Leveling as MW

[Panjier]

Thinking about maining my MW in Legion. What I was wondering was how bad are we during the leveling process?

[Jademist]

Thinking about maining my MW in Legion. What I was wondering was how bad are we during the leveling process?

We can DPS much better if that's what you're asking. Granted we won't down mobs as fast as a Windwalker but we can still down them in a reasonable amount of time.

[Peachpies]

You should level as Windwalker, it is much easier and faster and you won't be missing out on anything.

[dasquee]

Having tested my main on both live and beta, I can assure you that there seems to really be no difference in damage between current fistweaving and beta dps for mistweaver. The numbers are almost identical at 100, however I am told that as you gain perks in your artifact it gets a fair bit easier with the % damage increase.

That being said, it's significantly slower still than windwalker, however I will probably be doing at least the first few levels as MW myself and change to WW if I can't handle it when the second artifact opens up...

[Peachpies]

Having tested my main on both live and beta, I can assure you that there seems to really be no difference in damage between current fistweaving and beta dps for mistweaver. The numbers are almost identical at 100, however I am told that as you gain perks in your artifact it gets a fair bit easier with the % damage increase.

That being said, it's significantly slower still than windwalker, however I will probably be doing at least the first few levels as MW myself and change to WW if I can't handle it when the second artifact opens up...

I think it is better to start as windwalker since you have so many cooldowns + possibly the legendary ring

[Nihilan]

Youre basically indestructable as MW. FAR more so than BrM - at least while levelling. But you will have about 30% less deeps than WW. Maybe 10-15% less than the tank spec. The tank spec will be squishy but have far better aoe than MW.

If you can stand the playstyle, WW is pretty solid levelling spec. The healing orbs on kills give WW pretty much zero downtime.

My complaint with levelling as MW is that you are forced to adopt a poor mans version of WW's combo strikes by weaving tiger palm>blackout kick, tiger palm>rising sun kick. Those three buttons until level 110. Pretty friggin dull.

[Meradith]

On beta, I am MW main, but I am leveling as WW. Before starting I heard how much easier it was to level as healer this xpac and was torn. After doing a few levels as WW there is no real reason to level as MW unless you want to heal dungeons from 100-102. You get your second artifact at 102. Once you get it, choose MW then dump all your AP into it. The very very minimal loss of AP by doing it this way is made up for by speed of leveling. Now, if you arent a raider and arent in a hurry to get to 110 to grind AP and mythic dungeons, then it doesnt really matter. Do what you want.

As far as indestructible, I have not died while leveling WW and thats with commonly pulling 2-4 mobs when I can. WW has enough ways to self heal or reduce damage that its not an issue (dampen harm, diffuse magic, healing spheres, chi wave, quick effuse if needed).

[Deleted]

How good is the WW artifact? Wondering whether putting your first 13 ranks into WW to speed up all solo content makes maxing MW faster.

[Babylonius]

How good is the WW artifact? Wondering whether putting your first 13 ranks into WW to speed up all solo content makes maxing MW faster.

Blizzard said recently that they are endeavoring to make leveling as a healer easier for everyone.

[Meradith]

How good is the WW artifact? Wondering whether putting your first 13 ranks into WW to speed up all solo content makes maxing MW faster.

The first ability you get is pretty awesome. A big melee aoe cleave ability that does a lot of dmg. I would think 13 ranks is a lot of AP and might cut into your ability to max your MW artifact when you hit 110. The WW artifact gets slightly more powerful since you put in WW relics as you level and finish quest lines. I am only 104 but I am having no trouble killing multiple mobs with just the base WW artifact and putting all AP into MW artifact for when i hit 110.

- - - Updated - - -

Blizzard said recently that they are endeavoring to make leveling as a healer easier for everyone.

I have heard that too and I have heard many say leveling as healer is better than its ever been, but you will never be able to kill mobs as fast as when you are pure dps. So if your aim is to level as quickly as possible, the best way to do it is to level as dps and save all your artifact power for whatever your main spec artifact is.

[Tiphess]

Is leveling as MW in legion faster than leveling as MW in WoD?

I did the whole thing as MW in WoD and honestly it was fine

[Spotnick]

Guess I'll post this here too.

It has to be said.. don't waste your time leveling as a mistweaver.. you'll be cursing all along the way and end up swapping to Windwalker anyways.

Before Legion

• Acquire good windwalker weapons, don't bother if not 680+ as you will be able to purchase 680 fist weapons from the inn in the class hall.

Level 100:

• Get your mistweaver artifact
• Set your loot specialization to Mistweaver
• Purchase Fist Weapons on 2nd floor of the inn in the order hall if you don't have better.

