Is Fistweaver Ever Coming Back?

I’m not gonna demand anything I just wanna know if Fistweaver is back in Shadowlands. Every time there’s a new expansion I level my Monk and try to make a Fistweaver spec work and it never does like it did in Pandaria. I just wanna know if I should bother next time because honestly I can’t take the disappointment again and I’m probably just gonna abandon this character entirely if not.

Thanks!

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Should jump ship

Disc is the OG MW but you’re ranged, it plays basically the same as old MW conceptually

I have a priest, disc feels absolutely horrid to me. The flow of just running CONSTANT upkeep on this fleeting atonement buff in the hopes that maybe it will still be up on a few of the people you applied it to in time for you to cast 1 or 2 smites is just miserable. I hate it so much. It’s absolutely nothing like Fistweaving and I’m insulted.

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I don’t know why we can’t just have fistweaving back. We are already a low throughput healer with massive mana problems and low raid utility. Just give us this fun niche of a melee disc priest. What we use to have.

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Fistweaving is kinda, sorta coming back as a 2 min cooldown talent next expansion. So you can be a fistweaver for 25 seconds ever 2 minutes. That’s better than nothing, right?

Sadly, they decided to take Fistweaving, which felt amazing, and basically give it to Paladins lol. Glimmer is everything Fistweaving could ever hope to be. Solid dps, great cooldowns, strong aoe healing with options for single target burst, and every o-shi button imaginable.

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If I remember correctly, ion or someone said they don’t want a subspec (fistweaving) within a main spec (mistweaver). Something along those lines. It shouldn’t matter what they want though, it’s what the player should want and most MW I talk to want fistweaving. A 2min cd (to me personally) isn’t fistweaving.

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And yet they’ve got Holy Paladins getting a talented Glimmer of Light, which is a subspec inside a spec. Completely different mechanics compared to traditional Holy. Blizzard are idiots.

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Ion said that a good bit before glimmer (legion lead-up iirc) so they obviously altered their stance slightly.

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Why give the neat niche healing style of fistweaving to a spec that has a low representation? Blizzard knows this and they decided to give the fistweaving play style to the other healers that have more people playing them. Monks are the last class Blizzard cares about and the changes so far in shadowlands show this. SL will have the same mistweaver as BFA. We will be the least desired raid healer and mid tier for keys (maybe). Rdruid and Hpriest do what mistweaver is trying to do BUT better. We had fistweaving at the start of 8.3 but it was taken away. It was OP but they could of nerfed the spec in a similar way like glimmer. However we are monks and we don’t deserve more than 2mins of the dev’s time.

Hope we end up getting changes in the PTR but I doubt it.

All of the healers have been pretty largely untouched besides the initial unpruning and tuning, it’s hard to tell if they are waiting for raid testing or something to get better data.

Why would you change Hpally and Rdruid? They’re almost the perfect healer. Rshaman right now is in a great spot for raiding and could potentially be great in SL mythic+ due to the target cap. Disc Priest is almost as good as Hpally. Hpriest is still the king in Heroic Raiding and isn’t bad for Mythic raiding. All three of the throughput healers are meh in Mythic raiding because of the CD’s that pally/Disc/Rshaman have.

Mythic+ in SL will change drastically due to the AoE cap. I wouldn’t be surprised if druid/pally is still the best though.

There is no reason to change the other healers because they work and have a spot in world of warcraft. Monks don’t belong in Mythic raiding because we bring no utility to raiding nor great healing. There is a reason we tend to be the lowest healer in mythic raiding since the class was made. We did better when we had uplift because it was unique and valuable in some fights. I don’t know if uplift would make us unique if we had it back to be honest.

I wanna see Fistweaving monks be great again! Unfortunately that wont happen anytime soon because the devs treat us like a red-headed stepchild.

Why are you insulted? It’s true

Disc ramp up their atonements to do a majority of their healing

Old MW ramp up their renewing mists to do a majority of their healing

Both specs fill downtime with DPS

The only difference is Old MW presses a healing spell (uplift) to use their renewing mists, and Disc presses dps spells to use their atonements

Conceptually the same!

What are you all talking about? FW is here now and probably the optimal build. Especially in m+ What the hell is going on with these forums?

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The OP is talking about the specific implementation in MoP, and assumedly dislikes the current implementation.

MoP FWing used to heal the group for almost all of the damage that you dealt, all of the time.

