WoD's proposed Mistweaver changes

[Lovestar]

More GCDs spent casting it.

No, I mean a charge system like Chi Brew, so you don't really get 'more' ReM per fight, but you can choose how to distribute them in time more fluidly.

Spend ReM now (to make Uplift work) in exchange for not having ReM for longer afterwards.

[Leblue]

I'd think to make a charge system for RnM not horribly, horrificly crippling and truly useful without basically throwing away our ability to do anything else until we were done prepping them all the GCD for them would need some sort of reduction whether that's to 1 sec, or even .5 sec like Healing Sphere currently is.

I see a .5 sec GCD for putting those charges out as possibly too *good* and to maintain the amount of RnM you're already putting out to be equal it may cause a LOT of extra micro management. While on paper "Yay we get more control!" in reality it may turn more to a burden to constantly have to burn your charges and watch them to not waste any of them and cause a whole lot of extra clicking and micro managing.

Once again if you place RnM on someone in preparation or because they took damage and they get healed up to full its still going to overheal whether you put all three out yourself or the game picked 2 of the 3 for you.

[Lovestar]

No. I mean yes you're all right if ReM was 1 Charge = 1 HoT yes, that's just... no.

What I'm saying is ReM behaves exactly like it does now, except it has say, 3 charges (let's start OP and work backwards).

As long as you cast ReM once every 8 seconds (ie, 1 charge always recharging) you're not losing anything.

If you know AoE is coming in 5 seconds, or if AoE just happened, you can burn through all 3 of your ReM charges and now you have 3 ReMs on 3 different people blooming into 9 ReMs on 9 different people within 4 seconds (2 ticks).

But now you have to let your ReM recharge. This will take a total of 8 * 3 = 24 seconds. If you don't let ReM recharge you're going to eat it next time AoE happens so you need to balance burning charges with sitting on charges to make sure you have 'enough' ReMs for Uplift periods. So, sometimes no one will have ReM on them because you just finished 'burning' ReM for an AoE session.

This example has balance issues I'm sure, but that's the concept I'm throwing out here. If it gets shot down that's fine, but make sure we're shooting the correct target.

[Geodew]

That injured target can be from a range of 1% to 99% and that injured target can be hit with Wild Growth and then hit by something else which tops them off resulting in full on overheal. You have control over the area that possible targets can be, but not exactly over who it actually heals unless you have all the people who need healing most get around a specific person/point.

Irrelevant. This can happen to Renewing Mist and Wild Growth both, but we're stuck healing that player for 20 seconds instead of 8. And again, Wild Growth is by no means all of their AoE. It's used on cooldown because it's cheap and overall plenty of HPS, but individual ticks on one target are fairly weak. Contrast to ReM/Uplift where it's nearly all of our AoE pumped into 6 players.

In the current model where people are topped off immediately this sucks, I agree. In a model where everyone isn't instantly topped off that's not a bad deal to have a GCD that gives you 3 HoTs and lets you put on greater healing for those people if necessary. If all goes well, it shouldn't be the only answer have to spam uplift constantly to burn chi.

I don't foresee the same thing. I think it will still be an issue. This part of the new healing model may alleviate, but will not elminate, the problem.

To start, lfr is irrelevant. The damage is usually not even enough to break disc shields unless something's going horribly awry or people are standing in crap because "lol lfr" so this isn't exactly a great measurement of anything.

LFR is often irrelevant, but not here. I said *even* in LFR, so what you said was even part of my point. All you have to do is take the spec into any raid environment, where your AoE doesn't hit everyone (as it does in 5-mans), and notice how it feels. Wild Growth is on someone that just got sniped up? Who cares, it wasn't much that much of your total healing anyway, and you can move it in 8 seconds. Renewing Mist is on someone that just got sniped up? Mother god holy shitfuck baboons, all my healing is going to that dude for 20 seconds.

Second, the part where most of that healing goes towards healing full health players is a symptom of some of the current flaws of the healing model we're in right now. People can go from almost dead to full in a second. Its required in raiding otherwise you risk the person dying to random raid damage. If damage wasn't so threatening that people could drop dead any second, smart heals weren't so good at getting lowest health targets, and hitting your aoe button wasn't always the right choice then RnM as it is would be in a lot better position than it currently is. If RnM is constantly and always overhealing and there aren't large bursts of damage in the near future, do you really need to keep pressing it?

