Mistweaver/class feedback

Classes Monk
1

I’ve mained mistweaver since Legion. Here’s my feedback on the new talent trees released today. I have dabbled in bm and ww a bit, but not enough to have really informed opinions, so I’ll just talk about the class tree and the MW spec tree. I’m writing this without having read any other commentary anywhere else, I want to give my opinion fresh. Long story short: Lots of good ideas here, but the pathing, positioning, and dependencies can use a lot of work, especially on the class tree.

Class tree:
THE GOOD:

  • I like having jade serpent statue on the class tree. It’s kind of weak and situational, so burning a point on it here feels good, and it could be useful for other specs to pick up situationally if spot healing is needed. Similarly, it’s very cool to be able to pick up Black Ox and Provoke on the class tree. Could be situationally useful in M+ to help save the group if the tank drops.
  • Close to Heart/Windwalking/Generous Pour are great ideas in concept. Many trees put some multi-point talents at the top of the capstone level just to keep people from getting all the end talents, and these limited party buffs are great talents for that role.
  • Fast Feet is a great talent to have on the class tree for kickweaving monks who want to contribute a bit of extra damage.

THE BAD:
Oh boy, where to begin…

  • The placement for Grace of the Crane makes no sense. Asking BMs to pick up SooM and Heavy Air to get a core class tree talent??
  • I love the Chi Torpedo/Celerity choice node and the fact that Tiger’s Lust is a separate thing, but there’s no line from ROLL to the Chi Torpedo/Celerity choice node. You could pick up Chi Torpedo without having to take roll. So why take roll? Taking roll just to unlock things below roll is bad design. Maybe move roll to where Tiger’s Lust is at the top of the tree, and put the Chi Torpedo/Celerity choice below that?
  • The position of Roll Out makes no sense. Why does Close to Heart depend on taking Roll Out?
  • Again, I love the idea of having the first tier of capstone traits be Close to Heart, Windwalking, and Generous Pour. But Windwalking doesn’t lead to anything else, and it feels like it should. Also, the values for those talents are way off. 2 yard radius means they need to be standing right on top of you. The radius needs to be larger, particularly for Windwalking. “Move faster but only if you’re pixel stacked on the monk” is just worthless. The problem, of course, is that if the radius gets too large, then monk is picking up another super strong raid buff, in addition to Mystic Touch. Maybe make those party buffs? Or just stick with a useable-but-not huge range, like 10 yards?
  • It’s crazy that there are no connections to the entire right edge of the tree. If you want to get Expel Harm (which Brewmasters all will, at least), you have to take Tigers Lust, Paralysis, Paralysis2, Fort Brew, and Fort Brew2. That’s a lot of highly specific prerequisites for one ability!
  • It’s not clear how Save Them All works with mistweaver’s ability set. MW’s don’t really have an AoE heal. Essence font bolts spray out one at a time. If three bolts heal an injured ally, does everyone get the bonus health? How would that work if the three bolts that hit an injured ally are the first, second, and 18th? If this ability doesn’t work with essence font, that makes it much less useful. Do vivify cleaves count?

Mistweaver tree:
THE GOOD:

  • There is a huge amount of power in this tree, with a lot of fun combinations that I can’t wait to try out.
  • There’s at least three recognizable build-types in here. One for melee, one for casting, and one that is hyper-single-target focused. The devs said they wanted to have both of those playstyles be viable, and I think they really hit the nail on the head (depending on tuning). The hyper-single-target is super situational though. You’d use it on Sun King and… that’s about it. More on this below.
  • Revival/Restoral is a great choice node. A+, no notes, don’t change a thing.
  • I’m super excited to play around with Zen Pulse. That’s a great ability for M+ or add-heavy raid encounters. and the choice node below it is great too.
  • Dancing Mists, Rapid Diffusion, Misty Peaks, Restorative Proliferation and Tea of Plenty all look like really fun and powerful additions to the toolkit.
  • The Tear of Morning/Rising Mist node is kind of perfect.

