[7.1.5 PTR] Mistweaver Monks could use some love

[Deleted]

Hey there all,

With all the noise about 7.1.5 and the amazing recent efforts of the WW community in regards to Pandanaconda's post, I thought it might be a good idea to also shine some light on the issues of our favorite class' less prominent spec - Mistweaver. I'm not a huge fan of cross-posting, but it very clearly seems like Blizzard intends to sweep healers' issues under the rug and address them at a point after Nighthold. While many specs may be fine with maintaining the status quo (you won't see a Resto Druid worried about his raid spot), the Mistweaver spec which, even currently, cannot justify its place in the serious raiding scene, is not one of them. Considering our bad scaling with higher iLvls of gear and the heaps of new (and awfully itemized to boot) items coming in the raid tier, we desperately need some changes before we completely fall of the map and run into "the Brewmaster problem" - a situation where the spec receives changes and becomes viable/decent, but has been under-performing so long/often that people aren't willing to even give it a chance anymore.

Anyway, if you'd like to read more about our problems, contribute to the discussion or just help increase the visibility of the feedback posts, please direct your attention to these threads on the EU PTR forums:

https://eu.battle.net/forums/en/wow/topic/17614514694
https://eu.battle.net/forums/en/wow/topic/17614541750

I have not been able to find a thread about MW on the US PTR forums (it's very likely it got buried), but please provide a link here if you know of a constructive one that deserves support. Also, for any of you in the US, feel free (and encouraged!) to repost or link to these threads on your region's forums.

I know we are one of the smaller communities of the least-played class, but, please, try to make your voice heard. If nothing else, for the peace of mind that we tried to steer this ship away from the cliffs.

[cqwrteur]

I have post it on US forum. However, I don't think it would work. They would ignore us by shitty replies like "your spec is really strong just people don't play it too much"

MW Monks desperately need a second look

[Deleted]

As someone mentioned in the forum I expect a Extend Life treatment after nighthold, or a new legendary (pls no).

[Solemnity]

I definitely agree that Mistweaver just needs a little love and polishing. The problem I feel is that Blizzard won't make any serious move unless a significant portion of the playerbase is holding a specific stance on a narrowly defined issue. Rant Warning

It seems clear now that Blizzard won't respond to "utility" because we've been complaining about it for a couple years and they've dodged it masterfully. We're the only spec that had its root class fantasy destroyed; unceremoniously ending the fistweaver. It's multifaceted of course, but a lot of the problem was with the elitism. Mistweaver attracted players for many different reasons, but the elitist side of the Mistweaver community protected fistweaving tooth and nail and held it all the way to the guillotine at the expense of any meaningful constructive class talk. Blizzard declared that there was no way to make a legitimate raid healer that could damage simultaneously; it wasn't feasible to tune. Discipline was redesigned to consider this by lowering healing sustain but increasing burst healing, giving it good healing and damage, but it won't rival a core healer spot unless it's a farm boss.

You see people ask about Rising Thunder on occasion but they'll get told it's not "HPS viable". The error in this terminology implies they're comparing the talent to the healing of the other talents in the row. This is the fistweaving logic where they are trying to maximize healing and damage that Blizzard shut down. The real reason Rising Thunder is bad is because it's worse healing and it doesn't increase damage. Most of the trade off should be in the mana cost of RSK to begin with. If it did increase damage, and SoTC was buffed to make the playstyle almost mana neutral, you're still losing HPS by not using your healing rotation, but you get a similar discipline situation by being able to weave in some Essence Fonts when raid healing is needed. This would be a decent farm boss playstyle but it's severely undertuned and is being ignored in the talent patch.

Ghostcrawler just made some comments about the ambiguous community term "clunky". He described clunky "as if little thought or polish was given to the design", and that's exactly what Mistweaver is right now. Under 80 percentile healing, all of the healers are in a wonderful place relatively. However, the scaling of Mistweaver stops way before the other healers. The solution is not simple because nobody is really able to agree on what the problem is. Looking at percentiles this means that Mistweaver could be: undesired due to a void of utility, under-represented, poorly scaling, or mechanically inferior. It's easy to notice that Mistweaver has no redeeming quality to it aside from being a jack of all trades. It has the 2nd best tank healing and 2nd or 3rd raid sustain. Does this mean we need to fix utility? or fix tuning? Or should we reinforce the jack of all trades position with mechanical tuning? The community doesn't know, so Blizzard probably won't.

