[GUIDE] Mistweavers of Draenor: PvE Healing in [6.2]

[Geodew]

EM may just not be benefiting from the hotfix that's live right now, which would be a bug.

[Monkioh]

EM may just not be benefiting from the hotfix that's live right now, which would be a bug.

That is an excellent point.

[Geodew]

Just so I have this straight...

Currently Chi generating abilities have a mana cost tax on them of 1% which is refunded through Mana Tea once that Chi is spent and the Tea stack is created?

So in 6.1 with current gear levels most Mistweavers will see that Mana Tea refund be reduced by ~50%. Thus Mistweavers will spend more mana than all the other healers for their spells and also need to waste globals getting their mana only partially refunded.

How is Mana Tea useful then? It seems like nothing more than a huge disadvantage to the spec with literally no upside.

I cannot think of a single advantage that mana tea gives.

Not 1% per se since it already depends on your Crit atm. And nerfing it doesn't really change whether it's a good mechanic or not. That's why Total et al have been pushing for its removal for some time, not just recently. IDC much myself. It gives me something to do during a couple seconds of downtime that doesn't feel like largely a waste of time. If it were removed, we'd be using Serpent CJL instead, which has no mana cost, but pathetic DPS.

- - - Updated - - -

Thanks for the reply. I cant link but here is my armory.

us.battle.net/wow/en/character/zuljin/Sengbing/advanced - not sure why it says I have 79% haste O.o

Typically in crane I'll use PoM and EH and Jab for Chi Tiger and BoK for buffs then RSK as much as possible. You did show that it was a mana negative a few pages back. I'm still in the stage of decreasing the suck, and as I've tanked and dps'd at high level in the past its infuriating being bad a monking! In case you are interested, here are my logs from first kills on all heroic bosses save Karg and Twins.

\warcraftlogs.com/reports/3LGXWNzmrbfgMyCd

Can you link a time segment where you were fistweaving so I don't have to find it myself? I don't have much time to pick logs apart for people these days so that would help me out a lot if I could just look at a couple numbers from a specific fight you want me to look at, instead.

Like, if I had time to do that (can take up to 30-60 minutes per person if you're being thorough), the 6.1 weights would've been done ages ago. :P

It's an armoury bug with the decimal place. IIRC it should read 7.9%.

But it says Haste 1012 (+11.24%) so it should be more like 17% raid buffed. That's high but it's not stupid high. I've been at 21% at one point this tier because of all the Haste gear in Highmaul. You'd have to have Haste on like every piece to have an unreasonable amount, and that requires quite a special kind of unluckiness to actually happen!

Basically, your Haste is bad but it's totally normal for the tier, Spirit looks great too, so probably a rotational problem. Something I forgot: Are you using Chi Brew/PS during Crane? Make sure you're not wasting them. If you spend the first 45 seconds in Crane, there's basically no reason to not use a Chi Brew charge in the first 10 seconds or so (once you're sure your Mana won't cap).

[Emerya]

Mana Tea is not a mana-positive mechanic. We save mana for later phases by not spending it or refunding it in the earlier phases.

...

Given that mistweavers aren't especially OP at the moment I don't see how this massive nerf can be justified while other throughput healers are either being left alone or being buffed massively (hello shamans) while our real issues (PvP in 6.1, CM's, Mastery) are being 100% ignored or exacerbated.

That's fine and all - I wasn't answering the question of if it's balanced or not though. Just the benefit that mana tea provides. I'm not calling it a mana-positive mechanic. That would imply you're receiving more mana than you put in. It's becoming a spell cost reduction instead.

I'm making up some numbers here, but it's what, 2133 spirit at 3x to break even with what we have now? If you can get up to 3200 spirit, that would provide about 1.5x the current benefit of mana tea. So instead of every one chi you generate costing you 1% mana for 1% returned later, it now costs you 1% mana for 1.5% returned later. So for the numbers below, when I knock off the 1% mana, I'm just assuming you have 2133 spirit and all numbers are based on that.

But since spells have a mana cost beyond just the cost we pay for the chi, it's still not mana-positive. RJW is 12.5% base mana and generates one chi, so it's effectively 11.5% base mana. With an extra ~1k spirit (3200), it's now 11% base mana. Far from mana-positive, but still a cost reduction. RJW is an outlier though because the mana cost on it is so ridiculous. If you look at, say, surging mist at 4.7% base mana, so 3.7% after factoring in the chi, it becomes 3.2% with an extra ~1k spirit (3200). Somehow get another ~1k (4200)? 2.7%. So pick up ~2,000 spirit and you just cut the cost of one of serpent stance's main chi generators by a huge amount.

