I’ve been mistweaving in both Legion and BfA and i’ve loved the spec ever since i picked it up. Coming back to BfA after a hiatus i began looking for improvements in my playstyle on the monk and i came across the news that “fistweaving” was back. Now, what i always thought was amazing was for one healing class to have several different playstyles with different complexities to them. Disc and Holy on the priest being a perfect example of this. I was chasing the proper haste gear required for the fistweaving spec when the sad news hit about RM being nerfed. Don’t get me wrong though, it had it coming. WIth the performance it had in the high-end it should see a change, but the change that happened was in my opinion one that served to remove a playstyle rather than reign it in.
All this brought me to wondering what exactly the philosophy behind healing and the complexity of builds was from Blizzards side, and i was wondering if the community or Blizzard themselves could shed some light on this.
Should complexity of builds be rewarded with more output, be it DPS or HPS, or does this lead to detrimental behavior from the communities’ side as “simple = less performance” make lower barrier of entry builds less appealing?
How do you intend to counteract or reign in class and spec representation skewing when you push more “infinitely” scaling (Torghast, M+) content where few percentages of better performance that wouldn’t represent a problem in more “static” content becomes extremely obvious?
These are for me at least two burning questions that i’d love to see input from both the community in general and Blizzard if at all possible.
Mistweaver should be a strong hps healer that is durable (mobility, leather with fort brew) with strong tank healing + CD.
I think both fistweaving and upwelling should be viable and similar output. Fistweaving should get slightly more (not too much as they add a lot of dps) due to being harder to play.
I think healer builds with dps in mind should output healing below average for builds commited exclusively to healing regardless of their complexity. There must be a tradeoff: either you do both meh hps and dps or you do full hps only.
This blight of dpsing seeping into healing must be stopped and severly limited
Why? I guess because you are contributing dps, as well as healing. It would make more sense that you are able to contribute almost as much healing, and then relatively decent dps - that is a reward in itself, that you manage to pull off a total group contribution that exceeds what a dedicated heal only build could.
That is a fair assessment, and I agree. But in this case fistweaving in it’s current iteration and what I’m mentioning requires a much higher input and activity, i.e, higher skill and difficulty therefore it should perform better if done correctly.
If they require the same amount of skill/activity then yes, dpsing while healing should do less healing throughput than a dedicated heal build.
If only for solo content it’s great to have a healing spec with some decent dps output. I’m tired to feel forced to switch on a dps spec to do any outdoor content at a decent pace when tanks and dps can save so much time.
I actually feel that fistweaving is not supported enough. There’s basically one mandatory talent and one other talent that interact with the playstyle and that’s about it. I get why they want to nerf the current high-end build to avoid some silly situation in top mythic environment but ruining a fresh playstyle for 90% of Mistweavers in general is a bit overkill.
I’d be fine if they made Rising Mist really underwhelming again IF there was other ways to focus on a fistweaving gameplay, whether with talents or some other way.
For instance I don’t get why fistweaving doesn’t interact with our mastery. Why doesn’t it proc a gust of mist instead of a flat heal thanks to Rising Mist ?
I would love to see other fresh interactions between our melee abilities and our healing ones. Tiger palm could have an effect on another spell such as essence font. For example it could improve the strength of the next essence font cast for up to let’s say 10 stacks.
I am not the player with the most experienced ever, but from my point of view fistweaving is perhaps the hardest healing build in the game by far. Disc priests have a somehow similar playstyle but are way safer because they can do it from afar instead of needing to be in melee constantly.
I feel even with the current balance the payoff of playing fistweaver isn’t high enough in most situations. I’m ok with a nerf but if it comes with a proper pass at the spec as a whole going into shadowlands. I am invested in my character and I made it specifically to play fistweaver and I’d hate to have to reroll because Monks are the one class that never gets any love. (and I guess legendary items could drastically impact fistweaving, hopefully, and make it even more fun/relevant)
I like the idea that all healers should have some form of dps, just as tanks have dps as well, id say bring up the healers dps to the same lvl as tanks.
You call it a blight that DPS is seeping into the healing playstyle but i have to disagree. While the game has many ways to interact with whatever it is you are playing, as a healer (when not a disc priest) you are only making reactive decisions. You can anticipate and know which mechanics do what, but at the end of the day you are reacting to what happens in the encounter. Introducing DPS into a rotation means that you suddenly have the means to proactively engage with the encounter and makes for some actual decision making about which way you engage the encounter. In the question about how well you should be healing if you have an actual DPS output i agree; You should output less IF the complexity of the build is similar to that of another class focused solely on healing. The crux of the matter is that if complexity isn’t rewarded in some way, it simply serves to push healing in one direction, a direction where you as a healer wanting to perform well might as well play a less skill intensive class such that you can respond to the mechanics of the fight easier. Item level should not be the only knob the players can tune on to increase performance.