Earlier today, I was looking at my collection of all max level healers. Even though, I’ve already narrowed down(or should I say it’s been narrowed down for me?) the healers I plan to play in Shadowlands, I couldn’t help but log in on my Monk for a moment just to look through the spells and make sure I’m not missing something.
I know what I want from playing a healer. I want to be the cleanser of icky, the dispeller of badness and the healer of hitpoints.
But I wanna spin kick heads off and flying whirling elbow drop evil directly in the nutts while doing it.
I want that wholesome melee combat healer feel back.
What’s the chances Blizz can just make Way of the Crane a permanent effect? Or at least a talent? Or make Chi-Ji have a damage increase component w a shorter cooldown? Or something…ultimately, couldn’t talents offer different play-styles? Edit: at the very least buff MW damage to be competitive w other healers.
If you talent into that(my above mentioned what-if talent) and Rising Mists you could kinds sorta Fistweave. Or at least do some combat while healing. Or, you could talent into other talents to be traditional(boooooring) range healer?
Is it possible to bring back Mistweavers original playstyle, or something close to it, while at the same time pleasing those healers that just want to only heal? Isn’t this what talent trees are for? To offer varying styles of play?
I dunno, it just hurts man. I wanna play this badass Orc Monk SOOOO bad but the playstyle I’m looking for, while not perfectly represented elsewhere, is at least semi-capable with Disc and to a lessor degree, the Resto Druid…even if it’s not the Monk style that I really want. It just feels bad.
Tldr: Waaaaah! I want OG foot to face combat healing Mistweaver back, really really bad.
Yeah unless something fairly drastic happens for Mistweavers, it will likely be better to just play Disc Priest or Resto Druid as you mentioned.
Resto Druid can be a monster btw… Feral Affinity + Master Shapeshifter + Heart of the Wild + Convoke the Spirits (Nightfae Covenant) is more burst damage than any other healer in the game.
Disc priest just has so much utility in addition to everything else. Mind control, Leap of Faith, Purge, immunity break, shining force, thought steal, mind games, fortitude, etc… and ranged damage to heals.
I don’t think Fistweaving will be viable in most M+ dungeons. I mean, you can rock the leggo and take all the talents, but you’ll be abandoning the dps>heal ideology on most packs because the healing output will simply not be enough. Having said that, Fistweaving isn’t going to be a useless spec, even in dungeons. Despite having to resort to turret healing, you’ll still be providing damage that your group wouldn’t have otherwise. During periods of light damage intake, Fistweaving will more than suffice.
I’m willing to bet that Fistweaving will be far more effective in raids, where you can be a bandaid healer while providing damage. But this begs the question, why bring a MW when you can bring a Disc Priest? They have far more damage and utility.
Personally, I love Mistweaver. It’s my absolute favorite healing spec. I love the turret style specifically. I’ve never been a fan of damage-to-healing playstyles. Having said that, many voices on the forums are begging for Fistweaving to make a comeback, and I’m glad options are being introduced to help make that transition smoother. I’m VERY excited about Yu’lon and I have no idea why… but Chi-ji is supposed be an awesome substitute for Fistweavers – combined with ATotM, it will provide some semblance of the old Jab-Jab-Uplift style.
Atm MW is looking to be the 2nd strongest healer after rdruid for dungeons. MWs dmg is looking a bit low, but in season 1 of BFA healers weren’t doing much dmg and were instead focusing on healing more. MW healing in 5 man and in raid is looking pretty decent.
This 100%, a few weeks ago I would have disagreed but now I definitely agree. I’m not saying the playstyle is as fun as I’d like it, and Essence Font still doesn’t feel right in the kit, but they’ve made changes and Mistweaver is decidedly not bad.
Yu-lon is probably one of the strongest CD’s they’ve added to any healing class, and if they fix Chi-Ji (enveloping breath not working atm) it’ll be the 5man fistweaving equivalent.
I don’t find it fun to play, but the love of the class theme is keeping me with it. We’re actually in a very good spot, and hopefully, that doesn’t fall off moving into future tiers like it tends to do.
Ultimately fistweaving is around the same in raids, the main difference being they have a bit less coverage in exchange for duration extension. Chi-Ji isn’t that great in raids since it doesn’t scale with targets as quickly as Yu-lon.
That being said, Rising Mist and Upwelling are close enough in terms of performance, you can play either and see rather similar results. You’re likely going to end up swapping things around as you go through a raid tier, as you get more comfortable with each fight.
