys - not damage. This is due to unavoidable group-wide mechanics such as Burgess's Eye of the Storm, Melandris's Winds in Quarter Stars, Frost Shield AOE damage, etc. in Ruby Sanctum.

Now all of that being said, after playing seven healers over the past two weeks, my overall feedback is:

Now we have boss fights that require

That means it's easy to find fault with a lot of healers: for example, Preservation Evoker struggles with spread healing, and Restoration Shaman struggles with extreme single-target healing, like tank healing in the Temple of the Jade Serpent, because it doesn't have an external cooldown. Most of these healing specs have one or two things they kind of suck at, except for Resto Druid - they're just the kings of everything at the moment.

But to start off, going spec by spec, the first one I want to talk about is Miss Weaver. Now, from my experience (at least), this is like painting in broad strokes: all of the healers I’ve played that aren't meta (e.g. Miss Weaver, Discipline Priest, Holy Priest, arguably Holy Paladin, Resto Shaman) can do a lot even at 370-375 item level. Many keys may just require 20-25K healing overall with no extra stream healing throughput checks, and every healer does perfectly fine in that environment. I haven't had any trouble healing clean keys that don't have crazy boss fights in them, even on Tyrannical.

With Grievous there are a few boss fights that are crazy like that, like the last boss in Court of Stars going into that with a group of DPS that are in comms and coordinating defenses, and you don't have someone sitting at range to stack all the lines on the ground to bait the charges. Those sorts of things, there are some healers that definitely struggle more, and this Weaver for me has been that healer. It's felt like there are some keys, like Agatha's Academy on Miss Weaver, I've been perfectly fine with; that's been a fantastic key, I've done quite a few of those because it's easy to heal. But I've also avoided Temple of the Jade Serpent like the plague on this Weaver, because I just don't have that kind of crazy sustained throughput that is required there.

I did a 14 Temple of the Jade Serpent on my 330 item level Preservation Evoker, and I felt more comfortable in that dungeon with an item level 45 lower than my Mist Weaver. That's because stacked AOE healing is something that Preservation excels at, and Miss Weaver is not good at it. There have been a couple fights where I really struggled, like the last boss in Court of Stars. The Slicing Winds happen in sets of three, ramping up three times and then resetting. That's where Miss Weaver falls short for most groups.

The second one gets a little bit sketchy, but can usually get through it. This is all obviously depending on gear and DPS makeup, and how cleanly people do the fights, and if they use defensives and if they even know which slicing wins to use their defensives on, and things like that.

But then the third one, for example, a lot of times it feels like the only real button I have to save people in a two or three second window is Revival, and when Revival is no longer enough, this I can't heal that boss.

Overall, to me, fist weaving has felt a little bit like optional DPS rather than healing throughput, and that is because once I got into like the 10 plus Keys, as soon as I got to the point where mechanics would go out on players, especially like debuffs, and I would always have to stop fist weaving to specifically cast and heal those targets because I couldn't guarantee if my fist weaving healing was going to heal the correct targets.

I didn't want a debuff to go out, and like if I'm doing low keys where the debuff won't kill the player and all I really have to do is just top their health up before the next mechanic goes out, well then fist weaving works fine in my experience.

As soon as I get to an environment where this debuff is going to require healing or this target is going to die in 6 seconds or 10 seconds, or whatever it is, then fist weaving stops functioning for me because if, let's say, the tank is actually at 95% health instead of 100%, and I'm fist weaving, I could get a lot of my fist-weaving healing going into the tank instead of the debuff target.

So, the random nature of this weaving has been a bit of a hurdle for me, it forces me to stop fist weaving quite often, but I also kind of understand.

I don't want to be too critical with this weaving because I understand that if fist weaving if just standing on your feline Stomp and pressing like Tiger's Palm, Blackout Kick, Rising Sun Kick, if that was strong enough to heal to just raw throughput heal through a lot of mechanics then Mistweaver would be the best healer in the game and it wouldn't even be close, right?

