The State of Mistweaver Monks in Shadowlands

Community General Discussion
1

Let me start off with this: I have played Mistweaver monk all of Shadowlands. If I try to DPS or Tank, I always come back running to Mistweaver Monk. However, I have noticed a few things that could use some tweaking. In comparison to the rest of the cast of healers, us Mistweavers have the highest single target throughput by a large margin. However, that throughput doesn’t make up for the fact that we have the lowest damage, weak cooldowns, lame talents, and highest mana usage. Changes need to be made to keep up with the other healers.

  1. Talents

For one, I think Jade Serpent Statue should be made baseline. Also, the talents need to be replaced with more useful things, and most of them feel like PvP talents. They don’t do much for PvE. Mistweaver talents are really where they fall flat.

  1. Damage/Rotations

Using the basic 3 damaging abilities (Tiger Palm, Blackout Kick, and Rising Sun Kick) feels very, *very underwhelming. Without the added haste (only on the damage moves, not healing) that Brewmaster and Windwalker get, those moves feel garbage to use. Having to spam Tiger Palm to get any real use out of Blackout Kick feels unintuitive and a waste of time. Other healers have DoTs so they can quickly put in some damage and get back to healing. To participate in damaging at all, you have to dedicate a large sum of time into racking up Blackout Kicks with Tiger Palm, and even so, the results are also underwhelming. A possible solution to this would to add some sort of interaction or proc to Tiger Palm with Blackout Kick. Rising Sun Kick is fine, but I wish it buffed your next Expel Harm (maybe?) to actually be useful. Right now, Expel Harm is the only spell that isn’t used, even with the mediocre conduit. That most definitely needs to be reworked. If Expel Harms healing gained ~20% increased healing per use of Blackout Kick/Rising Sun Kick, that would be a lot more engaging. Or, an alternate path would for it to be able to target an additional teammate per Blackout Kick. Something needs to be changed about Expel Harm either way. Returning to Tiger Palm, it would be nice to see some sort of proc that would allow Blackout Kick/Rising Sun kick to hit multiple enemies now and then when activated. Tiger Palm feels terrible to use when paired with low damage and no procs. It feels pointless.

  1. Last Words

Mistweaver Monks have the potential to be something great. I think our healing rotation is perfectly fine. Mistweavers are a high skill healer that can seriously pump out some heals when played right. My issues lie in the rest of our kits. We don’t get an interrupt, (Jeez, what I would do for an interrupt.) our cooldown’s aren’t very good for how long of a cooldown they have, (Give me 2 minute cooldowns on Revival and Yu’Lon and we’re good. 3 minutes? Come on.) and our participation in damage is surprisingly low for a melee class.

  1. P.S.

Thanks for taking the time to get this far. I really appreciate you! Let’s all huddle together and pray for every Mistweaver main that there are changes on there way. Begins chanting.

6 Likes
2

I’d like to see RSK needed and BoK and TP buffed. It would smooth it the healing profile when using ATotM.

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The two specs with a notable dps into healing theme, Discipline and ATotM MW, should have better dps than they currently do.

Maybe we will when the monks get their 9.1 pass.

3 Likes
4

Give monks full flight speed with their zen cloud.

14 Likes
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Mistweaver isn’t a bad spec, they just need a damage buff. Their fistweaving build is fun and unique, only disc has a similar gameplay. They can dish out nice healing numbers. I actually find it enjoyable to stack up three tiger palms before a blackout kick and see those 3 hits happen really quickly. RSK has a lot of use already if you talent it. It can extend your hots on targets by 10 seconds, heal everyone with renewing mist on them and hits hard.

Outside of PvP, the serpent statue isn’t used really. I use to like it in M+, but the red crane talent is better just due to it’s healing in prideful. Making it baseline when it isn’t used much doesn’t make a lot of sense. I’d rather see rushing jade wind be baseline since it’s used a lot more.

Mistweaver has 2 very different builds and both are good. I’m not the greatest at fistweaving but it is fun and very viable in raiding and M+.

6 Likes
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The clouded focus legendary is pretty awesome!

1 Like
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There are several different approaches that Blizzard could take with MW.

Outside of a rework, I think what MW truly NEEDS most and not just wants:

10-20% buff to damage done
20% buff to the healing over time components of Renewing Mist and Essence Font

Mistweaver has great active healing. When I decide to commit to a heal, it does something. But if I am not using future sight to predict damage and be absolutely ready in advance to respond to it, the group suffers.

This has to do with the fact that our HoTs do relatively no healing. On average, Renewing mist is something like 9% of my healing done. This is a huge problem considering that the entire MW rotation revolves around getting as many Renewing Mists active via duration extension from Rising Mist.

Rising Mist is such an important crutch holding up MW right now, it’s just so weird that we revolve around extending the duration of HoT effects when our HoTs do so little healing (with the exception of EvM).

8

the existence of mistweaver has yet to be acknowledge by blizzard.

sorry

4 Likes
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I don’t fistweave because I don’t like being in melee! I made a ranged build work well for under 10 keys! I love it! I haven’t tried it higher than that. I know people do higher, so I wanted to make sure I gave my opinion up front about what I do! :smiley::+1:

2 Likes
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Personally, I don’t like melee in most cases, but I like that they have two distinctly different play styles and they work. I tend to go in and spinning crane kick then roll out just to give that 5% physical damage debuff. I’ll melee if there’s literally nothing for me to do healing wise.

1 Like
11

Yessss! Same! :smiling_face_with_three_hearts:

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Without a solid Raid DR CD Mistweavers will always be on the outside looking in as far as Mythic Raid heal comps and that thought trickles down to the masses like everything else in the game.

Maybe if Mistweaver throughput was far ahead of Resto Shamans, Holy Pallies and Disc that would mitigate things somewhat but that’s not the case. Add in their inefficient mana consumption and we get the current state healer rankings.

Any rework will have to wait for 10.0 but there are two changes we could get right now which would help…

  1. Lower the base GCD for Mistweavers to 1 sec like Windwalkers and which we had in MoP. That would not only help with damage output but it would make doing damage feel better. It would also increase the power of talents like Spirit of the Crane and the Teachings Leggo.

  2. Lower all Mana costs even more. This would increase throughout which tbh shgould be the Mistweaver niche.

1 Like
13

MW needs more damage. Ancient Teachings needs to be baseline with the lego instead being 2 additional targets at 50% effectiveness.

Those are the 2 changes I’d make although there are a few more.

1 Like
14

They made Glimmer a talent after being an Azerite choice, I’d be surprised if we didn’t get ATotM as a talent in 10.0, again assuming the devs are still aware that monks are a class.

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Rising Mist should be baseline and ATotM should replace it as a talent.

1 Like
16

That’s not a bad idea either

17

Mistweavers are garbo.

The spec pretty much requires innervates just to heal normally and doesnt even bring anything to the table.

Damage is meh, no DR, not much raid utility, one of the weakest tank externals due to scaling.

3 Likes
18

I don’t see why Mistweavers can’t deal high damage from healing like Holy Paladins.

19

Our HOTS need a buff and our dmg needs a buff. What else is new?

1 Like
20

mistweaver isnt a bad spec? lol… 2 very different specs and both are good? lol…

perhaps if you want to do +10 keys you can consider that haha