Mistweaver Mastery Idea

Classes Monk
1

Hello. I have a fair bit of experience playing mistweaver and I’ve played the class since the beta of Mists and have fallen in love with it ever since. I do not have alpha access but I figured voicing these ideas somewhere could still maybe be helpful :slight_smile: . Since the changes in legion, I felt like the mistweaver has lost a lot of its fun, unique flavor for a better suited kit for the rest of the game, which is fair. I was ecstatic to have the active soothing mist channel back in battle for azeroth and to somewhat go back to that very unique channeling playstyle. Additionally with a few other changes (way of the crane in PvE) (vivify-renew (uplift) synergy) to be added back in a different way that works better with the rest of the game outside raiding. I’m hopeful for more. There are still two things I’d love to have back as a mistweaver, and it looks like there’s already some interactions planned out in Shadowlands. One of which, I think would be easy to bring back: Healing Spheres. They could be brought back in the same way the other interactions and spells were brought back: building the idea upon what’s already there.


The current mistweaver mastery adds an additional direct heal to the target affected by our 4 spells; Vivify, Enveloping Mist, Renewing Mist, and Soothing Mist all activate on the direct target affected. Since our mastery is just a scaling healing power coefficient, and since can be thought of just adding an extra flat heal to those 4 abilities, why not turn it into a direct heal that’s in the form of a Healing Sphere? All that would be done is that the direct heal from the Gust of Mists would be converted into a Healing Sphere ‘coalesced from the mists’ that would spawn near the target that was healed. Theoretically, you’re not changing any current mistweaver numbers if the sphere is just consumed right away. I think it would be interesting to add more flavor to the mistweaver kit as well as give them back a core ability and some utility in giving other roles more player agency with healing. Additionally, Gust of Mists can go unused often (renewing pre-hotting, enveloping pre-hotting) and can end up being overhealing. Lastly, it gives a lot more class identity back to the mistweaver with coalescing mists to aid their allies and can maybe help with scaling other of their abilities which I will list ideas for further. But for now (Changes in bold):

Mistweaver Mastery: Gift of the Serpent

Renewing Mist, Enveloping Mist, and Vivify summon a Healing Sphere nearby the target. Allies (that are below their maximum health) who walk through it are healed for (0.1% of Spell power)[Scales with Mastery rating].

If a Healing Sphere is unused for (60 seconds), it will heal a nearby ally instead.

Soothing Mist - Interaction

“Heals… the target.”
Mistweaver (Level 29)
Each heal has a chance to cause a Gift of the Serpent near the target.
Occurring Gift of the Serpent while channeling soothing mist will consume an old Healing Sphere and directly create a new Healing Sphere near the target.

(This will function the same way Gust of Mists does currently and would be in line with why you’d want to use soothing mist on a target (more direct healing)). (Also, you would use soothing mist to use older Healing Spheres that are off in the distance that haven’t been consumed yet (M+, open world travel, etc)).

Rising Sun Kick (Rank 3) - Interaction

Your Rising Sun Kick also causes Gift of the Serpent.

(Summoning 1 healing sphere for 1.5% base mana seems reasonable and also adds that old, fighting mistweaver style. Additionally, this helps scale mastery in some way to the now known ‘kickweaving’ playstyle)

Revival - Interaction

Heals all party and raid members within 40 yards for (225% of Spell power) and clears them of all harmful Magical, Poison, and Disease effects. Instantly applies (and duplicates?) all healing spheres to nearby allies.

(Gives mastery scaling into revival and also incentivizes a higher skill cap of pooling healing spheres for when needed) (Also, if you duplicate all healing spheres, Revival changes from a flat raid heal to this interactive masterful Healing Sphere synergy)

Essence Font - Interaction

“Unleashes… plus an additional (12% Spell power) over 8 seconds.”
Gift of the Serpent will summon an additional Healing Sphere.

