Healing is a longer job in Season 2 than it was in Season 1. Everyone carries 25% more health, a crowd control category you have already eaten twice now stays immune for 20 seconds instead of 16, and the snares holding you in place got weaker. Games go the distance. The healer who wins is the one still standing on the third kill attempt.
Placements below come from what healers actually hold up under, not from what a kit reads like on paper: two of them were nerfed twice before the season was a week old, one was buffed on purpose, and one was skipped entirely. The rank ladder and the season's rewards live in our Midnight PvP Season 2 guide. This page is about who to play.
Last updated: August 23, 2026.
A tier here is two things at once: how much a healer holds together when the pressure is real, and how many people are actually playing it. Rank on throughput alone and you end up recommending a build nobody queues. Nobody builds a team that way.
One line in the patch notes sets the floor under the whole role. The PvP trinket hands damage dealers and tanks 20% primary stat and hands healers none of it, and the healer's own share of that bonus shrank from 15% Stamina to 10%. Everyone hitting you got stronger. Your cushion got smaller. Battlegrounds then cut healing received by another 20%, so the same healer is worth more in an arena than it is holding a node.
Your Venomous Abyss set bonuses do work in rated play and get tuned there separately, and Conqueror's Venomous Lacquer pushes set gloves and shoulders up to PvP item level. One wardrobe, not two. The rest of the gearing loop lives in our PvP gearing guide.
Tuning moves through a season, and the letters move with it.
Seven specs, four tiers. The gap between two healers inside a tier is smaller than the letters make it look, and comfort on a spec you have played for years closes most of it.
Holy Priest is the one healer Blizzard forgot. Every other spec on this page has a PvP line somewhere in the notes; this one has none, and it walked into the season with 16% more healing and cheaper casts than it had before. Then the launch pass sped up its Enlightenment regeneration while stamping the rest of its buffs PvE-only. That is the spec in one line: it heals like everyone else and it is still casting when they are dry. Guardian Spirit undoes a kill attempt outright, and Mass Dispel tears through immunities nothing else in the role can touch. Oracle is what everyone plays. It is still a turret, though, and the counterplay has not changed: get on top of it, cut the casts, and the mana advantage evaporates.
Restoration Druid removes people from games. Cyclone takes a target out of the fight entirely, and this season it picked up a second trick in Ancient of Lore, a tree form that ignores crowd control while you plant on the kill and refuse to die. Blizzard charged for both. Its PvP healing was cut in the patch and cut again on launch day, which is what happens when one spec gets this much control for free. It is still the hardest healer in the game to play around, and travel form still crosses a map faster than anything else in the role. The catch is the tree itself: it roots you, and this season rewards whoever kept moving. Keeper of the Grove is the build, and it is not close.
Holy Paladin is the healer you have to kill twice. Blessing of Protection pulls a teammate out of physical damage and Blessing of Freedom ignores every snare in the game. Aura Mastery then makes the whole team immune to interrupts and silences. Nothing else in the role stacks answers like that. Blizzard nerfed its healing twice this season and cut Judgment damage by 30%, saying flatly that its throughput was "higher than we would like" — and the seat never moved. Mobility is the hole. It has no way to disengage, so a melee cleave that commits to it turns the whole immunity stack into a stalling tool rather than an exit. Lightsmith here, which inverts the raid answer.
Restoration Shaman is the only healer Blizzard actually buffed on launch day, and the note said the quiet part out loud: the goal was Farseer's viability "as we begin season 2". Take that for what it is worth. A spec needing a targeted buff in week one was not in a good place. What keeps it honest is the totem kit, and that part is genuinely unique. Spirit Link Totem levels the party's health mid-swap, Tremor Totem breaks fear for everyone at once, and Hex is still a real setup button. Then the enemy walks at it. There is no escape and no immunity, and a healer who cannot leave is a healer who gets sat on all game.
Mistweaver Monk got a brand-new talent this patch, then watched two thirds of it get stripped out the moment it entered a rated game. Vital Expenditure is worth 300% of Soothing Mist's healing everywhere in the world and 100% of it here. The launch pass added more healing and marked that PvE-only too. You can read the pattern. Blizzard likes this spec better in dungeons than in arenas. The utility is real. Life Cocoon is one of the best single saves in the game, and Ring of Peace throws a melee train off a kill target for long enough to matter. But the healing wants you attacking, attacking means melee range, and melee range is exactly where you did not want to be. Master of Harmony, by a distance.
Preservation Evoker is the biggest gap on this page between what a spec can do and how often anyone does it. Almost nobody plays it. The patch then went straight at the reason people played it at all: Hover no longer ignores snares, and the PvP talent that let it yank itself out of trouble was deleted outright. Blizzard wanted Evokers "mobile and slippery" rather than untouchable, and it got what it asked for. What is left is a toolkit nothing else has: Rescue physically removes a teammate from a losing fight, and Time Spiral hands the whole team a free escape. In the right hands it is terrifying. It is also short-ranged and made of paper, with no button that says no. Flameshaper does the heavy lifting here.
Discipline Priest sits in C tier because everything it does well got taxed. The spec itself is fine. Both of its PvP-specific nerfs this season landed on Voidweaver, the build that made it a genuine damage threat, and the 30% damage cut it took outside PvP came with compensation that never reaches a rated game. What survives is prevention, and that part is still elite. Pain Suppression goes out through a stun, and Power Word: Barrier shaves a fifth off everything standing in it. Neither shows up on a healing meter, which is roughly the whole problem. Then there is mana. Ramp into a swap that never comes and you have spent the game for nothing. Oracle is the more common build.
