Is crane stance required?

[Raincrow]

Can someone point me to their logs where fistweaving has occurred? I always felt my damage while fistweaving was nearly negligible, so I can't help but to think that I'm either doing it wrong or that I'm applying to harsh a standard on what level of DPS has impact, especially versus HPS loss.

[Geodew]

Can someone point me to their logs where fistweaving has occurred? I always felt my damage while fistweaving was nearly negligible, so I can't help but to think that I'm either doing it wrong or that I'm applying to harsh a standard on what level of DPS has impact, especially versus HPS loss.

The damage is low but it's nontrivial, which makes it useful sometimes. The healing is also very mana-efficient to the point where you're still gaining mana overall (including passive regen, even though fistweaving is itself mana-negative) while healing quite a bit. 2pc and 4pc are also huge DPS gains, around 5-7k maybe for both together.

[Sashide]

Can someone tell me what the correct rotation is for fistweaving? Like a poster before me said, I feel like I'm not very effective in and it's probably bc I'm prioritizing spells wrong.

[Geodew]

Can someone tell me what the correct rotation is for fistweaving? Like a poster before me said, I feel like I'm not very effective in and it's probably bc I'm prioritizing spells wrong.

PoM: Opener is TP->BOK probably, no one has cared enough to check which is better, then spam RSK with buffs up.
CE: Jabx4 -> CE spam for a lot more healing, keep buffs up TP->RSK for a little more damage

Use Expel and Surgings with 4-5 stacks (5 stacks with 2pc) in place of Jabs to save mana

[Syoki]

I have always crane stanced but I am far from optimal at it. The real issue is that our raid group is, mostly, very melee heavy which causes a real cluster on certain fights. Going to have to get better at utilizing it and not dying to stupid things.

[SkyeMW]

Hey there!

Crane stance is fairly good on Gruul, even after the patch. My guild does three stack groups and my DPS helps beat out the enrage significantly. My gear is not that greatly optimized and my dps doesn't seem too fantastic in this pull, but here are some logs for reference for you. Revival will be most of your healing, of course, but you will probably get more HPS out if you do the two group stack strat and use ChiEx. Also note that I did not keep up the RSK debuff. I know.... :/ I don't think I can post direct links since this is my first post here.

/reports/nBdk9HVN68avMcFh#fight=1&type=damage-done

Hope this helps!

[Deleted]

Off-topic storytime: One time I got blamed for dropping Amber in melee on Paragons. Lol. I had to explain to them that I can't get targeted, why I can't get targeted, why I'm 100% positively absolutely sure I can't get targeted, etc. >.>

Let me tell you about my raid who didn't want me to fistweave because they didn't want me to drop blackrock barrage on the melee or get hit by acid. Also if I fistweave they always comment about how I am doing 5-10k HPS less than other healers. There is a lot of pressure to be doing well on meters. It's such a fun!

[Deleted]

Let me tell you about my raid who didn't want me to fistweave because they didn't want me to drop blackrock barrage on the melee or get hit by acid. Also if I fistweave they always comment about how I am doing 5-10k HPS less than other healers. There is a lot of pressure to be doing well on meters. It's such a fun!

start telling the other healers to pick up their dps game then

[Potta]

As a preamble, I'd just like to point out that Fistweaving should really be broken into two categories - one being a mostly full time use of Crane, with a spec designed to support it doing reasonble HPS, and the other being the occasional use from a primarily Serpent stance MW who wants to optimise their play. In this post, I'm only referring to the second.

It depends very much on the situation. You have to evaluate the benefits Crane stance brings at any particular point in time, and compare them to what you lose. The benefits of Crane stance are:

* Building up Mana Tea stacks
* Efficient healing
* Minor improvement to raid DPS

