With the sun setting on Dragonflight and The War Within on the horizon, our Mistweaver Monk Writer, JuneMW, offers a retrospective highlighting Mistweaver’s journey in Dragonflight and shares their hopes for the spec’s next evolution with a War Within Wishlist.

Our Guide Writers have reviewed their specs throughout Dragonflight and share wishlists of what they’d like to see in the War Within. Check out all of our released editorials below.

Dragonflight Retrospectives & War Within Wishlists

Frost DK
Restoration Druid

Augmentation Evoker

BM Hunter

Fire Mage

Protection Paladin

Assassination Rogue

Elemental ShamanRestoration Shaman

Affliction Warlock

Mistweaver Retrospect & War Within Wishlist

As Dragonflight‘s changes to classes begin to slow down in the ramp up before the next expansion, The War Within, it seems like a good time to talk about how Mistweaver Monks have fared throughout it all! An entirely revamped talent system, getting rid of six solitary choices, in favor of something resembling what exists in Classic, tier sets that progressed in power through the expansion, and all of the incremental changes we’ve received from the last beta build up until now!

Throughout Dragonflight, Mistweaver has been one of the specializations that has received a great deal of work, addressing major concerns with its gameplay, getting small quality of life improvements, having entire abilities reworked into versions that are more active and woven into the rest of our kit. But that’s not to say all of the nails sticking out have been hammered back down, there’re still some awkward design spaces that need to be addressed.

Dragonflight and How It’s Treated Mistweaver

This section will be covering most of the changes Mistweaver received heading into Dragonflight from Shadowlands, as well as the iterations we’ve received, both good and…not so good.

Talent Overhaul
Even though it’s been with us for only a little over a year, the talent overhaul is one of the best things that has happened to Mistweavers in a long time! It has given us more of a gradient between several sub-identities within the specialization, giving each of them a chance to shine throughout the expansion, as tier set bonuses and other tuning within the specialization allowed.

In raids alone, currently you can choose between a few different combinations of talents (mostly centered around whether you pick Ancient Teachings or Clouded Focus or between Tear of Morning and Rising Mist) that change the flow of combat for your healing between your Invoke Yu’lon, the Jade Serpent ramps. Depending on whether you want to spend more of your time dealing damage to your enemies without being heavily penalized, or if you want to sit at range and just heal, it’s been possible! The builds themselves aren’t tuned well amongst each other, given that there are more dials in our seasonal equipment that cause the difference to slide toward a specific playstyle for full throughput, but each has had their own time in the spotlight, whereas before our talents were just…six decisions that were mostly set and forget.

Those three raid playstyles, are, however, pretty inflexible with their talent points distribution. In order to get to the build-making talents at the bottom of the tree, there’re some talents that have to be picked up along the way. And while these points are generally still useful abilities, it does mean that other interesting abilities are left by the wayside because of the difficulty of actually getting to them. The Thunder Focus Tea modifying talents, Tea of Serenity and Tea of Plenty, can only be acquired by spending a couple points on Jadefire Stomp and its modifying talents, or into . The former path is mostly only used in Mythic+ content, where you won’t really use Thunder Focus Tea for its effects, and the latter path is a 0% pick because of the two point investment for a buff to our Mastery which…we’ll get more into why that’s bad in a later section. The issue is that some of the bottom-of-the-talent-tree capstone abilities feel out of place, or just…can’t be obtained because the points needed to acquire them just aren’t available.

An Expansion-Long Rework
While we were never one of the specializations that was given the level of attention and a full rework that some others received, plenty of our abilities were changed throughout Dragonflight, and were made so much better for it.

The first major change we saw was the removal of Bonedust Brew from our Mistweaver tree. It was replaced by Sheilun’s Gift, the old Legion artifact ability. While Sheilun’s Gift wasn’t an impressive spell for our kit back then, the addition of the two spells under it in a choice node, Veil of Pride and Shaohao’s Lessons gave it a niche in both raids and Mythic+. Veil of Pride worked well in dungeons (especially when Legacy of Wisdom was added a patch later, making it a phenomenal party-wide heal), while the buffs provided by Shaohao’s Lessons allowed our cooldowns in raid to become even stronger, something much needed because of Revival‘s weaker healing compared to other, longer-duration cooldowns.

