Mythic+

Preservation is a healing spec that offers an array of useful tools in M+. Burst healing, mobility, and unique utility allow it to bring strengths that differ from most healing specializations. Its healing style blends proactive and reactive elements, giving Preservation the flexibility to handle a wide range of damage profiles but at a higher skill requirement.

This playstyle revolves around layering multiple HoTs on the party in preparation for incoming damage. In Season 2, this is capitalized on by using Emerald Blossom as Flameshaper to keep the group healthy.

Where Does Your Healing Come From

A large portion of Preservation’s healing revolves around Echoing Merithra's Blessing. Because Merithra's Blessing applies a Reversion as well, you get all the effects from Grace Period, Merithra's Blessing Reversion, Golden Hour, and Lifespark on top of the healing bounces from Merithra's itself. You will Echo either Merithra's Blessing or the baseline Reversion constantly on your group to keep it active, mainly through Temporal Anomaly.

The other most important part of your healing is the combination of Dream Breath, Consume Flame, and Emerald Blossom. Due to the changes for season two, Fluttering Seedlings will now spawn extra seedlings when you miss people with your blossoms, and these seedlings do as much healing as the blossom itself and cause Consume Flame. This results in Emerald Blossom being a potent aoe healing spell that doesn't require you to aim at a stacked group anymore: As long as you have Dream Breath active on the party, using Emerald Blossom will do a very high amount of healing to everyone even if they aren't close to the main target.

Important Things to Know

• Most of your Emerald Blossoms will be cast with Essence Burst. Using natural essence for them is much more costly as you have to pay a steep mana cost on top of the essence.
• It is important that you target someone that needs healing with the Emerald Blossom, as your tierset will cause you to cast an instant Living Flame towards the target of the spell you consume an Essence Burst with. Spamming blossoms on yourself can lead to wasting this effect.
• Verdant Embrace is a very valuable tool to do spot healing and it also interacts with Consume Flame. Another option for single-target healing is to Echo Reversion on the player for Golden Hour. Verdant Embrace will do a bit more upfront healing but also has a much longer cooldown.
• You have two charges of Dream Breath and will constantly be consuming its duration to cause Consume Flame. In general you will use it at rank one and will cycle between your charges to keep it active on the group as long as healing is needed.

Rotation

1. Use Dream Breath to keep the heal over time active on the party when healing is needed. You have two charges of the spell so you should cycle between them as needed or pool them for specific moments of high healing required.
2. Use Temporal Anomaly often. This will be your main way of keeping Reversion active on the group and you will mostly use Merithra's Blessing into the Echoes it applies.
3. Heal the group with Emerald Blossom, target people that need extra healing. Even if your group members aren't close together they will still recieve healing from the blossom due to Fluttering Seedlings.
4. To do stop healing, use Verdant Embrace if available or Echo Reversion if it isn't. Using Verdant Embrace on someone before casting your Emerald Blossoms to heal the group will also keep them extra safe as some healing will be transfered via Lifebind.
5. Use Fire Breath to heal with Life-Giver's Flame and to proc Leaping Flames. Most of your Leaping Flames will be used for damage but it can also be a decent healing tool in a pinch.
6. Cast Disintegrate at the boss if there is no incoming damage. Casting Disintegrate is a good way to stay healthy on mana via Energy Loop, but keep in mind it costs a significant amount of essence (or an Essence Burst). If mana isn't a concern, cast Chrono Flame as it does more damage than Disintegrate.

Major Cooldowns

Stasis

Stasis is a tricky spell that is a bit overstressed in terms of “having a good stasis” Most of the time, as long as you have at least Dream Breath in it, then the other two spells can mostly be whatever you have available. Verdant Embrace, Temporal Anomaly, or Emerald Blossom can all be decent in a Stasis ramp, but try to stay away from putting something like Echo or a single Reversion in.

Dream Breath, Temporal Anomaly, and Merithras Blessing

This Stasis gets as much value out of Merithra's Blessing as possible. Cast Dream Breath at the start of our Stasis to store a future Merithra's Blessing. Next, we spread Echoes with a Temporal Anomaly, and consume them with the Merithra's Blessing we generated. The value comes from our Stasis release, it will cast our three spells, and still leaves us with a Merithra's Blessing left over, as Merithra's Blessing doesn't consume the proc when released from stasis. This allows us to do one extra Echo ramp with Merithra's Blessing for a little bit more burst at the end of our cooldown.

Rewind

Rewind is a press-and-forget raid healing cooldown that simply restores health equal to 30% of the damage your raid members have taken in the last 5 seconds. The ideal usage is right after a big wave of burst damage has hit the raid. Note that the healing from Rewind comes in the form of a 5-second heal over time, that will do all the corresponding healing spread across these 5 seconds.

Taking more damage while the Rewind hot is active won't increase its healing, the amount is decided at the moment you press the spell and it is simply delayed over the following seconds.

Conclusions

This version of Preservation might be the best one yet for mythic+. A lot of its historical shortcommings have been covered up by the much stronger Emerald Blossom giving access to spammable group-wide heals and the new tier set flooding us with Essence Bursts and free spot healing in the form of Living Flames. It remains to be seen if these changes are enough to push the spec, which has always had popularity issues, into the spotlight but it will for sure make it feel much more responsive at the things it has struggled on before.