Healing - Passive vs Active DPSing - Redesign

Classes Monk
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Defining Passive vs Active DPS

You heal PvE Content and are expected (often) to deal damage when healing. If you want to push higher end content, which most of us do, then you’re definitely expected and required to deal damage.
I see that there are 2 ways of doing damage, Active and Passive. I’m going to define them as follows:

Active - Moonfire, Lightning Bolt, Smite, Crackling Jade Lightning
Passive - Fire Breath, Acid Rain

The main difference between the two being that one requires you to press a button that often doesn’t heal (Active), or is outside of your healing rotation. (Fistweavers are unique that you have to actively dps to heal)
While the other (Passive) is one that you press primarily for the healing, but it also does substantial amounts of DPS and allows you to cast other abilities while that ability is still doing dps.

In general, I would like to see more Passive-Style healing in the game for healers, but since I’m in the monk forums I’m going to discuss this for Monks.

Fistweaver

Fistweaver monk’s whole kit is around Active DPS, yet they’re falling behind [Acid Rain] and [Fire Breath], which are Passive DPS abilities. While one could argue that FW monks are dealing passive dps through their punching, the reason why this is not the case is because if a FW is not doing damage, then they’re not healing. This is a similar playstyle to Disc Priest, but practically doubled down for monk. It’s a playstyle that some really enjoy and I won’t discount that, but it’s not a playstyle that everyone enjoys.
Aside from enjoying it or not, it’s a question of viability at higher end content. There is a reason why you don’t see FW monks in high keys, not only a lack of utility (Hero/Lust, BattleRess, etc) but also because there are often moments where it’s either unsafe to dps to heal, or there are mechanics causing you to move out of melee range which force you to spot heal - which feels bad and clunky if you’re a melee focused healer, and other healers can do this better.

Because Fistweavers are melee dps who are actively going through a dps rotation, it’s hard to know if these players even LIKE passive-style dps. My assumption is that these types of players who enjoy the active DPS rotation don’t really even want passive dps, because if they did, they probably wouldn’t be fistweaving.
But since they’re not competing with the classes that are capable of passively doing damage, there definitely needs adjustment. It feels bad to go through a full dps rotation and be outputting less than another healer who hits one button and reaches 80k dps while casting other abilities.

Solution Fistweaver

Fistweaver either needs increased DPS tuning numbers on their kit, or they need a passive dps ability. The reason I’m hesitant to see increase damage output is because a lot of their healing is % based from the damage they deal, so increasing damage means increasing healing. That’s the main problem with FW in my opinion, is you can’t tune it easily. But if you give them a Passive-Style DPS ability, then you can tune their main kit for healing, and then tune the passive DPS separately for healing.
[Rushing Jade Wind] is a great example of a Passive DPS ability for FW monks. If you could tune it to do damage and heal, then it’s something monks could hypothetically activate for some healing (like healing rain) while also using their main rotational abilities to output additional damage and healing. This would function like Passive-Style abilities without taking away the active playstyle.

Mistweaver

Mistweavers (ranged) have a much larger problem where their kit is practically useless at high end content due to their inherent LACK of damaging abilities. This is really disheartening to see, as it shouldn’t be unviable if the development team is designating half of a talent tree to it. I think a lot of the argument between “Be a Fistweaver” and “Let me play Ranged” is due to the shared space and both specs feeling not viable. If Fistweavers were goin’ hard in the MDI, they probably wouldn’t complain as much, but since half of their tree is taken by a spec they deem unviable, it’s easy to bully ranged casters.
Since half of the tree is designated to Mistweaving/Ranged, and since you can look up any Mythic Raiding from MoP and see MW monks casting soothing mist and healing from ranged, there obviously is a reason why this spec exists. It’s the original playstyle, and many people love it, myself included.

(Fistweaving didn’t become popular until Challenge modes, and you still channeled SM in those primarily, but eminence was way weaker back then and gimicky, it was not the meta playstyle)

Ranged MW is incapable of dealing damage. And that’s not okay in the modern world of healing. [Crackling Jade Lightning] is our Active dps ability, as it’s not a part of our core rotation, and it desperately needs a buff as it’s currently dealing 2-5k dps and only capable of Single Target. Getting into melee to deal damage is practically not an option since ranged MW aren’t taking melee DPS talents to make it worth doing. And [Accumulating Mists]’ functionality with Zen Pulse allows for burst every 30 seconds or so, but outside of that you’re practically useless. This is a huge problem.