Level 101:

• Go to the class hall, get Chen and Lili as your champions. Go on your mission table and assign Chen to be your bodyguard

Level 102:

• Go back to the class hall to pick the Windwalker artifact quest line and go do it. Use that weapon from now on. Be sure to unlock at least the first ability it hits like a truck.

Notes

• Make sure you use all your artifact power "on use" items when in Mistweaver spec so it goes on your staff.
• If a relic is not an upgrade for your mistweaver staff, cancel quest, swap loot specialization to windwalker and upgrade your windwalker fist weapons instead
• Same applies for trinkets
• Don't use any Artifact Power item on the windwalker weapons, no need to.
• Chen will tank everything for you, rares and everything, he's very op, and if he dies he almost respawns instantly.
• Of course, you can start with the windwalker artifact and get the mistweaver one at level 102, it doesn't change a thing if you don't plan to do dungeons from 100 to 102.

Really, that's quite simple to follow, works like a charm, and the new windwalker rotation is actually enjoyable... so making the leveling experience pretty much more fun than pressing the same damned 3 spells all the way.

Trust me, you DON'T want to level as Mistweaver. Not having cooldowns and interrupts makes this a miserable experience.

[Rilas13]

It's not a great experience, I have tired all three specs more then any other class. MW is perfectly viable, and the timing isn't actually all that much worse to WW.
But it doesn't feel good, this is mostly down to just the way healing specs work. I have tested most of the healers and their damage counterparts.

So the general takeaway I can give is that on any spec, your mob kill times will be around 15-22 seconds. Differences?

DPS: You have a larger toolkit to kill things with. These specs are designed to kill things so they feel good when you do just that.

Heal: Most** healing specs have 3-5 damaging abilities. Really if you take off the paint, as a healer you have 1 filler spell which you cast 90% of the time. A second spell that either has a CD or is a DoT. And a third spell that has a CD. Most of these have a fourth that is AoE. And some have a non rotational but a damaging ability(MW has Jade Lightning), so I counted it but you really won't use it much.

Side note: I would do what @Spotnick said. I would, even knowing what I know, go into Legion intending to level as a MW, get to 102 and grab the WW weapon and just level like that, because MW would just burn me out. I also never used to like WW but its new form is my favorite melee damage spec in the game, it feels incredible.



**Disc is a bit different from every other healing spec, since they were designed with DPS in mind. So my description there doesn't really apply to them as much as the rest.

*Edit, Second note: Devils advocate for a moment, if you are determined to level MW, all the healer specs are nearly indestructible through questing. Not that your other specs can't handle some torment but seriously heal specs get to just be unkillable for having such a dull time leveling.

[rulee]

It's not a great experience, I have tired all three specs more then any other class. MW is perfectly viable, and the timing isn't actually all that much worse to WW.
But it doesn't feel good, this is mostly down to just the way healing specs work. I have tested most of the healers and their damage counterparts.

So the general takeaway I can give is that on any spec, your mob kill times will be around 15-22 seconds. Differences?

DPS: You have a larger toolkit to kill things with. These specs are designed to kill things so they feel good when you do just that.

Heal: Most** healing specs have 3-5 damaging abilities. Really if you take off the paint, as a healer you have 1 filler spell which you cast 90% of the time. A second spell that either has a CD or is a DoT. And a third spell that has a CD. Most of these have a fourth that is AoE. And some have a non rotational but a damaging ability(MW has Jade Lightning), so I counted it but you really won't use it much.

Side note: I would do what @Spotnick said. I would, even knowing what I know, go into Legion intending to level as a MW, get to 102 and grab the WW weapon and just level like that, because MW would just burn me out. I also never used to like WW but its new form is my favorite melee damage spec in the game, it feels incredible.



**Disc is a bit different from every other healing spec, since they were designed with DPS in mind. So my description there doesn't really apply to them as much as the rest.

*Edit, Second note: Devils advocate for a moment, if you are determined to level MW, all the healer specs are nearly indestructible through questing. Not that your other specs can't handle some torment but seriously heal specs get to just be unkillable for having such a dull time leveling.

My thoughts are: Level as WW because once you reach 110 all the dailies/world quests/dungeons/raids give a ton of artifact power and you'll catch up in no time.

But if you're leveling as MW then you're leveling for the story and probably aren't concerned with speed.

In short... Level however you want. You'll get 110 soon enough.

[Servasus]

MW dps is about 33% lower from live to now, and does no eminence. I'm doing easily 60-70k sustained and over 120k burst singletarget damage on live at 742 ilevel, whereas on the ptr I am doing 40k sustained and MAYBE 70k burst, both using optimal single target rotations.