My major stumbling block with Crane stance, and why I often won't use it, is that the first two benefits are about mana. If mana is not an issue for you in a particular fight, then there's no real reason to Fistweave, even when the fight has a damage pattern appropriate to its usage. I'll take HC Imperator for example. It's often given as a perfect chance to Fistweave in the first minute of that fight, as the raid damage is fairly low. The problem is, Fistweaving (at least in a POM build) is lower HPS. Which means your other healers have to do more healing to cover for you. The more beyond their "break-even" point in mana spent vs regen'd is mana they won't have available in the rest of the fight. I could Fistweave for the first minute or more of Imperator, but frankly, I don't need to. I don't go out of mana there without doing it, so why would I have to? There's no benefit in me ending the fight on >50% mana from having built up a large Tea stack when Fistweaving or ~10% mana from no Fistweaving at all. If anything, it's counter productive, because getting the other healers to cover for your reduced output hurts their mana. In my guild at least, I'm generally far more comfortable on mana than our Paladin or Druid, so it's kinda absurd for me to push their already pressed mana more to aid my own, which has little to no problems. It's far better to have 3 healers at ~20% than 2 oom and one at 60%.

It will also depend on your raid composition - people here are talking about being in melee to RJW them and such - but if you run with a small raid group that is light on melee, you might only be hitting ~4 targets. That's often the case in my raids. RJW is better used in the ranged camp in that case.

So you should be careful in listening to advice about when people think "good" players will be Fistweaving. Assuming healing was an issue on a particular fight, I would be entirely sympathetic to a raid leader dropping a MW who was consistently doing lower HPS than the other healers, with the "excuse" that they did 4k more DPS on average throughout the fight. A MW who drops to crane stance occasionally has no appreciable impact on fight length. The only reason to do it is to have more mana later. If you don't need more mana later, then why take the additional risk of Fistweaving?

Because it is a risk! Melee is generally a more dangerous place to be. Any unforeseen raid damage will have you scrambling to catch up, because you'll have to switch out of crane, start getting ReM's up, and only then start Uplifting. Realistically, in any kind of event like that, you won't be able to help start recovering from it for at least 5 seconds. By which point the danger has generally either passed, or killed a few people.

- - - Updated - - -

Also if I fistweave they always comment about how I am doing 5-10k HPS less than other healers. There is a lot of pressure to be doing well on meters. It's such a fun!

You're brought as a healer. Any DPS you do is likely to be irrelevant to the kill time. If you're 5-10k HPS behind other healers, you are being carried and they have every right to complain at you.

[Deleted]

You're brought as a healer. Any DPS you do is likely to be irrelevant to the kill time. If you're 5-10k HPS behind other healers, you are being carried and they have every right to complain at you.

That's some blunt shit. I could top the healing meters if I went in guns blazing and blew my mana load all over the fight, sniped cooldowns with Revival and made my primary focus be all about getting high numbers. Doesn't mean I was playing well or carrying people who were doing less HPS than me.

[Sickjen]

Fistweaving is no where near mandatory. Some fights you should stance dance on low damage phases as it effects your mana tea stacks and more mana = spammable heals during high impact phases. As for where and when to fistweave it's all about how comfortable you are with healing in your group.

[Endler89]

Dunno why I replaced Shaman and Druid in my head, but I will edit that.

The way that iss worded, my mind immediately saw people attempting to edit the images in their heads. I know you meant your previous post, but the image of a man taking a chisel and hammer to his own head to edit his brain image flashed across my mind and I felt I needed to share it.

[Potta]

That's some blunt shit. I could top the healing meters if I went in guns blazing and blew my mana load all over the fight, sniped cooldowns with Revival and made my primary focus be all about getting high numbers. Doesn't mean I was playing well or carrying people who were doing less HPS than me.

My definition of carry is pretty simple: If the rest of the healers performed at your level of HPS, would you have started losing people/wiping?

I have no idea how your raids are, but I'm taking what I feel to be a reasonable assumption based on my own raids and say, if every healer started doing 5-10k less HPS, we'd have a lot of problems.

[Deleted]

My definition of carry is pretty simple: If the rest of the healers performed at your level of HPS, would you have started losing people/wiping?

I have no idea how your raids are, but I'm taking what I feel to be a reasonable assumption based on my own raids and say, if every healer started doing 5-10k less HPS, we'd have a lot of problems.

It's too simple, the decision making in healing is primarily about saving lives not numbers. Saving lives usually leads to better numbers, but that's not always the case.

[Kenai]

My definition of carry is pretty simple: If the rest of the healers performed at your level of HPS, would you have started losing people/wiping?