(In your big Essence Font → Mana Tea → Vivify Spam, who wouldn’t love to see a bunch of blue bolts getting twirled out then summoning a bunch of healing spheres nearby players)

Healing Sphere Legendary Interactions:

  • Healing Spheres instead grant a shield for the heal amount
    • Extremely good utility for maximizing effective health pool against hard hitting abilities (high m+, harder mythic raid bosses)
    • Good utility that mistweaver never necessarily had access to
    • Extremely good synergy and utility with Revival consuming and applying a Healing Sphere to allies right before a big raid hit
    • Maybe not extremely overpowered in that the shielding is the same amount as the healing or could be lowered by a certain percentage
  • Healing Spheres grant X% movement speed
    • Good incentivization for people to actively seek out
    • Added utility
    • Something niche but fun
  • “Chi Tea” [handguards] - Summoning (10) Healing Spheres regenerates (2%) mana.
    • Reminiscent of old mana tea and chi
    • Allows for good feedback loop of ‘coalescing’ Healing Spheres from the mists for allies and not getting far behind in mana because of constant direct healing
    • Gives fun, active playstyle of always hitting a button that mistweaver was in the beginning

So yeah. These are my own opinions and I understand the frustration people felt when healing spheres were not consumed back when they were the old mistweaver mastery. However, I think with the more clearly defined, binary summoning method (instead of unlisted spell summoning coefficients) like how the current mastery works, would allow for more spec flavor, enjoyment, utility and uniqueness. Thanks for reading. :slight_smile:

3 Likes
2

This seems… problematic; Having to tell people not to use healing spheres because revival will come up in a minute or less would be a pretty bad scenario to work with.

Other then that it seems like an interesting, if subdued, idea.

EDIT: Thinking on it, the problem I have with it is specifically that it’s not the monk who chooses when healing spheres activate, it’s other players; If we had spells which would ‘detonate’ the healing spheres instead of having players walk over them, that would engender a better choice of whether to pool or activate.

3

yeah, i think that’s a fair point. My idea would be so that you could actively ‘detonate’ them on a target by casting a spell while channeling soothing mist on a target:

This way, i would think it’s not button bloat and you have a straight-forward-ish way of detonation on single target.

I also agree, Revival would end up being wonky in that you wouldn’t want people to collect a healing sphere. It’s a hard spell to make mastery work for… maybe just make it spawn a healing sphere per person affected by revival?

4

This post became less and less cohesive as I went on, but I think it has some reasonable points, so I’ll still put it out here for anyone that has the time to read it.

I think expel harm would need a similar interaction to BrM — consuming up to x spheres to add healing (and therefor damage) — for spheres to start working. But then you run into the issue of your mastery feeling bad when people DO soak the orbs (because now you can’t use them for a juicy Expel). Plus, mastery being strongly tied to a single ability seems like a recipe for disaster.
Spheres also seem DoA for pvp and M+ where you are rapidly repositioning and dealing with enough other mechanics that having a constant “always be looking for healing spheres” affix is an undo burden on teams that want to play with a mistweaver.

I think an interesting angle would be mastery coalescing mist around the MW and having that mist ‘weave’ into abilities. Since it’s mastery, it probably can’t be anything too involved or varied—maybe just added damage on some offensive abilities and added healing on some abilities. Perhaps to spice it up just a touch from it seeming too much like “your abilities do x more damage/healing” the mist would be spent as a fraction of what you pool; if you pool up a lot of mist you can add burst healing or damage. So it acts like a builder-spender through mastery, which is a different flavor that monk could have ownership of.
The hard part about that is, how to build it and spend it in ways that are always relevant. Part of the problem with the current mastery is that we find ourselves in plenty of situations where it sits and does nothing:
For example: if I pre EnV + ReM + statue sooth my tank in M+ and keep him sustained with RSK and rising mist, my mastery is worth literally nothing. Even when I reapply the ReM and EnV, there is a good chance I am doing it in a window when it’s convenient for me and not necessarily going to get any mastery value.

