I was pretty sure with the changes that only the primary target recieved the full damage from blackout kick I may have heard from an unreliable source. I will need to actually be able to test it on live when the patch comes out.
So if you look at the hero talent trees you can kind of see Blizzards intent. They want you to play refreshing jade wind and dance of chichi with celestial conduit as it basically enables spinning crane kick to do an aoe gust of mist through the talent “flight of the red crane.” FotRC scales to your mastery stat’s value for how much gusts heals for. The proc rate for dance has changed multiple times throughout the season and the conditions to proc it do seem to me that they may be defined behind the scenes as I notice dance proc’s a lot more often in multi target than single target and specifically proc more often if I use spinning crane kick in cleave on awakened jadefire even without a dance proc vs any other ability but I’m not sure. I’ve done hundreds of keys with it and noticed a bit of a pattern.
For me dance procs about 2 times per pull, often more. What I’ve done essentially is just gotten very extremely good at fist weaving such that I don’t necessarily rely on DoCJ or JE. If it’s there and I want to use it, then it’s good, but I don’t play around it generally or count on it all the time. There are times when dance is highly clutch like coming out of the first boss of SV (edna) the tank will usually pull both packs in the room, and this is coming out of a very mana intensive fight that can deplete cool downs quite easily, so having dance there in multi target is very helpful. It’s also very good at out healing most aoe damage ime. With JE often times if you don’t have a charge and tea is on cd then it can feel like there’s nothing you can do, especially since the only thing justifying the MoH hero talents is JE. A lot of dungeons boarderline prohibit standing still and one of the wonderful things about fist weaving is not casting to heal in my opinion. If you need to use JE right now but can’t stand still or will have to move after casting it, then you lost that damage and healing you needed and can’t access it for 30 seconds. 30 seconds is an extremely long time for most pulls in m+. Under +15 most boss fights don’t even go for 3 minutes except a few problem ones maybe like the mist bosses can drag on sometimes. Dance can be castable while moving, it works every time in multi target, you don’t have to leave melee to do it safely in any case (also has some decent range relative to most of our abilities, which is good for dealing some damage while moving around area of denial to reposition)
While playing conduit I don’t actually notice very much difference in damage between Dance and JE. In fact i often find that because I elect to save JE for specific things that my damage might be lower overall because you’re just holding charges. With dance (unless there is something specific I want to do) I always want to press it in multi target. I think too without MoH amp that dance does more healing. Awakened Jadefire means that allies are indiscriminately healed for 110% of the damage it does. Dance makes spinning do 400% more damage. My dance proc does about 400k per tick, so allies are being healed 410k. Flight of the red crane is basically an aoe gust proc on 5 allies instead of the target cap of 1 afforded by Crane Style. So basically when you dance you’re getting like a cool downs worth of healing in multi target every time you do it, dance can proc dance back to back indefinitely (i’ve only been lucky enough to get it 4 procs this way though and maybe only a handful of times usually i get about 2 procs per pull and not always one after the other)
Chi-ji also synergizes with all of this. If you read Chi-ji’s text you’ll find that it says when you cast spinning crane kick (and a list of other things) chichi kicks up gusts of mist on up to 2 targets. Now generally it’s better to do your rotation because of how many things our rotation is involved in with our kit and damage, but hypothetically there are times (maybe due to range or jadefire proximity or maybe other factors in your decision making) if you dance when chichi is out you are doing the big healing that dance normally does (free, low mana cost, faster than the cast time of JE, can do it while moving, gives you a little bit of range, all that,) you’re getting your jade wind while chichi is out (which can proc FotRC 1-3 times during its duration,) (jade wind heals allies every 0.6 sec over 6 seconds which for me amounts to something like 130k,) and chichi is kicking up gusts of mists.
This is a lot of healing. Players have told me “you heal a lot more than other mist weavers.” It’s because i generally tend to run one point of resplendant mist with this. Which basically is like 30% chance for gust to do 75% more healing. This is kind of like 30% chance to do a 75% crit. And with conduit and dance not being reliant on when i can drink tea to get spikes of damage and healing amp and just flat out not having it if it’s on cool down like JE+MoH, i just do that all the time. It costs me like nothing and can do more healing than revival, no tracking Chi Harmony, no hard casting, not forced to drink tea to do that or keep track of how many stacks of empowerment i have, I just hit a button and it does humongous healing and I do that all the time.
I actually wish i kept my vods after more than a day cause some of the pulls in NW 13-15 I’ve done are some of the most absurd healing ever like almost 3m hps on gatekeeper pulls. And then cause of dance and conduit I’m usually feeling pretty safe going into whatever the next pull is by the tank. Not only because dance might have saved me a cool down but because conduit gives 75% cool down reduction to cocoon and tea and i’ll probably just get to dance again another 1-2 times on this pull. It’s so nice to just have an ability that just works and costs basically nothing. No mist ramping ( you can but don’t need to), no single target setup for zen, not planning around when to use JE or worried about how soon tea will be on cd, no chiji ramping (you can but don’t need to, dance is literally just that much healing in aoe pulls)
It suits the way i like to play mist weaver. I don’t know if I answered your question to be honest. Something i’ve been complaining about for a while tho is this push by blizzard to make mist weaver increasingly more dependent on and focused around Jade Empowerment. The changes also now make it so good for single target (where we were struggling the most) that I wonder if i’ll be forced to play it rather than what I prefer to play to push high keys next season. CoT already forces me to play it and it’s the only concession I’ve desired to make because I dislike CoT more than I dislike JE. Oddly enough dance is light years better for the last boss of cot for healing off the beatles but the first 3 bosses are so painful for any healer, especially mw monk. You can’t outheal the third boss forever, it just needs to die faster. 1st boss maybe depends on group comp. basically all the bosses in CoT are “how quickly can you kill it and how long can you survive.” A boss like the first one of arak I could probably heal forever if the rest of the team didn’t make any mistakes and damage didn’t out pace the replenishment of mana tea stacks. CoT bosses are not like that. It’s way too much damage way too frequently and indiscriminately to out heal for too long, it has to die faster, so JE is better. Plus as mw I feel that the final boss of city is easier than all the bosses before it. Just in general. There’s even a break in the fight to drink tea and top people off. Chiji makes you immune to the web snare, tigers lust if you don’t got chichi, touch of death if for some reason you don’t have either, heck even transcendence, heck we even have a talent that makes roll remove snares. Melee centric fight moving with tank around the room, sheiluns feels very good there,etc. Would LOVE to step out and swap talents to my usual ones for that fight but CoT tends to be a tough timer because it’s long and honestly needs tuned down a bit.
I think i rambled for too long sorry
Edit: I want to add too that when you start pushing super high keys the pulls often get bigger and more dangerous. Like in the mist +15 i timed we pulled all the gorms into the final boss. Walked straight through them to the final boss. This the type of stuff you’d only expect in mdi. That’s a huge multi target opportunity for huge healing with dance and that last boss of mist is definitely not one where you want to stand still to hard cast CJL. Especially bringing all of these gorms with their multiple AoEs into that boss. Dance is just better here. You would need to be very lucky or much smarter than me to get the most out of JE in a pull like that. Dance procs, press dance, just works. Dance is also uncapped aoe damage Jade caps out at like 4 or 5. I will admit we did this pull because the timer was tight like sometimes you just have to send it and try your best and I’m very thankful that when that situation became a reality I had dance talented.