Mistweaver monk feedback

Classes Monk
1

Hello
As a veteran mistweaver ever since Mists of Pandaria I wanted to make a feedback post with shadowlands on the horizon.

As there are no large changes on the horizon for our class I think it is crucially important to adress the longstanding concerns of the current toolkit.

I had a similar post waay back in WOD beta which was positively received.

I will split my post into a couple of points
part 1 basic abilities and synergy
part 2 cooldowns
part 3 talent choices
part 4 suggestions

part 1 basic abilities and synergy
Currently Mistweaver toolkit has the following abilities:

Soothing Mist - Low mana cost filler heal, enabler.
Enveloping Mist - Single target healing HOT
Vivify - Spammable single target heal with some splash
Essence Font - Cooldown auto smart heal splash aoe
Renewing Mist - Cooldown smart auto targetting heal over time

There is a key point here that I want to adress immeditately. I find choice in the abilities that I can press is very important. There needs to be a heal for every situation. Sometimes the choice of which ability to press first should be an engaging thing. My biggest concern with mistweaver currently is the lack of this choice.

Essence font is designed for raid play. Where activating and autocasting an aoe smart heal is efficient. However when you use this in a 5man party it is not good as you cannot hit enough targets with it and the healbars barely increase. For me this is also not fun in terms of raidhealing , as this can make up to >50% of your healing but you don’t “feel” like you do big healing. You just splash every player around you periodically for some %.

As renewing mist is just something you hit every cooldown and generally should be pressing it prior to engaging, in instanced party play between 2-5 players you are limited only to two basic heals:

Your choice is do I use enveloping mist, a large expensive over time heal.
Or do I spotheal with vivify. Sadly in the current state of the game vivify spam is essentially what mistweaver boils down to . It is mana efficient and heals most players between 25-50% of their health. Because it is so strong and because healthbars are healed really fast enveloping mist is rarely the good choice as by the time it ticks people get topped off. Further to this, enveloping mist increases healing by the mistweaver only by their spells. This does not work with trinkets, azerite or essences. As these are a major part of the expansion this further pushes you towards vivify spam.

Be it healing in a dungeon, spothealing in a raid, healing an outdoor group or inside of a battleground, I find the overwhelming majority of my healing is the use of this same spell. Ofcourse you also find soothing mist as enabler and gust of mist (passive mastery) and renewing mist on the details breakdown, but realistically in terms of rotation you are always going for the setup of the vivify.

part 2 cooldowns

Thunder Tea - a short cooldown spell that empowers what we are doing and can be used while already channeling soothing mist. This spell is fantastic, the only change I would suggest is to ever so slightly buff the interaction with renewing mist.

Life cocoon - a big absorb. This is based on % health of the mistweaver and scales only with versatility. Due to this it actually feels a little weird. You cannot pop intellect trinket or a blood fury racial to increase your big lifesaving cooldown. I would much prefer spellpower to atleast partially influence this.

To go slightly off on a tangent here, healing elixers, gust of mist, life cocoon, azerite traits and essences + trinkets do not scale with intellect. As this can all together make up a large portion of your healing that does not scale with primary stats that makes itemization very strange. Please adress this.

Revival - a very nice cooldown, though I would like a better visual effect.

Way of the Crane - a dps cooldown that allows us to spinning crane kick in a large pack of mobs and perform well in terms of both dps and hps.

I think mistweaver toolkit is nice and has everything we need in terms of throughput but we lack utility compared to other healers.

part 3 talent choices

EDIT TO FOLLOW

part 4 suggestions

I would love to see the return of CHI as a resource.
make vivify generate combo points that can be used to expend into a bigger spell, this creates a much more dynamic rotation.

The PVP talent “refreshing breeze” is the last part that remains of the good old uplift. When you vivify a target with the essence font hot it gets refreshed.

Sadly there is no way to vivify multiple people before this short duration hot runs out so it is impossible to use effectively. The interaction between spells should be promoted. If you spam vivify to maintain this hot on single target you are depleting much more mana than what the “additional hot” could ever tick for. The solution I present is what if “when renewing mist ticks have a 5% chance to apply essence font” and channeling soothing mist into a essence font hot refreshes it. On a numeric level this doesn’t change much, but having the option to maintain an extra hot on the tank is a fun mechanic.

Many mistweavers over recent years have been complaining that we have no damage reduction to give our tanks. I propose the following talent choice:
Chrysalis Skin - Replaces life cocoon. Buffs a target (max1) infinite duration 30second cooldown. Target takes 5% reduced damage and 50% of all periodic overhealing by the mistweaver is stored as an absorb shield up to a maximum of 20% player health.

Please make Ring of Peace have a glyph option to have reverse knockback like a vaccuum to suck targets into the centre. Perhaps this could be pvp talent.

The transcendance portal used to have a tiny slow perk on it, this was actually fun. Please revert this pruning.

