ATOTM nerfed a lot, damage buffed a lot.
Same healing overall, just damage closer to paladin…
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Having mastery do something for fistweaving would be fantastic. I have to put together two completely different sets for the same spec right now… Mastery is almost completely dead for fistweaving.
Some reactive healing would be good too. Expel Harm might be a good place for this, because it’s basically a dead ability now. I’m not sure what an insignificant self-heal with a moderate cooldown is doing in a healer’s kit. Maybe have it affect a number of targets? Preferably without the condition of having a HoT on them, or having to be right next to them, because we have way too much of that sort of stuff in our kit already.
The kit functions well if you’re 5 GCDs ahead of the damage, but if you have to do anything unexpected, you just have no way to react effectively. Even if you throw out some vivify cleave, the time spent doing that cuts into aligning the stars to make the kit work for the next round of damage (keeping enough RM and EF HoTs out, making sure you’re refreshing everything with RSK, continuing to stack ToM so you can continue RSKing, etc.)
It feels like there’s a lot of “synergy” in our kit, but none of the kit stands well on its own. The synergistic components are more like absolute requirements to maintain, and you will have severely reduced effectiveness if you don’t. This wouldn’t be as much of a problem if the whole kit wasn’t this way. Not much of the kit works to flow, either… I always feel very starved on GCDs with all of these conditional components competing for my time. It feels like juggling too many things, and if one goes down you’re done. The options for buying back time are very weak for mistweaver. For example, Yu’lon/Chi’Ji have no effect at all in an emergency situation. They’re incredible for predictable damage, but if it hits the fan and you need to press a cooldown, you better hope this isn’t your only one left.
Changes to mastery/fistweaving interacting and adding some on-the-fly up-front functionality to Expel Harm and Yu’lon/Chi’Ji would go a long way. This is just my perspective based on doing my first real foray into M+ tonight… Normally I PVP, but I don’t have time to write those thoughts tonight.
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Ooooh! Looks like someone missed Expel Harm Rank 3 in their spellbook!
Soothing Mist on yourself
Expel Harm → Heals you
Gust of Mists → Heals you
Expel Harm → Heals you a second time
Gust of Mists → Heals you
With the right conduits it’s quite powerful. Also useful in arenas to heal yourself + a teammate at the same time.
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If MW could survive stuns, EH is crazy good healing for the mana. I use it quite a lot to heal tank and self. It will heal self 2x when channeling self, for a massive self heal…
I feel the double GoM procs should come from ReM, and EF should also be the spell to cleave Vivify. Viv healing should soft cap for 5 targets. It would also be nice if EF instantly applied th effects to all targets, instead of channeling a delay.
This is a minimal change that shifts more reactive healing because EF is used multi-target, but rewards single target burst (double GoMs), whereas ReM is used single-target, but rewards multi-target burst (ViV cleave). Just swapping that would go a long way…
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I’d note expel harm rank 2 and rank 3 don’t even show up in the spell book.
EDIT: It also really underlines the issue with soothing mist, since the kit is basically trying to minimize channel times on the spell as much as possible.
These are good points. In the right situations it can be a very large and efficient heal. The issue that I’m having with the spell (or the kit as a whole) is that it has layers of conditions for effectiveness. This is great in doses, and makes for engaging gameplay and rewarding decision making, but the entire kit is full of conditions where nothing stands strong if a set of conditions aren’t met.
I think the conditional burdening might be where some of the MW problem lies, in PVP and PVE. Mistakes are very punishing on MW because if your conditions aren’t met, you can’t deal with the sitaution.
In your example case, soothing mist and essence font are the big conditions. Perhaps the issue with SooM is the current GCD for it; you rarely get any value out of that GCD other than making the next GCD spent stronger. You can get a huge self heal out of expel harm, but that’s only if you’ve already prepared for the situation with both essence font and soothing mist. Already that’s 2 GCDs of time before you can use your instant heal in any effective capacity, and that’s if you cancel your essence font early, wasting a ton of mana for just a few bolts. Already the efficiency of Expel Harm has taken a huge hit, and in addition to that, both of the conditions to make this heal effective require channeling, which opens you up to being kicked in PVP and shutting down the whole operation (if you were going to survive the minimum 2 GCDs of minimal healing to set up the big heal in the first place).
One might suggest that keeping essence font up as much as possible is a solution, but then we have to consider what kind of toll that’s going to take on mana, and whether or not it’s good game design (or player decision making) to do a bunch of overhealing and mana spending just to be prepared for the actual damage to come in. This wouldn’t be so bad if essence font had a more substantial HoT, because of course HoTs are used in anticipation of damage, but essence font isn’t used for the HoT… Only the up-front healing, and the interactions that the HoT offers. You waste all of the up front healing on full health targets to prepare for the actual damage to come in.
Some thoughts on solutions for this (Note that I’m not suggesting all of these, just some combination, as the changes suggested here serve to fix the same issue in different ways):
-Expel Harm stands stronger on its own
-SooM GCD shorter
-Essence Font is no longer channeled, but instead instant cast, putting an orb over you that functions the same otherwise
-Essence Font having an instant heal component (i.e. Weapons of Order style)
-Essence Font having a more powerful HoT
-SooM having an instant heal component (Mastery proc guaranteed on the first tick?)
Another thought that just occurred to me that might help the fistweaving playstyle - SooM can be channeled while moving, and/or doesn’t get interrupted by our melee abilites. The transition between the mist and fist aspects is just so clumsy in its current implementation!
These changes make a lot of sense to me too. Love the reasoning.
I konw its not instant instant but the bolts do heal on hit and they fly extremely fast
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I personally would just prefer a revert back to WoD. As mentioned above, Chi and mana tea were way more interesting and fun to me. I also miss the mechanic of Enveloping Mist, and the like, healing the target of your Soothing Mist regardless of who you are targeting. Not sure why that was removed. I don’t much care for fistweaving but I like that it was an option. Crane Stance was an easy, baseline, ability that satisfied those who didn’t want to just heal.
I didn’t play during wod but many players say it was a good time.
I preferred MoP over WoD monk but I’d take WoDs playkit back in an instant.
There’s a handful of monks that like the current playstyle, but the vast majority want our old one back.
The kit was very rewarding once it all clicked into how it worked. Now we have a half-baked kit that’s patched together by a legendary we won’t use after this expansion, with the most punishing healing cooldown in the game.
Mana > Chi > Tea cycle was nice.
Not really a mw thing, but I want healer damage reduced across the board with diminishing returns for more time spent dpsing. Make it worth dropping a global once in a while for kick (or a couple dots, for other heals, etc) but our time should be better spent healing slowly and saving mana, not dpsing.
Spear Hand Strike. Resto Sham will still be king healer interrupt but we deserve it too.