I'm not sure I understand your last sentence. Are you suggesting delayed the ReM cast? Because in Warlords, ReM on cooldown will be an even larger chunk of our total Chi gains. I imagine that offsets whatever advantage you're thinking of.

I played a holy priest from Wrath until MoP to when I switched to Mistweaver. Here's my PoV.
Priests gain greater control with PoH at the cost that they're restricted to group healing. If half the raid gets hit in a 20 man, but its split among the groups in 2s or 3s, you're not getting the full benefit of a PoH and the max you will heal is always five people (IF they're all in range of your target).

We as monks don't have as great of control on who we hit, but we're not restricted by group, effectively not restricted by distance, can heal 6 people (more with TFT) and we're not forced to commit to the spell there and then and can instead choose to just maintain it in preparation for aoe damage where the aoe wouldn't be wasted. If you can't heal people with uplift because only one or two of your RnM targets took damage to warrant an uplift, then you switch to other methods of healing. We're not solo healing either so keep in mind ao heals are already going to be flying.

Well, let's not weigh on Priest too heavily. Druid, Shaman, and Paladin have it better than both of us. My point was just that for a 10-man, I liked the Priest model way better because I felt like I had a reasonable amount of control, though it could have been better.

Having said that, in a 20-man, I expect Monk will still have it worse. If 10/20 people take a big hit of damage, yes, it's possible they're all in groups of 2-3. But that's the worst-case scenario. Best-case is they're all in two groups, and you get 100% of your healing until they're all recovered. Furthermore, the spell is (or at least was in T12-T13) more mana efficient than Heal even on 3 targets, which is guaranteed to exist somewhere. For Mistweaver, the best case scenario is also 0% overheal, but the worst case is 100% overheal, or very close to that, which is not terribly uncommon, either (quick probability math says 11% chance to heal 0-1 people even with HALF THE RAID injured).

Even if our single-target is greatly improved, and I'm nearly certain it will be buffed with the removal of Healing Sphere, (a) you still have ReM (15-30% of your healing in 6.0? Maybe?) on 6 useless targets, and (b) obviously using single-target spells will not be preferable for mana and chi efficiency's sake, maybe unless they make a major change to Enveloping, like reducing its cost to 2 chi or buffing it significantly. Keep in mind it will take much longer to get that 3 chi back for Uplifts.

Atonement was too strong and smart healing was too strong. Both of which are targeted to be changed for WoD. So while for this expac this may be true, this probably won't hold true in WoD so its hard to give credence to this if it most likely won't be a factor.

Soothing mists will be filler, and will probably continue to synergize with surging mists and enveloping mists. Healing Sphere is going away, and we're gaining a few extra options for healing through out level 100 talents as well as Detonate Chi. Fistweaving could shape up to be incredibly solid when raid damage is low enough to be covered by other healers and you'd spend time doing little else than channeling soothing mists.

I was referring to CATACLYSM, don't forget. Yes, it's overpowered now, but I don't remember it being so in Cata. Smite was between Heal and Greater Heal for efficiency and HPS both. Holy Fire was more efficient than Heal and slightly more HPS than Flash Heal, but had a cooldown (obviously).

I'm not positive Fistweaving will shape up with the stance model, mostly because we can't maintain Renewing Mist in Crane Stance.

I've also primarily raided in 10 man this expansion (did a few 25m pugs for giggles) and I can't help but shake that a lot of the problems are exacerbated by the over abundance of smart heals as a whole, the current healing model and the raid encounters role with it, and of course the overabundance of raid cooldowns taking care of damage that RnM + Uplift would be able to heal.

Perhaps exacerbated by, but not caused by, everything you just mentioned, IMO. The crux of the problem is in how the spell works itself, not the current healing paradigm.

Yeah, hm.

Is there... any serious drawback to ReM having a charge system?

Then again, maybe the more important thing to ask first is: Would that even fix Uplift's issues? Like, would it actually, or does it just sound better at first glance?

If the charge system worked like Roll's charge system? Yes, there is certainly a problem. You could save up charges, then expend another 8 seconds later, reaching 9 targets. So that's

0s: Let the ReM from 16 seconds ago fall off. Save charges, twiddle thumbs doing nothing. Superboring.
8s: Cast ReM.
9.5s: Cast ReM again. Shortly after, up to 6 targets.
16s: Cast ReM again. Shortly after, up to 9 targets for +50% aoe healing...?! (bonus points: Use TFT)

[Lovestar]

If the charge system worked like Roll's charge system? Yes, there is certainly a problem. You could save up charges, then expend another 8 seconds later, reaching 9 targets.

