The removal of essence font also stripped jade fire stomp of essence font bolts. This wrecked the amount of aoe team healing that was generated from the melee rotation. Now you have to waste GCD on spreading as much renewing mist around as possible before you can really get the aoe pumping.
Effective output is cut almost in half when you add in the set bonus rework.
It’s not. EF stacking with regular EF was infinitely better, and it could be extended with Rising Mists, and made Gusts of Mists do x2 the output, which was actual big value, regardless of your secondary stat.
Also marginally useful for PvP because Dispel reasons.
Sure, there were synergies with the Jadefire EF bolts, but they weren’t good synergies: even in the rare case in S3 where I played Ancient Teachings+Upwelling in raid, WCL broke down the Essence Font healing from Jadefire’s bolts vs. normal EF bolts and Gusts of Mist: both were comically low.
Mastery is now super-good for Fistweaving due to Crane Style, which is why stacking it will also be super good for Jadefire Stomp in TWW (pending balance adjustments).
In Dragonflight, the EF bolt just was a) a moderate heal that b) applies a comically weak HoT that also allows c) the ability for Gust of Mists to trigger twice on the affected targets while the HoT is up.
Yes, they were. Everything had a purpose.
Resetting FLS for EF bolts, which in turn lowered the cooldown for TFT → EF was incredibly important, which was used for high damage cycles, which then applied EF ofc for Gusts stacking and a REALLY GOOD HoT that could be extended with Rising Mists + the tiny heal from RSK after triggering it, back to resetting FLS to use on cooldown to your entire party to use the EF bolts to lower the cooldown of TFT → EF and the cycle continues.
They’re comically low because an incredibly large majority of people had no idea how to actually Fistweave in Raids, because the staple was casting.
It’s RNG.
If we still had essence Font then I could probably get behind this opinion, but since we don’t, I heavily disagree.