Mistweaver has a lot of issues currently that stems from the non-normalization of healing sources, dps rotations, and secondary stat interaction. When you have so many different factors in a kit that don’t mess well then you run into issues.
Healing Sources
This might sound like what spells do what healing but its a bit more abstract than that. Its how is healing derived from the kit. There are three major sources of healing sources from the kit, Directly from Damage, Indirectly from Damage, Directly from Healing Spells.
These break down pretty directly from what you’d imagine
- Directly from Damage - The idea behind this source of healing is the damage you do is directly linked to the healing done. Currently this is Ancient Teachings of the Monastery (atotm) and only atotm, you can look back and see other methods namely Way of the Crane. (note the damage the healing is based off of normally ignores boss immunities that read 99% DR and also ignores all damage amps that aren’t from the monk kit)
Examples:
Rising Sun Kick does 2k damage then atotm does 5k healing
Rising Sun Kick does 5k damage then atotm does 12.5k healing - Indirectly from Damage - This would be healing that is produced from hitting a spell that happens to do damage but the healing isn’t based on the damage done. Chi-ji and Rising Mist fit into this category, Historically Zen Pulse would be another spell that did this. If Rising Sun Kick
Examples:
Rising Sun Kick does 2k damage then Rising Mist does 294 healing
Rising Sun Kick does 5k damage then Rising Mist does 294 healing - Directly from Healing - This one is a decent catch all category. It handles any healing from spells that are hit button get healing and that’s it. This contains the vast majority of Mistweaver Spells like Gust of Mist, Vivify, Expel Harm, Essence Font, etc etc
While having such a wide range of sources might seem like a good thing it can cause an identity crisis and potentially a tuning issue. At the current moment Mistweaver feels like a I do damage to heal healer but that is a completely wrong. The vast majority of our healing has nothing to do with the damage we do. You can go look it up on warcraftlogs and find that atotm is never more than 50% let alone 30% of our healing. While it is a significant chunk the vast majority of it is maintenance healing that happens outside of critical windows which while very helpful is not the core of our healing. The large mixture of types of healing also leads it very hard to keep a playstyle consistent. If they overtune the raw healing spells then you drop the dps to heal aspect, if they tune the dps too highly then you completely avoid the healing spells. Not to mention how anal they will have to be when buffing DPS as it could easily trickle over to the healing side. It makes the balance of the spec and its playstyle exist on a knifes edge.
My suggestion is to convert all Directly from Damage healing to Indirectly from Damage healing sources. This could be handled the same way Chi-ji was handled coming into Shadowlands which assists in the stat interactions area I will talk about later. They could directly rip the logic from chi-ji and place it on Ancient Teachings of the Monastery. This would keep the same feel of I'm hitting damage buttons to heal but they are not being derived from the actual damage done. This could also allow for Chi-ji being buffed to 3 or more targets hit per damage ability to build a greater differentiation between the two. There might be an argument for doing the reverse, Indirectly from Damage → Directly from Damage, but I’d strongly suggest not doing this as it makes healing more RNG which is not a desirable aspect when it comes to healing. If we look back to Legion and its Uplifting Trance procs we can see and feel the pain of having your healing amount completely shift due to rng which for Damage is Critical Strikes.
DPS Rotations
This one might sound very strange coming from a healer but when you have 3 different single target rotations based on talents and cooldowns you start running into an optimization issue. Mistweaver’s single target DPS rotations are strongly focused around what can they do for the talents selected, Spirit of the Crane, Invoke Chi-ji, the Red Crane, and Rising Mist.
- Spirit of the Crane - This talent’s value completely comes from consuming Teachings of the Monastery stacks. These stacks are gained by pressing Tiger Palm and consumed by pressing Blackout Kick. This means you will want to always stack Teachings of the Monastery to max stacks (3) before pressing Blackout Kick.
- Invoke Chi-ji, the Red Crane - This talent’s value comes from the direct healing of Gust of Mist and the reduced cost and cast time of Enveloping Mist which will proc Enveloping Breath. The reduction system of Chi-ji is each damage spell pressed gives you a stack of its own buff which stacks to 3. This means you will never want to go over 3 stacks which means you can never get 3 stack of Teachings of the Monastery.
