What are some interesting options to give Monks more raid utility? I’m still curious what ideas are out there to give us that “oh good, we got a monk” impact that you see with some classes.
Ideas for both 1-off utility like warlock stones+summons, or “more the merrier” like immune soakers are welcome.
Everyone knows raid dr is a powerful form of utility, I want to see other non-hps non-dps ways a monk could impact their raid!
Some ideas to get us started:
Conjured Mana Tea to hand out, Manastone instead of healthstone. Other heals have an easier time managing mana, but more mana = more better! (Mistweaver only?)
AoE Transcendence teleport raid mobility cooldown. Create a ring, and after a couple seconds, teleport your entire raid to your transcendence location for low throughput loss movement.
Zen Meditation available to windwalker/mistweaver, and buff it as follows: “When taking damage from a source that splits damage evenly among all targets in range, a greater portion is allocated to the casting Monk.” So, when a monk uses Zen Meditation, you would only need one soaker instead of three or four to save your mechanic target, and the damage reduction means the monk still takes the same damage as if other soakers were present.
What do YOU think would be coolest for a Monk to bring to a raid?
Love the idea of a mana tea for raid. Very interesting. Could be like a healthstone with 1 or 2 charges and provides a similar mana reduction for a period on use. Would make us very popular with other healers.
What about another approach to the group mana idea. Make Mana Tea baseline. In it’s place on the talent tree: Mana Tea is also applied to Party and Raid members within 40 yards. This would also encourage using 1 of the other 2 talents in smaller group content since it would be of no benefit to a 5 man.
I believe that, according to the fantasy of a martial artist healer, MW should be a kind of “offensive healer”, a peaceful soul that knows when to use force to defend his comrades, compared with the defensive priest, for example.
Some ideas that come to mind are:
A rework to Mystic Touch, so it’s a CD that, when activated, causes the Monk to debuff like it does now, but with a stronger effect and affecting all damage, for a few seconds, instead of a flat physical damage increase (this would make it more interactive, and allow the MW to play a more active role in the encounter’s strategy).
A cooldown reduction for major offensive CDs (a counterpart to the new Holy Priest’s utility). Of course, it should be smaller, not 60 seconds.
A CD for a mist that replenishes resources. Not only mana, but also stuff like energy. It would work like a “hot”, so it’s not wasted if someone is already full when its used.
Alternatively, it can be a “defensive” cooldown, with an offensive fantasy. A Touch of Calm, that reduces the damage the target causes for X seconds (I know, it’s a DR, but I think all healers should have some DR, just not the same DR across the board). Maybe you can spread it once using SCK.
Other random ideas:
Some kick that pushes the enemy away in the direction you’re facing (probably more fitting to WW, though).
A cooldown to give all the raid extended attack range (based on the fantasy of some ki-fueled attacks), including (and specially) melees. This could help with how punishing some mechanics are for melee players, and make MW desirable in some encounters, like Denathrius.
A “sanctuary” like spell on a longish CD that would make the target unable to be targeted by enemies for X seconds, if possible (What I mean by “if possible” is that, for example, Sludgefist will not chain that player, unless there is just not enough people alive to target). I’m not sure how it would work in PvP, though. This would not be a tank external, but a way to protect certain players that need to do some mechanic or that are in a bad spot (I reckon it sounds very niche, though).
Just being raw kill/firepower would be an efficient and highly valued upside. Crank the damage up. Want everything to die faster? Bring WWs. I still remember the days where people stacked Affy locks to make bosses die fast.
Uninspired efficiency aside, Blizz could always give us old Zen Meditation back. Though, with how strong it was, it might put DKs out of work because it was a 90% magic DR that shielded buddies too. I still remember doing M Hellfire Council and accidentally stacking a fat Reap with a buddy, but I popped Zen Med and was surprised we both lived.
Or Blizz could make our disarm baseline again and let us disarm raid bosses with weapons like we used to and have it reduce their melee swings on tanks. Except have it work all the time because it was weird that I could disarm Kor’kron Darkshamans, but not Garrosh. It’d be funny to grapple weapon Sylvanas in the future. I can imagine the laughs already. Monks get Sylvanas’ bow before Hunters do.
As for something different we could bring to the table… I mean Blizz could always just put in a caveat to our interrupt that if we pull off a successful interrupt the CD is reduced by X amount of seconds so as to let us basically solo interrupt mechanics as needed. I still find it a little odd that we don’t just aim our FoF a little higher to make it like a throat punch barrage.