Unless we get buffed between now and live on the beta and ptr realms, MW going live this way will be absolute TORTURE to level. Which is annoying because leveling as WW means I'm going to lose out on artifact power I would have much preferred to have gone into my MW artifact.

If anything, our dps should be HIGHER between live and beta, since we no longer have eminence as a factor weighing us down. All healers should be able to do about 80% of the dps that a real dps can do, but as of the current build on beta, that just isn't the case.

[Deleted]

MW dps is about 33% lower from live to now, and does no eminence. I'm doing easily 60-70k sustained and over 120k burst singletarget damage on live at 742 ilevel, whereas on the ptr I am doing 40k sustained and MAYBE 70k burst, both using optimal single target rotations.

Unless we get buffed between now and live on the beta and ptr realms, MW going live this way will be absolute TORTURE to level. Which is annoying because leveling as WW means I'm going to lose out on artifact power I would have much preferred to have gone into my MW artifact.

If anything, our dps should be HIGHER between live and beta, since we no longer have eminence as a factor weighing us down. All healers should be able to do about 80% of the dps that a real dps can do, but as of the current build on beta, that just isn't the case.

Why would you lose out on artifact power? You don't btw. It makes no difference what spec you level as just use the AP items on the correct artifact. Also why should healer be able to do 80% of damage a dps can do. I think it is completely fine as it is currently on beta, you can level as a healer but you will be slower. There should be a trade off.

In the prepatch the dps do less damage as well. Not only you.

[Nynax]

Why would you lose out on artifact power? You don't btw. It makes no difference what spec you level as just use the AP items on the correct artifact. Also why should healer be able to do 80% of damage a dps can do. I think it is completely fine as it is currently on beta, you can level as a healer but you will be slower. There should be a trade off.

In the prepatch the dps do less damage as well. Not only you.

Personally I've always felt that a good design philosophy for healers would have been:

healer dps = dps spec base rotation with no major CD's

It would easily keep healers from the heights of dps abilities (esp in group settings) but wouldn't make questing feel like torture, when plenty of dps barely use their cd's anyway.

[ryklin]

@ccombustable

the issue with that is dps specs generally have 1 or 2 buttons with cds that they dont press often, but are a lot of their dps and you'd start really encouraging healers to burn mana on stuff like always keeping flame shock/pain/moonfire up, which is also kind of why mw didn't get rsk until crane stance became a thing and still dont have fof, blizz has generally tried to avoid this stuff, like if resto druids could just pump out starsurges on priority adds or holy priests could death low adds and mind blast between heals and devo plague the boss


encouraging healers to really maximize their dps and having said healer dps be enough to really have impact is an idea from EQ I don't think blizz has ever liked very much til now and has actively tried to avoid, although it is still definitely something that should be done in progression raiding, which I think will really be fun, but may make 5-healing doable and trivialize some fights that would be hard to heal otherwise if healer dps is high enough when they're not busy with the hard healing part of the fight

[Deleted]

Personally I've always felt that a good design philosophy for healers would have been:

healer dps = dps spec base rotation with no major CD's

It would easily keep healers from the heights of dps abilities (esp in group settings) but wouldn't make questing feel like torture, when plenty of dps barely use their cd's anyway.

Leveling as MW right now on beta is not even remotely close to torture though based on my experience. You make it sounds like we need 10 abilities to kill a single mob. Sure WW is significantly faster but imo it should be. The problem with giving healers that much damage is that you need to compensate the dps classes with 80% of the healers ability to heal. You cannot give the goodies to healer so questing is as easy as dps. Just spec dps for the 10 levels. Or level only through dungeons, it is slower but you can always be the healer

[Nynax]

Leveling as MW right now on beta is not even remotely close to torture though based on my experience. You make it sounds like we need 10 abilities to kill a single mob. Sure WW is significantly faster but imo it should be. The problem with giving healers that much damage is that you need to compensate the dps classes with 80% of the healers ability to heal. You cannot give the goodies to healer so questing is as easy as dps. Just spec dps for the 10 levels. Or level only through dungeons, it is slower but you can always be the healer

First ill say I have no experience leveling MW in legion, I was talking more healers in general.

My problem with that model is that it is so unbelieveable counter intuitive. "This game requires dedicated healers at max level. Oh but you shouldn't/can't actually be a healer during your leveling experience while your getting used to the game." And by the time most players, especially new ones, make it to max as the tank/dps specs that are more fun to level with there's rarely any desire to switch to healing.

I honestly don't have any problem with healers doing okay dps and dps doing all the dps but little healing. In plenty of cases if a healer stops healing people die. But if there's not much to do, it's terribly boring. (actually I only off-spec heal, because I don't mind raid healing, but I find dungeon healing mind-boggling boring most runs)