Hello,
I normally refrain from posting on the forums, and most of my mistweaver discussion is held in other communities, however I think enough time has passed in dragonflight for me to talk about the…. Mastery problem mistweaver is currently having. Depending on who you talk to, the stat holds a different perception. To some, it’s a dead stat forever doomed, for others it’s a beacon of an entire playstyle that is lost to time, and for most of the community this isn’t a pressing issue and I should probably go touch grass instead of writing about it. This rant is for keys and keys only, mastery still has its issues in other areas of the game but m+ is where I think this issue is the most interesting and also easiest to solve.
TALENTS:
Trying to tackle this tangled mess of a stat is tricky, but one of the biggest pain points to me is the mistweavers tree, our power budget, and supporting talents. At this point in the expansion, Faeline stomp is THE cornerstone of m+. Realistically there’s not much wiggle room at all in the bottom third, and to most that’s completely ok. However, due to how much of the power budget is put into faeline, it leaves almost every other part of the kit that wants to branch away from this gameplay loop severely lacking in both power and depth. This especially includes talents that either directly or indirectly support a mastery dominant playstyle. A good example of this would be our penultimate talents. Resplendent Mist is a relic from a past time, it being primarily dominant in Kyrian focused builds. Now it sits in the tree not even as a mediocre one pointer, but requiring a two point investment to get its full value. Secret infusion used to act as a pseudo weapons of order amp in the very early stages of beta, offering a similar amount of mastery to it if you decided to use tft on viv, but it was changed very early on. However the most egregious sin of the talents is our Chiji modifiers.
Gift of the celestials and Jade bond are at the very core of the talent issues. In essence, these two talents are what would come if you split Kyrian mistweaver into two parts. Gift of the Celestials gives you the ability for a shorter cooldown and consistent Chiji, at the cost of him being severely weaker. On the other end of the spectrum, Jade bond gives us the feeling of Chiji from shadowlands, a very powerful cooldown, but at the cost of long downtime between each bird rotation. For all of shadowlands most only knew the long form of Chiji, and both of these talents are just a significant upgrade. However to all two people who played Kyrian know, it’s a significant downgrade of the playstyle.
To best explain I’ll dumb down the general gameplay loop of Season three and four Kyrian mistweaver and compare it to our general gameplay in Dragonflight.
With Kyrian the general loop would look like this(assuming covenant leggo is on):
Pop Chiji → Crank out GoM and Envm weave while reducing CDR → Pop Woo → Continue cranking → Little bit of downtime → Back to Chiji
OR
Pop Woo → Crank out GoM and Envm weave → Pop Chiji → Keep cranking → little bit of downtime → Back to Woo
Side note: This is heavily generalizing the Kyrian style its just an example of how the two main cooldowns functioned in a vacuum
Compare this to the general gameplay loops with either Jade bond or Gift talented:
JB:
Pop Faeline → Pop Chiji → Get as many GoM through Blackout kick cleaves → Chiji downtime for roughly 1:45-2 minutes
Gift:
Pop Faeline → Pop Chiji → Play Chiji more for EnvB due to the weakness of low mastery GoM → Chiji downtime
The largest difference is that these two talents essentially take the two major positive gameplay moments of Kyrian monk and attempts to make them both work separate from each other and with Faeline as the glue. However coming from me, both are missing something to make it fully click. Gift has the fun uptime but the power shift away from GoM makes him feel clunky. Jade bond has the fun of large GoMs but it lacks the uptime and choices that double legendary Woo provided. Now there is a way to “”fix”” gift Chiji having lackluster GoM, there’s just one issue…
Stacking Mastery Incentivizes Boring Gameplay:
On the surface level, one can look at these issues and think that these are just small bumps along the way, and in theory the stat can still produce the highs that we’ve seen in previous iterations. However it’s main issue is mastery in its current form favors it being packaged into an amp instead of being a stat you actually want to obtain. Outside of our two main cooldowns, the only benefit of having mastery is more priority healing to one specific target. On paper this sounds decent, but the greater problem is that every other stat helps with this while also providing even more on top of it. This was another core part of Weapons of Order. Instead of being forced to stack mastery to get to the payoff, the cooldown enabled us to get whatever stats suited the base of our kit better while allowing the same gameplay loop. Without having any way to gain a large boost of mastery through talents(I’m not counting secret infusion it SUCKS so bad with viv rn), Mastery is stuck between a rock and a hard place.
Why Do I Miss Kyrian Mistweaver:
So I know contentious topic, but yes Kyrian was a build that could get you to extremely high key levels in Season 3 and 4 of Shadowlands(Don’t hurt me Meg). Viability aside, I think there’s a few major reasons as to why former Kyrian mistweavers can’t get the playstyle out of their head still. I used to explain it as the build “scratching an itch” but after a long time of writing about this topic, a few major ideas eventually developed. One of the most crucial was flexibility within our cooldowns and decision making.
