We break down all the reasons you should consider playing Mistweaver Monk in Patch 10.1 and even throw in a few reasons of why you might not. From all the changes since launch to the new tier set bonuses coming in 10.1, join us as we explore Dragonflight Season 2 Mistweaver Monk!
Why You Should Play a Spec in Dragonflight Season 2 Series
Feral Druid
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Beast Mastery Hunter
Arcane Mage
Shadow Priest
Assassination Rogue
Elemental Shaman
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Dragonflight Season 2 Monk Tier Set
Why You Should Play Mistweaver Monk in Dragonflight Season 2 (and Why You Shouldn’t)
Throughout the first season of Dragonflight, Mistweaver monks have received constant adjustments from developers, including various throughput buffs and quality of life changes in 10.0.5 and 10.0.7 that have been welcome additions to our kit. Our playstyle keeps us centered in melee, with our damaging abilities able to become efficient maintenance healing, all while our plethora of defensive abilities keep us safe. The Monk class, as a baseline, brings some great utility, mostly centered around controlling enemies’ positions, as well as causing them to take increased physical damage. There are potent short-range auras centered on the monk that affect your group’s damage intake and healing received, which are easy to apply to all of the players in melee range of the boss.
However, there are a few drawbacks to Mistweavers going into Season 2. Our talent selection can be a bit rigid, with one build’s talents gating another build’s prominent nodes. For new players, there are some breakpoints in parts of the specialization that change your spell priority, the kind that almost necessitate a WeakAura to simplify this split-second decision making. There’s also the looming monster that is our mana costs. A less experienced Mistweaver is liable to run out of mana far before a given encounter is done because of simply casting too much. There are ways to mitigate this with the Season 2 tier bonus, but these issues will likely continue to persist after this season as well.
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Why You Should Play Mistweaver Monk in Dragonflight Season 2
Melee-Healer Classification
This is one of the biggest strengths of a Mistweaver. We’re one of only two healer specializations (along with Holy Paladins) that have this hybrid designation. With this internal labeling, we are never chosen as targets for enemy abilities that give no reaction time and would injure players around you (think abilities like Magma Burst from Kurog Grimtotem). What this allows us to do then is to play in melee range of enemies without fear of harming our allies.
With us being in the middle of the boss’s hitbox, anyone who wants to attack the boss will be in range of our furthest-reaching spells, allowing us to heal those in danger without having to lose uptime on our efficient spells.
High Survivability and Mobility
In concert with rarely getting targeted by encounter mechanics, Mistweavers have the combination of high mobility from point to point and strong defensive abilities. Roll and Tiger’s Lust are both great options for quick movement, with Chi Torpedo or Celerity modifying the former to make it even better. Transcendence can be set up beforehand as an instant teleport for dodging abilities entirely, like Tempest Wing on Raszageth.
But when there are abilities that cannot be avoided, we have two strong defensive options typically talented at all times, with the option to take a small hit to your overall throughput for a third defensive option. Diffuse Magic and Dampen Harm are both standard picks, the former for any magic damage and the latter for any type of damage, but big, consecutive hits in particular. Fortifying Brew is normally not worth the talent point investment, but any fight that has your health in danger for it to be useful is worth the investment.
Dragonflight Season 2 Tier Set Bonus
The set bonuses coming for Mistweaver in Season 2 of Dragonflight are powerful, with a potential change in playstyle possible. Throughout the development of patch 10.1 on the PTR, the set has undergone much tuning, with the current iteration being the following:
Compared to Season 1’s Set Bonuses, Season 2’s still has an emphasis on our default playstyle of having Renewing Mist on as many players as possible. In Season 1’s Set Bonus’s case, it was so that its 2-Set Bonus (Monk Mistweaver Class Set 2pc) could heal as many people as possible, but in Season 2’s case, it’s to maximize the proc rate of the 2-Set Bonus as well as increase as much healing through the 4-Set Bonus, both directly through Renewing Mist‘s own healing and also the cleave healing of Vivify through Invigorating Mists. Essence Font also becomes worse to press with the removal of both Season 1’s 2-Set and 4-Set Bonuses, while Vivify sees further buffs with Season 2’s Set Bonuses equipped. This is the thread that gives the emerging build (touched on below) its potential.
The Season 2 4-Set Bonus offers players both a randomized increase to their healing, as well as a player-controlled way of ensuring the healing increase is available as often as possible. Because we can easily increase the healing of Vivify by 40% when drinking a Tea, Mana Tea becomes a throughput cooldown, as well as the mana conservation cooldown it already is. We already try to cast as many Vivify casts as possible while it’s active, and now the first few will be buffed to be even stronger. Thunder Focus Tea can also be used more strategically, while Font of Life and its cooldown-reduction aspect can make it a more frequent option.
The Set Bonuses for Season 2 are much more engaging than the passive bonuses of Season 1, and they help to shore up one of our bigger weaknesses, that of having a relatively more constrained mana bar compared to other healers. Giving control of a throughput buff to the player, instead of leaving it solely up to random procs, always makes for more interesting gameplay decisions.