Like, if this weaving did really good throughput healing, Mistweaver would be so OP it wouldn't even be funny because they would do top tier damage, like almost tank level damage, while bringing Ring of Peace and AOE stun, so Kicks on a like short melee cooldown, group wide avoidance, healing bonus, group dispel with Revival, good defensive options and Infinte Mantra along with a physical Leech, that'd be crazy strong.

So, this weaving can't be too crazy. I have felt that using Thunder Focus Tea as like a mini pseudo-cooldown has been quite effective, and that's just like if I know there's a bit of damage going out, I can use Thunder Focus Tea not only for the AOE heal from Uplift's Whisper, but knowing that I can get effectively two or three back-to-back Rising Sun Kicks can get me through quite a few AOE mechanics, which is nice.

I didn't do nearly as many keys in the Tyrannical week with Grievous and Bursting on my Mistweaver as I did in the first Fortified week, and I'm looking forward to getting back into some Mistweaver keys this coming week with Volcanic Sanguine. This is because the healing throughput required in a lot of instances won't be nearly as high, so Mistweaver won't feel bad.

I also played around a little bit with a tier of Mourning/Kind of Unison, a few variations of that - a non-Fistweaver pure Caster build. The main downside of these builds is that they do no damage, but with the way most healers are playing at the moment, most of them aren't doing damage anyway, so that hasn't felt like a big downside. The main issue I've had is that all of the Mistweaver casting builds, in one way or another, revolve around Soothing Mist, and having to be completely immobile to move health bars has felt quite limiting. You're either playing Unison so you want to channel as much Soothing Mist as possible, or you're playing Cloud of Focus and you want to channel Soothing Mist to reduce your Mana costs and increase your throughput, or you're playing Soothing Mist because you're casting a couple of Verifiers or Envelopings back to back and Soothing Mist is the most efficient way to do that.

Overall I felt the Caster build throughput is there but the manner becomes an issue much much sooner than pretty much any other hero I've played and like I said the immobility not not being able to move health bars and move there have been quite a few keys I just won't sign up to on my Miss Weaver because it feels like I'm almost throwing a key by just not playing wrestler Druid or Holy Paladin or evoker if anyone has any good advice on this I'd love to hear it I really enjoy playing my Miss Weaver I just wish I could play it better I wish I could output more healing that's that’s effectively it I've been watching as many top Raider IO front page Mistweavers I can the stream they're all kind of struggling or hitting the same wall from what I can tell as soon as they get to50 or 60 65k kind of HPS they're cap out people start dying here and there mistakes get punished because people are top door tanks are spending half a fight on half health things like that so if anyone knows any like Secrets or like excellent builds from Miss Weaver I’d love to hear them.

Resto Shaman, now I don't think Resto Shaman is anywhere near as bad as people think it is or like make it out to be it seems like a lot of people think Resto Shaman is the worst healer in the game I don't really think it is I think it's a bit better than people think part of that also could be that the bills people play seems like a lot of people are sticking to the old shadowlands BFA kind of build where they're all taking like Cloud birthstone as a default and then always playing around that and then if it doesn't work out it feels like Resto Shaman is bad I've been focusing on Riptide ascendance as a main cooldown and healing stream totem with the talent that causes it to do extra healing for every tip and I have found Resto Shaman throughput to be quite quite good its damage is also I mean it's quite reliant on being able to use a lot of global on damage but it has the potential to pump out some good damage and like I said with ascendants with ag as well and if you want to you can take the totem reset fast talent and then have four healing stream totals down at once that all ramp even that is like a pseudo cooldown you can do a lot of cool down healing with Resto Shaman like very well the thing I think Resto Shaman struggles with the most at the moment is their sustained throughput if all you're doing is like spot healing with Riptide and then trading cooldowns into big mechanics then and then spending the rest of your time spamming damage then Resto Shaman feels excellent as soon as you have to press more healing buttons than that.

