Fistweaving

Dävë-moon-guard · January 19, 2021, 5:36am

Can someone put me in the direction for a great guide For fistweaving I never really tried healing and the play style sounds fun. Video would be cool to

Yiffinhell-barthilas · January 19, 2021, 10:04am

I’d start by learning to heal normally first. Once you’re comfortable with the basics start slipping some DPS into that before trying full on fistweaving (as a healer you should aim to do DPS whenever you are able in M+ anyway). When you eventually get to fistweaving you’ll still need to heal in the normal style when your party members start taking spiky damage or the aoe throughput requirements are high enough.

Once you’re specced and geared for fistweaving though, your normal healing style is less effective, so nail the normal healing style first. That way you’ll know what to do.

Fistweaving can be effective in raids, but its not optimal for high M+ keys, especially with other players standing in fire. < 15 keys you’re probably fine if your group isn’t silly, and it gets much better with gear. One issue you have is that the heals from fistweaving are randomly targeted between everyone not at full HP. The huge heals from RSK often end up hitting people that don’t need it. But also, as mentioned, because you have to revert to normal healing anyway when things get hard, and you’ve taken a legendary + talents that are sub-optimal for the normal healing style, you are less effective in those high pressure situations.

Fightman-darkspear · January 19, 2021, 3:45pm

Fistweaving wont become viable until the healing is no longer random. Your spells aren’t smart in the sense they dont care who they are healing, so if your in a big raid group, you might be healing random people and not the tank who needs it right now.

Pscion-tichondrius · January 19, 2021, 3:53pm

There is a basic fistweaving guide, but its hosted in google docs and forum wont let me link to it here. It is basically the only resource I’ve found. MW is extremely underplayed, so we don’t enjoy the same bounty of class guides and healthy discussion other classes do.

It’s called " An OK Player’s Guide to Fistweaving." If that helps at all.
Also Mysticall on YouTube is helpful - he is mainly PVP but has been branching out into PVE lately.

Ipmane-whisperwind · January 19, 2021, 3:57pm

I would even go as far as in raiding you can get away with fistweaving more so than anywhere else. The uncertainty of healing is counterintuitive to being an actual healer. In M+ that random healing hitting someone at 90% health instead of the 40% tank can spell a wipe.

3 things we have that allow fistweaving to be somewhat viable:

Ancient Teachings of the Monastery(legendary)
Rising Mists(tier 50 talent option)
Chi’Ji(tier 45 talent option)

We have to go outside of what we naturally get to be able to fistweave, with Ancient Teachings of the Monastery being the make or break. Rising Mists alone is only to extend hots. The healing from it is extremely small. Chi’Ji is a great CD but you lose a CD in its place. Rushing Jade Wind is not that great unless stacked or in raid.

Once the developers decide on if they really want to make this a thing we may see all of what I mentioned baseline and add things to the talent rows to change or enhance how we play fistweaving.

Fightman-darkspear · January 19, 2021, 4:00pm

Thats why I hate blizzards balancing staff. They half invented something to see how it does before RETURNING it to the spec. But they didn’t want it to be the preferred method of playing the spec so they intentionally gimped it. I knew it would be underwhelming just by looking at it in the beta. They should have made it as good as humanly possible, and backtracked if it was too strong. Everyone would prefer something is released strong rather than really bad.

Flauris-stormreaver · January 19, 2021, 4:03pm

Rising Sun Kick:RSK
Black Out Kick:BoK
Tiger Palm:TP
Renewing Mists:RM
Essence Font:EF
Thunder Focus Tea:TFT
There are three rotations that I play with and I’ve been trying to figure out what’s best.

Always
Precast RMx2 and EF

RSK->TPx3->BoK while your legendary buff is up and use TFT for RSK cooldown reduction.
When you buff falls of you will have 1 RM availiable and another coming in 3 seconds. You can either RM->EF->RM->RSK->TPx3->BoK or EF->RMx2->RSK->TPx3->BoK.
Is the same as 1) but you don’t do TPx3. RSK->BoK->TP. BoK has a cooldown of two GCDs which means you can BoK->TP->BoK->TP etc
Is similar to 1) and 2) but you weave RM in between your BoK. Again since you can always get 1GCD between your BoK use that to put out RM.

Edit:

Mastery is useless for fistweaving.