I would also like to see enveloping mist increase healing received by items & trinkets this could allow for some niche uses where you could buff something funny.

ability suggestions for convenants :

As I see the focus is on essence font. I really don’t like this. This will only be for raid throughput. Please give us more interesting active abilties.

Kyrian is a reset cooldown on essence font.
Necrolord is an aoe heal increase that you use to amplify essence font. I would prefer this to be single target.
Nightfae is another version of essence font

Ability examples i would like to see:

“summon yu’lon the green serpent”
Breathes life on the battlefield, creating a healing rain. Targets are healing for 3% of maximum health every second. Lasts 15seconds. Visual green shower.
CD 2m radius 10 yards

“summon niuzao the ox”
Nearby players cannot be rooted or slowed. Nearby players benefit from 30% stagger.
CD 2m radius 20 yards. Duration 20seconds.

“aid of sheilun”
cast time 3.5sec
Heal a player to full health.
Cd 2m

2

While you do make a number of good points, I’d like to highlight something: Rising Mist, and its extension of heal over time spells. In M+, Enveloping Mist is an incredible tank heal, which you can extend to twice its duration with a pair of good kicks. That adds up over the course of a run, and as such, often ends up high in healing done. It rarely will be the top heal, but it does a lot of healing, and is worth having it kept up. Renewing Mist can also be extended, and since it lasts longer by default, you can have it on the whole party, and that adds a whole lot of healing too. And you extend it by doing something else than Vivify spam. Thus, for most of the duration of a fight, you will have something else you can do than spam vivify. That’s only really worth it if you can cleave it to other targets, or if the tank does need constant spam.

Yes, Vivify will still be the most casted spell, but Enveloping Mist, Soothing Mist, Renewing Mist and Rising Sun Kick and Blackout Kick are all there too, and all of those contribute to quite a lot of healing done.

Frankly, there are three cases I spam vivify in an M+:

  • I have renewing mist on most of the party, there’s heavy party-wide damage, and I have Mana Tea up. For example, fortified tentacles in Shrine, Cragmaw’s Tantrum, that kind of stuff.
  • Fortified Zul.
  • I’m healing a paper tank, or a party who likes to hug volcanos, or each other on quaking.

Every other time, I can renew HoTs and soothing mist, or do DPS (and also extend the DoTs).

Granted, having 4-5 renews out is there to enable vivify cleave (on top of its own healing), but I rarely have to spam vivify when I have enough renews out. One or two vivify is usually enough to top the party off, and we’re good to go.

No. Just, no. We already have a nice rotation as it is with Rising Mist. Make that viable in raid again, fix our mana issues, and we’re good. RM is already a pretty dynamic playstyle, quite action packed. We do not need yet another resource to pay attention to, while our mana issues persist. And without Essences and Corruptions, our mana issues will just be worse.

…so more vivify spam then? How’s that an improvement?

Now this I agree with.

Well, it fires off an essence font bolt, and the ability has a chance to reset by spell use. I think it might work well with RM. I don’t have alpha access, so haven’t tried it myself, but of all covenant abilities, night fae seems to have the best synergy with rising mist.

Would be nice if the rest had synergies with stuff other than EF, because like you said, EF is rarely used in M+.

3

I’ll address the most complete part of your post for now as you have a few things to be finished in a later edit.

Essence font is designed for raid play. Where activating and autocasting an aoe smart heal is efficient. However when you use this in a 5man party it is not good as you cannot hit enough targets with it and the healbars barely increase. For me this is also not fun in terms of raidhealing , as this can make up to >50% of your healing but you don’t “feel” like you do big healing. You just splash every player around you periodically for some %.

Essence font never makes up 50% of my raid healing, and I don’t see how it would since I use vivify with the hot, so paired with renewing mists, vivify and gusts of mists is going to do a considerable chunk in % of your healing.

Also essence font in 5 mans is just used for the hot.

As renewing mist is just something you hit every cooldown and generally should be pressing it prior to engaging, in instanced party play between 2-5 players you are limited only to two basic heals:

Preparing them before engaging yes.
Using them on cooldown, not always. Perhaps in M+ dungeons but certainly not in raids.
If you prepare with TFT a renewing mist 30 seconds prior to big raid damage hitting, once it does after essence fonting you’ll be healing a target with double gusts of mists procs, and cleaving to 4 targets that will have renewing mist. Simply using it on CD is inneficient healing.

Your choice is do I use enveloping mist, a large expensive over time heal.
Or do I spotheal with vivify. Sadly in the current state of the game vivify spam is essentially what mistweaver boils down to . It is mana efficient and heals most players between 25-50% of their health. Because it is so strong and because healthbars are healed really fast enveloping mist is rarely the good choice as by the time it ticks people get topped off. Further to this, enveloping mist increases healing by the mistweaver only by their spells. This does not work with trinkets, azerite or essences. As these are a major part of the expansion this further pushes you towards vivify spam.

I’ll be honest in say even in high level keys I just drop an enveloping mist on a DPS player and let it heal them back to full along with renwing mist. With current intellect and crit/vers levels it’s more than enough. (throw yourself off the little edge in zuldazar losing 70-80% of your hp) then put an enveloping + renewing on yourself and try it) Even on tank enveloping mist and extending it twice paired with rising mist generally works for most of the pull.