That's when Resto Shaman kind of feels like it loses a lot of its power it feels weak to me and I don't think Resto Shaman feels any weaker than say discreased at the moment or mis lever and they feel good most of the time and then they just feel a little weak in certain environments or certain scenarios Resto Shaman has also been a little bit of the same story as far as me like there are some keys I won't sign up to on a resto Shaman Temple of the Jade serpent being one of them if it's a high key especially when it was tyrannic or weak because not having an external for the second last boss I'm not saying I couldn't heal it but I didn't want to sign up to a key and then have a tank who like pressed you know one Global misplace or something or didn't save every possible cooldown for the blackout kit combo in the tank and died I didn't want to be able to like throw a key that easily by just not having an external cooldown.

Holy priest, holy priest has felt much better to me than discipline a lot less fun like I I really like discipline it's one of my favorite specs in the whole game and holy priest I think like I said in one of my earlier or even beta videos it feels like in a lot of situations it just devolves into nothing but heel and Flash heels fan which I personally find pretty boring but numerically speaking holy priest seems quite good I never really feltlike my throughput was the limiting factor when I was playing holy priest I bet a couple of other small things the main one being not having kick when I'm pugging all of my keys not having Kik isa huge problem there are so many dangerous casts in a lot of these dungeons that just have to be kicked and playing all my healers with the ability to like always just get the kick that people seem to miss has been really good and not having that Holy priest has felt absolutely horrible on the other hand having Master spell especially the short talented Master spell has been really really strong I've found many uses for that especially in the tyrannical bursting week even something like going into quarter stars and being able to master spell every route has felt excellent these are definitely things that wouldn't be even worth mentioning if you're playing with a coordinated and good group but you would be surprised how many people with Raider io scores that make it seem like they are knowledgeable and capable of the mechanics and have experience and then you invite them into the key and they don't know that they have to jump for the route to clear the route debuff.

So being able to like Master spell those kind of things has been excellent same with the root in Azure vaults seems to be at least in my pug experience a lot of groups a lot of DPS don't ever kick the big tree Golem whatever Goliath dudes on the platform that root everyone in place being able to master spell that has been saved a couple of wipes that’s for sure damage on holy priest hasn't been great for me and either has Mana actually remain a purely like PowerPoint of view I think holy priest is quite good I'd probably rate them as the highest worst healer probably rate healers as Resto Druid being the best preservation second best Holy Paladin third best and then there would be a pretty substantial Gap and then I would have holy Priestess the fourth best not having poison dispel has also felt quite bad but only in alcopher Academy, again this is another one of those kind of issues where if I was playing with a coordinated group or I was only playing my own keys and I always could form the group myself it wouldn't feel that bad because I would make sure I always brought like a couple of melee to cover all the kicks because I as a Healer wasn’t bringing one I would always make sure I had like a curse to spell and Temple with a jade serpent always had a poison dispel in algathar Academy had the ability to cover my weaknesses then yeah that wouldn't be as big of an issue but while pugging going into an Agatha Academy not having a poison to spell is you’re you're basically like rolling the dice as to whether or not your tank is good enough and geared enough that they can they're basically on their own on that tree loss and if they can kind of play on their own and do it the key will be okay if not you're kind of bricked.

As far as discipline priest goes I'm not going to be too critical of discipline because like I said it's a speck I’ve always really enjoyed I also think that the coming changes in 10.0.5 for disc in particular are excellent I think those changes are going to give disk more AOE throughput and I feel like that is exactly what disc is lacking at the moment the one thing I look out for when I play my disc priest is I need to make sure I'm playing with a tank that is fairly self-sufficient if I find myself having to use every single power word Shield at every single defensive Penance or every single Penance defensively on the tank I'm gonna have a bad time playing discipline priests whereas as if I play with a group where the Tank’s health bar never moves or it's a DK who's just could always like never dies and I don't ever have to touch them then discipline feels pretty good and I mean pretty obviously disc has the same kind of issues I was talking about before with holy priest and that it doesn't bring a kick but Master spell is great I also find myself doing decent amount of damage in pretty much every key on disc compared to the other healers and obviously that's just down to disc.