Solution Mistweaver

There simply needs to be more Passive Healing options for Monks (and other healers) to compete with the current power behind these spells like [Acid Rain]. An example of passive healing for monks would be the Torghast Power: [Corrosive Dosage]. This power that’s currently in the game already could be retuned to allot for passive healing in the monk kit. [Corrosive Dosage] - Causes [Vivify] healing to deal 50% of its healing as damage to nearby enemies every second for 3 seconds.
This type of talent would be ideal for Mistweavers since it’s a Passive-Style healing ability that would be on par with [Acid Rain], [Fire Breath], and others.
Additionally, retuning [Crackling Jade Lightning] to work with Unison, trigger additional effects, or reworking [Accumulating Mists] to empower [Zen Pulse] as a more focused DPSing ability would really enhance the Mistweaver viability.

Summary

Fistweaver and Mistweaver need some serious DPS buffs to complete with current competition. Not only do they need increased damage tuning, but specifically more Passive-DPS abilities.
Shamans/Prevokers are dominating right now and it’s because they’re able to do damage/heal while also doing other abilities on the side, whereas monks have to shift focus to deal damage, or to heal, and there’s hardly any overlap. Bringing back [Corrosive Dosage], buffing [Rushing Jade Wind] immensely, or adding new talents to give us Passive DPS would be fantastic. For the Active Playstyle enjoyers, [RJW] would suit them. For the Passive DPS enjoyers, [Corrosive Dosage] is that solution.

Thanks,
GL HF

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While I agree with your assessment and nearly everything you said the proposed change to balance fistweaving is too convluded. The easy fix is just tuning the dps/hps numbers. If they want FW to do more hps but not damage then all they need to do is change the 125% on ATOTM up or if they want DPS to go up but not HPS then just tune DPS up and ATOTM down a bit. Biggest problem solved. Like I know that’s kind of majorly simplistic but if you want to FW as your main way of healing then you aren’t looking to use healing spells a ton and the kind of rotation they have with vivify and ReM and EF I think really hit the mark for healing spells within a normal DPS - > HPS rotation outside of when mistakes are made and normal rotation needs to be broken for more HPS and whatnot. But if you want more damage then just give us more damage. We already underperform as a DPS/HPS spec compared to some of the just HPS specs (RShamman). But to lose on both ends of the equation just means that the only people playing monk right now are the dedicated players and they are slowly falling off too. I don’t play monk because they put up the biggest numbers, they can if you know what you’re doing. I play monk because the MoP play style really fit me and I love the immense amount of versatility a MW brings to themselves with knowing when FW is better or MW but just not being able to do any of it without trying 2.5 times harder than everyone else really puts a damper on wanted to even try for a lot of people.

But all of this to say you don’t need to add more to this spec or the FW part of it. You just need not to arbitrarily hold it back. Like why can’t we do a bit better? Why can’t a we (and disc) put up decent healer DPS and still decent HPS but not being kings or why can’t it be a sliding scale of FW (complete DPS) to MW (complete HPS).

Just my thoughts since starting this xpac and reading your post.

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Thanks for taking the time to read and reply. I don’t know why I made it so complicated, you really did just simplify that. I do think that I’m maybe thinking more in lines of why adding something to MW(ranged) my be beneficial, and potentially felt obligated to add something to FW.

But I think you might be right especially since Fistweaver is so unique in that its active-dps playstyle is also its passive healing playstyle. I sometimes just worry that the high keys where you have to get away from packs can really hurt them compared to a disc who can still do damage from afar. I was trying to find a solution that would allow monks to do damage passively without having to be actively doing the dps.

But I agree with you, and thanks for taking the time to reply. Just buff Fistweaver numbers and then add/change mistweaver mechanics. I think the kit of fistweaver is fine, I just think it’s too weak to compete atm.

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Then play another class? I don’t understand why people insist on making a monk into a priest with green sparkles.

It’s more a matter of the spec being difficult to understand. The healing comes from a very weird interaction between multiple poorly named and unintuitive talents. It’s a more complex class/playstyle (needlessly so in many areas), and so groups gravitate to what’s easier. Popularity isn’t a good indicator of theoretical performance.

As far as ‘lack of utility’. DPS should be a FWrs main utility. Sadly it’s laughably low atm. The rotations/abilities work, the numbers are just straight up too low.

This is simply it. The FW kit doesn’t need more weird and wonderful talent/skill interactions, it’s already a convoluted mess at times. I think it works so well more by accident than intention. The dps just needs to be higher, period (and tweaking the numbers of AT down is trivial).

And I like RJW. If they wanted to add an aoe dmg component that’s fine, but don’t strip the healing from it, it’s actually much better than people realize/give it credit for.