Certain trash packs like fortified motherlode or waycrest manner will require you to vivify due to people needing to be topped up but not always. And yeah sometimes you’ll need to spam tank a bit if they’re getting blasted like Zul in high fortified keys.

I run way of the crane in 5 mans and that’s generally my main source of healing.

Be it healing in a dungeon, spothealing in a raid, healing an outdoor group or inside of a battleground, I find the overwhelming majority of my healing is the use of this same spell. Ofcourse you also find soothing mist as enabler and gust of mist (passive mastery) and renewing mist on the details breakdown, but realistically in terms of rotation you are always going for the setup of the vivify

I disagree due to my explanations above. But I’ll agree in raids a lot of your healing is essence font based, and sometimes the most efficient way to heal is to keep casting it with upwelling stacks over switching to other healing methods which is disappointing and can get boring in some fights.

With chi-ji (yu-lon) becoming base line and as way of the crane becoming a talent that doesn’t cost 25K mana, as well as receiving other spells that provide healing in Shadowlands, it’s looking a bit better variety wise but I’d still enjoy if Essence Font or the Mastery was reworked. Eminence healing would also be good even if it was a stance, I personally like the Way of the Crane playstyle where my damage gets converted to healing and I’m sure many other mistweavers do too. Currently it’s been teased there’s a legendary power/conduit that heals an injured player by 20% of your tiger palm/blackout/kick, but that doesn’t seem to be enough. Would be better if it healed the same targets as Rising Mist talent. I guess we’ll have to wait and see how things develop.

4

Sadly our specc has so much stuff that just doesnt work atm. Yulon is weak and doesnt do healing sphere as it was suppost to do in the orginal post for mistweaver. Invoke Chi-Ji is a just a copy paste of Way of the Crane, it even gives the same buff. It also uses 25% of your mana and if you have less then 25% mana you get the bird but not the effect and go on cooldown.

Our mastery still bad, affects pretty much nothing.

We also spend way to much time just channel Essence font and to less extend soothing mist. Both of thoes spells could have their channeltimes cut in half.

5

Edit: wow that derailed a perfectly nice Topic
I deleted my half of the Argument sorry about that

ps: Thinkspring is still wrong in every single reply to my proposal

6

So, basically, the only change is that you can stack it to 5 instead of 3, and Blackout Kick consumes at most 3. No point in using a resource for that, can do that with the buff. Smaller change, exactly the same effect.

Trackingwise - a WeakAura can track both easily.

Having an extra resource that you can build with one spell only, and consume with another, and no other spell or ability is affected, is 100% pointless.

8

But it doesn’t simplify anything. From a gameplay point of view, it merely changes what you track: a resource or the stack count on a buff. Unless you refuse to use WeakAuras, which one you track doesn’t matter at all. It further complicates it by not consuming all charges if you have more than three. So no, it doesn’t simplify anything, quite the contrary.

10

And that is entirely possible without an extra resource. Why make things complicated with Chi, when the same effect can be achieved without?

12

I did not. The second part is equally irrelevant. You can play MW just fine without a TotM weakaura right now. If you were able to stack up to 5 and consume 3 only, that would be a stronger reason to have a WA.

For beginners, it would bring no noticable change, but would make it more important to have a WA for TotM for optimal play, due to the partial consume. Thus, more complicated.

And again, partial consume does not require a new resource. Re-introducing Chi this way would bring zero benefits for anyone.

14

Because when you go cat form as a druid, pretty much your whole kit changes. You won’t be throwing Wild Growths around as a cat. You have multiple builders, and multiple spenders too. A resource there makes a lot of sense.

In case of a monk, we do not change forms. Half our spells do not become unusable - to be replaced by other abilities - when we start DPSing. With your proposed idea, there’d be a single builder and a single spender. A resource for that is overkill, especially when we already have the buff in the game.

If it doesn’t add anything useful, it’s not worth it. And what you proposed is just as possible with the current buff-based system as with Chi - except we do not need the extra resource, so, in practice, simpler.

16

But it can be, if you already have the WAs and whatnot set up to track the buff. Switch to a resource, and you suddenly have to redo those. Switching is more complex, and still doesn’t bring any benefit, because once tracking is set up, both are super trivial to keep track of with WA.

I have a resto druid, I tried. Healing spells are not usable in cat form. Yes, you automatically go out of it without GCD, but they still are not usable in forms. You also incur the GCD tax when entering cat form to do DPS.

And in the druid case, each spec has their own main resource, pretty much, and there are multiple spells that use said resource, not just a single pair of builder / spender. Resource makes sense in that case.

For monks, in the way you laid out - nope. There are certainly ways to reintroduce Chi for Mistweavers, ways that make sense. Your idea does not, as it brings nothing that the current buff system can’t do.

18

A minor change does not require a separate resource. :wink:

19

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