I have no idea how your raids are, but I'm taking what I feel to be a reasonable assumption based on my own raids and say, if every healer started doing 5-10k less HPS, we'd have a lot of problems.

The way healers are and always have been designed makes HPS alone a poor metric of healer performance. Whether it's HPS being suppressed by absorbs, gimmick fights, what each healer is assigned, or general class imbalance, saying "this healer is doing 5/10% less drop em" is mired in fallacy. Doing less HPS than who? The RDruid who is getting snipped by PW:S? The Shaman who is raid healing while a HPally deals with tank spikes? The MWer who is building tea for later but there is never a later cause one-shot mechanic cause a wipe? The best one can do is check vs other of their class, and even that can be flawed (for example, gear score of one vs the other, 2/4 pc bonus, ect) As someone else in this thread said, all we need to do to look good is snipe another raid CD with our Revival whenever we can, we will look great. But that doesn't help the raid much at all, does it? Another example: PW barrier from Disc is AMAZING but doesn't show up on the meter at all.

I understand what you mean to an extent, but the assumption that a MW who is meleeing is going to be taxing the other healer's mana is a poor one, because it doesn't have to. The whole point was that during periods of light/negligible damage (which happens in almost every fight, at least at the start), there is rarely a more efficient use of a MWer's time than building up stacks of tea + doing some damage. If the MWer doesn't need the mana, then the raid is probably running too many healers anyway and the extra DPS is going to be helping more than just sitting around waiting or casting on people already topped off. If the MW does need the mana, well then there you go, there's no better way to get it. It's the (situationaly) best use of our mana regen mechanic, even it it's not 100% cut and dry on when to make the most of it. That is up to the fight (and the player). But there is absolutely no doubt that the optimal use of MWer involves FWing for tea (and as much available mana as possible) in progression or killing the boss faster when said bosses are on farm.

The results of doing so speak for themselves, more often than not making a large difference in my mana both on a per fight basis as well as a huge amount of mana gained over the raidnight (damage is w/e to me but certainly doesn't hurt). We can mince words on what is and isn't considered mandatory, but i call that a copout when you know that the MW who is paying attention and stance dancing properly is almost 100% gonna be doing more for that raid than one that is not. It's sometimes a helluva lot of extra work but it's not meaningless, not at all.

[Solemnity]

Fistweaving is something I'm internally conflicted with, honestly. Blatantly saying fistweaving is required is pure conjecture, but in terms of raw optimization it is required. People make these claims that sound like you have enough downtime to stay fistweaving for absurd amounts of time on every boss, and it's nonsense. You set up your little stance switching macro, keybind it, and prime your 4 little fistweaving abilities then you wonder when they're useful. The beginnings of pulls is where you can get a few stacks of tea, but unless you're a 3rd-wheel healer you're going to need to switch back when you need to get ReM rolling. Very few fights have I found where there's a legitimate downtime period involving things you can kill with raid damage irrelevant enough to consider fistweaving again.

The damage you will be doing is going to be minuscule in the grand scheme of things and is not going to overcome a raid's DPS optimization failures. Everyone's wiped a boss with mere fractions of health remaining though, so really any damage is good damage. It's the people who post saying they're fistweaving for 80-90%, maybe even entire boss fights that are being bad eggs. Fistweaving is not the magical 50/50 hybrid it was hoped to be, and if you're planning on making a career out of it you're probably better off being a Windwalker.

Ranting aside, I'm guilty of hardly fistweaving. Does that make me optimal? Well no, but I'd like to see someone claim they are. Bosses being killed by the skin of our teeth is a rare spectacle that, if wiped, would have likely been easily killed the following attempt. If the boss is killed with a healthy, surviving raid, your damage is pretty much worthless, but the tea you've gained could be an extra RJW cast, or similar.

TL;DR: It's probably better you do some punching just for the sake of tea stacks. No you don't need to commit to some dumb fistweaving lifestyle, and if your guild isn't carrying dps or other healers you'll hardly notice it's necessity.

[Deleted]

Blackout Kick does afterall 160% of its damage into healing. Sometimes the damage done is just low and it does add up with low mana usage.