They could add a MW thing where after they Revival they leave a buff like misty afterimage or something on everyone healed that negates the next big hit (not periodic damage) that they would have taken. Though, I get the feeling that would be used to cheese mechanics a lot.
Blizz could also just change the “1” in the Windwalking Aura to like “3” and that’d be huge.
We could also just be given the ability to just drop a keg of Nimble Brew so the entire raid can ignore one hard CC. Sorta like a special monk only cauldron. After all, playing by the rules of mechanics is for nerds.
Was bored so did a brainstorm while trying to keep them easy to design or recycle. Some of the later ones definitely don’t fit that bill though lol.
Envoloping mist increases everyone’s healing on the target. Simple and sweet, its already not a massive part of our healing kit outside of chi-ji/yulon due to mana constraints, but being able to enable big single target healing on a target at will could actually define a raid niche, also has the potential to make tanks happy too.
Karma Cacoon that redirects damage from a target by 50% of max health to a nearby target within 20 yards and generally works like touch of karma. Added benefit of giving mistweavers synergy with high stam tanks. Ideally on a short cd(preferably 1:30 like real karma), maybe replaces base chi cacoon as a talent that further replaces one of our unused ones, like chi wave.
Obscuring mists: fancy name for smoke bomb since protecting the raid with line of sight blocking mists would fit in our class fantasy, and also make rogues scream bloody murder.
An addition to mistweaver transcendance where instead of going to your clone you can swapblast a preemptively marked player. effected by the annoyance canceling item obviously. Its an effect not currently in the game that could see use in an organized group, differentiates itself from lifegrip since it can ignore roots, but requires a cast or preemptive use.
A mechanic themed toward expressing mistweaver’s nonhealing attributes, something that emphasizes the serpent’s take on things usually reserved for tiger and ox styles. In fact lets keep it simple and link it to thunder focus tea which hasn’t been in its best state in shadowlands. If mistweaver were to be tanky I feel that it would be dodge based, so lets say using a thunder focus tea procs give a buff called lightning reflexes for 2 seconds which grants 100% dodge giving that old havoc dodge niche to mistweaver. Similarly ww is also its own discipline so a mistweaver themed damage ability would not steal a ww ability like fists of fury but modify the most mistweavery damaging ability. I’d judge that to be spinning crane kick which we already have. So lets modify it a bit to be more generally interesting, like say when you use a thunder focus tea on spinning crane kick you also do a spinning crane combo which fires off 3 tiger palms into your main target during the spinning crane kick and generating the 3 totm stacks, allowing for more synergy with that one mana talent, and other fist weaving peripherals.
Mist mirage: 3 minute cooldown instant 20 yard range. Summons a copy of the monk for 10 seconds in the target space, this copy will fade into mists after 10 seconds healing nearby targets proportional to damage taken by the mist mirage. The mist mirage counts as a player in regards to soaking/stack mechanics.
Weaving mists: mastery changed from its current state to: our heals apply a 6 second hot that gives MASTERY healing and increases healing taken, not our healing taken just general healing taken, by MASTERY, like a healing version of the new arms mastery.
Falling storm kick, interrupting a crackling jade lightning with a rising sun kick causes it, the rising sun kick, to do nature damage and causes the monk to charge to the target. Not really for the utility just thought it’d be cool.
In general I feel blizzard is reluctant to give us DR, and so I feel the likeliest roll we’ll get in terms of unique utility would be damage redirection, or healing amplification. Holy already got a fairly big healing amp, but I think mistweaver could have a role in just being a passive healing increase just for existing and even more so for playing it well.
I’m mostly spitballing with these also, if even one was made a real change i’d be surprised.
Remove Mystic Touch. And I know this is a Monk thread but while we’re at it remove Chaos Brand from DH. It’s a stupid reason to bring both classes. In their place add the following CD for all specs of each class:
Multistrike (5 min CD): For 20 seconds all attacks from Party and Raid members have a 20% chance to strike up to 2 additional times at 30% effectiveness. Allies will be unable to benefit from Bloodlust, Heroism, Time Warp and Multistrike again for 10 mins.
