I agree blizz screwed up in some aspects, and they could for sure make changes to MW that makes it better to play (not better performing, but better to play). Ring of Peace and Mana Tea should be baseline, and I think an interrupt would be nice to have in m+. They should also make Upwelling better so Rising Mist isn’t just far better by default and they should make us less punishing. Now we’re treading into an entirely different territory that has little to do with what I am trying to say.
Did you read this post? Mistweaver buff request - #76 by Nasella-kazzak I think it sums my feelings up pretty nicely.
Limit Maximum himself said that the reason they did not bring a MW for world first race is because they don’t have a DR. I’d love to provide sources for all of this, but I honestly don’t have it in me to dig through twitch vods to find the exact moment that Max said X just to prove a point on a WoW forum.
resto druids aren’t setting their forum on fire because of this
Resto druid playstyle has been fundamentally the same for many years, so people already know how to play it. New players rarely whine about a spec because they usually know that they have nothing valuable to add to balance discussions. In Shadowlands however, Blizz significantly changed how MW is played in raids, and I think that for sure has something to do with it. None of the healer specs are super difficult to play, but Mistweaver has undergone big changes to our playstyle and we are too punishing if you don’t play at least somewhat correctly. People come from an expansion where they had Lucid Dreams and Claw giving them infinite mana, all while everyone in their raid having 70% crit or vers because by the time they started progging harder mythic bosses, everyone had full corruptions.
There’s a big difference between wanting changes to a spec, and saying a spec isn’t good enough or needs buffs.
Let’s go over the top 3 healers for a second. This part is important.
Paladins are overpowered atm because they do a TON of damage while doing decent healing and bringing aura mastery. If they nerfed their damage, they wouldn’t look as enticing anymore. However, DR is never bad so they would still be brought en masse.
Disc priests is amazing, but that is mostly due to the fact that pretty much every single boss has a big burst of AoE damage that hits the raid roughly once per minute. This makes Spirit Shell insanely good and can just downright trivialize some fights. Barrier is also insane, and on some fights it feels mandatory to have a DR. Oh, and they do a lot of damage.
Resto shaman does a lot of hps and they just never stop casting. They are so mana efficient it’s actually ridiculous. They bring Spirit Link which is arguably the strongest healing CD in the game, and believe it or not, Ancestral Protection Totem (APT) is extremely good for this tier. Resto shamans have like 5 CDs, and Earthen Wall Totem and Wellspring are both bugged in a way that positively affects their HPS. Not a single guild has killed Mythic Stone Legion Generals without either 2 holy paladins or 2 resto shamans. Why Resto Shaman? Because APT lets you sacrifice people to the Ravenous Feast that the Goliaths use to leap and just 1 shot people with, because the fight is overtuned. (paladin is for DR so people don’t get 1 shot, as it literally does 38k-ish dmg to non plate wearers if the add has 4 stacks, which it has. often.)
So you look at these 3 healer specs and go “wow, they have just about everything” and that is exactly the point of all this. This isn’t an issue with Mistweaver having or doing too little (our hps is = or higher than that of the other healers) and our damage is on par with disc priests for a lot of fights…) it’s the other healer specs having too much. Some parts of those specs really are due for a nerf, because it’s pretty clear that they have too many +'s and not enough -'s
As for MW, we don’t have DR or giga dmg or a free combat ress, and that is our downfall for the world first race and “top guilds” who copy-paste what the world first guilds do.
It’s those 3 healers bringing way too much at the same time. If they nerfed hpals damage, or if the tier wasn’t so perfect for spirit shell, or if shamans didn’t have APT, I guarantee you that you would see Mistweaver a lot more. This is a design failure that is caused by those 3 specs having everything.
But people see guilds stack these classes and go “mw bad” even though MW is actually very competitive. Like I said, we often have more dmg and healing, we just don’t have DR. Yes, DR is massive for some fights but it won’t make or break your guild, and having a MW will not hold your guild back outside of extreme cases.
So surely you can understand when I see Heroic raiders or people who just started Mythic whining about how “bad mistweaver is” when bringing a mw, holy, priest or rdruid is only considered bad in actual top 10 raiding guilds. Like even a top 50 guild will do just fine with a Mistweaver instead of that double shaman, 1 hpal and 1 disc comp they are running. It won’t make them drop ranks or add wipes to their count. What matters more than literally any comp you could run, is that people play properly.
I mean imagine if we got a 15% damage reduction on a 3 min CD. MW would just straight up be overpowered, because we already do more damage than most other specs, while pulling competitive healing.