The Venomous Abyss handed healers a raid with a quarter more player health to fill and far fewer healing absorbs than Season 1 threw at them. That one change did most of the sorting. Specs that pour raw healing into a raid gained ground, and specs built to stop the damage before it lands gave it up.
Placements below come from what healers actually produce inside the temple rather than from what a kit looks like on paper, which is why several names sit a long way from where you would expect them. Boss order, loot and the wing schedule live in our Venomous Abyss raid guide; this page is about which healer keeps the raid standing.
Last updated: August 22, 2026.
A tier here measures how much a spec contributes to Venomous Abyss kills, which is healing output plus how reliably somebody is there producing it. Throughput on its own would rank a build almost nobody plays above one carrying half the raid, and no roster has ever been assembled that way.
Blizzard rebuilt the role before the tier opened. Player health and creature damage both went up 25% at max level, with the developers stating outright that they wanted damage to be "less spiky" and healing gameplay "more satisfying", then hand-tuning encounter abilities to match. Season 1 leaned on healing absorbs to punish sloppy triage. The Venomous Abyss barely uses them. What it uses instead is movement: several encounters here keep the raid running, and the specs that need to stand still to produce their best healing have all felt it.
Roster logic matters as much as the meter. Five of the six healing classes carry a raid buff no other class can supply — Mystic Touch, Devotion Aura, Power Word: Fortitude, Mark of the Wild and Skyfury. Evoker carries none of them. That cuts both ways, because a buff a raid can also get from a damage spec of the same class stops being a reason to bring the healer.
Mythic is open from the start of the season alongside Normal and Heroic, with no Heroic-only warm-up to build a set in. That shapes a healing roster more than any single spec choice does.
The gap across this field is narrower than four letters make it look.
Tuning moves through a season, and the letters move with it.
Seven specs, four tiers, and one rule for reading them: the distance between two healers inside a tier is smaller than the distance between the tiers themselves. Comfort on a spec you have played for two expansions closes a gap that size on its own.
Holy Paladin is the healer this tier is built around, and it is not close. Patch 12.1 handed it 19% more healing and 20% more damage, and the tuning that followed adjusted four other healers and left this one alone. It did not need the help. The set is the sharpest design of the seven: the 2-piece doubles what Infusion of Light gives Flash of Light, and the 4-piece guarantees an Infusion from every Holy Light while raising that spell's mana cost by half. Herald of the Sun is the tree, and it is barely a choice, because Lightsmith trades roughly a quarter of the healing away for damage a healer does not need here. Around that sits the deepest utility in the role, from Aura Mastery down to Divine Shield, still the only healer immunity in the game. Entombed Sentinels is where it gives ground, because two golems spread the raid out and rolling heal-over-time healing reaches more of the room than priority healing does. Mana is the other limit.
Holy Priest is the steadiest healer in the temple after the Paladin above it, and 12.1 is why: 16% more healing, cheaper core casts, and Benediction moved onto Holy Word: Serenity. The tuning that followed then quadrupled the Oracle talent Words of the Wise, with Blizzard saying the goal was to make Oracle "a competitive option against Archon". It worked. Oracle now carries the highest healing ceiling of any build in the raid and is still the rarer of the two trees — the strongest untested lead on this page. The set pushes the same plan, paying crit for keeping Renew spread and handing a free one to whoever Prayer of Mending touches first. Power Word: Fortitude arrives either way. Movement is the tax, and this temple charges plenty of it.
Restoration Druid swings further between fights than anything else here, and the swing follows the encounter rather than the player. Patch 12.1 spent most of its attention on the spec and still left it short, which is why the next pass added another 4% healing with a developer note conceding it was underperforming at both healing and damage. The set is the cleanest of the seven to play around. Rejuvenation rolls a chance at Genesis, worth 15% more from every heal-over-time effect, and Nature's Swiftness, Tranquility and Convoke the Spirits all grant it outright on the 4-piece. Wildstalker is the build almost everyone runs. Mark of the Wild guarantees a Druid a seat somewhere in the raid, and Innervate now hands another healer a fifth of their mana bar instead of free casts. The honest problem is output. Heal-over-time effects tick the same on a raid carrying 25% more health.
Restoration Shaman is the healer most raids default to, and the reason is that nothing about it is hard. That default holds right up until the damage does. Steady output covers a Normal clear comfortably and thins out faster than anything else here once Heroic starts hitting properly. Patch 12.1 rebuilt the core rather than the set, pushing power back into Healing Rain and Riptide and pulling it out of the Totemic tree. The set then drops a free Healing Rain off Chain Heal and shields whoever stands in it. Totemic is the tree by a wide margin. Spirit Link Totem is a raid cooldown nobody else can offer, Bloodlust comes free, and Spiritwalker's Grace answers the movement this temple keeps demanding. One catch before you reroll. Skyfury also arrives with an Elemental or Enhancement Shaman, so a raid that already runs one is buying throughput here, not a buff.
Preservation Evoker is the widest gap on this page between what a spec produces and what a roster actually wants from it. It also gets better as the content does, because part of its healing scales with the damage the raid is taking. Harder difficulties suit it. No other healer here gains that much from the step up. Patch 12.1 turned Dream Breath from a burst heal into a heal-over-time, which changed how the spec feels more than what it produces. The set is the quietest in the role, spending Essence Burst on free Living Flames and adding 5% to every green spell on the 4-piece. Flameshaper is the tree. What it offers instead of a raid buff is a bag of answers nobody else has, from Rewind to Time Spiral to Cauterizing Flame. Then comes the other side of that trade. Its range is short in a raid that spreads, and its single-target healing barely exists; worse, this is the only healer in the game bringing no raid buff at all.
Mistweaver Monk spent the whole patch cycle being handed things and still came out mid-pack. 12.1 trimmed its healing and paid it back through Mastery; the pass after that added 8% on top and sped the 4-piece up by a third, with Blizzard stating outright that the spec had been underperforming. It does its best work where the room stays busy, spreading Renewing Mist and cleaving Vivify across everything carrying it. Give it one target and it offers nothing special. The set is a plain rotational buff to Rising Sun Kick and Rushing Wind Kick, either of which can come back free. Conduit of the Celestials is the tree; Master of Harmony trades most of the healing for damage. Utility is the problem. Mystic Touch gets the Monk in the door, Life Cocoon and Revival are real buttons, and past that there is no damage reduction to offer. A spec with nothing to mitigate has to win on the meter, and this one does not.
Discipline Priest is the clearest case here of a spec punished for the thing that made it good. Its damage was cut by 30% in PvE, because Blizzard said it "has been overperforming compared to other healers", and that one line is the whole story of where it sits. Atonement went from 32% to 46% to keep the healing whole, which looks neutral and is not — Atonement is reduced past five targets while the damage feeding it was cut everywhere. So it carries the strangest profile in the role: the thinnest healing output of the seven, and still by a wide margin the biggest damage contributor of any healer in the temple. The set leans into that same loop through Penance and Mind Blast. This is also the only healer whose two hero trees are both genuinely played, Voidweaver for the damage and Oracle for the healing. Bring it for what it prevents. Pain Suppression and Power Word: Barrier still decide pulls on a progression boss. Do not bring it for the meter.