THE BAD:

  • Tear of Morning/Rising Mist might be too perfect. That node feels mandatory for every build. Fortunately, there’s a great way to build there: Gift of the Celestials, Misty Peaks, then ToM/RM. You’d have to take Gift, of course, since having your celestial on a one minute cooldown is just insanely powerful. It’s even more powerful because of Invoker’s Delight. Having a 33% haste buff for 20 seconds every minute is just incredibly powerful. So you have to take Secret Infusion and Invoker’s Delight in every build. Now 7 capstone talents are fully dedicated and I have limited ability to pick up other things. Awakened Feyline and Bountiful Brew are effectively dead talents. This feels like a dumb complaint - parts of the tree are too strong, so the other parts of the tree won’t get used! - but it’s an issue. ToM/RM should require a bit less of an investment, and Invoker’s Delight can’t work the way it currently does with Gift of the Celestials.
  • Song of Chi-Ji feels like a dead talent. I can’t think of a time when I’d want to use it.
  • Nourishing Chi isn’t a great talent, and Overflowing Mists isn’t worth two points. That means it’s just going to feel bad to take Yu’lon’s whisper.
  • There’s a lot of talents that buff Life Cocoon, but LC is a single-target external on a 2-min CD. Taking any of those talents feels bad because even a super-buff Life Cocoon is only useful in very rare situations. If you want throwing out amazing LC’s to be a thing that MWs do, attach a CD reduction to one of the LC buffing talents. Or put a 60 sec CD reduction as a choice with Calming Coalescence.
  • There’s also a lot of buffs to SooM in the tree, and SooM is not a very good ability. There are very few cases where you want to channel a full SooM on someone. It’s better in M+ then raids, but damage is much more important in M+ than raids and damage-dealing builds are going to be focused on doing damage rather than the occasional SooM you’ll need to throw on the tank. Putting points into SooM and LC make for a great single-target Sun King style build, but are basically useless outside that. In almost every case, those are dead talents, and they just serve to lock whatever is below them.
  • Resplendent Mist is in a weird spot, and it won’t feel good to take in a BDB build because Gust of Mists has a big, well-known overhealing problem.

And finally, a plea for Corrosive Dosage: The melee playstyle deals passive damage. The ranged casting playstyle doesn’t. Corrosive Dosage is crazy powerful in current Torghast, nerf it if you want to keep in in the tree somewhere, that’s fine. But caster builds cast vivify much more than melee builds and caster builds also have no way to do passive damage through healing. Being able to splash damage onto the boss from your vivifies on the tank would be great. If you need somewhere to put it, replace Unison with it. Unison isn’t good enough to have a place in the bottom row.

2

I found this when I was messing around with the tree too. Faeline Stomp is a melee ability, so if I’m “Fistweaving” it’s difficult to get Rising Mist and Awakend Faeline. It’s impossible if you want Invoker’s delight and that haste bonus is huge when you’re trying to maximize Teachings of the Monastery.

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3

Yes, the 33% Haste from Invokers Delight is too strong. But, 33% is what the SL Legendary is and they just took the SL Legendary and directly brought it over to save time.

So, if you are not fully expecting that 33% Haste to be nerfed down to 15% or 10% Haste then you havent been paying attention.

4

Roll is baseline. Thepassive to the left of the monk tree grants an extra charge.

Circle talents are upgrades. Square talents are actual skills.

I think having the statues in the general tree is cool but also very weird. Maybe having to pick between Ox and Jade statue in a single node, allowing for more freedom on the other side. Right now it feels pretty obvious which spec is picking which statue. I can’t see a single tank not taking Ox statue, or a single healer not taking Serpent statue.

Also Ox statue I’m very sure it will be controvercial if a dps uses it. Triggering tanks.

My biggest personal request is switching Soothing Mist and Renewing Mist. Soothing Mist is extremely iconic for Mistweavers but also extremely useless for windwalker or brewmaster SPECIALLY because theres the instant vivify talent. They dont have any other casted heal, so soothing mist looses 90% of its utility.