That would be the entire point... you sit on charges and burn them when you need Uplift control. Charge system inherently means you're not gaining anything 'extra' by burning charges, just rearranging (temporally) when things occur.

Burning to zero ReM charges constantly would just make you a foolish Monk that gets caught with your dogi down when AoE breaks out.

I would expect changes to TFT in response, but then TFT itself exists to band-aid Uplift, doesn't it?

0s: Let the ReM from 16 seconds ago fall off. Save charges, twiddle thumbs doing nothing. Superboring.

Yeah, sure... if ReM was the only button on your toolbar, like that Shaman joke screenshot from WOTLK with Chain Heal on every single slot of every single actionbar.

[Geodew]

That would be the entire point... you sit on charges and burn them when you need Uplift control. Charge system inherently means you're not gaining anything 'extra' by burning charges, just rearranging (temporally) when things occur.

I would expect changes to TFT in response, but then TFT itself exists to band-aid Uplift, doesn't it?

We're sitting here arguing for Blizzard to change Renewing Mist so we're no longer balanced around a large amount of overheal, then we turn around and say we want to only be doing maximum healing when we do no healing for the last 8-16 seconds? They have to balance us both around our average overheal and our 0% overheal. The further those are apart, the harder that is.

[Lovestar]

I must be missing something (not unusual though).

How is not burning ReM charges equivalent to doing 'no healing'?

You always have 1 charge recharging (this is equivalent to the normal 'hit ReM because it lights up' we use right now). When you need more ReM, for Uplift (or for whatever other reason), you sacrifice your extra charge(s).

The 8s recharge means you're only 7.0-6.5 seconds delayed between 'sitting' on your topmost ReM charge or just continuing to use it on CD while the clock ticks down to needing Uplift.

[Geodew]

I must be missing something (not unusual though).

How is not burning ReM charges equivalent to doing 'no healing'?

You always have 1 charge recharging (this is equivalent to the normal 'hit ReM because it lights up' we use right now). When you need more ReM, for Uplift (or for whatever other reason), you sacrifice your extra charge(s).

The 8s recharge means you're only 7.0-6.5 seconds delayed between 'sitting' on your topmost ReM charge or just continuing to use it on CD while the clock ticks down to needing Uplift.

Let me rephrase. We will be balanced around both our average healing, and our maximum healing. The higher our maximum healing compared to other healers, the lower our average healing will be to compensate. A charge system make those two things diverge greatly, causing balance difficulties, and making it so we do very little healing when we're NOT bursting to keep our average HPS in line. (Would you Uplift with only 3 ReMs out?)

[Keiyra]

Irrelevant. This can happen to Renewing Mist and Wild Growth both, but we're stuck healing that player for 20 seconds instead of 8.

Why do people refer ReM to being "stuck" healing a player for 20 secs. A long lasting hot should be seen as good thing. HoT's by their very nature are designed with the foreknowledge that a fair portion of their potential healing may go to waste. That's part of the balance of the typical high efficiency of HoT's and the benefit of having a heal on a target that can work on damage that happens long after the heal was originally cast.

Now, I can understand when you say it feels "stuck" in regards to Uplift. Uplift needs to be its own heal (while maintain some connection to ReM), without being locked into only ReM's targets. It would of course have to be rebalanced/nerfed, since it is currently balanced around under the assumption than a fair chunk of its healing can be wasted, much in the way a HoT is balanced. I like the idea of it healing X targets where X=# of rem's active, or even healing one target within 10 yards of each person with a ReM hot, or something like that. Leave the flavor of ReM and Uplift connected, but let it choose random injured targets at the time of uplift cast.

[Geodew]

Why do people refer ReM to being "stuck" healing a player for 20 secs. A long lasting hot should be seen as good thing. HoT's by their very nature are designed with the foreknowledge that a fair portion of their potential healing may go to waste. That's part of the balance of the typical high efficiency of HoT's and the benefit of having a heal on a target that can work on damage that happens long after the heal was originally cast.

