I think I made a post like this last season and since the seasons nearing its conclusion and everyone else is doing theirs I want to do it again.
A lot of my opinions are unchanged from last season.
Aside: I like fist weaving so much i dropped dps and tank to make this my main in DF. Despite its problems I love the playstyle and I like mw when it is fist weaving focused, when fist weaving is very effective and rewards good positioning and quick decisions, and I generally dislike any more torwards forcing us to be more cast oriented. If I wanted to play a caster spec I would just do that or drop healing and play something else, that is jus kind of how I feel about it being my main and I have the most fun with mw when fist weaving is effective, quick, and versatile.
- RSK should always be reset through our rotation.
I’ve never looked at mw’s kit and thought “you know what this needs? to press tigers palm more.” I don’t know why this was ever changed and I think it should just be a guaranteed reset. Putting RSK reset on an “rng” thing detracts from the flow of the rotation IMO and makes even less sense now given that RSK isn’t really a healing cd as much as it has been in some seasons. Moreover, I believe that RSK should be more effective.
- A playstyle with over emphasis on melee up time would be nice
Continuing sort of off the last point. Why do we RSK? To spread and extend an impotent HoT for the purpose of enhancing a vivify in some capacity or to spread a heal amp. I don’t find this to be exciting gameplay and leans into caster centric gameplay. The only thing I appreciate about it is that, when it works as intended, that one instant cast vivify/ZP feels great and I think it should feel good if we detract at all from melee to cast anything. This is one of the main appeals of mw to me: Quickness. It is also why I think RSK should be gauranteed reset. Instant casts and a quick rotation, casting while moving, and being very mobile creates exciting and enticing gameplay. Anything that slows it down (through rng or unecessary systems like mana) doesn’t feel very good.
If anything our mists perpetuation should play into empowering fist weaving and not the other way around and not in an unintuitive way like manually misting targets in the middle of our rotation. Maybe ZP could be reworked such that it works on the next vivify OR rsk, to the same effect. That way the flow of the rotation is maintained and encourages continuing to do it as much as possible to extend through our rotation.
- TFT empowering Renewing Mist
I personally do not care if RM exists for 10 seconds or 30 seconds. I will just never realistically ever spend TFT on RM unless maybe it’s for the haste from SI. I didn’t used to (and sometimes still opt not to) play secret infusion and so without that I will just never do this. What I might like instead would be for it to be duplicated onto another target (or 2) so there’s more coverage when empowered by TFT, or at the very least for the amount healed over 20 seconds to be doubled. I don’t find it exciting to press RM at all really but if there was ever going to be something that made fat fingering RM after TFT kinda ok it’s never gonna be “lasts 10 more seconds.”
- Fist weaving in general needs to be stronger
You might think back to like siege and when there was an aoe pack when you think about FW in TWW. You know that when you walked up and did your opener on the pack with cleave targets there would be big healing and also that in single target it was very weak. So weak in fact it might have been weaker than any other healer but don’t quote me on that. So when they fixed our single target to bring it up to par with what’s required in game they basically made it inneffective in aoe in a sense. Like now when you walk up and fist weave a pack it barely does any healing without Chiji, which I find problematic for a variety of reasons but most importantly unfun. This pushes mw to cast more and be more CD reliant than I personally feel like it was before on aoe/cleave.
I don’t believe at all that our aoe/cleave needed to suffer in order for our Single Target to be barable. And if you don’t know what I’m talking about imagine a situation where the party is at 50% hp, you have no cds, and limited mana. All you really have left is your rotation, so you do it, 4 stacks, BoK, the party heals to like 56% hp. So for all those globals and struggle, positioning, cc’ing, etc., you got basically nothing and the party might die in the next 10 seconds. That’s not fun, in fact it kind of really bums me out. If I had never played in a season where I knew it was reliable maybe I wouldn’t have strong opinions about it but it’s too late for that.
- Talent trees feel too rigid to me with little room for flexibility
And the main reason for that is because so many of our talents are base line just for functionality. You want to fist weave? Gotta talent it. Renewing mist? Idk why but you have to talent it. Cacoon? have to talent it. You really only get 2-3 talent points that you can move around and in my opinion, for my playstyle, and what I like, moving those points does not feel good most of the time. It gives up something considerable. There’s only really 1-2 that feel like I can split them like ZP and MWrap, or SI and FT, otherwise you have to drop the sheiluns capstone to get proliferation or delight. Does hitting another 2 targets feel as powerful as those talents all the time? Well i’m gonna talk about that next.
