Fistweaving: When, Why, and How You Should

[Dreyo]

Refer to my comment number 12, it actually originated from your thread :-P

http://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/...1#post19701317

Well, yes, but I more meant I thought the answer is worth putting in the guide.

[Austilias]

Looks like an interesting style of healing, but how 'safe' is it?

By that I mean, is Fistweaving a luxury when everyone's at around full health/no risk of dying or is a viable/sustainable way of healing 100% of the time?

In any case i'd likely stick to my Paladin/Shaman for healing due to the sheer ease of it, but my monk's sitting on 75 and I might level her a bit to give it a try.

[Totaltotemic]

Well, yes, but I more meant I thought the answer is worth putting in the guide.

As I've said, gearing questions are best left out of this. With such situational use, Fistweaving is not something you should gear around because in most casts of pure DPSweaving it's already OP enough without needing to min/max for it. Save that for normal healing where we actually need the help.

To expand on that, let me make something very clear (which I will probably end up adding to the OP). There is no such thing as a "Fistweaver." What I mean by that is that Fistweaving is a Mistweaver tool. Anyone that attempts to Fistweave in place of normal healing all the time is going to be in for a rude awakening when they get to any kind of difficult content. There are times and places to use it, and there are times and places to not use it. You can't be a Monk that only Fistweaves any more than a Paladin that only uses Divine Light. That is why a portion of the is focused on why and when you should Fistweave; it is not always appropriate. As such, gearing specifically around it wouldn't make any sense.

[Dreyo]

As I've said, gearing questions are best left out of this. With such situational use, Fistweaving is not something you should gear around because in most casts of pure DPSweaving it's already OP enough without needing to min/max for it. Save that for normal healing where we actually need the help.

1h vs 2h isn't exactly the same league as haste vs crit, though. I dunno, I mean it's up to you, but even just simple fiddling with weapons and noticing the difference in how hard blackout kick hits made me ask the question in the first place. Even something saying "the difference is close enough so that it doesn't matter, use whatever" would be helpful, or "It's not worth ge. Given how much is invested in weapon choice as this stage, given the nature of sha-touched weapons and the legendary quest, it seems like an important thing to mention, to me.

Something along the lines of "it's not worth gearing for it specifically, but here's how your gear affects it (or doesn't?), so it's one factor you should use to determine if fistweaving is worth doing."

[Totaltotemic]

1h vs 2h isn't exactly the same league as haste vs crit, though. I dunno, I mean it's up to you, but even just simple fiddling with weapons and noticing the difference in how hard blackout kick hits made me ask the question in the first place. Even something saying "the difference is close enough so that it doesn't matter, use whatever" would be helpful, or "It's not worth ge. Given how much is invested in weapon choice as this stage, given the nature of sha-touched weapons and the legendary quest, it seems like an important thing to mention, to me.

Yes I agree that the question of investment is an important one. To assuage that concern, I've added a small segment dismissing the need to gear specifically for Fistweaving.

Something along the lines of "it's not worth gearing for it specifically, but here's how your gear affects it (or doesn't?), so it's one factor you should use to determine if fistweaving is worth doing."

As for that, I don't need what should be a simple explanation bulked up with irrelevant information. Nuances like that are best left to theorycrafters that provide us with the information to make these explanations or guides out of, it's simply not important to the general audience. Regardless, the current gearing situation doesn't matter for whether Fistweaving is worth it or not because the situations in which it is useful have high returns regardless of stat distribution. The 10% difference between prioritizing Crit or prioritizing Haste wouldn't change the fact that Fistweaving is blatantly overpowered with a 50% or more damage increase. With the magnitude in variance in boss fight conditions, the variance in personal stats is tiny in comparison.

[Spotnick]

I never bothered much with tiger palm, does it increase your eminence that much? Usually I simply jab for chi, use BOK to keep 2 stacks of serpent's zeal since i'm always auto-attacking the boss. I'm already bad at resetting SZ on cooldown, I never really bothered with the other.