The next major change was Mana Tea, having been largely untouched since it was changed in Legion, becoming a blend of its past two designs. Lifecycles was changed alongside it, to facilitate the old feel of the Mana Tea Cycle, spending Mana to generate Chi to spend on bigger spells (the ones included in Lifecycles), which would grant us Mana Tea stacks, which, back then, just refunded Mana to us. In this combined form, the spell granted us a relatively lower amount of mana returned, but it also lowered the cost of spells we cast per stack we consumed, giving us some much needed agency with our mana!

A baseline ability that saw very little use because most of its power was tied to channeling Soothing Mist, a spell we hadn’t really used in any capacity, Expel Harm was changed into an active ability well worth pressing, albeit at the expense of Healing Elixir becoming a passive ability. The fortunate thing is that, because it is a baseline ability, Mistweavers who didn’t talent into Healing Elixir were granted a phenomenal self-healing ability on a low cooldown, while those that had already been talenting into it gained that, on top of a passive that immediately brought their health up whenever it dipped below a threshold.

There are so many more quality of life changes that have happened!! For instance, the talents under Jadefire Stomp were changed to persist for eight seconds after leaving the effect, giving us much better flexibility with positioning. Invoke Yu’lon, the Jade Serpent had the mana cost reduction on Enveloping Mist changed to 50%, allowing it to actually become the powerful ramp spell it’s become now. Shaohao’s Lessons was changed to give a buff that displayed the next lesson you’d learn, making it a much more flexible cooldown! Celestial Harmony was given its shield on Celestial cast, turning its activation into a moderately powerful party-wide defensive ability. Font of Life was changed from a flat amount of healing added to each Essence Font bolt into a percent-based increase, allowing it to scale throughout the expansion instead of dropping off entirely.

All of the above changes have been an amazing set of positives for Mistweavers this expansion! However, there have been some changes that leave a bit to be desired with the specialization going forward. In this latest season, Invigorating Mists has had its healing reduced beyond five targets with Renewing Mist active on them. This is something that is mostly out of our control thanks to being one of our two major sources of Renewing Mist buffs active in the raid. The other is versions of Renewing Mist from casts of Enveloping Mist during Invoke Yu’lon, the Jade Serpent, but that’s less of an issue because the duration on those active Renewing Mists is much shorter than what’s possible from . The way that this had been handled before was that each player was healed for an amount of Spell power, but now with more and more Renewing Mists active in the raid, the healing per person goes down. This is a long way of saying that if you need to focus healing into a single entity (like the Renewed Bramble Barrier during the Larodar, Keeper of the Flame encounter, or the Darnassian Ancient during the Fyrakk encounter), and has duplicated many instances of Renewing Mist over your raid, the key healing you need to do on these entities will take a massive hit because of something outside our control.

A spell left by the wayside for most of this expansion is Essence Font. During the Legion rework of Mistweavers, Uplift had been split into two spells, Vivify and Essence Font, as a means of maintaining Uplift’s original design space of being both a smaller group healing spell, as well as our main raid-healing ability. However, with the amount of Renewing Mist we could reach in raids thanks to Invoke Yu’lon, the Jade Serpent ramps and Rising Mist extensions, Vivify had become our main raid-wide healing spell. This was further exacerbated in Season 2, when the Set Bonuses revolved around high Renewing Mist counts and increased Vivify healing by a significant amount. With current playstyles in Season 3, Essence Font still sees little, if any, use in any form of content. Other spells do what it does, but better and cheaper. Jadefire Stomp is able to provide the bolts used for its additional Mastery events, while also activating Ancient Teachings, two of the biggest edge use cases of Essence Font in previous expansions.

A Myriad of Playstyles
Touched on above regarding the talent system overhaul, each Season of Dragonflight, Mistweavers have had a playstyle come forward during each raiding tier that capitalized on the season’s set bonuses, as well as the tuning and state it was in at the time:

Those are the briefest differences between our seasonal raiding playstyle. One thing that’s maintained its identity has been our Mythic+ healing, with Season 3 being a great boon to it. Through the past seasons, talenting into Jadefire Stomp and its underlying talents, Ancient Concordance and Awakened Jadefire, has made dealing damage to large groups of enemies one of the best and most efficient ways to heal your group! Depending on how many enemies you’re facing, you could cleave a small handful of them, doing a lot of healing through Ancient Teachings and Blackout Kick damaging three at a time thanks to Ancient Concordance, turning all of that damage into healing on your group. Invoke Chi-Ji, the Red Crane is your celestial of choice with both the shields from Celestial Harmony and the increased healing on those Blackout Kick cleaving hits making your group essentially invincible, outside of events that you wouldn’t otherwise be able to react to. Going into Season 2, Sheilun’s Gift came online, with both Veil of Pride and Legacy of Wisdom augmenting it to be a low cooldown, group-wide heal that would top off everyone’s health bar after bursts of damage.