There’s an emerging gameplay change that revolves around ramping with casts of Enveloping Mist with Invoke Yu’lon, the Jade Serpent active every minute via Gift of the Celestials so Rapid Diffusion could apply a number of Renewing Mists to your group, culminating with casts of Vivify through Soothing Mist with Clouded Focus talented for powerful raid-wide healing (which is made even stronger when you acquire Neltharion’s Call to Dominance). But to get the full potential of this playstyle change, our overall mana is placed under even more stress, to the point that removing casts of Essence Font is a necessity to keep a competitive level of throughput through a given fight. Selecting different talents and changing up your playstyle, has, in the past, been a change that the developers wanted in tier sets, so seeing this high skill ceiling build make its way into the spotlight is great to see!
Unique Utility
Outside of the throughput Mistweaver Monks are able to bring to the group, there are plenty of other abilities available to us that could be useful in a given encounter!
- Short-range auras allow you to keep players around you buffed with persistent effects. If they are removed from the area of these auras, they persist for a few seconds. The potential auras you can apply to your allies are:
Close to Heart – The affected player’s healing received from all sources is increased by 8%. This is already on the way to picking up one of our best talents in the Monk Class Tree, Save Them All, and is similarly strong for our throughput, as well as the overall health of our group.
- Generous Pour – While the wording on this talks about increasing a player’s Avoidance stat, there’s no change to their character’s stats. This has been tested and confirmed that it works as intended. It still reduces the damage of area-of-effect abilities they’re hit by, but the calculations are done out of sight.
- Windwalking – This is the aura that is least likely to be talented into, simply because the 4% movement speed buff requiring 3 talent points is a steep investment. But there are some situations where this could still be useful!
Monks are exceptionally strong at keeping their enemies either locked down or moved aside, preventing them from advancing. This is achieved through a number of abilities, listed below:
- Leg Sweep – Stun all enemies around you for a few seconds. Able to be augmented by Tiger Tail Sweep to increase its radius and lower its cooldown.
- Disable – Snare your enemy, reducing their movement speed by 50% for 15 seconds, refreshed by your melee hits.
- Paralysis – Paralyze your target for a minute.
- Spear Hand Strike – A melee-range interrupt on a 15 second cooldown. Spectacular to have in dungeons and specific raid encounters, when an interrupt can mean success or failure.
- Ring of Peace – Create an area in range that forces all enemies inside of it out, and prevent them from entering it for a short period of time, during which you can catch your breath and prepare for when they’re able to get past it.
- Song of Chi-Ji – Disorient any enemy caught in this traveling cloud.
Finally, one of the most important Monk-specific utility abilities, Mystic Touch. Any enemy you damage will then take 5% more damage from all Physical sources, making this an extremely powerful ability!
Adaptable Abilities
On a surface level, Mistweavers have a fair amount of customization in our talent builds. Taking Faeline Stomp and its related talents allows you to increase your damage and convert most of it to healing at a high rate, to the point where, during encounters with a large group of enemies, it’s more beneficial to continue dealing damage than cast Renewing Mist or Vivify. Talents like Ancient Teachings and Awakened Faeline‘s Spinning Crane Kick component allow us to use our melee-healer classification and heal our allies by damaging our enemies. However, in raids, most encounters aren’t suited for Spinning Crane Kick‘s healing, but Rising Mist allows Rising Sun Kick to be one of our highest healing spells in its place!
Both of our major throughput cooldowns are choice nodes that provide marked differences between each other, and each have their own place, in a given encounter.
- Revival vs Restoral – While both heal for the exact same amount of health, also healing affected allies with our Mastery: Gust of Mists, and both abilities dispel hostile Disease- and Poison-classed effects, the differences come with Revival additionally dispelling hostile Magic-based effects. Restoral, on the other hand, can be used while we’re stunned, making it perfect for when there are important abilities that you don’t want removed erroneously.
- Invoke Yu’lon, the Jade Serpent vs Invoke Chi-Ji, the Red Crane – While the theming of our specialization relies on both of these August Celestials, we can only invoke one of them in battle with us at a time. Choosing Yu’lon allows us to cast more Enveloping Mists back to back on the group, making great use out of Celestial Harmony‘s Enveloping Breath healing. While the healing Yu’lon herself does is negligible, the healing that Chi-Ji is able to do is incredible. Using our melee-damaging abilities, we’re able to heal many people frequently, especially when our allies have Essence Font active on them, as the healing he does can also be duplicated by Essence Font‘s effect!
Why You Shouldn’t Play Mistweaver Monk in Dragonflight Season 2
Issues in the Talent Trees
Despite the above section praising the decisions available to us when it comes to preparing for an encounter, there are some cracks in the system that are starting to become apparent. For example, there’s been a large increase in player health and enemy damage dealt, as a means of combating the massive overhealing done by healers and to allow fight design to be more gradual rot instead of challenging through bursts of damage. The only talent we have that buffs Essence Font, our main raid-wide healing spell, is Font of Life, which scales by a flat number based on our player level. That stopped going up several months ago. The size of this healing gain on Essence Font and the size of players’ health is minuscule, and with the changing of our tier sets (mentioned above), there’s a very real possibility that Essence Font will not be worth pressing.