I'm curious about your post since I'm currently working on heroic Mel'jarak and never really considered going into a full dps rotation under recklessness.. will probably once again have low numbers due to disc priests absorbs, but I'll be curious to try it instead of using uplift.

[Totaltotemic]

A 600% damage buffed Tiger Palm hit around 100k for me (hard to tell looking back at logs because it doesn't show Max like Recount does, only average and total). That's 4 targets worth of Uplift, but it will also almost never overheal, always going to the most injured targets. Not to mention the fact that the Renewing Mists themselves won't do hardly any healing on that fight, I only kept it up on the tanks outside of Recklessness. In fact, because all of the healing is smart healing, you can even tell your other healers to lay back and get their mana back while your OP auto-attacks sustain the entire raid. It's really quite funny.

[Callimonk]

Go to 3rd drop down > Expression Editor.

try running in the Query box

spell = "Tiger Palm" and amount >= 100000

That should return any results of Tiger Palm hitting for greater than/equal to 100k. It's not perfect - obviously you'd need an actual program to evaluate the data, but it should give you something to determine the max.

Hope that helps.

Edit: I hope you don't mind, but I took the liberty of running the query on one of the logs you ranked on, according to wow-heroes. With your charname edited out (even though it does appear elsewhere on this forum), I see the stuff in here: http://pastebin.com/hGXjWuFz

Edit: wanted to add, that I know it isn't 100% relevant to what you're saying (as far as healing goes), but wanted to show that you can - in fact - determine information out of logs, provided you have the right tools.

[TheTrueM4gg0t]

talking about gearing: as there are no fights you can just dpsweave on, its the easiest thing to just stick with normal healing gear.
BUT you can switch weapons infight! so if you know you will be dpsweaving for quite a period (mel'jarak 600%) phase, wouldn't it make sense to switch to a 2hand DPS weapon?
the differances are huge in DPS, here small comparison of 476er weps:
1h heal: 1450 dps
2h heal: 1950 dps
2h dmg: 3700 dps

also theres quite a difference in 1h heal vs 2h heal. as zealweaving is a usefull tool, should you always try and have 2h staves as a MW? I never really thought about that....

[Totaltotemic]

Ah I've never used the expression editor, thanks for the syntax. Apparantly my Tiger Palm hit for 110k-120k and Crit as high as 267k one time. So yeah, better than Uplift for only one Chi.

Also another thought on two-handed weapons: It's been crunched over and over again in the past few weeks, and generally a 2h weapon is more favorable for Fistweaving, so if all else is equal you should get a 2H, but as little as a 5ilvl difference can make a 1H pull ahead. Again, this is an advanced theorycrafting thing that I don't personally know if it's fact or not, as such I'll leave it out for now.

[Spotnick]

A 600% damage buffed Tiger Palm hit around 100k for me (hard to tell looking back at logs because it doesn't show Max like Recount does, only average and total). That's 4 targets worth of Uplift, but it will also almost never overheal, always going to the most injured targets. Not to mention the fact that the Renewing Mists themselves won't do hardly any healing on that fight, I only kept it up on the tanks outside of Recklessness. In fact, because all of the healing is smart healing, you can even tell your other healers to lay back and get their mana back while your OP auto-attacks sustain the entire raid. It's really quite funny.

I will definitively try that this week. Finally something I can do without being outshined by our disc priest.

[Callimonk]

Also another thought on two-handed weapons: It's been crunched over and over again in the past few weeks, and generally a 2h weapon is more favorable for Fistweaving, so if all else is equal you should get a 2H, but as little as a 5ilvl difference can make a 1H pull ahead. Again, this is an advanced theorycrafting thing that I don't personally know if it's fact or not, as such I'll leave it out for now.