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Also as a response to the posting of this topic I really am curious as to why you feel a MW monk needs to put up DPS numbers? Why isn’t the monk on a sliding scale of FW (best healer DPS/moderate HPS) to MW (Very high HPS, the top mw maybe being able to compete with other specs, but extremely low DPS to compensate)?

Why does it have to be that there isn’t a healer out there that has high HPS just to be a HPS pumper? And with a MW being locked into SooM it makes perfect sense on monk to run on the DPS - HPS scale as being like a FW - MW scaling.

With this idea in mind I feel like Monk in general is being arbitrarily held back because they don’t want us to be best at everything while having nothing to complain about except our lack or nonpersonal utility.

Similar concept to Disc vs Holy priest in my mind. Disc should always do more DPS than Holy, but Holy puts up them sweet sweet green HPS numbers. Like why does it need to be more complicated than that, at a base level? Once you dive into the meat of it all you can get more complicated. But at a base level why isn’t this how it’s looked at?

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To this argument, it’s silly to say “Just play another class” when the goal is to allow your players to each have a foot into the content they want to do. It’s simply not good game design to develop classes and specs that are incapable of doing the content you create. So creating half of a talent tree to a spec that’s not able to do certain content feels really narrowminded.

I think because in the realm of higher end content, you have to output dps as a healer and I think that all healers need some work in this department. I don’t necessarily agree with the notion that only a handful of healing specs can be good at Mythic Plus. I think that’s poor design from my perspective to create a Pillar of EndGame only suitable for 3/8 healing specs. I think all 8 should be playable at high end content, and considering modern criteria for that is a healer who can heal and do damage, then I see a problem with the other 5 specs that aren’t outputting dps. There almost is never a mechanic or difficult encounter you can’t overcome by killing it faster (adding more dps), whereas there are plenty you can’t overcome by adding more healing. Adding more healing, or being a big hps pumper isn’t as effective as being a balanced dps/healer combo, so having mistweaver be a hps pumper isn’t a viable solution. (It’s also not even outputting that much more HPS than most specs)

I may have worded this poorly, but I didn’t want to remove the healing from RJW, I was just saying make it do damage so the monk could press it similar to Healing Rain (set it and forget it for a few seconds) to do damage and heal. But since RJW isn’t doing any damage right now, it’s useless imo.

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Maybe in M+, but in raiding HPS pumping is definitely a thing, as you can then bring less healers and more proper dps.

Which is why I don’t think caster MW really needs a huge dps overhaul. FWr makes sense for a more balanced, dps/hps build, caster MWr is more designed around mass hps, or something similar. They each have their niche.

As long as there is a viable healing spec for monks for both M+ and raiding, it’s fine. I don’t think we need 2. This isn’t unlike druids (convoke/swarm focus for M+, rejuv focus for raiding).

*edit: seems Paboo beat me to it, we have basically the same argument

Well my FWr is 415 ilvl at 2500 M+ rating. I use is all the time in 19s. Its great in large aoe pulls like RLP, AA, or NOK where your tank/melee dps are going to be standing right next to you.

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This is also insight I simply don’t have. I’m not a huge M+ Pusher because I don’t necessarily have the time right now, I only get to raid once a week and do M+ once a week or so. If you’re able to really get good value out of it then it’s something I need to reconsider. I just haven’t experienced that high end, because I’m locked out of it by playing caster MW/time restrictions/average player. But this is good insight, would you wish it also did DPS too though, I wonder?

I suppose I can see this perspective. I know a lot of my bias comes from wanting to play caster MW in mythic plus and feeling gimped out of it. It just isn’t fun as a player to feel this crappy about your spec. We’re teased with tools that could make us viable, like Accumulating Mists (it makes Zen Pulse hit so hard that it pushes me to 100k+ dps for a moment, then by the end of the pull I’m back down to like 5-10kdps) and it sucks knowing we’re just a few tuning knobs away from being viable and me enjoying that content. That’s largely what this post is about, just making it viable, because I don’t think designing your game with intent to make something not-viable is good. But I genuinely do see your perspective and recognize I could be wrong.

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I don’t know what you’re talking about my preffered method of healing M+ is as a MW SooM monk. I use Tom and my talents and rotation accordingly and I run an average of 15-18+ all the time. I just don’t have a group to run M+ with so I pug everything and it’s slower than slamming key after key with a group, which I’d still do as a MW SooM build and tell them to push it higher and higher, harder and bigger packs until I found the literal breaking point. I still don’t feel like I’ve hit the ceiling yet.