Now, I can understand when you say it feels "stuck" in regards to Uplift. Uplift needs to be its own heal (while maintain some connection to ReM), without being locked into only ReM's targets. It would of course have to be rebalanced/nerfed, since it is currently balanced around under the assumption than a fair chunk of its healing can be wasted, much in the way a HoT is balanced. I like the idea of it healing X targets where X=# of rem's active, or even healing one target within 10 yards of each person with a ReM hot, or something like that. Leave the flavor of ReM and Uplift connected, but let it choose random injured targets at the time of uplift cast.

Make no mistake. It is not a "bonus" or a happy coincidence that it happens to last that long. We are deliberately balanced around the fact that it lasts that long.

[Leblue]

Irrelevant. This can happen to Renewing Mist and Wild Growth both, but we're stuck healing that player for 20 seconds instead of 8. And again, Wild Growth is by no means all of their AoE. It's used on cooldown because it's cheap and overall plenty of HPS, but individual ticks on one target are fairly weak. Contrast to ReM/Uplift where it's nearly all of our AoE pumped into 6 players.

They're also spells with a different purpose. Wild Growth is a response to aoe/raid damage and Renewing mists is a HoT in anticipation of raid damage that may or may not come. If spamming uplift as soon as we have the resources becomes less necessary, then this no longer is as crippling. We're not a one trick pony that's 100%, completely screwed if every single RnM target isnt' a viable uplift target in WoD. If you don't have enough injured people to make uplift worth the chi, you don't use uplift you do something else instead.

I don't foresee the same thing. I think it will still be an issue. This part of the new healing model may alleviate, but will not elminate, the problem.

How so? If people with RnM aren't full health then RnM doesn't overheal. If enough people with RnM take damage to warrant uplift then we cast uplift. If not enough people take damage we don't and either hold onto the chi and bank it, or spend it elsewhere. We're still getting 3 20 second HoTs with the potential to burst heal in one global cooldown. Considering Uplift isn't our only aoe chi spender now, we're not completely crippled if it can't be utilized efficiently.

I'm not sure I understand your last sentence. Are you suggesting delayed the ReM cast? Because in Warlords, ReM on cooldown will be an even larger chunk of our total Chi gains. I imagine that offsets whatever advantage you're thinking of.

If I'm raiding Mythic and I have 4 other healers and we've determined that for X amount of time in the fight its more worthwhile for me to sit in crane stance and dps with the little bit of random healing that will provide, RnM becomes irrelevant until I switch back to Serpent stance in preparation for a heavier amount of raid damage. Is there a reason to always sit in serpent stance and try to play the snipe game with your healers if there isn't enough incoming damage to warrant it? What if your 4 co-healers and your eminence was enough to cover the incoming damage? Is RnM still important at that moment?

Having said that, in a 20-man, I expect Monk will still have it worse. If 10/20 people take a big hit of damage, yes, it's possible they're all in groups of 2-3. But that's the worst-case scenario. Best-case is they're all in two groups, and you get 100% of your healing until they're all recovered. Furthermore, the spell is (or at least was in T12-T13) more mana efficient than Heal even on 3 targets, which is guaranteed. For Mistweaver, the best case scenario is also 0% overheal, but the worst case is 100% overheal, or very close to that, which is not terribly uncommon, either (quick probability math says 11% chance to heal 0-1 people).

Even if our single-target is greatly improved, and I'm nearly certain it will be buffed with the removal of Healing Sphere, (a) you still have ReM (15-30% of your healing in 6.0? Maybe?) on 6 useless targets, and (b) obviously using single-target spells will not be preferable for mana and chi efficiency's sake, maybe unless they make a major change to Enveloping, like reducing its cost to 2 chi or buffing it significantly. Keep in mind it will take much longer to get that 3 chi back for Uplifts.

If I see a significant amount of aoe raid damage go out and my RnM targets didn't get hit hard enough to warrant uplift but there are still plenty of targets to heal I'm going to probably either flat out use Detonate Chi or I'll use a combination of 4 Chi Chi Explosion and Detonate chi. Uplift is not our only answer to aoe damage anymore. If you're stacked in melee you can SCK for more chi while also healing up some of that damage.

Perhaps exacerbated by, but not caused by, everything you just mentioned, IMO. The crux of the problem is in how the spell works itself, not the current healing paradigm.

If other smart heals are made as dumb as RnM is it really a problem? RnM isn't supposed to be the aoe healing response. Uplift isn't going to always be our aoe healing response anymore. A lot of the current issues with how healing works against current raid design compounds on itself. What may potentially be a minor flaw or weakness is greatly blown out of proportion because of other "broken" mechanics.