Now I don't think they'd let spirit get to such extremes - it only appears on a few pieces of gear for exactly that reason, so they're able to limit it in comparison to other stats - and at those levels the natural mana return from it would be ridiculous. But that's all I meant by it. It's one more thing they have to try balancing, and unfortunately it swings in the other direction as well which is where we get screwed over in PVP/CMs, effectively acting as a mana increase compared to what we have now. The best thing they could do is just remove it altogether.

IDC much myself. It gives me something to do during a couple seconds of downtime that doesn't feel like largely a waste of time. If it were removed, we'd be using Serpent CJL instead, which has no mana cost, but pathetic DPS.

Well, if they're giving other healers some damage ability increase (I assume without a healing mechanic attached - just something to blow extra gcds? I haven't really looked into those changes) then they could just buff CJL's damage but with no eminence return in serpent stance. Give us that same option of acting as a healer at range providing some DPS, whatever they deem appropriate for a healer spec, but if we want to have the damage conversion then we have to swap to crane and fistweave.

[Rife]

@Emerya

Good post.

Mana Tea does seem like a good spectrum with which to tune MW mana. The problem is that it's such a burden on us with no recompense or alternative. When spirit reaches levels that would make Mana Tea advantageous to us, it gets nerfed hard.

We only ever see the negative side of the Mana Tea spectrum.

It's nothing but bad news from the moment we hit 100 until presumably BRF gear levels, hence the nerf for 6.1. Thus it sucks in 5 mans, heroics, Challenge Modes and PvP yet the only thing Blizzard care about it ensuring it isn't too strong in Mythic BiS while ignoring how bad it is in all other aspects of the game.

[Totaltotemic]

If you look at, say, surging mist at 4.7% base mana, so 3.7% after factoring in the chi, it becomes 3.2% with an extra ~1k spirit. Somehow get another ~1k? 2.7%. So pick up ~2,000 spirit and you just cut the cost of one of serpent stance's main chi generators almost in half.

And this is where Mana Tea scaling with.. well.. anything becomes a problem. It's not in reducing the cost of super expensive spells, it's in that, with enough mana return from Mana Tea and passive mana regeneration, you can enter into this awkward area where you're actually mana positive doing non-heavy healing. This is actually why Crane abuse is a thing; Jab has such a low mana cost (and there's a bunch of free chi thrown around plus a 20% crit buff that's there because reasons) that it's actually very easy to increase the benefits of Mana Tea so much that you're close to mana positive while still throwing out spells that are doing something because they're basically free. The lower a spell's cost is, the closer is already is to passive regen, which makes it much closer to being mana positive and starts at a higher exponent than higher cost spells.

Incidentally, this is why Expel Harm is basically a press-on-CD ability despite doing practically zero healing. The spell is like having Power Strikes passively. 2% mana when at the very least 1% is returned from Mana Tea is a bit of a joke, at that point it would have to be free if Mana Tea didn't exist.

Parts of a spec's kit making Spirit more valuable are generally fine, just convoluted. Innervate wasn't doing anything crazy to Druids when it was scaling off of Spirit because it was a cooldown. If you increased your Spirit by 200% with a 10% uptime, all that really did was give you 20% more Spirit, it was just removed because it was boring.

The huge problems come in when spells become cheaper. Does anyone remember Shard of Woe and the fact that it was BiS for Arcane Mages for the entirety of Cataclysm? Making spells cheaper across the board with effects creates exponential scaling the lower a spell's mana cost is, which is why Mana Tea scaling with literally anything is awful (yes, this was true even of Crit in 5.1 and I said it then too).

What happens is that net regen is total regen minus spells used. Increasing regen by 10% increases total mana available by a lot more than 10%, so increasing mana regeneration already has exponential scaling on number of spells available (but this is often reset at different stages as you leap to more and more inefficient spells). Here are some numbers:

-You're spamming a spell that takes 2% of your mana per second. You regenerate 1% of your mana per second, so you lose 1% of your mana per second while spamming this spell. If you get 10% more regen (so up to 1.1% mana/sec), now you're only losing 0.9% mana per second. If you get another 10%, you're down to 0.8% mana/sec lost, which is a 11% gain instead of a 10% gain.

-If this is a cost reduction instead of a regen gain, a 10% reduction in cost would go from 2% mana to 1.8% mana, shrinking the net loss to 0.8%, which is already a 20% gain. If it goes down another 10% to 1.6%, now you're at 0.6% net loss, a 33.3% gain.

So while both increasing regen and decreasing costs scale exponentially in terms of remaining mana available, decreasing costs scale a lot faster since spells being 10% cheaper is inherently more than 10% more regen since costs must be greater than regen for mana to be meaningful.

