Gather 'round, young Monks, and let me tell you a story about the most unique, fun specialization and playstyle that World of Warcraft has ever seen.
It was the beginning of Mists of Pandaria and Monks were the new kids on the block. Unfortunately, very few people were hyped for the class. It didn't get a cool intro starting zone or start at a high level like Death Knights did. There was no real story involved with the Monks, just some Pandaren dudes that showed up and taught some people how to do Monk stuff. Even worse, two of the three Monk specs were absolutely atrocious at the launch of MoP, bringing nothing special to the table to attract players to the class.
Despite all of this, there was a shining light in the Monk class: being a Mistweaver. The spec promised wildly different healer gameplay than anyone had ever seen before. Disc had the Atonement mechanic forever in "hurt bad guys to heal the good guys", but it was always more of a soloing thing and the spec had never embraced that mechanic. Mistweaver embraced damage-to-healing as a concept, to the point where all of the level 30 talents both did damage and healed, Xuen was the only real CD the spec had which also did damage and healed, and half of the iconic Statue was where half of the Eminence healing (the damage to healing mechanic) came from.
It didn't stop there though, because what made Mistweavers
feel different from other healers was that if you were out standing with the other healers as far from the boss as you could get, you were actually playing very incorrectly. The most overpowered healing spell in the game in 5.0 was Spinning Crane Kick, which forced you to be in the middle of the people you wanted to heal. Melee or range, it didn't matter, you were a Mistweaver and you went wherever the healing was needed, no matter where that was. However, there was something lurking in the background of this wondrous SCK spam. People began to theorize that, when SCK spam was not the best thing to do in the entire game, it oddly made more sense to be constantly auto-attacking the boss while keeping up buffs to make those auto-attacks heal people. The loophole was that instant cast spells did not stop you from auto-attacking, so you could actually set these up and just constantly AA without losing any healing and in fact doing more healing than casting single target heals would (helped in part by the fact that MW had the worst single target heals in the game). It was very different because the entire concept of raid-frame whack-a-mole just didn't exist for Mistweavers, but that was how every other healer had functioned for over 7 years.
This paradigm of being in melee and having to watch enemies led to frequent use of normally unused abilities in healer tookits like interrupts and stuns. Mistweavers weren't focused on the raid frames like other healers, but had to actively watch the field to ensure being in the correct spot for optimal SCK usage and hitting enemies. Over time the difference between a Mistweaver and other healers grew to be like the difference between a melee DPS and a ranged DPS; the battlefield vision was just so different and positioning meant different things that it felt like playing an entirely different role.
Eventually, Spinning Crane Kick was dethroned,
leaving this concept of hitting the boss to be the optimal way to heal at nearly all times. Nothing lasts forever though, and sadly the problem in this case was that someone forgot that Mana Tea was a thing that existed and spells were just generally too cheap, allowing MWs to output nearly maximum throughput for an entire fight without ever running out of mana. The dev team, in their infinite wisdom, decided that the problem was with using offensive abilities and not with having spells just be too cheap, so they doubled the cost of Jab and made it refund half of its cost when using another damage spell so that it could never be used purely for healing reasons, as well as nerfing Eminence healing for good measure.
This didn't stop Mistweavers though. The spec's entire identity at this point revolved around breaking the rules and playing differently than every other healer. Another loophole in the design was found, as the mechanic to "break" using Jab for purely healing reasons did not interact well with the Legendary Gem that was a proc that made spells free for 4 seconds sometimes, and Mistweavers quickly returned to infinite mana because we would actually gain mana in those procs via abusing the Muscle Memory mechanic. That too was seen as offensive, and rather than fixing the problems of Mana Tea and Muscle Memory, Mistweavers spent the entire last tier of MoP with overly nerfed spells, being nearly useless in raids. Many of the remaining Mistweavers died off, leaving the spec by far the least played in the entire game.
Warlords of Draenor came around, and the simple solution to people abusing damage to healing mechanics was to throw them all in a separate stance. This did come with the added benefit of allowing it to do decent damage, but the core problem of giving Mistweavers infinite mana still remained as Mana Tea was still generated in this new Crane Stance. The spec has limped along like that, always having a broken mana model and some wonky healing patterns until now. It has become all too obvious that there are almost no people left playing the spec that were around for its original design and have no love for the melee-centric playstyle that it forced. With it being too troublesome to keep trying to balance that aspect of Mistweavers and not many people caring for its existence anyways, it is being eradicated and Mistweavers are being rebuilt as a traditional healer that stands out at range and clicks on raid frames to heal.
My most fun moments as a Mistweaver were not when I was doing a ton of healing, but when I got a big clutch stun or interrupt or taunt in a stray caster add. It's when I blew up some adds because I could, or Touch of Death something just moments before it would have killed the raid. It was juggling hitting enemies with healing people and having to decide which was more important at any given time. I got to do all of those things and still be a healer. It's going to be gone soon, but it has been on life support for a long time and it was pretty obvious this was coming eventually. It was the most fun I'd ever had in WoW, and it sucks that it has to end but it was great while it existed.
RIP Melee Mistweaver 2012-2016.