I was referring to CATACLYSM, don't forget. Yes, it's overpowered now, but I don't remember it being so in Cata. Smite was between Heal and Greater Heal for efficiency and HPS both. Holy Fire was more efficient than Heal and slightly more HPS than Flash Heal, but had a cooldown (obviously).

The ability for atonement to generate what's effectively a healing cooldown is really good, and hopefully this alone is grounds to tone atonement down quite a bit. Atonement also wasn't quite as widely spammed as it is now because it wasn't as strong throughput wise.

I'm not positive Fistweaving will shape up with the stance model, mostly because we can't maintain Renewing Mist in Crane Stance.

If the encounter doesn't demand 100% full throttle from all of your healers at all times, there's no reason NOT to use crane stance. Why do I need to continue to maintain RnM if I don't plan on using uplift in the future? In WoD I'm not going to sit in Serpent stance and sit there hoping I can uplift. Planning out when I'll actually need the throughput and maximizing my windows to use crane stance to deal some extra damage would be more beneficial to my raid team. Is an 8 second window long enough to use crane stance? Probably not. What about a 20 or 30 second window though?

[Lovestar]

Let me rephrase. We will be balanced around both our average healing, and our maximum healing. The higher our maximum healing compared to other healers, the lower our average healing will be to compensate. A charge system make those two things diverge greatly, causing balance difficulties, and making it so we do very little healing when we're NOT bursting to keep our average HPS in line. (Would you Uplift with only 3 ReMs out?)

I guess part of the problem is that after you burn those charges, you're not just getting "YAY UPLIFT HIT 6 PEOPLE AND THEY WERE ALMOST THE PEOPLE I WANTED HIT ".

You're also getting a ton of extra ReMs out, which keep ticking, and are concentrated into a narrower space of time.

Oh, hell, I don't know. I'm just trying to find ways for MW to have some kind of short-anticipation / reactive AoE that makes some kind of bloody sense.

- - - Updated - - -

Why do people refer ReM to being "stuck" healing a player for 20 secs.

We only care because of what it does to Uplift.

By all means give me a cheap free kinda strong 20s hot that behaves like influenza. That's great.

It's all fun and games until somebody gets AoE'd.

[Leblue]

We don't know the damage patterns of WoD just yet, so my answer might be irrelevant in the future, but in most instances you are forced to maintain ReM on CD 24/7 because it's a very irreversible decision not to.

There's also 100% no reason not to. There's isn't any loss to casting it only gains. How we're currently set up in the current raid tier you're heavily punished for even missing a second or two on your RnM. In WoD this may not be the case. You don't always need to go at full throttle and if you don't need to be at full throttle you can afford to do something like dps to heal.

RnM and the current state fistweaving pretty much falls exactly into the cherry picking that they want to prevent. If I'm in crane stance I've made a decision to sacrifice roughly half of my healing to provide roughly half the dps of a full time dpser because that's more useful to the raid at that time then me sniping other healers because nothing's going on.

That being said, there were fights on T14 where I wasn't casting it on CD (some of which I hardly used it at all), instead I relegated myself to doing other stuff (and let my Disc co-healer do most of the AoE healing).

The more active mana regen model they seem to be adapting to all other healers makes me even more sure that there will be lulls in damage to allow you to get back some of that mana during the fight. These lulls could also be used for us to do some dps.

[Leblue]

Its a shift of healing philosophy. Now instead of pressing the button because you're wrong to have not used it because there's not reason to not use it, you have a choice on whether its worthwhile to use it. Stance dancing won't be a thing, its not worth it. This is going to require a bit more foresight and most likely communication from the rest of your healing team to decide if its worthwhile for you to switch to crane stance and do some damage. As I've said many times before, you won't always need to bring the full throughput of your entire healing team to bear and when you do its going to be predictable.

This also shifts us away from relying solely on uplift as our aoe heal which is something I feel like some people aren't quite willing to let go. As a mistweaver, the goal should be maximizing your hps and dps not one or the other unless you're specific role within a fight is to just provide a small amount of healing from the damage that you do. The new state of it where we might actually decide to not use RnM and sacrifice the potential healing to switch to damage is interesting and I'm interested to see how it pans out.

