MW Mastery implementation feels incomplete

Classes Monk
1

In its current iteration, Mistweaver feels unfinished to me. Specifically, the Mastery only benefits part of the toolkit, which doesn’t feel right.

This post is about what could be done to incorporate the Mastery: Gust of Mists into every aspect of the spec while keeping the mastery itself the same. I’ve seen 3 different primary play styles, spot healing, spread healing, and Fistweaver. I’d like to see GoM incorporated into all 3. Currently, it feels like GoM is primarily for spot healing. I’m sure others with more experience with playing MW have come up with even better ideas, but this is what I’ve come up with.

First, Gust of Mists could be removed from Renewing Mist. (It could be added back with a talent for the spot healing playstyle.) The primary purpose for ReM would be to allow cleaving of GoM onto allies. That brings me to Vivify.

Have Vivify rank 2 cast GoM on all ReM targets, instead of (or in addition to) healing them directly. This would allow the spread healing style to benefit from GoM

The following idea doesn’t directly relate to GoM, but I think it would be cool if you could cast ReM while channeling Essence Font. Just like Env Mist, Vivify and Expel Harm can be cast during Soothing Mist. Having to stop and channel EF for 3 seconds always interrupts the flow of the spec for me. Being able to cast ReM during that time would keep the flow going.

Talents.
Chi-Wave could proc GoM on ReM targets that it hits, as could Chi-Burst. This would give them synergy with mastery.

Summon Jade Serpent Statue, in addition to what it currently does, could make ReM apply GoM on the initial cast. This would be the primary talent for spot healing.

Each Refreshing Jade Wind cast could spread one ReM, duplicating it to another ally, in addition to what it currently does. This would be the primary talent for Vivify spread healing.

Invoke Chi-Ji, the Red Crane could be the primary talent to enable a GoM Fistweaver build. To enable this without being too powerful, I think it would need a significant redesign.

For it to work, Chi-Ji could be made into a controllable permanent pet. Things like “Chi-Ji’s presence makes you immune to movement impairing effects” would need to be one of its abilities that you can activate for a short time with a CD.

I think it could work to have a buildup and release system. BoKs would add a stack of Mist on Chi-Ji, stacking up to 10, RSKs would then release stacks which would cause GoM to heal all targets with an active ReM, with 1 stack being used for each ReM. I’m not sure whether it would be best to have Spinning Crane Kick generate a stack of Mist for each enemy hit or give it have a chance to spread ReMs to nearby allies. It might be good to have Chi-Ji start with 3 stacks of Mist and gradually go back to 3 stacks when out of combat.

To prevent this build from being too powerful in combination with the ATotM legendary, personal damage could be reduced by 50% while Chi-Ji is active. Then have Chi-Ji exactly duplicate all your damage so that overall DPS remains the same while only getting half benefit from ATotM.

The way I imagine this working is to use Tiger Palm to get extra BoKs and each BoK generates a stack of Mist on Chi-Ji. RSKs then release a stack for each ReM you have active, causing a GoM to heal them. If no ReMs are active then no stacks are released and no one is healed with GoM. If you have 3 ReMs active then 3 stacks are released to heal those targets with GoM.

These changes or something similar, along with GoM being added to Revival in 9.1, would make every heal and play style (except the talent Healing Elixir) benefit in some way from the Mistweaver Mastery.

To reiterate, I’m only trying to figure out how to better incorporate GoM into the full Mistweaver toolkit and make it feel more intuitive to gear and play, not trying to solve the lack of raid utility or fix any other issues.

Does anyone else have ideas along these lines?

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I strongly feel Gust of Mist should be a talent, not a mastery. But as it is, I think the best way to add it to Fistweaving would be to make it proc off Rising Sun Kick.
I think it would be nice if it randomly picks one injured target with ReM active (so we have a little control over it) and it has a longer range than ATotM (so it’s a way to Fistweave into the people you can’t reach right now with ATotM).
Making it proc off Blackout Kick would be probably too much (but maybe it can work once ATotM goes away.

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Wait until next expansion to possibly fix it

1 Like
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Fistweaving kind of feels like it has a hole in it where there aren’t enough effects that trigger mastery. However, we don’t need a billion mastery effects or it becomes “mastery or bust” which is worse in my opinion than how things are right now.

