Potential Mistweaver Rework

Classes Monk
1

After watching a lot of Shadowlands Alpha gameplay for Mistweaver, I feel a bit let down. I thought this expansion would bring a lot of fantasy back every class. Yes, I know it is still alpha, however, at this point in time it doesn’t seem like the developers have a clear idea what to do with monks. Especially Mistweavers. Here are some ideas that I would like to see added into Shadowlands:

  • The return of Chi as a resource - Mistweaver spells are mana heavy. Adding back the Chi resource would add more fantasy to the spec as well as easing on the mana usage. I will list how the design would work below.

  1. Soothing Mist - Every time Gusts of Mists heals a target via Soothing Mist it will generate one Chi.

  2. Enveloping Mist - This ability would cost 2 Chi & a percent of mana.

  3. Vivify - Vivify no longer heals targets with Renewing Mist. It will only heal two targets for a set amount and generates one Chi. If the secondary target does not need healing the excess healing will go back to the primary target. Basically, Vivify wants to heal two targets for 50/50 of the total healing of Vivify. However, its values will shift depending on the targets health. So, it could heal for 25/75. Additionally, any over healing would be created into a HoT on the primary target.

  4. Uplift - This spell would heal all targets with Renewing Mist. This would cost one Chi per target with Renewing Mist.

Note: This way, Uplift isn’t over powered and can’t be spammed. Plus, we usually only ever have 3-4 Renewing Mists out at a time and would allow the need to use the new Vivify.

  • Gust of Mists tweak - this mastery is great. It adds a strong single target heal to Soothing Mist, Enveloping Mist, Vivify and Renewing Mist. However, as a Mistweaver main, I do miss healing spheres.
  1. Gusts of Mists - Whenever Gusts of Mists over heals a target, a healing sphere will be summoned near an ally for the over heal amount.

Note: This will allow our mastery to be even more sought after and useful. Also, this will allow help with healing when transitioning to low dungeon/raid damage to medium dungeon/raid damage.

  • Eminence - I know this is something that is hard to balance, but it was such a unique style of healing. It would be great to have for low damage healing during dungeons or raids. The best way to implement that would be to make a new unique Crane Statue.

  1. Crane Statue - This will heal all allies in 20 yards for 25% of your damage done divided equally. The statue will have a 15 second cooldown and you can only have one statue summoned at a time.

  2. Crane Statue - Whenever you Rising Sun Kick, a Gust of Mists will heal the lowest health party or raid member.

Note: This will allow the fantasy of Fist Weaving and wouldn’t be broken or over powered. Also, it makes our mastery even more useful when you are Fist Weaving since it will interact with Rising Sun Kick.

  • Jade Serpent Statue - this will be a baseline ability with a 15 second cooldown.
  1. Breath of Yu’lon - This will replace the Jade Serpent Statue on the talent tree. This talent would function just like the old one before it was removed. It would breath a healing flame in the direction of the target it was healing.

Note: Instead of the Breath of Yu’lon talent there could be a talent that increased the Eminence range of your Crane Statue by 15 yards and does more percent healing.

  • Mana Tea - This was such a huge fantasy ability. It allowed monks to not be afraid to heal and use their spells without worrying about going out of mana.
  1. Mana Tea - Every 4 Chi that you spend with generate 1 stack of Mana Tea with the max of 10 stacks. Each stack will restore 1% mana.

Note: This would allow Mistweaver to not be afraid to use their spells. But, it wouldn’t allow them to spam their spells.

I have nearly 200 days played on my Mistweaver. I fell in love with the spec because it was so unique and had such a different playstyle. I truly miss it. I still play the class today with the hopes of it become unique again.

Please leave your thoughts and feedback below. Also, if you have any good ideas for Mistweaver’s please share them. Thank you for taking the time to read this long forum, I appreciate it!

11 Likes
2

This not only reads well but seems well thought though and makes a lot of sense. It’s nice to see people as passionate about their class as you are.

Fingers crossed that Blizz sees this and at least discusses this as an option. Good read, thanks. :slight_smile:

1 Like
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Some cool ideas there for sure. One thing about mastery are you wanting the spheres instead of current mastery or in addition to not. The issue I see with it is that it contributes nothing in a situation with no over healing which is when healing is needed most.