I'd assume that it's something similar to Windwalker - we just overall scale well with weapon damage, and the higher the ilevel the higher the weapon damage. In addition, Way of the Monk gives 40% increased attack speed (re: NOT haste, though it reflects as haste in the Character screen). I made this judgement off of this post:

Why is haste bad for healing normally? Well, it give HPS without HPM and only even affects 4 of our actual heals. However, for Fistweaving, it actually increases HPM because what it affects is auto-attacks, and you do not spend mana to auto-attack. This skyrockets it above Mastery (which is pretty bad until 5.2 anyways) putting it on par with Crit but without the extra mana regeneration that Crit provides. This is obviously very good for Zealweaving which relies mostly on auto-attacks, but the closer you get to DPSweaving the less it matters because Haste does not increase HPS for Jab/TP spam or the free Surging Mist spells.

(bolding mine)

Granted, I've never even spec'd into MW... so Last time I healed (mainspec) was end of T12... so my knowledge is rusty right now.

[Totaltotemic]

1h weapons get 70% more auto-attack damage, while 2hs get 40% more attack speed. However, because abilities are based off of weapon DPS, 2h abilities will hit harder. The end result is that 1hs do around 10% more white damage while 2hs do around 20% more ability damage. In some situations (primarily strict Zealweaving where the only abilities are a Blackout Kick every 30 seconds and a Tiger Palm every 20), a 1h might eek out over a 2h because over 75% of the total healing would be from white hits, but then in other situations a 2h would win (like pure DPSweaving).

It's complicated, and one isn't a clear winner all the time. Direct experimentation is difficult to say the least because most people don't have identical ilvl and stat weapons with an off hand that also has the same stats. Switching weapons mid-combat would most definitely be a good way to min/max, but again that's outside of the scope of the OP. The idea was to give a player more insight into how best to use the Mistweaver toolkit, not necessarily theorycrafting to min/max 3% gains.

[Spotnick]

Confirmed, 3 shot Mel'jarak heroic tonight, I did 51k HPS (freaking disc priests), Eminence was 32% of my healing + 23% from statue.

That was.. awesome lol.

[Unspunreality]

It sucks. We have 3 priests in my guild. And since healing is easy we had a DPS race as healers, me vs the holy. He beat me by like 400k on our blade lord kill(Damage done, not healing. As a monk there is literally nothing for me to heal on this fight with 3 priests and a paladin.). =( Could all be rng, or me being scared about his blade thing and running too far a few times. It is fun though.

To be more on topic though, does anyone have a nice WA to track the TP buff? Im using affinities thingy for everything else on WA but it doesnt track TP because I never really used it before.

Honestly Im not that good, weaving it in I find I end up missing a few other things or I miss the timer on keeping the buff up. But I think maybe if I use a WA instead of tracking my buffs I could better time it, because my buffs are far and my WA is pretty much around my HUD.

[Callimonk]

It sucks. We have 3 priests in my guild. And since healing is easy we had a DPS race as healers, me vs the holy. He beat me by like 400k on our blade lord kill(Damage done, not healing. As a monk there is literally nothing for me to heal on this fight with 3 priests and a paladin.). =( Could all be rng, or me being scared about his blade thing and running too far a few times. It is fun though.

To be more on topic though, does anyone have a nice WA to track the TP buff? Im using affinities thingy for everything else on WA but it doesnt track TP because I never really used it before.

Honestly Im not that good, weaving it in I find I end up missing a few other things or I miss the timer on keeping the buff up. But I think maybe if I use a WA instead of tracking my buffs I could better time it, because my buffs are far and my WA is pretty much around my HUD.

This one will pop up a texture when it has <4s. You can adjust that, ofc: http://pastebin.com/nT30Ns0p

[Unspunreality]

Hrm. I kinda like it, but it doesnt fit in too well. Im looking over how I have BoK's buffed displayed and Im trying to figure out if there is a way to do the same for the TP buff. Have a small asquare icon for it with a countdown timer inside of the icon like affinity has for bok.