Flauris-stormreaver · January 19, 2021, 4:06pm

Refreshing Jade Wind is REALLY strong if your raid is stacking up. And since fistweaving is so great on mana you can switch to EvM spam while JS is up.

Ipmane-whisperwind · January 19, 2021, 4:30pm

I mentioned RJW is strong but only if stacked. If its not hitting more than 2 people then IMHO it is not worth it. Fistweaving is great on mana. Especially when you talent into Spirit of the Crane. No one is arguing that. Its more so unless you are overly geared for the content you are doing it can be a bit unreliable. Gating the legendary by a channel that requires you to cancel on top of the mana for the spell being upfront is ridiculous.

Fistweaving is enjoyable and fun to play when it is optimal. I highly recommend Mysticall The Monk on youtube(PvP and PvE). He and others give a guide on using fistweaving. They even realize the issues monk have. But blizzard just seems to be throwing bait out to see if people will bite before they decide on making fistweaving an actual thing that doesn’t require you to rely on a legendary to pull it together.

Ninh-draka · January 19, 2021, 4:46pm

More specifically Blizzard has never intended for fistweaving to be the ‘preferred method of play’, it’s always been a downtime thing in their eyes. They didn’t ‘intentionally gimp it’ so much as they weren’t designing it to be what people were dreaming of in the first place.

Diogenes-shadowsong · January 19, 2021, 11:12pm

Here is a new guide I found:
h t t p s://questionablyepic.com/fistweaving-raid-compendium/

Tonich-garona · January 20, 2021, 6:47am

Definitely would recommend RJW for castle nathria. Fistweaving is super viable, if not preferable (maybe unless you’re cutting edge). The downside of chi-ji is that the healing is mastery based, which is terribad. The goal is to have 0 mastery, with as much crit/vers as you can get.

Overclocks-emerald-dream · January 21, 2021, 12:56am

I wouldn’t make that assumption, the guy who created the class and spec has a YouTube channel now and he said he made MW based off how he likes to heal.

Blizzard made disc, then Ret “combat” healers in Legion, and sort of strafed away from the fist weaving play style. I feel like they made Holy the “damage -> healing” archetype.

Gedpriest-queldorei · January 21, 2021, 2:22am

even full fistweaving using the legendary still requires you to cast essence font about every 12-15 seconds

between those times you use your 2-3 melee moves that actually generate fistweave heals PLUS keep your renewing on peeps

choose the fistweave talents to make your fistweaving extend your hots

pray that you have other healers so you can just fistweave most of the time but expect to have to completely stop fistweaving to cast some targeted heals - in M+ if you arne’t casting targeted heals quite frequently you can basically guarantee deaths due to lack of heals

someone on the bliz team is just not a fan of MW in this xpac

Keida-alterac-mountains · January 21, 2021, 2:49am

I love Mistweaver and the fistweaving was a dream come true. Was.

There are a few scattered resources, but nothing strong imo. Regardless, I’ve been DEDICATED to making it viable. Just today, I have given up. It’s the least viable build of the least effective healer class, especially in PvP. It was most effective in raids, but any cookie cutter Druid or shaman will outperform.

I quit the class and the build I most love because it is demonstrably outperformed.

Ninh-draka · January 21, 2021, 4:05am

https://www.engadget.com/2013-02-22-an-early-look-at-patch-5-2-for-monks-part-2.html

“We want Fistweaving to provide significant damage and healing, but both should be less than an actual DPS spec or a traditional healer (again Atonement is the model).” -Ghostcrawler

EDIT: Blizzard’s design sense on mistweaver hasn’t really changed since this response. “Mistweaving” or just primary healing provides the heaviest healing while “Fistweaving” provides a lesser amount.
I’ll admit I don’t really understand what people want out of fistweaving, as I am perfectly happy with the current state (smarter targeting could always be nice, but I won’t hate the playstyle without it). It always seems like the expectation is to kill hard casting, which seems counterintuitive for class design to me.

Tonich-garona · January 21, 2021, 8:02am

Fistweaving is perfectly viable in raiding. If you plan on pushing higher keys, probably not. It’s just about optimizing spec and gearing. Try to get as close to 0 mastery as you can and stack as much vers/crit (i personally prefer vers, although they say crit sims slightly higher) as you can get. You’re never gonna be going to throw out quite as many kicks/punches as a disc priest will smites, but you can still pump. I usually top healing meters in my 8/10 heroic semi casual guild while still bringing good damage.