Official patch notes
Eminence still doesn't heal for enough to increase healing when it matters, during high raid damage moments, serpents zeal does. I greatly dislike SZ nerf.
Unless there are fights like Mel'jarak obviously.. solo healing everything due to eminence is kind of fun, but a little bit op.
So yes, Serpent's Zeal nerf, not good. Hopefully they are not done yet. However the TP spamming could result in free Surging Mists to throw around, which I believe I have never ever used in a raid yet since I have never reached 5 stacks of vital mist.
I need to do some ptr raid testing.
You linked a fight that has an insane damage increasing debuff on targets which stacks up as proof that eminence is powerful when absorbs aren't around?
Wut?
Next patch eminence should serve well to spot heal, however it's not a raid healing device unless theres a massive dmg taken increase for it to outpace ReM/uplifts. SZ on the other hand, always helps and can be used during low damage to increase our healing during high damage, which is why I don't like the SZ nerf :c
I don't like it either.
I accept that it's possible that fistweaving will need a nerf after they make changes. But if it did need a nerf after the TP/BK changes, nerfing SZ is a bad way to do it. If the healing is too much, then it should be reduced across the board, not solely in SZ. Beyond just the issue of it being weird to focus all the pain on one aspect that wasn't overpowered to begin with and wasn't changed by the resulting buffs, it severely disrupts the 1h/2h weapon balance because TP/BK do proportionally more of the healing when you have a 2h.
Even if I accepted the need for a healing nerf relative to the last build (which I'm not sure that I do, but I don't have those numbers), the SZ nerf is a bad way to fix it.
I made a post on the PTR thread GC has been responding to, hopefully we can get a response. Maybe one of you twitter folk can ask for the reasoning behind the change.
I think they want to make Fistweaving more of a decision than passive benefit and probably reduce the gap between 'pure ranged' and mixed healers. Hence, they are nerfing the fistweaving healing done by 'jab,jab,uplift' (both the Jab healing and the SZ healing will be reduced), but significantly increasing the healing done by actual fistweaving abilities (Tiger Palm, Blackout Kick).
Paipan|Monk|Perenolde-US
Kyam|Shaman|Perenolde-US
Arakuth|Mage|Perenolde-US
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maybe the deeper reason is not to punish people that don't use big UI addons with mousover macros too much.
(you can do 100% autodamage (=free eminence healing) while rem+jab+jab+uplifting when using mouseovers)
Why would they make the class less punishing to people playing incorrectly?
It's to make fistweaving a more pronounced play style, the reason ghostcrawler gave for the initial changes was to make players feel more dedicated towards doing it. The damage increase, mana return on Tiger Palm, and reduced passive healing all contribute towards that idea.
so is everyone not playing with your favourite UI, in your eyes coolest adddons, without a naga, without a gamerkeyboard... playing the game incorrectly?
You can't say that. blizz can't expect everyone to use some functionality they don't even offer themselves. (at least not in an easily acceptable way. sure, you could replace every spell you have with a mouseover macro, but as I mentioned, I'm certain they don't expect eveyone to do that)
No, every healer who doesn't at the least make mouseover macros are unnecessarily gimping their reaction times. Even without the added incentive of SZ it's something I'd consider mandatory. It's nothing to do with my opinion about your UI, and I don't even own a naga or a "gamer" keyboard.
Mouseover macros are both a blessing and a curse, and should not be used without at least acknowledging their downsides.
For one, the game considers "mouse over raid frame" and "mouse over target in the field" as the exact same thing. Should you ever want to make a conditional macro to affect your target if you have no friendly mouseover, you also have to make sure that your mouse doesn't land on a friendly player when you take it off of your raid frames. This adds a rather meta-level problem where you have to worry about where your mouse is when you are NOT using it in addition to when you are.
Secondly, the target frame gives a LOT of information, and bypassing that denies you access to things like specific buffs or debuffs that you might not want always showing on your raid frames, like tank cooldowns, simply things like Shield Block, other class damage reduction cooldowns, and healer cooldowns like Sac or Pain Suppression. Anything that would normally be in the target frame that you still need is something you then have to display elsewhere, leading to screen clutter and is more mentally taxing.
Finally, as a Monk-specific thing, Chi Burst and Zen Sphere depend heavily on where the target is, and selecting them first to show on the minimap exactly where that person is standing is something you lose with purely mouseovers. On top of that, Enveloping Mist and Surging Mist are both heavily dependent on who you're using Soothing Mist on at the time, which leaves, you guessed it, yet another thing to keep track of either on your UI or in your mind.
This isn't to say that mouseover macros are the devil, they're quite useful. However, it's important to keep in perspective what you're missing out on just to get an extra 30ms into your reaction time. To cap it all off, there are very few spells that Monks can even use on specific targets, so I can't for the life of me see how it would be mandatory for anything other than keeping SZ going (which only requires you to make macros for Life Cocoon, Dispel, Renewing Mist, and the level 30 talents).
You are missing nothing. Put an effort to configure your Grid properly. And play with friendly namemeplates on. You need them for Healing Spheres anyway.
Any accidental interactions with the world frame are easily solved by using clique, put any buffs you need to know on your frames and have an ounce of situational awareness so you know who is where in your raid.