[iDrunkenheal]

Its a shift of healing philosophy. Now instead of pressing the button because you're wrong to have not used it because there's not reason to not use it, you have a choice on whether its worthwhile to use it. Stance dancing won't be a thing, its not worth it. This is going to require a bit more foresight and most likely communication from the rest of your healing team to decide if its worthwhile for you to switch to crane stance and do some damage. As I've said many times before, you won't always need to bring the full throughput of your entire healing team to bear and when you do its going to be predictable.

This also shifts us away from relying solely on uplift as our aoe heal which is something I feel like some people aren't quite willing to let go. As a mistweaver, the goal should be maximizing your hps and dps not one or the other unless you're specific role within a fight is to just provide a small amount of healing from the damage that you do. The new state of it where we might actually decide to not use RnM and sacrifice the potential healing to switch to damage is interesting and I'm interested to see how it pans out.

This sounds nice in practice but rarely works out in real world raiding in 25. In 10 man it does have it's benefits, but 10 man is no longer a thing. There were only two fights this tier where having a MW instead of a druid was extremely beneficial nourshen and malkorok. Both of these situation another disc priest would have been better. The only reason that I could even dps during those fights was because I could have ReM out. And the total amount of damage I did to the boss was close to 1-2% of his health. This is full on FW only putting ReM out to heal.

In WoD you A. can't stay in crane stance the entire fight since you will do very little amount of healing B. Usually when you really need that dps is also a very stressful time for healers. Think thok bats ascendant council.

FW in 10 man is extremely powerful because you can do significant healing + damage and can do both simultaneously. In WoD you will do less % damage to boss due to doubling the raid size + you can't heal and dps at the same time.

The only fights where FW will be useful is fights like ambershaper and horridon.

[Totaltotemic]

If you don't have enough injured people to make uplift worth the chi, you don't use uplift you do something else instead.


Considering Uplift isn't our only aoe chi spender now, we're not completely crippled if it can't be utilized efficiently.


Uplift is not our only answer to aoe damage anymore.


RnM isn't supposed to be the aoe healing response. Uplift isn't going to always be our aoe healing response anymore.

Well this is new. What else are you supposed to do? Take one specific talent, spend 4 chi on it to summon a bunch of healing spheres, press Detonate Chi and then....? You've effectively spent 4 chi and as much mana as a Surging Mist (yeah, Detonate is 8.8% base mana) to do less healing than one Uplift on maybe 5 or 6 people and you can't do it again for 10 seconds. That's not "something else to do" or "another answer to aoe damage", it's a complete joke. Detonate still makes the spheres only do 50% of their original healing, and it has a 10 second cooldown and a huge mana cost. Chi Explosion isn't even close to useful for spread out raid healing.

ReM is fine, it's a hot and it does what hots do. Shortening the time frame between when ReM goes out and when Uplift goes out won't help. Other raid heals avoid the people at 100% when they are cast, not when they are set up. As long as Uplift only heals people with ReM, it will be useless the second those people hit 100% while no other raid heal falls off that hard. There is no other answer to that situation, there is only Uplift.

There are a lot of simple changes that could make MWs viable in this situation. Detonate could have no CD and do full healing instead of half. Chi Explosion's healing radius could be increased to 20 yards. Uplift could be de-coupled from ReM. ReM could move to injured targets once it overheals. Eminence could be a 40 yard range and you should just punch the boss in those situations and use Blackout Kick to heal multiple people. Any one of these would work, but as it stands MW does not actually have an answer besides Uplift in those situations, and Uplift is a horribly broken spell.

[Deleted]

Speaking of Detonate Chi, I can't be the only person who finds it very underwhelming? 10 second cooldown, 12 yard range, 8.8% of mana, no chi gen and 50% of the healing sphere effect? Not to mention it goes full retard and detonates every single orb you have, not just the ones with a potential target - yeah no thanks.

[Leblue]

This sounds nice in practice but rarely works out in real world raiding in 25. In 10 man it does have it's benefits, but 10 man is no longer a thing.

Good thing both 10 and 25 man are both out the window and all the healing classes are being balanced around 20 man instead.

There were only two fights this tier where having a MW instead of a druid was extremely beneficial nourshen and malkorok. Both of these situation another disc priest would have been better.

You could probably argue that most healers this tier could be replaced by disc priests. Preventing damage bursts has been more powerful than actual healing this entire tier whether that be through absorbs or cooldowns. Both of which are getting toned back significantly so healers are actually dealing with the damage instead of absorbs being kind and cooldowns doing it for us.

The only reason that I could even dps during those fights was because I could have ReM out.