- Sheiluns should hit 5 targets by default
- The single target emperor talent should not be a capstone and instead an alternate option to baseline sheiluns
Why does sheiluns only hit 3 targets? 2 of them are random and I swear it must be truly random because it had to have healed people at 100% hp cause the other 2 injured targets didn’t get healed! Why?
Where is 3 target cap for sheiluns useful? 3v3 arenas? 2v2s? No because you would just take the single target one, honestly. I have wanted this to be changed for so, so, so long and I just may never understand why it does not hit 5 targets baseline. I think it should, I don’t think a talent that makes it “functional” or boarderline “viable” should really be a thing. Just make it do that. Which brings me to my next point
- Calming Coalescence should be removed and cocoon just buffed 80%
- A Target’s damage reductions should reduce the damage the cocoon takes
Cocoon is alrady in a weird spot for healer externals and sometimes in the history of its existence could be critiqued as maybe the worst healer external. It does have its uses, it absolutely does, but it doesn’t feel the most effective to me personally and I don’t think a talent that makes it 80% more effective needs to be a thing. Just make cocoon 80% more effective. In high end content this doesn’t feel optional to me it feels mandatory.
I would also settle for damage reductions reducing the damage the cocoon takes. As far as I can tell they do not. So like lets take a fight from last season like say necrotic wake 15 Rot Spew frontal. Iiirc it would kill a shaman through cocoon so they still have to use their defensive or wolf form stacks or something, so then if they don’t have it then there’s not even a point of putting it on them, I think. Or what about a shadow priests 10% fade, I think that should absolutely reduce the damage taken by the cocoon.
If you put pain supp on a dk their AMS takes less damage. If you put cocoon on a dk their IBF doesn’t make the cocoon take less damage. Cocoon would be so powerful as an external if it was baseline stronger and/or acquired the tankiness of the target.
- (Celestial Conduit) Restore Balance
So you know how in the rshaman tree they have 2 talents for healing tide totem? And in the spec tree is says “if you already have HTT then this talent makes it stronger and gives it another charge.” I think that is how this talent should work for conduit players but for Refreshing Jade Wind. Odds are you are not taking RJW in dungeons. You can, I have, but odds are you aren’t, and I would argue odds are MWrap or zen pulse or something else is more effective healing, so with this talent you’re only getting a jade wind during chiji which doesn’t feel like getting the full value out of this talent imo.
- Flight of the Red Crane & Dance of Chiji
It’s been my opinion that originally or at some point the class designer wanted conduit players to prefer dance of chiji while JE would be prefered by MoH but realistically JE is just better in every conceivable way. I’ve played DoCJ up to 15 and think it’s a very fun talent that supports the way I like to play MW (on the move, casting while moving, proactive instead of reactive, etc.) But JE is just better. I brought this up in my post last season so i’m bringing up again here now because I think it still needs changed.
- Flight of the Red Crane
I don’t think this should scale with mastery. Anything else would be better and the proc rate should be more reliable than mastery (which in m+ is probably going to be quite low for most people preferring crit and/or vers.) that or DoCJ needs fixed
- Dance of Chi ji
I love this ability. I love it. I wish I could play this in every single key. Rewards positioning, castable while moving, aoe, w/ FotRC it generates mana tea stacks and does another gust heal, love it. But DoCJ isn’t viable because MWs damage is the only palletable thing about them in the healer line up and where they can be the most impactful with this is in their priority damage that inclines them to run Jade Empowerment.
There is a way to fix this though in my opinion. Just make DoCJ scale to target cap. So for instance SCK is soft capped at 5. If there’s 1 target it should do the same damage to that one target as it would split between 5 targets. I despise flood gate but if it worked like this I might actually start to enjoy it. I would love pressing this button on swamp face or mama or anything else. I would feel another reward for perfecting melee uptime and positioning and repositioning. It still gives some reach but doesn’t make me into a sniper turret like JE.
- JE
I used to hate this talent but it’s ok. I said in s1 and still kind of believe now that as long as this talent exists and is as good as it is then there’s nowhere for them to take MW. This is most of your damage, this is most of your burst healing outside of cds, this prio, this is pad, this is whatever you want it to be. Confusingly, despite being our primary damage dealer, it’s not physical damage and so does not benefit from our own mystic touch afaik, but anyway, I do think that JE could still be improved a bit and it’s a small change.
