Hello again, I made a post a while back but a bug on the forums prevented me from posting but the GMs and tech team seem to have finally resolved it, and it gave me more time to think about what I wanted to suggest.
My names aoibhinn, serial karate doctor. If you do +13-16 I’ve maybe even been in your groups, I see the same people a lot I feel like. I run an unorthodox build that I don’t really think or know of any other mw running. That’s conduit with dance of chichi and resplendant mists.
I’ve only used Jade Empowerment to time cot 13, because it just feels flat out required even as low as 13 where as for most keys I’ve been told it becomes required to play it at +16. Because of my unusual build people have told me “you heal a lot more than other mist weavers.” I’m surprised that we only saw JE get tuned up for single target in the ptr notes we got a minute back.
I have some complaints with JE because it feels like it puts so much emphasis on a single talent to make up for all the things it feels like MW is lacking compared to other healers. And it’s not one to me that is a part of the fun of mw. Standing still to channel a single spell that having to move to cancel feels very bad, because you probably if not always need the healing/damage from JE. Dance does similar damage, castable while moving, gives a reason to press spinning crane kick, does great healing, and it synergizes with “Flight of the Red Crane.”
I think that it was blizzards intent for dance to go along with Conduit synergistically because of the hero talents. But the damage in single target is much worse and so is the healing.
I think part of the problem is that Flight of the Red Crane does not proc often enough just with dance and chichi alone. Of course there is an option for this and it is what I want to talk about: Refreshing Jadewind. Refreshing jade wind is a very neat talent but being that it’s intended to be played with Conduit and does so little healing by itself (and can with low procs or no procs of FotRC) it’s almost always better to put the point into something else. In raid i’ll run it but in m+ there’s no point.
I imagine that blizzard wanted Jadewind and JE to be counterparts of each other, both opening up a lot of bonus healing when drinking tea, but the talent point into jade isn’t the best choice ime/imo except maybe for fist weaving in raid.
I think that Refreshing Jadewind should just be integrated/combined with “Restore Balance” and/or “Flight of the Red Crane.” Like just let us have it so we can get the full synergy and intended use out of our healing talents. I think it would be nice to bring up Flight/Jadewind’s healing to be competitive as an alternative to Jade Empowerment. As it is right now Jades usefulness is both a blessing and curse on the spec. Not only in that it removes freedom of choice and playstyle but because it coerces the player to make their entire character revolve around it. Crit stat for one and more problematic to me is Master of Harmony. Master of Harmony is very unintuitive and gives up many of the great things that conduit does (including damage reduction, movement speed, can be channeled through silence, cocoon cool down reduction, etc.) and ox procs and much more. It’s not my thing, I don’t want to play it and I got to where I am without playing it. Which isn’t much but I think it does contribute to my strong opinions about this. Master of harmony is currently holding jade empowerment up and jade empowerment is the only validating reason to play MoH. Literally just for damage amp, because the potential high damage from it is simply the only thing that MW has to offer in this meta and even then is a monk potentially doing really high dps worth not having a lust healer, not having PI, not having a healer with a bres, not having a healer with a class buff, not having a healer with an external damage reduction, etc? Well I think lfg can answer that question because all they want is shamans and disc priests most of the time.
Fist weaving is the reason I got into healing. This is or at least was prior to light smith and blessing of winter, a very unique thing we did. As the uniquity has faded to become sort of the standard mist weaver doesn’t particularly stand out in my opinion and with JE and MoH having some degree of push to make us more cast oriented or dependent, over fist weaving, it has at times made me a bit unhappy with my favorite character. While we get a single target buff to chichi and JE, we are losing out on our rotational damage and healing potential with the changes to blackout kick which is how i’ve managed to keep the way i like to play fistweaver alive and why i do so much healing by just being very good at fist weaving. I have talked to some monks even higher rated than me who told me that around 16 JE becomes practically mandatory and next season it will be so good that I am worried dance will become irrelavant.
Now normally when blizzard gives us a binary choice for this it’s obvious that the other is intended for pvp or raid, but that’s not the case with dance of chichi. JE is better numerically and practically in raid fist weaving, in pvp fist weaving (lol i know chill,) and M+. Being that dance has uncapped aoe damage and high healing potential it would be reasonable to assume it’s intended for m+. Being that it’s very clearly meant to synergize with flight of the red crane you might assume this is what blizzard wants for people to consider is a viable alternative. being that it shares the same node as JE, you might assume it’s meant to be an alternative.
But realistically, unless you want to labor as I have done to squeeze everything out of it, that’s not really possible.
I think that what could help at least with the single target healing part of it would be to bring refreshing jade wind up. Integrate it directly into Flight of the Red Crane or Restore Balance. It’s not a practical talent for most situations where resplendant mist or focused thunder or Tea of X are just better overall.