This expansion its been very easy to just fluidly switch from dealing damage to healing. Keeping ReM out is required if for no other reason than we only have one answer to aoe damage via chi dumps: uplift. Combining the fact that we're getting more ways to handle it, and the urgency of spam aoe healing the entire raid is going to be toned back, this won't be a factor and could create very real windows where a good mistweaver will switch to crane stance and maximize the damage they can do. Sure you could sit in Serpent stance the entire fight, but you'd pretty much be wasting half of your tool kit.

In WoD you A. can't stay in crane stance the entire fight since you will do very little amount of healing B. Usually when you really need that dps is also a very stressful time for healers. Think thok bats ascendant council.

Thok as an encounter won't exist in WoD if they stick to the healing model that they've proposed and been making changes towards.

So far as Ascendant Council you had smaller bursts of raid damage through the fight, nothing critical so long as it was healed and people were kept up reasonably. The final phase there was raid damage that started out light and started to ramp up. So when the final phase begins, and bloodlust is hit, do you really need to blow all of your healing wad in one go when the rest of your healers are probably already doing so? Would your efforts be better spent doing some extra damage while they don't actually need the extra throughput because it would go to straight up overheal or making your co-healers just overheal?

Obviously when you first reach this you'll probably want to straight heal so that you get a feel for it, but if you and your co-healers go "oh for the first 30 - 45 seconds its not that bad, you could probably dps to heal and we'd be fine" then you now have a window when that damage can truly make a difference.

FW in 10 man is extremely powerful because you can do significant healing + damage and can do both simultaneously. In WoD you will do less % damage to boss due to doubling the raid size + you can't heal and dps at the same time.

Damage is damage is damage? So we assume that you have 2 tanks, 4 - 6 healers, 12-14 dps. Each dps does roughly 6 - 7% of the bosses health, with the tanks doing 4 - 5% of the bosses health and you yourself do 1 - 2% of the bosses health. How much healing doesn't need to be done because the boss died that much quicker? I mean outside of those incredibly close first kills does it hold a lot of value? Maybe not, but for those kills that are nailbiting to the end during progression that damage is invaluable.

Focusing in a little bit though.

you can't heal and dps at the same time.

Considering up to 70% of my damage will be converted healing I'm going to disagree with you. You can't go full on balls to the wall healing in Crane stance, but you can still do healing while providing roughly 50% of the dps of a full on damage dealer. You're still generating vital mists stacks at the same time to throw out spot heals with surging mists.

Why is it a bad thing that during periods of low damage or damage that your co-healers can fully and easily handle without you that you do damage?

The only fights where FW will be useful is fights like ambershaper and horridon.

FW will be useful in every fight I can squeeze it into. We shouldn't look for only gimmick fights when we're analyzing how useful Crane stance is. We should be looking for windows of opportunities or ways to make those windows of opportunity so that we can utilitize this.

[Deleted]

Crane stance will be a lot more prevalent than people think, it has every tool regular mistweaving has except ReM and Uplift. Hell it even has a flash heal mechanic with CJL, you will be able to deal with semi-often burst situations without leaving Crane stance at all.

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Also let's dispel something before people use the argument again, moving up a raid size doesn't make your damage contribution any less effective in terms of being a member of the raid.

At 10 players your comp is probably this;

• 2 tanks
• 2 healers
• 6 dps

At 20 players your comp will likely be this;

• 2 tanks
• 5 healers
• 13 dps

It's not an excuse for a DPS to say "oh I'm only doing half as much damage proportionally to the boss now, I can lower my dps" and it's definitely not an excuse to say "oh I'm only doing half as much damage proportionally to the boss now, I'm going do nothing at all but overheal" as a Mistweaver.

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Here's something funny, atm Renewing Mist will do 44% of spellpower as healing in 8 seconds. SooM before statue will only do 39.9% of that over 8 seconds. So like the only portion of direct healing that is cheap will be weaker than a Renewing Mist. Nice game blizzard.

[Lovestar]

OMG okay, okay, what if — Uplift causes healing in a radius around each ReM victim?

So it's like the healing version of Flame Shock + Fire Nova.

Because like OK, the people with ReM are being healed by ReM ticks, right? So, we'll hit everyone else.

Target limits — same as any other AoE other healers have — just targets are selected from injured people within radius of ReMs, instead of radius of target (PoH, WG, HR) or radius of you (LoD).