I think there is an inelegance to the toolkit and this is coming from someone who actually enjoyed the mess that was the old Mistweaver playstyle. We lack that polished uniformity to our spells because too many of them aren't cohesive. We have long single target heal cast times, but Sheilun's is over the top and unnecessarily difficult to use. Soothing Mist doesn't synergize with anything, is not mechanically proactive or useful retroactively outside of tank healing. We have a heal, Effuse, that is questionably tuned to be one of the least efficient single target heals in the game to the point where you can ignore it. Of course its polar opposite: ReM, the most efficient heal in the game. Essence Font is supposed to be the thing we blow our mana on, but it's questionably tuned for what it does. To really do well with it you need a bunch of innervates. I try to think of things mechanically that would make this smoother.

I have more fun thinking of a new and smoother toolkit than actually playing the class these days. Like Effuse becoming a SooM activator. A smart heal component to SooM that would let us not have to break the cast on a healed up raider. It would split off from the initial target to heal damaged players until it overheals then it jumps again. Never worked out the logistics of how fast it would split and basically knit a blanket of green over the raid, so not a good idea but still fun to think of. A good idea on the main Mistweaver thread was to make Sheilun's a channeled cast like old Mana Tea. Uplifting Trance could also be used to empower essence font possibly. A more forgiving change to either Lifecycles or Mistwrap to account for Essence Font.

Sorry for the huge wall of text but this is as cohesive as I could get it.

[Deleted]

Trouble i see with MW is its a combo of hots and ST, but the ST is not as strong as say a pally and the HoTs arnt as strong as a resto druid and i think they want MW to be that filler healer that can do a bit of every thing. But i feel we need a boost in our output

[Saverem]

I have post it on US forum. However, I don't think it would work. They would give us the shitty reply like "your spec is really strong just people don't play it too much"

MW Monks desperately need a second look

Gee I wonder why people don't play it too much. Surely the problem doesn't lie with the creators, but with the players who are obviously too dumb to appreciate how strong that spec is!

Those top guilds don't know anything by taking their Holy Paladins, Resto Druids and Resto Shamans over the obviously strong Mistweavers!

[Deleted]

Very good iniative to bring both the EU and US monks together. This is the real monk campaign of legion it seems :P

[cqwrteur]

Very good iniative to bring both the EU and US monks together. This is the real monk campaign of legion it seems :P

No among EU, US and China MWs together. The post in US forum is posted by me --- a Chinese.

[taek]

The niche of the MW is to make sure all none of the other healing specs can call themselves the bottom tier healers of this expansion.

And it's doing that job well.

[Deleted]

Trouble i see with MW is its a combo of hots and ST, but the ST is not as strong as say a pally and the HoTs arnt as strong as a resto druid and i think they want MW to be that filler healer that can do a bit of every thing. But i feel we need a boost in our output

I think this sums it up perfectly

[Deleted]

We can live with one bad secondary stat but not with 2. We were OK in Nightmare, I don't think that we are so far away from other healers in ToV if you look to 75% parse. But clearly we do not beneficit enough from secondary stat increase as ilvl goes up. Still secondary stat will be nerfed so it should not be that bad. We just need to increase slighly our haste and mastery efficiency in raid environnement but wihtout becoming op in donjon (as haste and mastery are our best secondary stat there).

As suggested in battle.net forum, haste should lower Renewing Mist CD. This would probably be too much as more renewing mist means also more uplifting trance proc. Having something like 50% of the haste reduction would probably be OK (8s/(1+0.5%haste). That would be a ~2% raw healing increase in raid environnment according to a fast calculation considering 25% of healing due to renewing mist with 15% haste rating (GCD from 8s to 7.44s).

In order to have an increase of mastery efficiency, only in raid environment, essence font may applied gust of the mist on target affected by renewing mist. That is probably more than a 5% raw healing increase and a free one, so to compensate target affected by essence font should no longer beneficit from double gust of the mlist.

