Brewing: Mana Tea
Consumes 1 stack of Mana Tea per 0.5 sec to restore mana equal to 3 times your unbuffed Spirit.
For each 4 Chi you spend, you gain 1 stack of Mana Tea, with a chance equal to your critical strike chance to generate 1 extra stack.
Brewing: Mana Tea
Consumes 1 stack of Mana Tea per 0.5 sec to restore 4% of your mana.
For each 4 Chi you spend, you gain 1 stack of Mana Tea, with a chance equal to your critical strike chance to generate 1 extra stack.
Meditation
Allows 50% of your Mana regeneration from Spirit to continue while in combat.
Uplift
2 Chi
Heals all targets with your Renewing Mist active for (165% of spell power).
Introduction
Dragonflight patch 10.1.7 doesn’t bring massive, sweeping changes to Mistweaver monks, but it does bring back an old mechanic that had been missing since the Legion rework of the specialization in 2016, as well as some current talents moving positions, and others being baked into spells for streamlining the talent tree. An elaboration of that, as well as a short history lesson on the specialization closer to its inception, are detailed below!
Changes to Mistweaver Monk in Dragonflight Patch 10.1.7
- Mana Tea has been redesigned – For every 10% mana you spend, you gain 1 stack of Mana Tea, with a chance equal to your critical strike chance to generate 1 extra stack. Activate Mana Tea to consume 1 stack of Mana Tea at a rate of 1 stack per 0.5 seconds. Each stack consumer restores 1.2% mana. When your channel ends, the mana cost of your spells is reduced by 1 second for each stack consumed in the prior channel. Can be cast while moving, but movement speed is reduced by 40% while channeling.
Talent moved to where Invigorating Mists had been.
Invigorating Mists has moved to where Mastery of Mist had been.
Mastery of Mist has been rolled into Renewing Mist baseline.
New Talent: Energizing Brew – Mana Tea now channels 50% faster and restores 20% more mana.
- Replaces Mana Tea where it had been, as an option on the choice talent node with Lifecycles.
Lifecycles has been redesigned – Vivify has a chance to cause your next Rising Sun Kick or Enveloping Mist cast to generate a stack of Mana Tea (tracked as Lifecycles). Enveloping Mist and Rising Sun Kick have a chance to cause your next Vivify to generate 1 stack of Mana Tea (tracked as Lifecycles).
Spirit of the Crane has been removed.
Mists of Life and the choice node of Nourishing Chi / Calming Coalescence have swapped positions.
The Biggest Change: Mana Tea
The biggest change for us this patch is the remaking of Mana Tea, with it going from a static cooldown that flatly reduces mana, into something more interactive and frequent. It’s evocative of how Mistweaver used to manage its mana, with Mana Tea stacks generated from Chi (which needed mana spent to generate, but more on that later). And as someone who misses that style of gameplay, I’m glad to see it return!
With this new design, the mana reduction can be split up to be useful when you need it, instead of being forced into a 10 second window. Being able to regenerate a little bit of mana, while also preparing for a few seconds of mana reduction immediately afterward for incoming damage, is a nice bit of balance between the old mana-recovery design and the new mana cost-reduction design. Flexibility is one of the strongest things to have in a healer’s toolkits, and this combination of past and present designs has it in spades.
Another aspect of this change is adding in more value for our stats outside of direct healing increases. Generation of a Mana Tea from any method has a chance to crit, adding another stack for free, giving Critical Strike a small, but impactful, increase to our mana sustainability. Having stats grant more than just raw throughput gives more weight behind your gearing choices, adding just a bit more depth to gear acquisition.
And all of this is without even talking about the wonderful change to Lifecycles! This talent has gone from something rarely taken, and has been transformed into something extremely close to how Chi used to work for us in the context of the Mana Tea Cycle. Turning this talent around to become one of the more consistent Mana Tea generators, especially when they crit, has made it possible to channel Mana Tea at most places where the mana reduction can really shine.
In Mythic+ Dungeons, this is a massive increase to our mana sustain, as well as our throughput. Relying on Spirit of the Crane as our only source of mana regen made it so that casts of Spinning Crane Kick would have to stop, plummeting our damage as well as our healing throughput thanks to Awakened Faeline, while either modifying talent under it (Energizing Brew / Lifecycles) can see use. Being able to drink during Tyrannical bosses, while also being able to generate further stacks, is going to have Mistweavers rarely sitting for mana. Generating stacks during a trash pack and drinking on the way to the next one will also keep us from slowing the group down, or getting to them and having to recover players’ health bars.
Impact on Dragonflight Season 2 Tier
In Season 2 of Dragonflight, our current tier’s 4-piece bonus is able to begin at the start of every Mana Tea channel, allowing for much higher uptime on Soulfang Infusion. To maintain this, it would be disregarding the mana reduction part of Mana Tea, as you would only drink one stack at a time to maintain uptime. However, the healing we would gain from 100% uptime on this buff would likely offset this weird way of using Mana Tea.
Relearning the Spell and Awkwardness Otherwise
As of current implementation, Mana Tea is a bit awkward in our moment to moment gameplay. Even though its GCD is the same as any of our other spells, the rate at which we consumer stacks is static, making it a fairly noticeable speed bump to an otherwise fast and fluid gameplay. However, this feeling tends to go away as you channel more stacks at a time. For those trying to weave it in during their standard gameplay, it’ll definitely be something that’ll get annoying, but for those that channel for longer than the GCD that it triggers, you can start a cast at any time to get right back into the fight.