In s1 if your primary target died you snapped to the next target. Beginning in s2 that doesn’t happen anymore and so that big single target/prio damage isn’t going into the next target in the chain afaik. I think that should be fix/changed. There’s scenarios where a target can become immune or untargetable as well (though maybe not in this seasons dungeon pool) and I really think the primary target should change so that you are always getting that primary target damage if you choose to continue your cast after the first one dies. Would make it feel a lot better to stand there channeling if it did.
- Mana tea should be more powerful or the cost of our spells should be reduced
I feel like we went from being one of the healers with the least amount of mana problems to one with the most. I don’t feel like the power of our individual spells alone reflect their cost, but rather how we weave many of them together to activate 100 interactions/procs/things is how it “works” and so I don’t think the cost of our abilities or the increased impotence of mana tea was a positive change. Mana as a resource in PvE often feels antiquated and doesn’t serve much of a purpose in game and isn’t equally a problem for every single healer. Some have a lot of problems and some have none. I don’t think a reason for the change to mana tea was ever explained and even now still I believe it needs reverted or our spells reduced in cost. I can’t find any validating reason that renewing mist should be 45k or enveloping 100k when they can be so fundamental to bare bones functionality.
And next
- Utility
Mist weaver is in a really weird spot. When we have a problem it seems like to me, just me idk about everyone else, that blizzards solution to that problem is to increase our damage. And this cycle of increasing our damage as a response means that results in:
- eventually the damage is too good
- it didn’t fix the underlying problem
- it gets nerfed, problems back
No damage reduction external, no group utility, no bres, mystic touch is a hyper specific buff for a single group type and on top of that I think every other healer has multiple stat/party buffs so I don’t know why we have to be confined to a single one that is also the least versatile, and our md feels kind of bad in tww. Maybe that’s just me but the healing from it isn’t great for a lot of pulls I can imagine. It’s ok to rotate into some “fixed” or easy to plan for events but as a hail marry it usually doesn’t work and as amass dispel it can feel bad cause it’s a 3 min cd and I think “well what if I need that for healing later :(” kinda weird place for it to be. I like what uplifted spirits does for it but I think like 1 second off is not enough to drop a different talent for it.
- Finally if damage really is what is supposed to separate mw from other healers then it needs to get to and remain exceptional
I don’t think there’s any way for you to do this and it to stay balanced. But really, if MW doing 1-2m dps regularly through CDs was such a massive problems then why do I now see some other healers reach these numbers without an immense lack of utility? I am inclined to believe that the only reason mw was nerfed so frequently into mediocrity was that it was over represented and that invoked a knee jerk reaction from blizz. This after mw basically got nerfed every week of ptr while very minor nerfs came very slowly for disc priest and its exceptional over representation for 2 entire seasons (and quite possibly a third) does make me believe there’s a degree of favoritism or at least apathy for MW. I am not trying to say you don’t care about mw players but I do think you guys like balancing around some healers while letting some others just exist.
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Kind of what I want to see though
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- I’d like, as a part of the fist weaving “build,” for fist weaving to be more effective, faster, and for our abilities to play into fist weaving rather than for fist weaving to be a sort of “filler” thing we do that plays into misting/casting to spread amps to make our healing do anything at all.
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- I still think Sheiluns should hit 5 targets baseline.
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- I think in PvE that mana deserves to be a non-problem or at the very least that that mana tea should be more effective or maybe that the cost of our routine abilities should come down the cost of our basic abilities don’t reflect their individual power in my opinion.
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- Either the damage needs to go higher again or utility profile needs innovated. Since balancing the damage aspect is hard or impossible and the utility problem has been a problem for 200 years, and because our damage feels pretty average now against an hpal or pres evoker, just keep it where it is maybe and innovate utility then adjust through tuning later.
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- A party buff or bres or anything that would make mw appealing to group content would be a net positive for mws and for groups. As it stands mw has nothing unique or powerful that stands out compared to other healers it does however lack many of the basic tools that every other healer has some version of. Even with mystic touch you’re weighing “is the 1% damage diff from that vs skyfury worth missing out on everything in the rsham kit?”