Utility Maintained, Utility Added
While most of our utility to a given group is also available from other Monks, having it central to a very mobile healer already in melee makes us especially appealing. Applying Mystic Touch requires us to actually damage each enemy, and Spinning Crane Kick or Chi Burst are phenomenal at this, in a single global cooldown. The short-range auras introduced in Dragonflight, and , are phenomenal at making sure that your raid group stays alive. Increasing their healing taken and reducing their damage taken from unavoidable damage definitely go a long way.

Dragonflight and Its (lack of) Borrowed Power

One of the biggest departures from previous expansions is that Dragonflight didn’t really have any of its predecessors’ borrowed power sources. There were randomly dropped legendary effects or artifact weapons to continually level, there was no Azerite to gather, there were no Covenants or Runecarving Memories to craft. You’d have to stretch “borrowed power” a good deal from these previous iterations to see that the seasonal gear in Dragonflight is more in line with these effects. And while these previous expansions had some version of them too, they were never as important as the expansion-exclusive systems, the ones that were only around for the 2 years the expansions themselves were relevant.

In the past few expansions, each source of borrowed power felt a little aimless for Mistweavers, like there wasn’t a lot of direction for the specialization. The Legion artifact, Sheilun, Staff of the Mists, while it had abilities that can now be found throughout the Mistweaver talent tree, didn’t really shore up any of the weaknesses introduced in the wake of its rework. Azerite Powers from gear and Heart of Azeroth Essences were similarly underwhelming for us, with Corruptions letting us be one of the strongest healers in recent memory…up until they were nerfed and any interest in Mistweavers went with it. In Shadowlands, Mistweaver was able to heal raid groups without much specific targeting of our abilities, maintaining both Essence Font and Refreshing Jade Wind during periodic damage, while casting Fallen Order during periods of higher damage, relying on the cooldown reduction from the Sinister Teachings legendary from all of these events to make it a frequently cast ability.

But still, none of these really fit with the playstyle or established toolkit of Mistweavers. While some were powerful, undoubtedly, they still had the veneer of something rented on them; something stapled on top that hadn’t been given time to become our own. With the talent overhaul, all of that feeling has gone, with tweaks made to abilities and abilities added specifically to modify them into something almost unrecognizable to what we had known them as. Dragonflight has been a breath of fresh air for some of these ideas that couldn’t really be explored in the expansions they originally appeared in, but being a part of a more cohesive whole.

However, if you do use that macro-level definition of “borrowed power” to apply to seasonal gear that gets replaced when the new season comes out, the tier sets we’ve had access to have ranged from “pretty alright” up through “this is the best one we’ve had!” The Season 1 set, Wrappings of the Waking Fist, was a basic, entry-level set of bonuses. It didn’t really change how we approached our gameplay, but it was still significant throughput to what we already wanted to do. The Season 2 set, Fangs of the Vermillion Forge, in its pre-nerfed state (where the 2-Set Bonus gave Renewing Mist a chance to grant us Soulfang Infusion, restoring mana over time) radically changed how we approached our builds, finally unshackling us from the rigid mana pool we had grown accustomed to for the past six or so years! And now with the current Seasonal Set Bonuses, found in Mystic Heron’s Discipline, we shift our focus from spending as much mana as possible into casting our spells intelligently on players with Chi Harmony in order to heal through the 4-Set Bonus.

The War Within Wishlist

With the development of Dragonflight coming to a close soon, and its 4th season looking to be an interesting one, the future is looking very promising for Mistweaver! With all of the changes that the talent overhaul and the iterative changes throughout its life have brought us, there’re not a whole lot of pain points present within the specialization, but the ones that are there, are glaring.

The biggest part of our toolkit that I haven’t touched on here, whose effects reverberate throughout it, is Mastery: Gust of Mists. Our Mastery is in its second iteration, having been changed in the Legion rework of the specialization into the form it’s in now, to be an additional amount of Spell power added to our targeted healing spells (and Revival). Touched on above, the cost of Essence Font, compared to other spells that fulfill the same role, both in Mistweaver’s own kit and among other healers’ kits, is one of the main reasons it’s not cast in the current iteration of Mistweaver. Packed into the spell is a minuscule heal-over-time effect, but while it’s active on targets, they will receive a second healing event of Mastery: Gust of Mists, if they received one. This now allows casts of Revival to heal for more, depending on your Mastery rating, while the healing of another of our major cooldown, Invoke Chi-Ji, the Red Crane and his casts of Gust of Mists, is similarly affected by players with the effect of Essence Font active on them.