Thematically, monk is a combo class. We spend time setting up a big combo window to do lots of healing and/or damage. This is why the essence font interaction exists. Blizzard is very clearly stating with this mechanic that they want you to focus all of your healing into this essence font window. With that in mind, I believe that changes to mistweaver monk need to emphasize this “combo” nature. Also, if you read the “flavor text” of Chiji talent, our melee attacks stir up gusts of mists. Thematically, it makes sense that our flurry-of-blows style attacks should stir up gusts of mists, but then when we are empowered by Chiji, all of our attacks stir up gusts of mists. Our two flurry-of-blows style attacks are a 3 stack TOTM dump (4 black out kicks in 1 GCD) and Fists of Fury.

To fill that mastery gap with minimal reworks of the class mechanics and talent system, I propose the following:

New Baseline effect: Rising Sun Kick resets from Blackout Kick trigger a Gust of Mists.
Triggering from RSK is a little bland in my opinion; there isn’t much “feel good” factor with that design. Blizzard likes procs and well designed procs are fun because they have “feel good” factor. It feels good to put in effort to fish for procs and especially when you get lucky with procs. The RSK reset effect happens enough to add nuance but not dominate the healing of the spec. If RSK triggered gust it would inevitably force mistweavers into casting RSK because of its low mana cost and the high scaling on our mastery; there’s just nothing in the mistweaver kit with comparable HPET. However, since there is a non trivial GCD investment into building TOTM stacks and then spending them, mistweavers won’t feel obligated to build around this effect RSK reset effect, because they can achieve comparable healing with their other spells in the same timeframe. Additionally, there is already a great feel-good factor with spending your TOTM stacks, but with this change multiple black out kicks in your TOTM dump could theoretically proc a RSK reset, so it’s possible to get multiple gust procs from one dump of ToTM stacks, adding some UMPH to that already feel good moment. On top of that, this change reduces the inefficiency of TOTM as an effect (since right now it’s technically bad for you to have multiple RSK resets in one ToTM dump, this change neutralizes that inefficiency).

New Mistweaver Spell: Fists of Fury. Pretty straight forward here, please give mistweavers this fun nuke spell. Our dps rotation is really boring especially in AoE, it would be amazing to have this as an additional option when we don’t need to heal or build up TOTM stacks and we want to do more burst AoE.

New Effect added to Way of the Crane talent: (Fists of Fury - Each time you strike the primary target, there is a 66% chance to stir up a gust of mists, and each time you strike secondary targets, there is a 33% chance to stir up a gust of mists). The feel good factor on this one is straight away obvious: big damage and simultaneous big healing. I don’t know why some monks don’t like channeling essence font, it’s my favorite point in the rotation. It feels good to me to channel a long powerful spell. I think it would feel soooo good to be able to channel essence font, follow it up with double RSK, and finish it off with a fat fists of fury. In M+ this doubles as a dps increase and then also its healing scales with targets so when you use it on a big pull after essence font you just get a ton of gusts procs. Just imagine running into that first pull of DoS and getting to channel a juicy fist of fury, popping off on the damage meter and the healing meter. The specific values I’ve chosen for the chance to proc gusts are simply for balancing ST vs AoE, so that this talent doesn’t become mandatory in ST (if it guaranteed too many Gust procs on ST you would run into the same situation with gust on RSK, where the HPET becomes too large relative to other spells or choices on the talent tier). This effect adds a much needed boost to the way of the crane talent that makes it much more dynamic than simply buffing the mana return, but at the same time synergizes very well with my first proposed change since you would want to be dumping TOTM stacks to benefit from gust healing.

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Current mastery exists to give mistweavers an incentive to cast heals on specific targets, rather than smartheal and aoe heal everything. This is why it doesn’t exist on any smart healing or aoe healing.

The Fistweaver Mastery Problem isn’t going away because good healer design means targeting injured players and healing them, not just perma aoe/smartcleave healing. If our mastery gets smarter, the rest of our spells are going to get dumber to compensate. Blizz will never just jam current mastery onto our smart/aoe rotational heals and call it fixed, because you’ll make the spec brainless and boring.

If you make mastery affect all healing spells, it’s like it doesn’t exist. If you remove mastery and increase throughput of affected spells to compensate, what happens?