Not adding to stop its healing to do damage out of all of the healers whenever I play my priests those are the keys I’m most try on I'm putting the most effort into running my own keys or being very particular when I sign up to other Keys it cares if I'm playing a priest and I’m not bringing lust or battle res or kick and I need to rely on hybrid dispels for poisons and curses and diseases then being able to kind of oh yeah and I need a tank that is quite self-sufficient then yeah I need to be quite picky with what I play with or I need to stick to lower level keys where a lot of those kind of not having a battle res in like an eight or a night isn't a big deal not having a battle res in of 13 or a 14 is probably a bricked key for preservation there isn't a great deal to say here I'm gonna release a video shortly discussing the kind of the TA build.

What makes preservation so strong at the moment the only issue I could ever possibly have on my Avoca is range playing with two or three range DPS on an evoker especially in podcast where you can't like just yell at someone in Discord to move in it's horrible it's so bad that I played a ruby life pulse with a warlock and two hunters and I was I was ready to just I’m never playing with a triple range group again in a pub on my evoker it's just not happening if you aren't playing with those kind of Oddball groups that have full range DPS and playing preservation Fields there really are no complaints at the moment other than its 30 yard range.

The only boss that I worry about playing preservation is the Tempest in not good offensive and that's because everyone spread out around the boss that everyone's running around away from the Healer collecting orbs and things like that so having the range limitation there can be a little difficult but in pretty much every other environment it's fairly noticeable overall throughput for preservation is through the roof dream breath is so obnoxiously powerful that it really like whatever else you press doesn't really matter you just have to make sure you land your dream breaths and you use them at a decent time and preservation is yeah it's easy rewind also helps in many situations.

Rewind is such a strong cooldown that that button alone can do more work than three or four are five buttons combined together on other on other healing specs there are some mechanics on bosses that if I'm playing any other healer I'll be thinking about or planning what cooldowns I'm going to trade for certain mechanics and then on my preservation evoker, a lot of the times I don't even worry about it I just play like normally and if something gets out of hand I press rewind and everything's fine what I will say about preservation as I don't want to say like a limitation or a weakness but just how the spec plays is you are always playing around or playing with a cooldown playing preservation is always playing around bird Embrace dream breath Spirit Bloom which are three cooldowns and I mean that's the Lion's Share of your healing and then outside of that all you’re ever really doing is hitting reversion living Flame or temporal anomaly or Echo and even Echo is mostly just setting up to use your cooldowns so you're still always playing around those cooldowns I found as I was gear clearing up that this meant that in a lot of situations if you're dealing with any damage patterns where those cooldowns is enough to handle then preservation feels like you're cheating almost like it does way too much Healing For Whatever item level you have or compared to whatever any other healer can press.

But if you ever end up in a situation where you’ve used those cooldowns poorly like if you've blown them all at the same time and then you don't have a cooldown to press for the next 15, 30 seconds whatever that's when preservation can feel like it's really bad so the main learning curve for me for preservation has been to stagger my cooldowns so that I’m not blowing them all back to back and that I mean as as I got higher item level playing preservation has been much more fun because I really start thinking about how I'm going to use those cooldowns in each particular pack so it feels like I'm learning how to optimize as I go pull by pull more so than any other healer that I've played so far that also means though that if you're playing with I don't want to say bad DPS but if you're playing with DPS that eat a lot of damage and you have to then trade your cooldowns for things that you didn't plan on or that you don't want to you can end up falling behind for where you would be using those cooldowns to trade for mechanics it's a little bit like a disciplined priest if you have to use all of your power wood Shields and defensive penances to make up for someone standing in the fire or a tank taking way too much damage or something then you're going to have a bad time because you don't have those short-term cooldowns to do your AOE group healing.

And the same goes for preservation if you’re using burden Embrace and you're using an echo dream breath hop just to keep the tank alive with an echoed reversion hot and it's still only just keeping the tank up then yeah if you’ve used those cooldowns for that then you're not going to have them to do your AOE healing.