Most guilds aren’t going to care if a disc priest does more damage, most just want you to play what you like playing, to the best of your ability. If you’re aiming for Hall of Fame, then maybe you’ll be finding guilds that care about those things, the bulk of the community doesn’t.
If you’re doing low to mid-tier keys, either playstyle is perfectly fine. Higher keys fistweaving will almost certainly pull ahead. It’s the start of an expansion, people are going to be A LOT squishier than they are now, requiring more of your attention, so do damage where you can and focus on keeping people alive. A lot of people are finding ATOTM to be underwhelming, I myself still prefer Tear of Morning, which is incredibly strong even after being nerfed.
If you’re expecting to keep people alive via doing DPS as your primary method, try again in a few tiers. Has absolutely nothing to do with monk and more to do with the state of every characters’ power and gear, which is always weak at the beginning of an expansion.
I think MW is gonna be a solid middle of the pack healer for m+. Not top tier, but much better then Holy Priest or Resto Shaman. Those healers are designed to excel at healing groups of 6+ where in m+ its much more important to be able to heal 2 or 3 at a time and thats where MW shines.
For Raids its probably as bad as live but I’ve heard some good things lately.
If they don’t fix anything else we most likely will end up falling off, in uldir MW was very strong and many top world guilds took them in for mythic uldir, but our kit gets progressively less strong the later the expac, however even as I say that things have changed for MW getting yu lon and ENVB alone is huge, but adding onto that covenant abilities like FO and BDB we could be feeling strong even in the 2nd tier. They do need to work on the night fae and bastion covenant abilities because they just aren’t up to par with maldraxxus and venthyr. They “shouldn’t” nerf Fallen order just because it’s so strong relative to the others, instead they should try and bring up the other two that are much weaker.
BDB even after the bug got fixed is still pretty decent, it caters to a more steady healing style where as Fallen order is more bursty. BDB feels espiecally strong in stacked fights.
Assuming an RM playstyle of; ReM, RSK, BoK, TP, BoK, Free Fill to next ReM.
If they removed the EnvB effect this would probably be okay, since it would only add 480% SP per 10% mastery every minute (so beating out revival at about 50% mastery). The ‘semi-smart’ healing would likely make any more mastery then that less effective then more general stat increases.
Just checked, it seems to be working.
EDIT: to explain why I think that would be okay even with a fairly high amount of added healing over a fight, you are losing out on either JSS or RJW for a far less ‘controlled’ healing method. Per rotation it will also only come out to maybe one additional Vivify cast.
Yeah, that’s really great and all but I’m specifically talking about playstyle over raw metric power. In particular, I’m talking about the desire to play a melee combat healer that mixes martial arts beatdown with healing and cleansing love in equal parts.
I can appreciate MW being in a good spot numerically, it’s just a shame the class has drifted so far from its roots.
Thats my whole *booty thang here, I LIKE seeing how much damage I can push while maintaining my healing duties. That playstyle is super fun too me.
This small fact is in part what made my heart plummet. Would at least be fun to have a small taste of Fistweaving.
Exactly, even before the nerf to chi ji it would’ve been hard to justify taking it when you would lose out on statue and RJW, now it isn’t worth it at all.
MW most likely won’t be going back to its MOP/WOD days. Rising mist is a pretty fun to me but I understand there are people who want eminence and all that Jazz back. I enjoyed MW back then but I honestly think The MW of back then would’ve fizzled and died in M+. Was a fun raid healEr for sure, but it’s ST and group healing potential was severely lacking.
I’m not sure how it was hard to justify, besides EnvB being bugged for so long. Pre-nerf Chi-Ji added ridiculous amounts of healing with little to no mastery investment.
Using yu lon with RJW gave even better healing in a lot of stacked situations. And there are some fights where the ST of statue “could” be worth while to use. You lose both these options by taking chi ji.
I’d argue that Chi-Ji could easily be stronger then both pre-nerf due to mastery scaling, but ultimately that isn’t really going to help the argument since Yu’lon was also heavily nerfed.
Right now Chi-Ji does need a buff to compete, though it would only need to be half as strong as pre-nerf Chi-Ji to equal both with 0 mastery rating.
Second or third worst for PvP right now on SL beta depending who you believe regarding holy priest changes. Only holy paladin is worse but has a crap ton of useful utility.