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- Restore Balance should grant the RJW Talent baseline
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- Dance of Chiji should scale to the number of targets
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- Flight of the Redcrane should proc and scale with something other than mastery imo and be effective (or frequent) enough such that DoCJ is as viable as the healing from JE
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- I didn’t mention it but also I think that Chi-wave needs buffed dramatically
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- Calming Coalescence should be removed and Life Cocoon baseline effectiveness raised and/or cocoon should benefit from the damage reductions of the target
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- I’m not sure how to make revival feel better but maybe adjusting the CD time or increasing the CDR from uplifted spirits would be good. This isn’t as big of a deal as the other things on the list, to me.
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Tier sets
- S1
The season one tier set felt abysmal to me. It might have not only been the weakest healer tier set at the time in terms of its impactfulness but quite possibly the worst one added to the game. Even our guide pointed out that you just shouldn’t even factor it into your decision making. In high keys with min maxing we would (because what else can you do) and even there it was underwhelming to me - S2
Boring really no other opinions. - S3
While I’ve only read info from a shady sight if what it says is true then I beg you to not nerf it for conduit. Just let it be, thanks.
Monk Class Talents
- Lighter than air
This talent needs its tooltip updated to reflect everything it does. I also sometimes think it doesn’t deserve to be a capstone talent and that it could just be merged with Bounding Agility into a single talent but it’s a minor complaint really and won’t change much about how i feel about monk if it never moves or changes - Wind walking
This one is in such an awkward place in the tree, I think, to intentionally make it hard to take. Not only is a 4% movement speed buff DEEP in the tree but in a weird place to try to pick it up on your way to the capstones. I’d like for jade walk and windwalk to be merged into a single node where Jade Walk currently is. My vision for how this works is that out of combat you have 15% MS and project a 4% MS buff to allies within range, and upon entering combat lose the 15% MS and maintain the 4%. The 4% retaining its “stacks with other speed buffs” quality. -
- So much of our class tree is already mobility and this gives the least amount of it so it’s hard for me to justify ever taking it even though I really want to
- Linked spirits is a wonderful talent but I don’t like that it forces me to drop Flow of Chi, Lighter than Air, or Fatal Touch. It has some wonderful niche uses and tek but it’s hard to justify personally with how mechanic frequency prefers LTA and FoC’s DR or heal amp feels stronger than a long cd port over the course of an entire key.
- Hasty provocation and Swift art should be switched. I feel it makes more sense to choose between snare reduction or snare cleanse than between reduc and a taunt talent. Maybe I’m wrong here and it would make it too hard for brews to get provocation and Save Them All idk seems strange to me though
Finally, revisiting my idea that chiwave/chi burst should be replaced with an ability where you throw a sun hat like a frisbee at enemies and then have to move to a swirly to catch it thereby increasing its damage/healing. I think this is a cool idea where we go mortal combat hat throw on enemies and it bounces around dinging them and it plays into the “positioning is important and fast paced” gameplay. Its also more interesting mechanically than chi-wave/chi burst.
Alternatively I’d be ok with chi-wave just being stronger. A lot stronger.
Sorry for any typos I’ll come back and edit in the future
Edit:
Something else I’d like to add that’s a bit tangential is that mw is simple on the surface but incredibly complex under the hood. I find it hard to convieve of a way for cd manager to replace WAs with the way MW is currently designed but you guys are moving towards that very quickly while looking to phase out addons that make the spec playable at a high level. We have to do a billion things or have a billion procs to do effective healing and most of them are not represented on the UI.
Moreover, regarding the CD manager, the font of your icon for teachings of the monestary or black out kick stacks, is bad. You’ve created a unique problem by destroying the personal resource bar on our characters and making cd manager obstructive or boarderline useless.
Why?
The icon for ancient teachings and teachings of the monestary in CD manager has to be scaled so large that it takes up way too much of the screen. Your options are to move it way out of the way (thereby negating the usefulness of heaving this info readily available) or to make it smaller. If you make it smaller it very quickly becomes impossible to read the numbers and know how many stacks you have. The number actually just turns into an amorphous blob or dot.
The personal resource display was perfect and since its utter destruction i’ve had far more WAs than I previously did please fix it. I don’t think yall necessarily understand how absolutely fantastic the personal resource bar on our toons were. It was compact, highly specific, easily recognizable, and easy to understand without any input, customization, or forward thinking on my part. It also anchored to my characters health bar (or name plate?) which i found very very good not just on monk but warrior, paladin, evoker, and well basically everything. Please fix it so i can delete like 4 weak auras.