I'm telling you as a mythic raider in HFC, Mistweaver was superior to Shaman as soon as legendary ring came into the game. It turns out shaman cds (while good), weren't as op as fistweaving, extend life or revival.
I also would not call shaman "consistently" a top 3 healer. That's true today (for normies), but for the majority of mop, and a little bit of wod, shamans were as "average" as mistweaver.
Key word, overpowered. I guess it's fine if something overpowered, stays overpowered if Mistweaver has it, but it's an issue for holy paladin has a monopoly on tank healing for literal years :thinking:
Anyway, I think I've explained to you before, every point in time you've talked about this, mistweaver (among other specs) was overpowered at the time. Blizzard don't randomly nerf specs without reason, that makes no sense. It was within complete reason for Blizzard to nerf Mistweaver if you actually try to understand the context. Mistweaver in t14 was massively overperforming, that's why you always saw 2-3 of them in 25 man raids. Blizzard at the time effectively nerfed the healing of mistweaver by ~25%, and nerfed all the mana costs, and mistweaver was still a top 3 healer in T14, depending on your skill level. Goes to show you how overpowered Mistweaver was at the time (although disc priests LUL). Mistweaver in ToT was overperforming, that's why you always saw 1-2 of them in your raid. Blizzard nerfed disc priest, holy paladin and mistweaver within the same patch.
Moving on to WoD, blizzard basically only nerfed mistweaver with the chi explosion nerfs. Pretty obvious why blizzard nerfed Chi Explosion. They did not want Crane stance to do equal hps to serpent, because you would then be forced to play crane to be optimal, and this was around the time when blizzard accepted no one wanted to dps as a monk. Luckily, blizzard ended up buffing mana tea by a lot which ended up causing mistweaver to do comparable hps to shaman/holy paladin/disc. Sadly those specs were extremely overpowered in BRF, so the buff only made mistweaver an above average healer.
I remember saying this logic doesn't make any sense (it doesn't). Mistweaver was allowed to be good before. It was the master of AoE healing for the majority of it's lifecycle. Do you honestly believe blizzard designs specs to be worse on purpose? Like one day in a board room blizzard said to themselves, "okay mistweaver will never be allowed to be good". This logic doesn't make sense because this would only apply to 1 class out of 36 in the game. What makes mistweaver so unique in this regard?
Following this logic, you cannot say "monks are not allowed to be good" because brewmasters have been consistently overpowered since they came out, only becoming average after experiencing massive nerfs.
Your point only made sense for non-mythic mistweavers. Which would be fine, but you like to say Mistweaver was bad in Mythic raids, which is objectively false. Why not make your point about difficulty of Mistweaver, or about how the spec was too different from other healers for Mistweaver to perform well back in MoP/WoD.
You know the best part about saying guilds and communities as a whole would not accept a "bad spec". This might sound incredibly egoistical, but i'm actually playing a spec right now that started with a bad opinion from the community, and it slowly turned into a spec where people make fun of their holy priests who can't play disc because they see good players like me play :thinking:. Again that point wasn't really meant to stroke my ego (i don't need to go on mmo-c to do that), but it's going to show that all the community cares about is if a spec can do good output, and mistweaver has historically done so.
Another example would be how survival hunter in the eyes of the community changed.
That's an extremely bold claim. No one in the history of wow has ever said "we need a mistweaver in our guild".
Lets just ignore the fact that literally every 10 man guild wanted the disc mistweaver combo because of the dps and how good the two specs were with each other.
Lets just ignore how Mistweaver was stacked in t14 and ToT due to the power level of the spec.
Lets just ignore how paragon made their rdruid reroll Mistweaver for t18 because of how good mistweaver was.
Lets just ignore how Paragon said on finalboss "We wanted to bring a mistweaver in for Imperator, but we didn't have the gear to do so". I mean clearly they wanted to bring a mistweaver to hinder their world first kill huh.
Semantics aside, why does the spec need to be literally the best thing ever to do be good in your eyes? What exactly is wrong with mistweaver being slightly worse than the 1 or 2 other healers providing you're good?
Reeeeeeeeeeeeeeee every spec in the game in WoD was mostly propped up by their set bonus, that is how set bonuses work reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
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I decided that because after they butchered fistweaving for the last time I realized blizzard never actually wanted fistweaving to be good. This combined with mistweaving being nerfed multiple times throughout beta I knew that mistweaver would be bad.
Also Disc was similar to old Mistweaver, and like old mw rewards skill so....