I didn’t make up any statistics, the other guy posted them above:
1800: 2800 Heal Priests vs 900 heal druids
2100: 1200 hpriest Vs 530 druids
2400 : 91 Priest Vs 63 druids
I assume that they’re correct. If they’re wrong then my following explanation is also wrong, obviously. And yes, it doesn’t make too much sense because the guy doesn’t make a difference between disc and holy and therefore his data makes druid look weaker than it was in DF S4. But even by giving druid that generous handicap it still comes out on top once you factor in the total popularity of both classes.
To better illustrate the point: You have 1000 people playing spec A and 100 of them reached glad. You have 2000 people playing spec B and 100 of them reached glad as well. You’d most likely draw the conclusion that spec A is stronger.
But they do add up? 3,25% of all priests above 1800 reached >2400 while 7% of all druids above 1800 reached >2400. Sure, you can’t exactly figure out the meta by looking at statistics only, especially since blizzard doesn’t give us access to it’s entire data (like how many people play each class in total, how active they play, maybe they just stopped playing their class after a meta change and now you have an inactive player sitting at a high rating…) but it’s good enough to see a trend.
The data shows that rdruid was extremely good in DF S4 which is also the general opinion of the people who played during that season.
Both Chastise and Clone are problematic and the only reason why there are no complaints about both skills is because both hpriest and druid are bad right now. Clone should be nerfed, rdruid shouldn’t be able to have 30y range on that ability. And yes, everybody agrees that rdruid would have to get compensated for that, for example by bringing back adaptive swarm.