Switching Renewing Mist to the general tree would allow a small HoT (and at least usefull spell) for BM and WW, but remain exactly the same for Mistweavers

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5

There are a lot of connections to right side
How often are you pressing expel harm as MW though especially if your getting an instant vivify if you want it?

Speaking as Brew Expel harm is a waste of a global. You are better off just side stepping slightly and walking into orbs to collect them

6

As a MW main I love the trees. I abhor fistweaving and love that mistweaving had so many options. The build I will be testing on alpha after work is all about soothing mist and cleave healing. My primary focus will be to see if all the mana reduction talents stack or override each other. I also hate JSS and will never take it. Ox on the other hand will be fun in m+.

I’d like to point out (and I don’t know if this is intended or a bug) that roll is baseline. The talent for roll gives it a second charge. However, the celerity talent does NOT give it a third charge, only recharge reduction. And if you take celerity without the roll talent you still only get one charge of roll.

2 Likes
7

they said this is a bug. Celerity can give a 3rd stack

8

That’s good to know. I’d much prefer tigers lust and roll with 3 charges over tigers lust and chi torpedo. I’m very good at torpedoing myself places I shouldn’t. Roll is much safer :joy:

9

I’m expecting SOME change. I said as much above. But it’s not clear what that change should be. If you tune Invokers down to 10% (say), then it’s a dead talent for anyone who DOESN’T take Gift. Maybe that’s just how they’ll do it - Invokers is tiny and only worth it if you take Gift - but it seems like there’s gotta be a better solution. Maybe make Gift halve the duration of Invokers as well?

11

They’re really on the right track with a lot of the talents and making Monk the most mobile healer. I think it’s a big miss that there’s no talent to make SooM castable while moving again.

A lot of people have said they’re not sure if Vivify being instant will make it to live because it’s so strong. I’d really ask that if this is the case, then SooM being made castable while moving would be a great replacement, although I think MW could use both to really cement their niche since they still don’t bring as much utility as most other healers.

Oh also, please for the love of all that is holy allow Ancient Teachings of the Monastery to trigger off Essence Font OR Faeline Stomp. It’s always been a bit of an awkward pairing with ATotM and EF being linked, but it makes perfect sense for it to be linked to Faeline Stomp. And then you have the option of EF if you get unlucky with resets/have to move.

2 Likes
12

I really hope instant vivify makes it live, even if it heals less and only does big heals with escape from reality.
Also switching soothing mist with renewing mist for the general skill tree would allow some castable bigger heal, while retaining the instant cast (nerfed) vivify

13

So i think i’m the only PvP fistweaver that has gone above 1600 in Shadowlands (i’ve not found another, strangely enough), and I was 1731 in the end of last season. I’ve been a huge proponent of Fistweaving in pvp on the reddit forums and here and always seem to get shot down.

I also feel like I was the only one who was super excited to see our pvp damage increase in the last patch.

I started playing monk in BFA because I wanted a vulpera that was a class I didn’t have and ended up making this guy and sticking with him because i loved him so much. I leved up as brew in pvp and pve and didn’t get into healing until i was forced to on the final boss of BFA hours before AOTC closed for the void drake. I did WW in pvp and with the ToD reset talent, I was getting upwards of 40-50 killing blows in an epic bgs (i have tons of recount data and screenshots available if you want to see.)

I was brew pvp in the first season of shadowlands because stagger was the only way that I could survive being one shot by the macro monkey classes, then they nerfed all tanks with the increased damage taken in pvp because paladin tanks were too much, and instead of raising everyone to that level, they just smashed us to the ground.

I turned to WW in season 2 and got to 1801 in LFG with a random unholy dk before not being able to progress due to the toxic culture. In turn, I found a pvp community that asked me to heal, and since I don’t really play how other played, i went with the Ancient Teachings leggo due to the similarity in play to brew.

Now, I’m mostly just a casual player that got to play a lot more due to covid and my job going into suspension ufn. I don’t really try to push farther than what I need to to get to a state where I’m not being demolished. I can handle fighting against tougher playes. I’m a Soulsbourne player at heart and I grew up wrestling for most of my life. I respect the fight against tougher opponents.