Unless I’m misinterpreting it which is honestly likely since its 5 am :disappointed:

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For the mastery, it was a combination. We will still have Gusts of Mists. However, whenever it over heals a healing sphere will spawn for the over heal amount. It adds a bit more flavor. Also, I have 110% mastery so it’s my top actual heal and my top over heal too. I figured that would solve the over heal problem.

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honestly, with chi generation just being one for a full cast of SooM and one for every vivify this would be extremely hard to generate resources quickly enough. Basically the same problem Mistweaver had at the start of WoD with the added point that fistweaving won’t generate resources through tiger palm.
EDIT: hells this playstyle would still be EF centered since an uplift costing upwards of 4 chi would just be a waste of time to cast for.

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That is a fair point! With Soothing Mist, it procs on the deck system. That means it will proc once every 8 ticks. Every eight tick won’t be a proc. It will proc between 1-8 and reset again. Peak of Serenity explains it very well. I would add a link below but Blizzard won’t let me. With that being said, you can get at least two Chi from a full cast. But, what if Expel Harm and Renewing Mist generate one Chi? Maybe that would help?

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Possibly, what you are looking at with that is chi generation of about 3 in general every 9 seconds with vivify casts to fill in additional needs.
There might be an issue of being gcd locked though, since you are looking at a fairly low amount of time to cast spenders compared to generation, though that would only really come from casting Enveloping twice compared to one cast of uplift.

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Some of these things I really like, however I don’t want to go back to chi. Only because having certain spells locked behind it would be awful for M+ from a healers POV. One of the best things about MW is that I can throw ENVM on my tank before he pulls and start getting the strong hot ticking on him. If we got chi it would be awkward in keys on pulls where I didn’t have the resource set up right away for my tank and or others.

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I’d like the return of mana tea and chi, but not a neutered version of it. The original version was 4 chi for a stack, stacking up to 20, 4% mana per stack. Your mana costs of things like surge were pretty high, but that was fine because after your mana went down fast, it also went up fast.

Chi spenders also should only cost chi, not mana + chi. EvM was a huge heal in MoP but you couldn’t just cast it on demand, it required a 3 chi setup. The setup time justified the huge value + chi spenders essentially already have a mana cost in the mana it cost to generate the chi. There was also a mechanic originally where you had a chance equal to your crit chance to generate double mana tea charges when you generated a charge.

I think this is balanced when compared to traditional mana because you can’t sustain your burst for that long before needing to drink mana tea, so you have to still be aware of resource management and decide when you’ll have a window to chug mana tea. You don’t want to be oom and need to chug at a critical point when you need to be healing.

Traditional healer resources are mostly all up-front and then you run out and never really get a lot back again where original MW can go down much faster, but then go up and can repeat that throughout a fight. That’s fine because it’s not really “infinite” mana in that you can’t just endlessly heal, there are valleys in your healing and you have to be careful that one of them isn’t at the wrong time.

edit: and the way consuming mana tea worked is that it’s a channel that consumes one stack per second, so you could restore 4% of your mana per second while you had stacks, but you needed to channel it (without the glyph). This was also a nice trick in PvP because it was a physical school spell so you could bait interrupts with it.

Vivify could just be a chi spender uplift replacement and bring back surging mist as a generator + expensive single target burst heal instead of a PvP talent. Or make vivify a generator and essence font a spender which would be a bit of a different playstyle for AoE than the original.

I think bringing back eminence and baseline statues would be fine. Eminence was never a huge source of healing anyway, it was just some light healing to add on top of whatever else you were doing. Fistweaving originally did a lot more healing via chi generating and spending than eminence I believe.

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10

I can understand that reasoning. For me, I never use Enveloping Mist until the tank is around 70% health. Two reasons:

  1. Enveloping Mist actually heals for the same amount as Soothing Mist, the real benefit comes from the healing increase provided by Enveloping Mist.

  2. As a Mistweaver, you have to trust your HoT’s. Soothing Mist is our strongest heal next to Gusts of Mists, in my opinion. So once I cast Enveloping Mist at 70% HP I just cast Soothing Mist and he gets back to full. Plus, most tanks self heal anyway so you don’t have to spam heal them back to 100%.