The numbers would need tweaking to balance it with Time Warp. But the idea is to offer more alternatives to Time Warp and not another CD that can be stacked on top of Time Warp. I’m thinking this could be stronger on encounters with a shorter burn phase or AOE in nature and Heroism stronger on longer burn phases or Patchwerk in nature. My concern is that top M+ teams might decide they still want or need both CDs because maybe there is dungeon with a tough boss that heroism is better for but also has a particularly tough trash pull multistrike would be better for. Then team comp becomes even more linear than it already is. Ideally raid encounter design would dictate which CD is best for the top players but casual groups would just use whichever they have available to near equal effect and if they have both its just a nice “problem” to have.
Awesome ideas across the board here. I’m glad to see people breaching the idea of giving us some party/raid dps buff potential, something which blizz has very carefully and slowly started reintroducing, and monk is a great candidate for the next step.
A couple more ideas to make monks feel special:
Spear Hand Strike for windwalkers given two charges with slightly longer cd. This would give windwalker a SOLID niche in every raid. Having one of your interrupters always able to cover another interrupt in a pinch would be huge. Weird pvp implications that I’m not qualified to comment on though…
AoE Soothe, and feature some enraging mobs in raid for the other soothers to dispel. We essentially used it in the MoP cinematic to stop the shipwreck survivors from fighting, why not put it in game?
Expanding a bit on Critswalkin’s idea, why not split the heroism style buffs into each of the secondary stats, and share fatigue debuff? This would be ignoring a lot of game history, but something like Time Warp for haste, Bloodlust/Heroism for crit, Ancient Hysteria for vers, Master’s Gift (monk version) for mastery. Balance the amounts gained to be different % based on equal gains from their respective secondary stat ratings. Then individual groups could decide which stat to stack for that particular encounter/pull.
First and third ideas sound really good. Add reworking the level 35 talent row to the list and I’d be very happy. RoP just needs to be made baseline already, Good Karma for WWs don’t really fit in that row and literally nobody uses Tiger Tail Sweep.
I like that approach too. Expanding some on your take. Maybe instead of raid buffs the heroism category spells are now group only buffs so which classes you put in which groups in raid becomes important again and you won’t have a class whining that the raid is using the mastery buff when haste or crit is their best stat. Maybe even some unique strats could come out of this since raid groups could stagger the group CDs for different mechanics. The negative is this forces raid groups to be sure they have 4-6 of the classes that have a heroism category spell so I think to prevent that from become a class stacking issue more classes need to have 1 of the spells.
I feel like blizz is testing the waters a bit for going back to party based buffs within raids, with minor things like windfury, stone legion, and crimson chorus trinkets. Would be very cool to see the idea develop into monks alongside shamans for party buff potential.
Yea, I had mentioned the “Tea Table” in another post, having it hand out Mana Tea consumables like a Health Stone. Although, I think we can expand on it and make it resource based. Have it not just restore mana but also chi, energy, rage, runes, hate juice (or whatever it is Demon Hunters use). It becomes more wide spread of a utility.
Other Ideas:
Shrouding Mists: Short buff that increases chance to dodge significantly
Blanketing Mists: Expanded version of Shrouding Mists that puts down an area of mists in which friendlies in the area get a dodge bonus.
Guiding Lantern: Puts a lantern into the air. Any ally within the range of the lantern increases the range of spells and abilities by X yards
Zen Flight (remastered): Allows target character to slow fall in non fly zones and fly in flying zones. Only cast-able on one character at a time.
Serpent’s Grace: Increase the haste of a target character for 5 seconds. When Serpent’s Grace expires, Serpent’s Grace will jump to another character within 20 yards. Serpent’s Grace will expire after 5 jumps.
Blessing of Yu’lon: Increases the duration of any HoTs cast on a target by 3 (5?) seconds. Added bonus of a little green dragon that orbits the target for the duration of the blessing.
Centering: Reset all abilities that are still on cool-down of a target character.
On a side note I think they should make Tiger’s Lust baseline for mistweavers and replace it with Dragon Kick on the talent row.
Sounds interesting, or some variant of the older version of the ability to where it can be used as a group damage mitigation instead of the version Brewmaster is currently stuck with.
Good Karma effect could also apply to all teammates within 5 yards. That could offer excellent protection on a relatively short CD. Touch of karma and then use provoke to prevent an impending wipe.
I like this idea too. To give us like a group stagger that turns a large hit into dot damage. This would also take advantage of the throughput strength we do have to heal it back up. And it would fit thematically with the class rather than just being straight damage reduction.