There’s an awkward edge case where consuming a single stack of Mana Tea has the mana reduction wasted, which is admittedly where most of the value of Mana Tea comes from. Since the buff starts counting down the moment you stop drinking, ending the channel after half a second makes it so that only instant cast spells could get any value from it. The most accessible example of this would be Essence Font, but with the current tier making Vivify both more mana efficient and higher throughput in raids, I don’t anticipate this to be much of an issue. Timing it so that Vivacious Vivification is available would be the best case when you’re consuming fewer stacks, but the 10 second cooldown on the spell makes it unlikely to see consistent use when you’re consuming only one stack at a time.
Smaller Changes to Mistweaver in Patch 10.1.7
The removal of Spirit of the Crane seems to fully commit Mana Tea as our active mana regen ability, with Lifecycles having Rising Sun Kick be one of the abilities that can grant Mana Tea stacks (with the right buff). While I am a little sad to see it go, any mana costs that go to damage also contribute to Mana Tea‘s cap of creating more Mana Tea stacks, so it’ll still be with us.
Meanwhile the change in positions between Mists of Life and Nourishing Chi / Calming Coalescence feels like more of a thematic change, where the direct upgrades to Life Cocoon are placed right under it. Or it makes the pickups toward Chrysalis more impactful for our overall throughput, with the Renewing Mist and Enveloping Mist applications from Mists of Life being sizable increases to healing during our celestial cooldowns.
Mistweaver and Its History of Active Mana Regen
I keep talking about the way that Mistweaver functioned before the Legion expansion, and for those unfamiliar with that, this is the section for you! Just to provide some more context about why I’m really excited to see all of the above changes to Mana Tea.
Prior to Legion, healer classes relied on Spirit to increase their Passive Mana regeneration during combat with . From Legion onward, all healers regenerate mana at a rate of 4% mana per 5 seconds. This allowed for flexibility in gearing, where you would get to a level of Spirit where you could heal throughout a given encounter without running out of mana, and then gearing toward maximizing your throughput.
Active Mana regeneration is where you use your abilities to generate surplus mana for you. Recent examples from Dragonflight include abilities like Daybreak and Spirit of the Crane. Other healers rely on conditional mana reductions or short cooldowns that allow them to cast spells that would otherwise spend a lot of mana at once, in order to heal without running out of mana.
The Mana Tea Cycle Exhumed
Before the Legion rework removed rather unique components of the specialization, Mistweavers had Chi as a resource, alongside Windwalkers and Brewmasters. Mistweavers would use their abilities with a hefty Mana cost to heal allies, or prepare for damage with Renewing Mist (which was able to spread to a greater number of people at a time, without relying on the randomness of or short durations afforded by )., but these abilities would generate Chi, which could be used to cast powerful healing spells without any associated mana cost. And thanks to , spending Chi on spells like (which has been split into Vivify and Essence Font), Enveloping Mist, or Rising Sun Kick. Spending that Chi would then grant us Mana Tea stacks (with the same chance to critically strike for a second stack as the version of Mana Tea in 10.1.7 has), and drinking those stacks would return a sizable amount of mana to us. And thus, the Mana Tea Cycle, Mana turned into Chi turned into Mana Tea turned back into Mana!
As an aside, the mana that it returned was just a flat rate based on our maximum mana, but during Warlords of Draenor, this was changed to be based on our Spirit with , but once Spirit as a stat was removed after that expansion, the Mana Tea as we knew it, as a flat mana reduction while it was active, entered our talents.
This is a long way of saying that Lifecycles is trying its best to emulate Chi’s effects on this new cycle of Mana turned into Mana Tea turned into Mana and Mana Reduction! Vivify, Rising Sun Kick, and Enveloping Mist were the ones most likely to give us these Mana Tea stacks, and Lifecycles echoing that is exciting to see! To complete this theming, I would like to see Essence Font added in some way, maybe combined with Vivify‘s effect, like how Enveloping Mist and Rising Sun Kick are combined, as was used to heal both small groups of players (the intention behind Vivify), as well as larger groups of players, thanks to how Renewing Mist worked back then (which is the intent behind Essence Font).
Final Thoughts on 10.1.7’s Changes to Mistweaver Monk
Overall, this change to Mana Tea has me incredibly excited for the patch. While emulating the older version of the spell, the version we’ve been using for years is also staying with us. Building additional stacks with Lifecycles for high stacks of Mana Tea, in order to have a longer time of Mana reduction after channeling for periods of high burst damage, adds a great amount of depth to the specialization. While there are some tweaks that could turn this set of changes from great to amazing, I’m glad to see that the specialization is still being iterated on, with meaningful changes and flavor from the past being given a place in the current version of the game’s design.
About the Author
This guide is currently written and maintained by JuneMW. She’s been healing as a Mistweaver since Siege of Orgrimmar, taking small breaks over the years before she started Mythic raiding. During Legion‘s beta development, she began theorycrafting for the specialization, where she found one of her favorite hobbies: creating spreadsheets. She’s currently a moderator in the PeakOfSerenity server, where she spends some of her time answering questions and helping players understand the specialization.