- Rising Mist - This talent’s value comes from a mixture of its direct healing and the extension of hots. These are both procced when you press Rising Sun Kick meaning you want to get as many off as possible. There is a nice little passive called Teachings of the Monastery that makes it so every Blackout Kick gives you a 15% chance to reset the cooldown of Rising Sun Kick. (note each Blackout Kick including ones from Teachings of the Monastery are an independent roll to reset. Meaning being at 3 stacks of totm pressing Blackout Kick doesn’t mean a 45% chance but rather 4 different coin flips) This leads the player to wanting to press Blackout Kick as often as possible to get more Rising Sun Kicks out which reduces the priority of stacking Teachings of the Monastery.
Just reading the talents and their definitions you can directly see that all three play on Teachings of the Monastery in a different ways. If you want to lean into one talent then you are proactively hurt the other two which from a game feel sense is terrible. This produces many anti-synergizes within the kit itself when all the talents abstractly read do damage to gain benefit. Produces a “noob trap” for newer players that might push them away from the game.
Since I see this come up so much I will comment on it.
Mistweaver should be a melee healer who sits in melee to damage. I know there are people out there who want to do damage from ranged but has never been the case for Mistweaver. It would be like making a feral druid a ranged dps spec, there isn’t any historical or lore reason to do this. While Blizzard has pulled us inwards with atotm, Rising Mist, Chi-ji and Spirit of the Crane, there is still a group that doesn’t like that but the normalization of the spec gives a clear development direction. I’m not saying to remove all casted healing spells just make it clearly be known that you are a melee. That doesn’t mean force being in melee to heal but rather your optimal location is in melee.
There are a few ways to tackle in my head but they all come down to changing 2 of the three talents to accommodate the other. One unique option would be to rework the Mistweaver DPS rotation as a whole by targeting Teachings of the Monastery’s stacks and RNG reset nature of Rising Sun Kick. Stealing the Windwalkers reduce x spell by y seconds per Blackout Kick would remove the RNG issues while keeping more frequent Rising Sun Kicks. This could be compounded into removing the stacks of Teachings of the Monastery and giving Tiger Palm a damage buff to compensate. Then rebasing the talents to be based off this DPS cycle. Even this has its own and unique issues that making it an imperfect system. A small secondary system on a kit is hard to rework without making it overly complicated.
Secondary Stat Interaction
Now this point is very direct and clear cut, the relationship from our secondary stats and healing is broken. Specifically Mastery is a massive issue while it has improve there are still enough talents that don’t interact with it at all. If any of these talents because optimal or better then you have just doomed a stat for a spec. Don’t get me wrong. I think trade offs and stat interactions are cool but when the trade offs are RJW is better than Vivify from both a HPM and HPC standpoint to the point where you’ll drop Vivify in order to have enough mana to play RJW then its not just 1x reason to dislike Mastery but two. This has also lead to a inflated mastery coefficient in an attempt to fix or cull this issue. In World of Warcraft all stats give you X points per Rating but since mastery is a unique stat that isn’t a flat multiplier Blizzard introduced a Mastery Coefficient which turns the (rating / rating per point) into Mastery Coefficient * (rating / rating per point) which this allows them to tune a specific specs mastery without impacting other specs. Mistweavers Mastery Coefficient is 4.2 which means every 35 rating we get 4.2% Mastery… If we compare to all other healers we see
- Resto Druid - .5
- Holy Priest - 1.25
- Disc Priest - 1.35
- Holy Paladin - 1.5
- Resto Shaman - 3
While comparing Mastery Coefficients like this isn’t a valid 1:1 comparison or healthy it is very strange to see most healer specs have low coefficients and still want the stat while we have an insanely high one and want to avoid it like the plague. This also causes a shock and with stat DRs confusion to players who swap from another spec over to Mistweaver.
This is a rough one that I don’t have any good ideas for. My best idea is the ability to prorate how much mastery hits for and apply it to more aspects of our kit. For instance if each heal from RJW was 25% of mastery while main target vivify is 200% of Mastery. This way they can both lower the coefficient to be more inline with other healers and specs while introducing more interactions of the stat. Healers will also run into a love hate relationship with mastery due to the lack of a DPS aspect of it but that isn’t a problem I’m aiming to fix.
Closing Thoughts
While these are not direct spell desires such as Bring back Way of the Crane or Making SCK produce more than 1 st of Gust of Mist for Chi-ji I believe these are very actionable items that should help the overall kit feel more connected with less negative feedback loops.