ReM targeting never matters. Even if you cast on full health targets, it jumps. Worst case is one tick overheal, making it never worth bothering to focus on who to cast on.

Enveloping Mist suffers as a spot heal because the initial heal is gone, meaning you have to TFT if you want to effectively triage someone. Currently, the gusts heal is just enough to hold them until you can use the healing bonus to fully stabilize. Without, you’ll EnvM a dying target and then they’ll finish dying before your next gcd.

Celestial gets more smart cleave healing, and it matters a little less who you target with your EnvM hard/instant casts.

Essence Font becomes just a channeled raid heal with a cd. Not worth tracking your ef hots anymore, high efficiency spot heal targets dont exist any more, removing the interesting decision making between healing an EF hot target, or a more important raider who didnt get the hot. Just push button when raid damage.

Vivify turns into scuffed prayer of healing. 35% more healing on your target compared to the cleave targets, down from 110% more healing on your main target (@ 369 mastery). Just keep vivifying the same injured target, and all affected targets are healed about the same.

Soothing mist would be fine, a little less interesting to proc big mastery on EF targets but otherwise fine.

Expel harm mostly unaffected. Slightly less interesting because no EF buff.

And of course, fistweaving completely unaffected since they only do about 3% gusts healing.

This is why I oppose pretty much every mastery re-work suggestion that has been proposed. When you “make mastery affect all our spells” you throw the axiom of “Targeting your healing correctly is important” in the toilet for the entire spec, and ALSO fail to make fistweaving better.

Unrelated: Casting ReM during essence font channel is a cool idea that has parallels to casting during soothing. I really like it.

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You’ve said this before, but the way our mastery works isn’t how you want it to lol. Strictly speaking in raid, if someone is gonna get hit by something fatal, you get more value ENVM before the dmg goes out to waiting until after, like if someone on slg gets hit by wicked blade, and they already have one stack I’ll ENVM a second before they get it, and they’ll get huge value out of ENVM. Because of how our mastery works it just isn’t satisfying to beef up like it is for crit or vers or haste. Why would I focus mastery and increase throughput on 3 spells, when I can focus crit and vers and get increase throughout on ALL my spells. If vivify cleave procs mastery then maybe it would have more value, but my spells still have a lot of oomph to them just focusing crit and vers. Even when I do go UW and play as a MW mastery is still one of my lower stats.

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My post here is about how reworking mastery to buff all spells (like crit/vers does) would ruin the spec by further reducing emphasis on targeted healing. I’m not arguing that stacking mastery is good since for most mw heal priorities, it isn’t.

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Then how about rework one of the talents to make mastery affect everything in some way, but greatly reduces it’s value? That way if you don’t take the talent, everything stays as it is. If you want mastery to benefit spread healing, you take the talent, but you’ll no longer be as good at spot healing.

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That’s what Rising mist currently does, except the value of Mastery from gear goes all the way to zero and you get all the benefits of extremely reduced importance of targeted healing.

You just can’t have our spells interact with each other the way they do without current Mastery existing to force us to choose targets carefully. By making it an optional talent, you can just “talent out” choosing the right targets to heal. At least with current Rising Mist, you have to ALSO gear it out, not just talent it out. Suggestions for a MW rework need to preserve the PURPOSE of our current mastery: Choose heal targets correctly.

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You keep saying our mastery requires us to choose targets carefully, that isn’t true at all. Also RM is much better ST healing, the build that wants the smallest amount of mastery possible, does better ST. Our mastery could do a little more, it wouldn’t hurt anything lol, we have the least interactive mastery of all healers. Make our viv cleaves also proc mastery, or back when multi strike was a thing, RNM had a chance not to go on cd based off multi strike, if they redid the numbers for our mastery, that could also be pretty cool.

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If you gear 0 mastery and only cast aoe heals, you dont have to. Fistweaving is the problem, not mastery

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But I do cast ST heals, like I’ve said in other posts MYthic sire is incredibly heavy on tank dmg, I ran no mastery and still was able to do 700k healing to one of my tanks and 600k to the other. There isn’t an issue with fistweaving lol, we are a melee healer, we just need more interaction with our mastery. The fact that my ST healing is still impactful with 0 mastery is an issue at least in raid, aside from Kaelthas not once this raid tier have I felt like I NEEDED mastery. If blizz wants mastery to be a dead stat in raid that’s fine, it’s nice in keys, probably one of the nicer healer mastery’s for keys if I’m being honest. But it just has no worth in raid, when some of our strongest spells have little to no interaction with mastery.