On top of that, these two changes have a good synergy. The first one is realy easy to test on ptr but the second one is probably more tricky and could wait 7.2.

[cqwrteur]

lol. blizzard doesn't love mistweavers xd

[Deleted]

Hey all,

I hope the holidays find you well.

Sadly, it looks like Greatfather Winter didn't get our letters. With the patch already on Background Downloader, the time for sweeping changes has almost definitely passed. Still, it's not too late to, at least, get some numbers tuning - even just addressing something like our mana costs or adjusting scaling numbers would go a long way towards retaining some hope for future of the spec. I, like many others, would rather not have to re-roll come Nighthold, but, as things stand, I can't, in good conscience, keep requesting a spot for Mythic content when it's clear that my class would hold us back.

Still, I'm happy to see that the discussion is still active, both on EU and US, even at this time of the year - it really goes to show how dedicated the MW community is and how strongly we feel the need for change! Even though it may feel slightly futile at this point, I strongly encourage all of you to keep the constructive feedback coming!

I will obviously be bumping up the EU thread, but, as I have no access to US forums, I ask that those of you that do keep the train rolling. Also, while I feel that I covered most of our major points in the OP, here are also a few posts I made at a later point. These, sadly, didn't fit in the main post and, as such, may have been overlooked, but cover relevant issues and can be used to keep the discussion going. As such, feel free to use them to bump the US thread should it start dying down.

Hey all,

First off, thanks for your support and contributions to the thread - they are both much appreciated!

Secondly, I realized that I did not talk a lot about solutions to our problem with secondary stats. As adjusting our scaling might be the shortest and simplest path to a "quick" solution in regards to our desirability come Nighthold, I thought I might provide a few drawing-board level ideas that can start a discussion.

Do note, however, that without addressing some of our more broad issues such as Mana Regeneration and Expenditure, I believe that Mistweaver Monks simply cannot be brought to the level of other healers. That said, making us scale better with gear may delay our complete extinction from the serious raiding scene long enough as to allow time for a more significant review and rework of our mechanics.

As outlined above, our problem stats are Haste and Mastery - most of our gear has them and yet they are overwhelmingly eclipsed by Versa/Crit when it comes to performing in anything larger than 5 player content. So, instead of having us rely on flat "+Healing" secondaries, how do we get Haste/Mastery to be more desirable and worthwhile to stack? Let's try a few options - keep in mind that I am not advocating that ALL of these be implemented together, but, rather, providing multiple possible variants. Here we go:

For Haste:

• Make Soothing Mist's tick-rate receive a higher % benefit from Haste (eg 25% Haste makes Soothing Mist tick 50% faster)
• Make Renewing Mist's cooldown get reduced by Haste
• Make Thunder Focus Tea's cooldown get reduced by Haste

For Mastery:

• Make Soothing Mist trigger Gust of Mists every X ticks[/li][li]Make Vivify trigger Gust of Mists on ALL healed targets rather than just the primary
• Make all of our healing spells trigger a portion/% of Gust of Mists (eg Revival triggers Gust of Mists healing equal to 15% of our Mastery, Vivify's second and third target get 50% etc.)

Again, these are very rough ideas of what could be done to improve these stats, but I think something along these lines is the direction they should be looking towards.

Please let me know what you think.

Bumping the thread for visibility.

I also want to note that, perhaps unintentionally, the changes made to the secondary statistics of the Nighthold Tier Set make an already hard to justify decision (to equip them over Crit/Versa pieces) even harder.

As the set bonuses are hardly anything to write home about, the new versions' toning down of Crit (an actually useful stat) in favor of Mastery and Haste only increases the odds of us having to either completely forgo or highly limit the number of Tier pieces we equip.

As Mastery is a popular Windwalker stat and Haste is a focus of Brewmasters, this shuffle is hardly surprising, however, our inability to get any real value out of these stats which are so prominently featured on, what should be, very desirable class-specific items further reinforces the need for our secondary scaling to be looked at.

Bumping the thread for visibility.

I also wanted to address a point made by Antagonistka above:

- The artifact ability - It has nice theme to it, but also a hefty cast time which causes it to often overheal. Would be nice if it triggered Soothing Mist, too.