I have a sort of vision for what I think fist weaver could be and I feel like the monk design team has moved further and further away from what made this spec so unique. I do give them credit for consolidating the spec tree, because I started in s2 dragonflight…and whoa boy…that was unusual. I think there were times we put a single point into a bunch of nodes without 2/2 them causae 2/2 wouldn’t be as good as spreading out 1/2s. That was weird. I digress.
Moreover, on the talent tree changes I think that jadefire stomp should be an innate ability that all mist weavers have. It’s very deep in a mostly isolated part of the tree but jadefire stomp is mandatory just to make fist weaver baseline functional. I don’t think it would be a problem necessarily for cast weavers to have jade fire stomp, because without it’s supporting talents it wouldn’t really be all that good for them to use when they’re talented so heavily into juicing cast weaving. If refreshing jade wind talent was combined into the hero talent tree and if we could get 1 or 2 more points in the spec tree, I think it would go a long way to making this work. As it is with my current build I can only put one point into resplendant mists and that one point is more healing throuhgput with dance or chichi while fist weaving that probably any other choice in the tree with limitations for tree tier progression. This means the only other talent i can play around with is rapid diffusion which I hesitate to drop because spreading around mists for ramping zen pulse is extremely important, because mist weavers single target healing is entirely dependent on empowering Vivify and zen pulse is the bread and butter combo for single target healing. Tea+Enveloping on the target+Instant cast vivify. That’s the biggest heal we can even do minus stomp empowering Vivify as well.
I also at this point struggle to wonder why sheilun’s isn’t just 5 targets. Without Legacy of Wisdom 1 person in your party will not get the healing of Sheiluns which is never a good thing in a season with so much unavoidable aoe damage (group damage) so it also consumes a talent point just to get the desirable baseline usefulness of sheiluns. This again doesn’t really seem to me at least to benefit any form of end game content. Being able to hit 6 in raid is a little more useful but I don’t imagine that sheilun’s is particularly a strong part of the rotation of cast weavers. I can’t say for sure but raising/lowering the target cap of shieluns to just 5 baseline would be nice and also free up a talent point. I’ve played with the idea of taking this point out but there’s like no key where I don’t need the full healing of sheiluns for the entire party unless maybe it was to not heal the tank, but we have no control over who it heals without legacy of wisdom.
In the class tree i think that wind walk is in an awkward place and should be consolidated with Jade walk. It’s very deep in the tree for a meager 4% speed aura. I think aug like baseline has a stance that is like 10% but idr and I don’t believe without checking it costs them anything to do. I think it could work where jade walk is a 24% personal with 4% aura and upon entering combat only the 4% aura stays, because jade walk is only effective outside of combat currently. This would move it further up the tree, make it easier to acquire, and give us more to help our team. And this brings me to my next point
MW is the only healer in the game without a communicable damage reduction. The cocoon, even with Calming Coalescence, is not as effective as just being able to put a defensive on to someone that doesn’t have one. In lower keys and simpler content it is highly effective but in the highest forms of content it’s rarely as good. A big shield is nice for when a missed kick leaves someone at 4%, right? But the cocoon will rarely save someone from the massive unavoidable group damage spam that is a constant thing in these dungeons. It’s not as good as pain suppression on a tank who needs an external to survive a pull. It’s better than nothing but not as good and rather than getting damage reduction for a set amount of time they are only going to survive as long as it takes to break the cocoon, which in high keys, even the curses in stonevault will break it over time. Enemy autos will break it. I’ve looked at a log where a DH took 89million damage from melee on a standard pull. After he died he said “I need an external,” and I told him “I put it on you, check the logs cocoon was on you.” It might be more helpful if cocoon made defensives better, right? Like if the target with cocoon pressed a defensive, the cocoon takes less damage, but as far as I can tell, and having asked many very high rated mist weavers who don’t know, I don’t think it does. That would be big but it’s unclear if it does and usually what necessitates cocoon in boss pulls is the lack of a personal. I just glance over at my omni cd ui and see druid doesn’t have their singular defensive and cocoon them before call the brood starts, because they are almost gauranteed to die even if they go into bear form in like +14 or 15. And trust me it breaks the cocoon pretty easy.
Now I the thing is that monk used to have a communicable damage reduction. It was an aura called generous pour and gave all allies in short range 5% avoidance, so damage reduction against AoE. This would have been very useful this season, but instead it seems like blizzard reworked this talent to only be a 4% personal avoidance in a talent called Martial Instinct. Even though it’s leess than 5% i’m glad i have this rather than nothing, but as an aura it was much more helpful for my team.
And the more I think about it, monk actually has the least to over their team of all the healers, like i mentioned at the top. No communicable cheat death, no bres, no PI, no lust, no party buff, no external damage reduction, etc. And I think mw is the only one lacking in so much utility. I think every other healer in the game has some or most of these things.