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Idk why you’re way off the point of my last few posts. Mastery’s design is pretty clear: encourage correct targeting in a spec with overwhelming smart heal and aoe heal. Yea you CAN drop all mastery and still heal fine, even single target, i never said you couldnt

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The assumption should always be:

The class is rebalanced after a suggested change.

If everything proc’d mastery the heal from GoM would be lowered to account for its increased occurance. And for fistweaving you could nerf the 250% of your damage to account for mastery procs.

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I think our Master also needs to add to our attack power in some form. Currently Mastery is pretty useless for Fistweaving. Yes its useable in direct heals, but does nothing for heals through fistweaving… so either it should a) increase our damage some or b) increase any heals from fistweaving.

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We are healers, we shouldn’t have a mastery that increases our dmg. If mastery affected vivify cleave, that would be a nice thing for fistweaving, since we can have 5-6 vivifies out at times.

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Yeah, my suggestion would be to give fistweaving the revival treatment and nerf the legendary but let it proc mastery.

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Our mastery should be another boost to everything similar to all the other healing masteries. Gusts of mist could be made a passive ability or talent, because it already functions like one: it effects a specific part of our kit. It wouldn’t even be hard to come up with a relevant theme that is currently unused since it can be about mana efficiency, movement, healing amp, damage+healing to damage pipeline.

I generally don’t like gusts of mist in its current state, its far too specialized for a healing mastery. The biggest flaw though is that it badly hurts our stat priority, it is a stat to be avoided since in many cases it will contribute a very small amount of your healing, and its spot healing potential is generally unneeded because we have the most potent short hot in the game. In its worst case you have a stat that does almost nothing for your real heals but 1 in 4 pieces of gear will have it on it, maybe more because I’m pretty sure blizz just stuffs raid gear into a randomizer and calls it good each tier. Its just really bad for our itemization, and it’ll only get worse as we start hitting secondary soft caps. I feel that the revival change is a band aid for this, but I worry that its probably not a good long term solution as it means we’re still stuck with gusts of mists for a longer period.

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Gusts of mist is incredible in M+ and probably one of the better healer mastery’s for keys. I really do think it applying to vivify cleaves also, and when rem spreads would make it better. People wanting our dmg abilities to heal with mastery or wanting our mastery to increase our dmg are thinking in the wrong direction. Healers mastery should do healing in some way without dmg, no other healing mastery has dmg as some part of their mastery, so ours shouldn’t either. Add a few more things to our mastery and I do think it’ll be fine in raid, it’s already great in keys.

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I never said it should, by damage+healing to damage pipeline I mean literally like the disc atonement one where we just get more healing per damage done. Furthermore I’m not saying mw mastery is always bad, I’m saying its unhealthy for the spec at large. Its scaling allows it to go to the moon numbers wise, but it sacrifices synergy with a solid half, if I’m being nice, of our kit and any borrowed power we might end up using, which tends to be a lot these days. Our aoe talents, essence font without follow up, chi cocoon, everything to do with yu’lon, refreshing jade wind, rising mists, chi wave, chi burst, vivify split healing. None of those are effected by our mastery, and that is unique to mistweaver. Holydin, holy priest, and resto sham have 100% of their healing kit covered by mastery, disc and resto druid are mostly covered but they have some set up with hots, and atonement respectively. I didn’t even get to the borrowed power fistweaving stuff that will probably not even exist next expansion going off of the pattern on how blizzard keeps giving us borrowed powers that should just be baseline.

I’m not one of the people saying that rising sun kick should proc mastery, I’m for gusts of mist being removed entirely as our mastery and replaced with something more akin to other healing masteries so that the stat can be relevant more often. I feel that it would be better for mistweaver overall to have a stat that is synergistic with whatever loadout we might choose to use, rather then have a stat that demands a loadout to accommodate it. Its especially egregious since next patch or the patch after we’re gonna be looking at the soft stat caps and having to choose how to make do with haste and mastery or weakened crit/vers while other healers will have less problems using a balanced stat layout.