The bolded part is actually currently implemented in the game. However, an actively bugged interaction between Soothing Mist/Sheilun's Gift and Renewing Mist prevents it from working properly under certain conditions. To test this yourself, try the following:

• 1. Cast Effuse, then cast Sheilun's Gift - Soothing Mist will begin channeling
• 2. Cast Renewing Mist, then cast Sheilun's Gift - Soothing Mist will not begin channelling

It's ironic, because this was, pretty much, the only "buff" Mistweaver's got in 7.1 and it ended up not doing anything since it doesn't work most of the time. We can't even "play around" the issue as Renewing Mist is a major part of our "rotation" and using it "on cooldown" is strongly recommended, if not mandatory.

Needless to say, this bug was discovered, thoroughly tested and detailedly reported Day 1 of the patch (as some of us were mildly excited about the addition and hopped straight into instanced content to play around with it) and has neither been fixed, addressed or even added to any "known bugs" lists that I know of.

This may sound like a huge rant over something very minor, but it's missteps like this that not only lead to further growing annoyance among an already largely ignored part of the community, but also serve to confuse people who are somewhat new to the spec as they are left wondering why their Soothing Mist is randomly activating.

- - - Updated - - -

A bit of a double-post, but I just wanted to give props to Solemnity's excellent post above. Considering the subject matter, it is a surprisingly cohesive and insightful contribution to the discussion. Hats off to you, Sir.

*snip*

[this is caranthir]

Too bad they aren't changing anything in 7.1.5, I'm equipping a hpala alt just in case

[Deleted]

Small bump for visibility.

[Solemnity]

They won't do anything, sadly. Logically, Blizzard is polishing 7.1.5 right now to go out before or on the 17th. Just because they've said the two aren't linked doesn't mean it would make sense to release Nighthold, then release a fairly significant tuning update a few weeks after which can disrupt progression.

They've only made one statement about healers being in a good place so it's clear they are setting us aside for this patch. Certain specializations could definitely see more love, like Windwalker, but I am most upset by the complete lack of discussion with the Mistweaver community. They never give us any design decision insights or commentary. A <insert DPS or Tank here> will say they really dislike or want to see <insert thing here> improved and Blizzard replies by wanting to hear more feedback about <insert thing here>, or compares <thing stance or predicament 1> with <thing stance or predicament 2>. They slapped a completely new toolkit on us and removed our class fantasy and gave it to Discipline, and they won't even reply to us.

[TeracottaMaid]

I gave in and boosted a Resto Druid to 100, almost 110 already, really sad this is the state of things. I've loved Monk since I returned after mop in wod but knowing that MW will see very marginal gains in HPS with NH and other classes already provide more than us I'll be parking my Monk until something changes.

[Deleted]

I am not sure of what it means but a couple of build ago the mastery seems to have been buffed:

Mastery: Gust of Mists Effect #1: Apply Aura: Dummy (24) (SP mod: 10 13)


Is it a 30% buff of gust of the mist?


P.S.
Sorry, I can't post link to wowhead but you all know where to check this ^^

[Deleted]

Is it a 30% buff of gust of the mist?

In short - yes. However, it's a whole other matter how far this buff goes in terms of addressing our issues.



On another note, here's a small glimmer of hope from a post by Ornyx in a US thread ("Paladin Class Fantasy" ironically enough) today:

*Just* sent an email asking for Mistweaver feedback. In due time.

Here's to hoping.

[Smashley]

Just to make sure I'm understanding today's 7.1.5 patch notes:

* A decent buff to Gust of Mists (making Mastery even stronger)
* A great buff to Zen Pulse (for those of us who mainly run M+'s—this is amazing!)
* An amazing buff to Mistwalk (making this even more OP in PvP)
* A small reduction in mana cost to RSK for those of us who run the Rising Thunder talent (something my fellow mmo-champers have been asking for!)
* A small nerf to Soothing Mist

Is the change to Spinning Crane Kick also for Mistweavers? [Spinning Crane Kick's damage is increased by 50% for each unique target you've struck in the last 15 sec with Tiger Palm, Blackout Kick, Rising Sun Kick, or Rushing Jade Wind]