I will recognize that mw arguably has the best control profile for pve of most healers but even what we do have is not as good as what other healers have. We have an aoe stun, ring of piece, para, a 15 sec cd melee kick, and optionally a sleep (RoP preferred usually for PvE.) but like resto shaman has stun totem potentially on far shorted cd, their knockback/knock up is castable while stunned, a 12 sec cd ranged kick that gives a conditional/typed 15% damage reduction on successful use, and that’s just talking about the comparison of their control profiles. That’s not to mention skyfury/windfury totem buff, lust, ankh, and the many many things they can do.
I’ve been a bit perplexed why blizzard chose this route for mist weaver. I think it’s easy for us who love this class, regardless of spec, to recognize it’s very often neglected. The MW tier set for s1 is the worst example of this and I could write an entire post at this length as to why but I’m gonna skip it for now.
I know that some people will mention ptr speculation might have MW being brought up as meta, but what I have come to assume from reading all the changes to healers in general is that MW’s ceiling didn’t necessarily get raised by a whole lot just because ChiChi and JE are better in single target. No, it’s just that all the other heal specs seemed to have gotten nerfed into the ground except mw and druid (who got a buff.) These changes from blizzard either in the form of reworks or tuning are hard to comprahend to me, because this entire season has been associated with healer and tank difficulty that lower rated people often think of as unfair and higher rated people often think of as unbalanced. This is one part class/spec/hero design and one part dungeon design. But I feel like healers and tanks have been asking for blizzard to dial back the load put onto healers and tanks, and that the changes to nerf like disc priest for example didn’t really, to me, solve the underlying problem(s.) It took like 3/4 of the season for some tank busting trash to get toned down 25%. I think quite easily that some dungeons like CoT, SV, and GB will be despised in later seasons if they remain the same. We don’t know what the game will look like then but I know people that this season dislike the way it is so much they quit at ksh or even ksm, that these coming back in later seasons might quite possibly deter them from pushing these keys specifically like they already do. If you look in lfg at any given time the keys available to choose from in the 12-15 range are almost always Arak, DB, and Mist. These also have some of the highest completion rates of the season. These are shorter 3 boss dungeons where roles have more autonomy and at least in the case of arak and DB, very forgiving timers. They also generally feel more balanced to heal as any spec. And if we ever get a season like this again when legion classic comes out, I think I will just stop playing retail altogether after ksm, and go play legion m+. People like just being able to be good at their role and spec and blast. The most popular keys, the “easy keys” are the most similar to these. These also, I think, tend to be the types that makeup the content of what most people consider a good season.
I digress though.
It feels bad enough to my preferred playstyle that JE+MoH dmg amp is boarderline required in the current season and the way it’s looking for next might actually mean that it is required and I’m not personally fond of that. I will probably still run conduit with JE. I know higher monks than me have for some keys. Conduit just does so many thin-
Oh just remembered one more thing. The damage from conduit needs to be uncapped and not divided based on number of enemies in combination with the changes to jadewind which i mentioned, in order for conduit + dance to be competitive with JE. At least that is my suggestion for now. I’m open minded to just making dance more effective in single target as well. After all JE was a talent that made a single target novelty spell a hyper potent aoe damage spell, so I don’t see why dance can’t get similarly tuned up. The damage disparity in single target is huge. We’re talking 100k a tick vs 500k a tick. Like a single JE does more damage than the entire duration of Conduit unless conduit crits. Even then it might I’m not sure over time. If conduit wants to remain a tankier healing centric alternative to the glass canon nature of MoH then I think maybe raising the damage reduciton provided to 20% and lowering conduit cool down to like 40-45 seconds would be an interesting move to play around with.
Also give us back generous pour. 5% avoidance cannot replace a defensive and still wouldn’t be as good as pain supp but it would at least be something we can have to help our team survive. Just today in sv someone messed up the vers buff by doing it out of range of the party. Someone just barely took like exact damage from the duo boss fight to die like they would have survived with less than 10% hp it was honestly quite incredible how precise that was. But imagine if monk just gave them 5% avoidance they would have narrowly survived that. Avoidance isn’t even necessarily as good as Aura Mastery, because avoidance only includes aoe damage while the Paladin DR aura is all damage. And there doesn’t necessarily need to be a way to push it up like Aura mastery.
I’ve also thought maybe cocoon could give the target Armor or maybe people with enveloping take 1% less damage increasing by 1% for the original applicaitons duration (would have made this seasons tier set remotely useful.) I’m just throwing out random numbers too it would need tested and tuned. As it is right now paladin gives their target like 20% armor any time they WoG them. They do that all the time. Especially herald.
Sorry i started off with a really consolidated idea of what I wanted to talk about and went down some rambling rabbit trails. I think i did better this time than last.
Blizz plz don’t force me to play JE