But there has been some times where it was only gear difference that won the fight and not skill. I have several screenshots of where I was 1v1 against a dps in a double dps group (mine died and so did one of theirs) where I matched them one for one in damage and healing. The three I can think of on the top of my head were a survival hunter, an enhancement shaman, and a fury warrior. The problem was, that their self healing was just enough more than my damage to prevent me from gaining an upper hand and my cooldowns were just that much longer than theirs that it guaranteed them the kill.

Honestly, the challenge of fighting as a fistweaver in shadowlands has been the most fun that I’ve had the entire time i’ve played the game. It’s a thrill to deny a kill and to overcome the boys who blow their cooldowns instantly for the gratification. I can survive a warlock 1v1 and any rogue or hunter. With the upgrade in damage, I can even hold out for over a minute 4v1/2 without dying in Rated BGS. I win more of my randoms than I ever have before.

With that being said, I’m pretty satisfied with the starting look of the monk trees. They definitely need some work, and i would very much like to spend the time that I have in order to help this community and myself play how they want to play. I have a fellow RBG monk healer that heals the meta and because we are both different play styles we cover a lot of ground. He’s distance and power, and I can basically keep a group alive as long as I’m punching things.

Oh, and I love the fact that Faeline Stomp is part of our build, and it’s getting and upgrade.

But here is where we come into issue. With the current setup of the tree, I cannot play how I currently play without almost gimping myself in the final parts of the tree.

One blatant obvious criticims, is that i have to get bone dust brew in order to gain resplendent mists and rising mists is pretty much out of reach. if you look at my build in my covenant, I have the resplendent mists in my soul bind. My current Mastery is 125%, and my gusts in always secondary to my ATotM (35-40% each), unless im not directly fighting then it is up to about 70-90% of my healing.

Right now as it is I need to get BDB and sacrifice Misty Peaks and Rising Mist for Resplendent Mist. While it would be interesting to mix both faeline stomp and BDB, with my current rotation BDB would just be extra, and I feel that the combination of MP and RM are better for my style of play an BDB is for burst, which fistweaving does not have. We have great sustain if we can keep our rotation going, but burst is mini compared to any other class in the game.

I also think the Keefer’s Skyreach Talent should be baseline for all monks at the end of the class tree, and not just WW. I really love it with my brew spec, and i’ve messed around with it on my fistweaver and it is just way too fun to let WW have it for themselves. Plus I think it would solve one of the issues that I have where people jump in my range and out of my range (other melee) because they don’t want me healing myself, and i think that cowardly stuff can be smashed in the face with this.

And this really gets me into the design philosophy that I’ve seen going around where there can be ‘wrong’ choices. I would rather give everyone a extra 3 or 4 points to make everyone get what they want than force somebody to gimp themselves in order to play a certain way.

I’m okay with the tough choices where I have to pick something to go into a slot. In this instance I would rather talents change the way somebody plays so that the game suits the style. I love that I have a silence and a slow as baseline for MW. I’m not even too upset that we are all forced to get Soothing Mist, when I will pretty much never use it on any spec. I would rather have expel harm there.

If the trees were to reflect the archetype of the class, Yin/yang, I would have the offensive abilities going down the left side and the defensive abilities going down the right, and the middle being balance and healing. For WW, instead of making it like a straight damage dealer like every other class, I would rather that it be an Assassin/Ninja, where it’s mostly about opportune strikes and counter strikes and ToD fits that aspect of it. I’d like to see ToD more than just an execute, with maybe a “lower maximum” hp when not used in that manner. Brew, I would like to see this class as the soak damage/aoe heal with cc. MW, I don’t mind the distance “prayer” monks, but I think that Fistweavers should be able to 1v1 anyone with equal healing to the damage done, with the true game being counter’s and stuns.

Blizzard should watch more kung fu movies.

Anyways, that’s my thoughts for now. I’m looking forward to the future of fistweaving.