With regards to M+, I’ve never seen fistweaving in a better spot. The 10.0.5 talent change was excellent, with Sheilun’s Gift providing us a useful filler spell for those times between Chi-Jis. With 10.0.7 there will be an extra talent to make that cover 5 players, bringing it up to compete with evokers’ Spirit Bloom for quickly slapping some health back into a party on the edge.
I find caster style is also quite viable for M+; although caster does not mean ranged! Spinny kick has a good radius on it and we can generally hang around behind the rogue, throwing big heals with big cleaves, and spinning for some dps when we have free globals. Biggest advantage is that if we are forced out of melee, we don’t drop hps, only dps and I think there’s a very good argument that this is the right priority for a healer. Biggest problem is we do a lot less dps and have to move in to stun/interrupt (although we can still spec improved paralysis.)
Personally I find fistweaving a little harder because it sticks us up in close melee with all the mechanics going on there. For sanguine/spiteful/storming weeks, or quaking with 3 melee dps, I actively prefer to spec for casting and just be out of that stuff.
However… mistweavers this season live or die by timing their celestial correctly. If we use it badly, e.g. NOT at the AoE damage phase on Nokhud lightning boss, we don’t have anything else to cover for our mistake. If we fail to set up for Chi Ji, then it takes us 3 GCDs after popping it to get any effect; if we set up at the wrong time, we’re now stuck on hiatus either holding that buff ready or letting it drop and cycling round again for another 3 GCDs.
I personally don’t enjoy that so much power has been packed into this 1 (or 3) minute cooldown, because we end up with 12 seconds of gigantic overhealing followed by 48 seconds of meagre maintenance healing. Fistweaving can struggle in this gap because it doesn’t direct it’s healing very well.
My hope for the future would be to see some of that smoothed out. Sheilun’s was good and will get better soon, that’s great news. The PTR has a thing where activating the celestial puts a chi cocoon on the whole party; which is daft. Make chi cocoon have a whole-party effect, don’t tie even more power into our big CD.
Which sounds negative so I will repeat that honestly, Mistweaver has never been better in M+. It has some flaws; most healers do. It’s generally a case of picking the healer whose flaws you most naturally adapt to. If you can handle the timing, then you can have some great fun with faeline and spin to win, ducking in and out of melee, and contributing a decent amount of dps to your party.
For raids… well, as above, I simply never got the hang of it this tier. I’m kind of cross with it, because I was a decent raid healer in BfA and SL, and now I suck and I really think it’s down to gameplay changes. I used to be able to keep essence font on the raid, kick a lot, and do decent numbers.
But now it’s super sensitive to getting our celestial timing right, and being aware of things like when we’ve got more than 6 renewing mists on the raid, stop everything and vivify spam. The default UI just doesn’t give a good job of helping you with the latter and basically mandates the use of a weakaura to keep a counter for you. As a general point of game design, specs should not be designed to play in a way that requires third party UI addons. And you definitely shouldn’t get what the class discord refers to as “cascading failures” from small mistakes. That is needlessly punishing and most specs don’t have that.
And I’m not saying MW can’t pump; it can, and there’s plenty of people prove it. But it is god damn hard to play well in raids.
My biggest regret this season was not identifying the MW changes earlier, because I would have changed raiding main while I still had chance. It’s exceeded my expectations in M+ and I’ve gone further with it than I expected there, but it’s become too hard for me to master in raids and I wish I’d swapped to something a bit less reliant on perfect timing.
…you might even say it requires expert timing.