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I think what people are talking about might have something to do with:

Raid
The ‘optimal’ build still lacking throughput and utility compared to the comparable disc and hpal builds. This is DESPITE rising mist requiring more melee uptime than hpal (also remember that hpal in ineffable + wings doesn’t need to be in melee and w/o wings has drastically reduced impact from being outside melee). Oh, it deals less damage

M+
Before even pointing out the issues, people might wanna scroll the first few pages of top MW vs top rSham (becuase people seem to agree that resto shaman is bad in m+). They are surprisingly close.
Rising mist is certainly okay in M+, but the only reason this fistweaving is good is because the other two talents are garbage. One should be baseline and the other extends the channel of a spell that doesn’t even get cast for its full baseline duration. Your RSK actually eats a lot of mana over time which sounds fine because, hey you can just drink right? You certainly can, and all the while you’ll be contributing 0 dps. Or, even worse, you will force the group to wait for you which means you are actually dealing negative DPS (i.e. if your group does X DPS, every second the have to wait for your drink, you are essentially preventing X damage from being done.) And that RSK mana is put on top of already insanely costed spells. Wanna do AoE damage? Sure, just spend all of your globals and ~900 mana per second to do what a holy paladin does with a single GCD and no mana or a resto druid does for a single global with no positioning requirement. I can’t speak to disc here, but holy paladin becomes more efficient with haste (more haste = more holy shocks instead of less efficient fillers + more crusaders strikes to get…even more holy shocks). MW gets less efficient if you spam out more RSKs than needed to maintain HoT extensions. They have to pay for extra SCKs instead of getting more ticks in a flat window. Oh but the MW has a row of mana tools and spirit of the crane gets you MORE mana with haste! Mana tools kind of like mana return on beacon (baseline) and innervate (baseline)?
Oh also…you’re still dealing less damage. (Now to be fair, the 5% melee damage is more relevant here than in raid because you only have 5 slots to get it.)
And please, pleasepleaseplease don’t say that way of the crane is some massive core strength “because MDI”. Great tool for some situations but once again: tranq, devo, wings, pain supp etc etc all baseline (we’re starting to get apples to oranges here, but the point is that crane is not some end-all-be-all that makes the spec incredible—if anything the 2 min CD w/ extended duration makes it less desirable than a 1 min CD and moves us away from fistweaving.)

Don’t forget that mastery is a dead stat if you wanna fistweave. And a spec’s mastery, I’d argue, is supposed to be core to your spec fantasy (fire mages setting everything on fire, resto druids creating rampant growth) or at the very least just work with it pretty well (frost DKs doing more…frost damage, ret paladins swingin’ the light harder.)

Fistweaving certainly is a spec that exists and is optimal compared to other mistweaver specs, but it is not a spec that exists next to actual damage weaving specs.

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Sorry, I don’t know what any of this means. I don’t really care about maximizing utility. I don’t play with a spreadsheet open and I don’t do Mythic+ to begin with. My issue isn’t with any of the numbers it’s with the design. Let me explain.

WoW has, as far as I can tell, 3 ways it has handled designing hybrid healer classes in groups:

  1. Disc priests handle it by having you go back and forth between mouseover healing spells and damaging your target constantly within a rotation. Fine for the people that like it, just not my playstyle.

  2. Resto druid. The fact that their healing spells are mostly set-it-and-forget-it already allows them to set up their hots, hop into a shapeshift form, do a little damage, and then hop out when they need to. A TON of work has been put into making the flow between these states smoother like giving you abilities that automatically activate a shapeshift form off the GCD and making healing spells automatically shapeshift you back, also off the GCD.

  3. Fistweaving (the way it was in Pandaria) got rid of the back and forth between healing and damaging by just straight up combining them. Your damaging abilities did a little healing too while jade statue was up. That’s it. No trying to fit a healing spell into the middle of fighting, no stacking hots so you could fit a little fistweaving in between. You could switch to full on healing spells when you needed to for boss fights and things but other than that it was simple and I liked it and they got rid of it and now there’s just disc priest in the game twice. And I hate playing disc priest.

The flow as it is now with having to run constant upkeep on renewing mist is honestly just stressful to me. It’s constantly ticking down and I can never have it on enough people to feel useful. If these sound exactly like my complaints about disc priest it’s because they are. Blizz has said disc priest was their model for hybrid healers that they bodged onto monk in BfA. Interrupting my fistweaving flow with having to switch to a mouseover heal so frequently just feels awful. Fistweaver monk as it is now and disc priest as it is now both just feel bad to me. In fact, monk is even worse because renewing mist is on a cooldown and I don’t even control who it jumps to. I just want my third way back.

To start with, it’s highly unlikely Blizzard will ever bring back MoP mistweaver; The game is too hyper focused on 5 man content right now to justify a design centered around raiding.

Second, the numbers inform the design. For example, Rising Mist right now is built around the RSK reset mechanic, because it requires around 60% haste to fully extend Renewing Mist with RSK alone. This means that we are forced to put upwards of 5 gcds after every RSK, severely limiting the amount of time we can put to healing without losing a ReM.

Third,

What?
MoP mistweaver is well regarded specifically because of how smoothly it would move between damage to healing in a fight.
‘Jab,Jab,Uplift’ didn’t exactly arise from nothing.

Why did they ever take fistweaver out as it used to be? Was it truly a case of lolfunbad?

Were there other problems blizzard had with it? I came into mistweaving late and missed that train and regret it greatly, it sounds like it was so much fun.