On the flip side I do FW for raid. It’s a mass AoE/Cleave build but I find it to be the most effective getting 10-15 ReMs put and just pumping those instant Vivify into my group. You also have way more tools at your disposal than I feel you are giving FW raid healing credit for. I still don’t optimize myself and hit ~60 something thousand HPS on average.

In my opinion I’d say if you’re healing 10 or less people casting MW is boss and 10 or more and you start slowly getting into my version of spread FW healing and it’s boss.

I know this feels counter intuitive to what I thought it would be like but it’s how it’s turning out for me. I also prefer to make MW work wherever I can and this just seems to be best for me but I’d still like to improve.

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Well no, a passive DPS ability is Hit Combo.

RJW requires you press it.

Also why does anyone think MW needs any sort of tuning? It’s in a good spot right now, not significantly stronger than others, but by no means bad.

And if tuning is the problem for MW (which it isn’t), then you know what you do instead of tuning the damage of abilities? You buff ATOTM

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I mean… maybe? It’s more an issue of single target dps than multi target. SCK does decent aoe dmg, and can be spammed indefinitely. Resonant fists is mostly aoe dmg, FLS and Chi Burst also aoe, Zen Pulse aoe. We have a lot of aoe dps options. A little more dps would be nice so I certainly wouldn’t say no, and I already cast it in those scenarios anyways…

But where we’re really lacking is single target dmg. TP/BoK is core to any single target rotation, and they hit like wet-noodles. Expel harm is a sad joke. We have nothing like adaptive swarm or Nature’s Vigil (druid talents), closest being Chi-Wave (which again is just sad in terms of hps or dps).

I wouldn’t want more buttons to hit, the Monk rotation is already GCD constrained, more buttons wouldn’t necessarily mean more dps (or hps).

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It’s not that you don’t understand, people have explained their reasons. You just don’t care and are trying to be antagonistic.

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Agreed. SCK should do double the damage it does now, and our new 4 set should grant corrosive dosage.

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Not at all. I don’t really care either way.

It’s generally that the reasons explained don’t make any sense. The only general theme of the ‘MWrs should be casters’ argument is that they are played like priests with green sparkles.

The one guy did elaborate (I don’t remember which thread, this or another, and am too lazy to go find out) is that he liked ‘beam/channeled’ casting. But I’m not sure why anyone would find that useful in dragonflight given how little of that is necessary in the current content. If this was TBC I could see a desire there, tanks needed constant heals. But now tanks are nearly invincible and only need the occasional top-up, most healing is aoe/spot/triage on the dps.

To be more specific and less flippant, MW actually feels like a cross between priest/druid. You have Soothing Mist and the statue acting similar to priest healing (low mobility, high single target healing) but more clunky with less tools. Then you have Enveloping/Renewing/EF/FLS mist which is basically Regrowth/Rejuv/Wildgrowth/Efflor (with the monk mastery simply being a crappy version of the druid one). In both cases it feels like I’m playing a reject version of other classes.

The only time MW has felt different, interesting, or fresh is FWing.

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This is a weird statement considering gust of mist and echo of light basically have the same description.

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Hmmm, ilevel 405 1800 MWer, should I spend time reading this or is it a waste of time?

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Opinion.

MW even as caster is immensely more fun than sham and priest and was a huge breath of fresh air. ( this is coming from someone who mained both r sham and H/D priest from cata till legion - when I tried monk I never looked back )

MW always felt more to me like r sham with more HPS and less utility, better tools to manage mobs/enemies, easier to weave in damage, better mobility and self defensives, requires some set up. AG/ASC + CBT nukes back in the day felt like pseudo revivals. You manage riptide’s 2 stacks like RenMist, spreading them out to prep for dmg. Stun totem and slow totem and lasso can be used like leg sweep and RoP. Stream totems buff ST healing now if talented, feels like popping TFT for env mist boosts. In recent expacs with Prim wave + riptide being basically a pseudo ren mist+viv cleave it feels even closer now tbh.

Meh. Priests are boring. MW has always felt like it’s own healer mostly to me, with various options inside the talent tree to tweak how it felt it always stays fresh.

The argument MW is a green priest is weird to me.

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Rarely is there any good/unbiased info in any of these threads/monk forums. Take anything in here with a grain of salt. Lots of people mostly venting their frustrations outside of a few people who are most likely trolling at this point.

Both MW and FW styles can be made to work in 20’s and mythic raids if the person puts in the effort to learn the class/talents/content.

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Oh come on. It’s been completely civil discourse. I mean if you don’t care or don’t want to talk about MWrs, why even comment in or read this thread?

I read your response to mine. We have different opinions, yet I still found it interesting. You made some good points… what more do you want?

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