Blizzard buffed soothing mist for SL but hasn’t given us any extra fun stuff to do with it, which is very problematic. Soothing mist should be core to MW identity but, if you are playing well, you use it very minimally! Fistweaving builds were skipping Jade Statue simply because it was a waste of a GCD to cast a single tick of soothing mist to start the statue. We are mistweavers not misttogglers but the current spec toggles (soothing mist on spam spam spam soothing mist off back to vivify spot healing.) So I think the two questions: “how do we make mastery fun/relevant?” and “where do we get the ‘weaver’ part of our spec?” can both find an answer in soothing mist.

You said you personally enjoy the active channel of soothing, which is absolutely fair, but my problem is that there just isn’t much content where it is very relevant to the point of being a core part of the spec. It’s a useful tool for big incoming damage on a single target, but becomes worthless as soon as we need to aoe heal, spot heal, or fistweave. Somehow soothing mist needs to find relevance in those situations.

What if mastery spawned spheres/coalesced mist near the MW and the MW used it by stepping into the cloud to weave the mist into their abilities. This would work just like the healer trinket off of ilgynoth ( fistweavers could “splash” mist on nearby allies when using RSK/BoK/SCK), but we could have the mist pool together to avoid a situation where you just litter the ground with mist throughout an encounter.
“But nobody uses that garbage trinket!” Right, because as soon as you can’t get into the pool for one reason or another, it’s garbo. So now we look to our friend soothing mist and/or expel harm to be ways of spending this mist without positional requirement. Expel harm could absorb up to X healing from ‘nearby’ (a generous nearby—20-30 yards) mist just as BrMs absorbs orbs and soothing mist could be a fallback bread and butter spender for it that will always soak nearby mist to add healing. Maybe when you have a pool of mist, soothing mist consumes mist from the pool to chain through a few targets or form a cloud/ring of mist around the target for aoe healing.
I don’t think all of this meshes together quite well enough to get to the level of simplicity needed for a mastery effect, but at the moment our mastery is not general/usable enough to be a mastery effect so I don’t think getting some general concepts out hurts anything.

Edit: The pool of mist thing seemed cool in my head because it gives the player more agency, but in reality, “void zone” mechanics and the like would just make it too burdensome and do the opposite: suddenly you can’t use it to weave into abilities of your choice, you MUST use it on the options that have no positioning requirement. Maybe just make it a could of mist around the mistweaver. Certain abilities generate it certain abilities spend it at a fraction of the total ‘cloud’. This at least gives the ability to still save up a bunch for burst. Renewing Mist is used in all content and situations, maybe start there (little dicey with PvP purges though)…

TLDR:
Mastery isn’t relevant for MW in a lot of situations. Soothing mist isn’t relevant in a lot of situations. We don’t ‘weave’ anything at the moment.

Make mastery give us some kind of mist to be woven, make soothing mist more usable in a variety of situations, don’t forget about fistweaving interactions.

5

Maybe just a simple change.

Gust of Mists:
Whenever you cast vivify or rising sun kick, you heal the primary target and all allies affected by your renewing mist for X

Maybe keep the current soothing mist interaction as well—a random 1/8 ticks will trigger mastery.
Technically the wording needs a change to reflect the fact that vivify will gust the target while RSK obviously can’t. And, assume the scaling is less than the current mastery because you are hitting more targets.

Simple change but one that addresses a lot of problems.
ReM is always relevant to MW. You want to keep them rolling in arena, M+, and raid—regardless of your build. It shifts some of MWs obscene single target to cleave. It gives the fistweavers some love and support. Given the right tuning it would allow Essence Font to finally be tuned down so it’s a part of our kit but not the entirety of it for AoE (and on the flip side, taking some strength and presumably mana cost off of it allows it to be a more useful part of the M+/Arena kit).