What happened with Mana Tea in 5.1 was that MW mana started scaling in two ways: Spirit increased regen and Crit reduced costs. This was problematic because it made Crit more and more valuable the more of it anyone had (until a point of being at infinite mana, which happened automatically in MoP due to the LMG and Muscle Memory so no one actually got to see how devastating this should have been), but it wasn't so bad because Spirit and Crit were on different exponential scales so they weren't ramping up insanely quickly.

What we have now with Mana Tea scaling off of Spirit (and what I tried to tell people every time they suggested it should scale off of Spirit) is that Spirit both has the exponential scaling of increasing regen and decreasing costs in the same stat. This leads to an insanely ridiculously scaling stat where it's good at low amounts, but it very quickly becomes an unstoppable juggernaut that becomes more and more valuable until MW has infinite mana, which means MWs will want to stack Spirit until Mana isn't even a thing you think about anymore.

This is, of course, problematic because in the mana model any time mana becomes infinite gameplay devolves into "spam the highest HPS button." The only way to avoid a place where mana becomes infinite when Spirit is to set the ceiling on it so high that you hopefully never get there. This is exactly why they changed from 4x Spirit to 3x Spirit because they could see the inevitable infinite mana boogyman on the horizon. The problem with doing that though is that the scale is still the same, they just lowered the base so everyone at the lower end is screwed beyond belief.

TL;DR

Making Mana Tea scale off of Spirit creates two-factor exponential scaling for the MW mana system. Such scaling is literally impossible to confine within a normal expansion's item level growth to have both "barely enough" mana at the lower end and "nearly infinite" mana at the higher end because the Spirit scale is defined by normal healers without double Spirit scaling. By creating an exception where one spec scales twice as much, it breaks the intended mana paradigm throughout an expansion in such a way that it will either be horribly broken at the lower end or horribly broken at the higher end.

This is literally the exact same problem Fury Warriors had for years with Crit scaling because they scaled off of it twice as much as anyone else did, leading to being rage starved at first and infinite rage at the end. Mana isn't supposed to do that, ever, therefore Mana Tea cannot ever scale off of Spirit without breaking the mana model in some way.

[Deleted]

That doesn't sound right. Keep in mind that a lot of CE's healing in Crane Stance comes from the Eminence, which was unaffected. My Butcher log was only like 6% or 8% from the actual heal because it was ~40% overheal every attempt (but rumor has it that the range was large enough to hit both groups and I was unaware and too scared to waste an attempt trying). CBA to do the math right now though because I'm spending time with my SO right now :P

Yeah I went back to look at the log and it seems the healing source entries have altered slightly (I think?) but yeah I was probably being a bit overzealous. I was angry at the change, still am to some degree, because it's a clear signal that they just don't want us to be healing significantly in Crane. Who cares if in some situations we deliver equivalent healing in Crane to Serpent? Isn't that the definition of a bloody niche?

- - - Updated - - -

What we have now with Mana Tea scaling off of Spirit (and what I tried to tell people every time they suggested it should scale off of Spirit) is that Spirit both has the exponential scaling of increasing regen and decreasing costs in the same stat. This leads to an insanely ridiculously scaling stat where it's good at low amounts, but it very quickly becomes an unstoppable juggernaut that becomes more and more valuable until MW has infinite mana, which means MWs will want to stack Spirit until Mana isn't even a thing you think about anymore.

When I proposed improving haste by tying it to mana regen (to cancel out the proportional increase in costs) this is exactly why I wanted a negative interaction or diminishing returns by not interacting with spirit-based regen. Idea being to have a compensation for haste at low gear levels and as mana contribution from spirit grew it slowly lessened in effect.

[Totaltotemic]

When I proposed improving haste by tying it to mana regen (to cancel out the proportional increase in costs) this is exactly why I wanted a negative interaction or diminishing returns by not interacting with spirit-based regen. Idea being to have a compensation for haste at low gear levels and as mana contribution from spirit grew it slowly lessened in effect.

And really if you think about it, haste is the only stat that should ever increase available mana besides Spirit because it inherently reduces the amount of available mana. Things like the extra Mana Tea or Shaman's Resurgence don't even make sense to have with Crit because Crit is already a stat that increases HPM whereas haste does not.