But maybe that’s a bit too small. During Season 2, Mistweavers were able to bring the number of active Renewing Mist buffs over their raid back to it’s original iteration, where each cast had a set number of times it would jump to an additional player when it would travel from full health allies to lower-health ones. Casting Vivify became the better, more efficient spell for raid healing, and after that, realizing that Clouded Focus made it even stronger, Essence Font was never really an option to cast in raids. With the introduction of square-root scaling of lower per target healing beyond the fifth active Renewing Mist, casts of Vivify aren’t as powerful as they had been. But with the total number of active Renewing Mists being dependent on , it leaves our ability to purposefully have fewer active Renewing Mists for higher per-target healing out of our hands, and losing that agency, especially during those moments where your single target healing is more important, is an awful feeling.

Removing that penalty on Vivify healing, and allowing us to purposefully cast more Renewing Mist buffs on the group, without relying on , could see Essence Font develop into its own unique spell! Returning higher active Renewing Mist counts to our own agency would let the specialization become a bit more fluid and unbound from relying on RNG, flattening the highest peaks and bringing up some of the deepest valleys in our throughput. Let it be something stronger than the strength of its potential! As Essence Font is right now, there’s no real reason to press it, and since its original implementations, it’s always been this mana glutton with a non-zero amount of its power tied to its Mastery-affecting effect. Maybe a total rework of Mastery: Gust of Mists is necessary to give Essence Font the space to come into its own at this point. Having a stat as unwanted as Mistweaver does its Mastery, having it be lower priority by a wide margin than Versatility, an almost unnoticeable stat because it just makes throughput numbers bigger, has been a thorn in Mistweaver’s side since it was reworked in Legion.

Hopes for Hero Talents
Introduced in BlizzCon 2023 with the World Soul Saga’s three expansions, The War Within‘s systems were touched on, with Hero Talents being a main point of interest. Since then, only a small handful have been revealed with their full list of abilities, but the names for all of the specializations are known! Monks have three options shared among our three specializations, Master of Harmony, Shado-Pan, and Conduit of the Celestials. These have been presented as fantasy-fulfilling augments that would allow you to tweak your character in a way that you find enjoyable. While one of the main specializations of the class can only have two of the three Hero Talent trees available to pick from, the two that, based on name alone, fit most thematically with Mistweaver are Master of Harmony and Conduit of the Celestials.

Within these two trees, there’s plenty fantasy to pull from! Conduit of the Celestials can showcase us as channeling the strength of both of the Celestials associated with Mistweavers, further increasing the potency of either when we Invoke Yu’lon, the Jade Serpent or Invoke Chi-Ji, the Red Crane, or even going further and allowing the one we’re not talented into in our Mistweaver Talent Tree bleed through and gain some benefit while the other is active. Or going further and having some other aspects of our Celestials active when they’re not. Maybe when Invoke Chi-Ji, the Red Crane is chosen, our melee abilities can grant a weaker version of his Enveloping Mist mana and cast-time reduction passive. Something to incentivize casting our melee abilities during periods of lower healing requirements. Maybe this Hero Tree would also bring back the visual effects from the Mists of Pandaria legendary cloaks, like Jina-Kang, Kindness of Chi-Ji; just to further showcase that Monks are tied to their Celestial.

Master of Harmony could lean more into strengthening our healing spells, as a way to show our spells have a way of affecting our allies, outside of just healing them of their physical injuries. Based on the name, it could also tie more into Expel Harm, having it gain more functionality than what we already have. Maybe something tied to how much healing or damage it does? That would give the recent Thunder Focus Tea augment a more compelling reason to be used over the other options.

The weakest of these three is the Shadow-Pan Hero Tree, mainly because the organization it’s named after has been shown to be primarily focused on their physical abilities, which better suits the Brewmaster and Windwalker specializations. However, at the beginning of Mists of Pandaria‘s questing in The Jade Forest, Taran Zhu helps cleanse your factional liaison of their negative emotions that are manifesting as the Sha, and this would be angle that would have to be taken to sort of break it away from abilities that are physical-ability increases. But this does step on Master of Harmony’s toes.

Without any more information to go off, any of these three could be interesting additions to our toolkit, and I’m excited to see what the developers have in store for the future of Mistweavers!

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.





Source link

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here