As far as Resto Druid goes again there isn't a huge amount to talk about here so Druid is just crazy strong all you do is take life Bloom talents you take vertical you drop airflow you press your hearts that's it can't really get it wrong the power of Resto drilled right now is inherency verdancy is like it’s I I think vertices is almost single-handedly making Resto Druid star it's that strong so yeah you just play around that and when you can't play around that you fall back on your spreadhot healing for bosses like Tempest and not cool defensive and you'll still be fine and then if you can get into anysituation where you can hear a stacked group resto Druid just becomes absolutely insane it also has a really easy job of getting its damage out by just pressing Sunfire and moon fire in between your normal hot or normal healing spells and then if you need any like heavy burst healing or you get into a bad situation where you're falling behind you just press convoke every minute and that spell play is the game for you and Gets You Through crazy healing checks like eye of the storm and balls of Valor or slicing winds on milandris.

Lastly we have Holy Paladin now Holy Paladin is the Healer I put three healers in s t when I was making my tier list in beta and that was restorative preservation evoker and the Holy Paladin I think at the time I said Holy Paladin was maybe not quite s but it was it was in between A and S it was a little bit behind Druid and Avoca but it was still much better than any of the other healers I think I got that pretty much spot on because Holy Paladin has the potential at the moment to do crazy HPS as well you can do 80 I mean my Holy Paladin isn't that good and I haven't done that many keys on it but the potential is there to do very good HPS I've seen some of the top holy paladins doing 80 100K HPS on Stone step the second boss in Temple of the Jade serpent I've also gone into pretty high healing check bosses like first boss Ruby light pools and Holly Paladin and had no trouble whatsoever a lot of that at the moment feels like holy shock is just doing what holy shock does which isa lot of healing all the time and Beacon hard carries a lot of your AOE healing your tank healing things like that and then when things get crazy you just light a dawn with wings and your group healing becomes excellent bully Paladin damage has been what I feel like the weakest part of the spec it does okay.

AOE damage it does quite low single Target damage it also has strong cooldown healing Divine tall Wings holy Avenger horror Mastery and even your kind of single target saves like Bop one minute sack and lay on hands means that I feel like I always have quite a few cooldowns and buttons to work through before I start panicking like if health bars start dropping or mechanics get failed or something goes wrong or I'm going into a 14 Ruby life pools at 370 or something on a tyrannical Grievous week with the first boss and I'm not quite sure if the DPS are going to blow up the welts or they’re going to properly try and burst down the Frost shield before the group dies if I'm there on a Holy Paladin I’m not that worried because I know that I have good AOE throughput for the duration of my wings or my holy Avenger I know I have cooldowns to cycle through also I mean it kind of goes without saying but throw a beacon on the tank and then just heal the group in a lot of situations means that you just don't have to worry about tank healing at all and that has felt really nice hug healing.

If I was playing with really really good tanks and having the ability to just Beacon to DPS in your party would also just feel great that'd be really nice it'll make your AOE healing even better overall I think like I said at the start of the video I think most healers have a couple of weak spots and most of them feel fairly balanced against one another with the two major outliers being Druid and Avoca I also think paladins at the moment don't seem very strong because of those two kind of overshadowing them and I'm hoping to see some changes some balance changes coming through soon I've got my fingers crossed that blizzard are going to do some kind of healing pass in general where they're going to look at balancing healers for Mythic plus like AOE healing throughput especially trying to balance them better in that situation I think at the moment having preservation of vocals that can do 180k birth ceiling on Stone step and then average you know 120 130k over two or three minute boss fight is cool but then having other healers that struggle to break 50 or 60 is tolerable I think if DPS was balanced as poorly as scaling throughput was right now there would be like riots on the forums people would be going nuts so I'm hoping that that's going to get addressed and I’m hoping at the same time that uh blizzard are going to look at at somehow making healing a little bit more fun maybe.

Overall maybe just in PvP with the kind of solo queue no healers are playing issue that blizzard are having right now I am very happy to kind of wave last week goodbye the tyrannical Grievous bursting affixes were horrible they have really highlighted these kind of these throughput differences between healers and I'm looking forward to getting into some more normal key like affix weeks and combinations so that taking a Mistweaver into a ruby Life Pools doesn't feel like you're growing or you know running it down mid but that's it for this week, thanks for watching!