The problem is just that no one really seems to realize that every expansion the devs set up a healing model that starts at X regen which is okay for raiding using cheap spells like Soothing Mist fairly frequently, then as you get more Spirit you start picking up more Surgings with maybe some RJWs thrown in, and then by the end of the expansion you're not afraid to deal with sub-30% Butcher levels of raid damage for 3+ minutes straight by spamming all of the aoe heals. The only way this model ever works is if mana can be guided along a curve where Y amount of mana regen can be expected at Z item level, and they do that by setting Spirit equal to some value of mp5 and set ratios of HPM to HPS abilities accordingly.

The model breaks as soon as extracurricular mana-affecting things get put in and gets more and more distorted the further a healer gets from the standard regen model. Paladins just have undertuned mana costs (or perhaps Holy Light with double beacon is overtuned) and Priests still have a talent tier devoted to regenerating mana for some odd reason, while MWs have Mana Tea mucking things up. All things considered, Druid and Shaman mana is in a fairly good place and Paladins could be there too if Holy Light's mana cost was increased by ~10-15%. Priests need the mana talents to go away and MW needs Mana Tea to go away so their mana costs can be balanced appropriately, and maybe then we'd finally see the healer model that they've been trying to implement for 5 years now, if only they would stop mucking it up with other things that affect mana just to be edgy.

[Floopa]

the new alch trinket got changed from mastery > versatility

does anyone think this might see some use as a MW? the 55 sec ICD on the int proc wouldn't line up with anything but we'd be seeing pretty big bursts of healing which can help our throughput substantially imo

[EVB]

Having no int AND no spirit in 6.1 on a trinket seems very stupid to me.

Int procs for healers are kind of useless, too, IMO.

[Rife]

@Totaltotemic Where do you think MW will be in BRF in regards to mana? Near infinite levels or dumpster level?

[Deleted]

Having no int AND no spirit in 6.1 on a trinket seems very stupid to me.

Int procs for healers are kind of useless, too, IMO.

+40% effect from mana potion would be pretty nice in the world of crappy Tea

[Floopa]

+40% effect from mana potion would be pretty nice in the world of crappy Tea

works out at around 50-75~ spirit depending on fight length.

[Deleted]

Better than a spit in the eye

[Totaltotemic]

@Totaltotemic Where do you think MW will be in BRF in regards to mana? Near infinite levels or dumpster level?

I don't know, I don't even currently play MW. I know mana can't really be too much worse in 6.1 though because at most you'd be losing maybe 4 or 5 RJWs across a whole fight. Now for people doing CMs, PvPing, or still in like 640 ilvl though, they're going to have an awful time.

[razlopp]

I don't know, I don't even currently play MW. I know mana can't really be too much worse in 6.1 though because at most you'd be losing maybe 4 or 5 RJWs across a whole fight. Now for people doing CMs, PvPing, or still in like 640 ilvl though, they're going to have an awful time.

From personal beta testing it seems like we will be "fine". Not so much as an extreme either way, but more of a balance. Running RJW seems a little too far fetched until we get more spirit but as an overall assumption I can say that it'll be "okay". However, let me tell you this I managed to sustain 50k+ hps in crane stance during gruul. Where compared to serpent where I could do mid 40s~. The only problem with that though is that I go through my full mana pool within maybe 1:30-2 mins of the fight. I obviously have tons of tea stored but you have to chug 10 seconds worth to get backup to even an optimum level. Just throwing in my 2 cents .

[Deleted]

^
Glyph Mana Tea and use it on CD?


Is Gruul a "stacked" fight then? Did you use RSK and TP or just 4chi Chi Explosions?

[razlopp]

^
Glyph Mana Tea and use it on CD?


Is Gruul a "stacked" fight then? Did you use RSK and TP or just 4chi Chi Explosions?

Glyphing it seems like an option, but probably is better used without for down time, etc.

Yes, there is 2 raid stacks, which one each group taking a butcher type cleave if you will.

I managed to get better results with 4 chi explosion, also we were running 2 Mistweavers, and the entire room was orb city. I wish I took a picture it was like no ball pit I have ever seen before.

[Totaltotemic]

^
Glyph Mana Tea and use it on CD?


Is Gruul a "stacked" fight then? Did you use RSK and TP or just 4chi Chi Explosions?

Gruul is, more or less, basically Brutallus (or the boss in Tol Barad). Alternating raid groups takes a meteoring attack with a DoT and then he sometimes throws everyone around the room because he's Gruul and that's what Gruul does.

[Headmarine]

Glyphing it seems like an option, but probably is better used without for down time, etc.

Yes, there is 2 raid stacks, which one each group taking a butcher type cleave if you will.

I managed to get better results with 4 chi explosion, also we were running 2 Mistweavers, and the entire room was orb city. I wish I took a picture it was like no ball pit I have ever seen before.

Did u do this b4 or after the 30% nerf?