Kyji in its prime form had so much variety in how situations could be approached, both from a cooldown management and also a rotational perspective. Due to having such a high uptime of both Woo and base Chiji(both cds combined meant we had roughly 40-45% Chiji uptime in a key), it enabled for boss encounters to take on a new level of engagement compared to our vampire counterpart.
Bosses in Keys generally fall under 2 categories most of the time. Ramp based bosses, and sustain based bosses. Because in a way you had two Charges of Chiji who both play slightly differently, it changed the perspective on Chiji rotations and the cooldown management of the bird. A great example to look at would be Plaguefall, specifically comparing and contrasting the healing profile on Globgrog versus Margrave Stramada.
I’ll be taking my pf 26 as an example:
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports/9hqm12ngxrvZGbVH#fight=28&type=healing&source=191
A Boss like Globgorg in a high key revolves around a lot of sustain damage taken from the red slime pool on top of some quick burst healing whenever stomp goes out. What this meant was Chijis were less spread out and our rotation during this fight was similar to how it was now. One interesting mechanic was cycling in 24 second Chiji into the last half of Woo’s duration, a strat normally not seen often at all during this season. Healing wise the fight played out insanely similar to dragonflights version, being a mix of Gusts, Envm, and EnvB. Chiji was utilized as a cooldown to sustain the groups health consistently throughout the fight mixed in with some burst if possible on stomps. We can then Compare this with Stramada, which was much more of a burst healing fight in comparison, and it implored a lot more tech and strategy. Chiji transformed from a sustain cooldown like we saw in Globgorg into a full burst cd. Because of the way infectious rain dealt damage mostly through a dot, ramping up with each tick, Ef stalling was extremely prevalent. Instead of the usual pre ramp into blackout kick for damage, the rotation looked something like: Pre ramp → Ef(Quick Stop) ->damage event starts Woo → Ef(hold for full duration) → Blackout Kick.
It’s hard even with logs and footage, or even my own explanations here to describe what exactly made Kyji click, but there was nothing that came close to pulling off a Woo window successfully. It’s a feeling and healing playstyle that worked so well in the landscape at the time, almost felt like capturing lightning in the bottle. So much in depth strategy and tech from an otherwise simple button. I deeply miss the playstyle and what it brought to the table. If there was one thing that Kyrian showed, it was the fact that mastery can create deeply interesting and fun gameplay patterns, it just needs a little work to get going.
Solution:
I will confess maybe my solutions are a tad bit too cooked. But in my eyes mastery does have the chance to have some time in the spotlight given the right direction. There are some big solutions like a full rework of mastery(please dont I love the stat), but in the current state I see two smaller scale solutions that would work to at least bring the feeling of mastery being powerful back.
A. Inclusion of a Mastery Amp to the kit
B. More Mastery Supporting Talents and More Mastery Synergy with the overall kit
For our first solution, it’s going back to the tried and true. Mastery has shown to be great in small bursts, so returning some sort of mastery amp could help resolve this playstyle hole mistweaver currently sits with. You could very easily make FLS and choice node with Woo, with the corresponding nodes below being Effusive Anima Accelerator and the capstone being Call to Arms. There would be a lot less design problems than one would expect when going down this path considering the only time CtA Woo was extremely toxic was during the dragonflight preseason(which was mostly due to fls+gift+jb conduit). In fact having this choice node would create some very interesting talent choices, such as gift Chiji being able to clip the last 12 seconds of Woo. Another smaller way to help relieve some of this would be general buffs to the stat, talents, and interactions. Things such as returning sheilun’s mastery proc, buffing secret infusion mastery, rearranging resplendent mist’s location, and more would do wonders to boost how the stat feels to play around with.
ANYWAYS I need to go touch grass after all this wowza. I didn’t really cover some other crucial parts of mastery like Essence Font sucking right now but the entire point of this post is to be a love letter to my favorite build of all time so maybe another day. I hope it goes to show how fun Kyrian was that I can write a four page document trying to explain what made it so amazing. So Uhhhh TLDR time!
TLDR:
Mastery has been severely lacking in dragonflight compared to our options in later shadowlands seasons, mostly due to a strange power budget, lack of support and interactions, and Chiji talents that split Kyrian’s playstyle in two. Call to Arms Woo was the peak of Gust gaming and either returning both the ability and the legendary as a choice node with the Fls path or by adding more interactions and fixing some talents would go a long way to make an otherwise dead talent feel a bit better for the player.