I feel that Enveloping Mist costs too much mana. I only use it for the healing increase. If we were to add Chi back I wouldn’t be afraid to use Enveloping Mist more. Plus, you’re always casting Soothing Mist anyway so you will generate Chi too. But you do make a good point!

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Omg i would die if Breath came back. I loved using it in WoD. Although it may not have been the best at the time, the visual effects of it really got me. Although, I didnt agree with it being attached to statue. I would gladly have statue be placed as a baked in abiilty and have Breath take the talent spot of it while replacing statue if talented in. Give it a 30 sec cd tbh. I begged for this as well when BFA was coming out in the ptr forums but never got any responses.

Also, give me my Mist Walk back. Give it a CD with a decent heal.

2 Likes
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The higher you go the less that’s true, ENVM does cost a bit of mana however with rising mist you can double it’s duration. I just don’t think putting our strongest abilities behind chi could be balanced well. Espiecally the higher you go.

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Alpha or not you must go hard on feedback. Alpha is not an excuse anymore as it allows devs to get complacent. Don’t be a jerk yes but don’t hold back on feedback.

Tho personally i like how mistweavers heals work as a direct heal with the beam and such but i wish fistweaving could return for more options for other people. I don’t mind that i just don’t want to be forced into having to DPS to do my best healing i will say. Options is all i ask for.

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I personally would really enjoy a more complex play style for MW monk and chi seems like the best way to do that. I have the same concern that everyone else has about chi however and that being the difficulty to do meaningful healing in keys.

I like your idea with vivify how it would try to aoe heal when possible but bring into a single heal if it isnt needed elsewhere. This is nice for aoe but its the only thing we have keeping the tank alive in a key. Sure we soothing mists the tank and also enveloping mist them but in a scenario where there are multiple people injured and you only want to heal one person, well, we have no kit for that. Maybe a talent to reverse the ability? Single target first then aoe??? Something in addition to that but you get my drift.

Yes, healing spheres in mastery with overhealing! Amazing. That would be an aswesome addition. Maybe if they make it adds up 20% of your overhealing over time and when it reaches a certain amount it spawns a sphere with a set amount of healing. This seems like a practical way of doing it because the way you mentioned would spawn SOOOO many spheres that all healed for like nothing each. This is more of a idea for the devs.

I had one idea that could be baked in somewhere that you would normally need say “2 Chi” to cast enveloping mist, but say if you were out of chi or only had 1 then you could cast it and use mana instead per chi missing. This could fix some problems by adding in some skill usage of chi and maybe allow for that “IM REALLY DESPERATE AND DON’T WANT YOU TO DIE” mindset for a period and be mana inefficient to still heal. But maybe making monk this kind of healer that plays somewhat similar to Arcane mages where they use mana more directly and have more control over it apart from just passive regen.

WOD/MOP was so much fun in how if you were bad at MW then you would be oom in the first minute of a fight, but if you were good then you could sustain longer than other specs. This would be so cool and would be a fair change since as it stands, the only reason you bring a MW specifically to a raid is if you dont have a paladin. Making monk the king of pure output would be balanced behind their pure lack of utility, mainly durring raids.

I do not see blizzard going back to the old mana tea system unless they are willing to heavily balence it because they want healers to use mana as a resource and not just have full mana at the end of a mythic final raid boss. I would like to see the old version and the interaction it would have with Chi to add so much depth and flavor to the class.

There is so much cool stuff you mentioned that they could add like the statue and everything and the complexity. However i could see how they might argue that this is giving monk too much and not add it. Perhaps this could give them a reason to reintroduce the proper fistweaving stance and proper mistweaving stances back to clear up bars and distinguish when you are fistweaving and when you are mistweaving.

I dont see how making monk this more unorthodox healing spec is a bad thing and do not agree at all with their decision making that they spoke about for the legion rework, expecially since they double backed on it with other classes. Making Mistweaver fun to play and flavorful and complex but also rewarding at the same time is going to require them to go back and reintroduce what made the class special and interesting in the first place because right now we are just weaker paladins with less utility. And i am not happy that they arnt going in this direction, at least so far.

So ya, this was not structured well as it was put together at random based on what i was thinking at the time.

Im really looking forward to feedback and hope a dev sees this!