There’s a rather large functionality change coming for Ancient Teachings, where instead of the listed spells going to only one target, its healing can be split on up to 5 allies. When spoken about though, it’s recognized as a primary piece of Mistweaver’s healing toolkit, going so far as to affect the tuning of one of our baseline spells, Vivify. This importance feels at odds with its placement, though. While the top of the tree is filled with iconic abilities (several of which are impossible to talent out of based on talent gating, including Invigorating Mists, Vivify‘s cleave component), Ancient Teachings is placed deep in the tree, on a choice node with Clouded Focus. While either talent affects our maintenance healing in some way, that’s something that shouldn’t be easily skipped, and be made apparent for players newer to the specialization that they’re important and can be built off of later in the talent tree.
Introduced in 10.0.5 to replace Bonedust Brew, Sheilun’s Gift has been an overall success! During Legion it was our artifact ability, but there have been a few talents introduced alongside it that change how you interact with it; Veil of Pride and Shaohao’s Lessons share a talent node, and Legacy of Wisdom was added in 10.0.7 to make it a quick, powerful group heal (particularly in dungeons). The buffs that Shaohao’s Lessons can shuffle through are undeniably powerful, allowing us to empower our main throughput cooldowns further than before. However, this does end up turning Sheilun’s Gift into a spell you only want to use before these abilities, making its healing less important and shuffling its buffs eating at global cooldowns for Revival/Restoral or either Celestial.
Unintuitive Gameplay Moments
The overall gameplay of Mistweaver Monks is fairly standard. There’s some small amount of prep work in spreading Renewing Mists before damage occurs, and then we react to group damage with…an option of spells. And this is where it breaks down a bit for new players because there are several options available for us. If you have Ancient Teachings active, will Rising Sun Kick and stacks of Blackout Kick via Teachings of the Monastery be enough to keep the group healthy? How many stacks of Sheilun’s Gift do you have? How many Renewing Mists are active, maybe casting Vivify is better for your raid than Essence Font? Are Upwelling or Legacy of Wisdom talented? Mistweavers typically rely on a few WeakAuras in raids that provide reliable Renewing Mist counts and are able to make decisions for the best spell to use in response to incoming damage for our group’s health needs. In Dungeons this reliance is less needed because of talent selection and it being much easier to tell, at a glance, how many buffs are active in your group. But that’s a definite barrier to entry for new players, getting a feel for the class and understanding which similar spells to use.
Thunder Focus Tea is an ability with a short cooldown that augments the next spell we cast. Throughout the tree there are talents that modify this core ability. For example, Font of Life lowers it cooldown based on Essence Font bolts, but Secret Infusion adds a small bit of depth to using it, where you want to have value out of your choice, but also gain a beneficial secondary stat. More often than not, we give up the benefit of the spell augmentation for an increase to Haste. This is a very small complaint compared to the above paragraph, but it’s something worth mentioning for players new to the class, that there will be decisions made that might go against a spell’s intended use in order to get the most throughput available.
Outside of the analysis paralysis from our spells overlapping each other, the playstyle is fairly basic. Use downtime to prepare for upcoming damage, keep spells with short cooldowns rolling, use damaging abilities to heal up incidental damage, and then use any number of other spells once incoming damage starts to outpace that. Our cooldowns are fairly straightforward, but can really shine when there’s encounter-specific abilities, like Revival dispelling Frozen Shroud on Broodkeeper Diurna, completely removing that mechanic on your entire raid.
Mana Constraints
Mistweaver Monks have had a long history of fighting against our mana bars during longer encounters. Compared to a more traditional healer’s toolkit, our slow-to-cast single-target spell, Enveloping Mist, is incredibly expensive because of the added healing received amplifier while it’s active, and our faster spell for when people are injured is similarly mana hungry. The Dragonflight talent tree has been fairly generous, allowing us to take mana conservation talents in Spirit of the Crane, Mana Tea, and Escape from Reality, while Season 1 has offered items like Conjured Chillglobe to help us either regenerate or reduce the costs of our abilities. But one of the biggest aids in prolonging other healers’ mana bars has been the Potion of Chilled Clarity, along with the Potion Absorption Inhibitor embellishment, and while other healers have been able to sidestep the major drawback of longer cast times with instant cast abilities, Mistweaver isn’t so lucky. While there is a workaround with Soothing Mist, it’s still awkward and unnecessarily slows down an otherwise fast-paced specialization.
Mistweavers also have to recognize that our single-target healing, while especially strong, is also incredibly draining on mana. It will take some getting used to, especially because we need to let Enveloping Mist‘s healing amplification work over time. Our single-target healing isn’t meant to burst players to full after a few spell casts, it takes time, otherwise you can expect high overhealing (unless your ally is taking an incredibly high amount of damage very frequently). Our strengths lie with efficient group healing.
With the Season 2 2-Set Bonus, we can expect to return a sizable amount of mana over a given fight, but until then, we’ll have to continue plotting out Mana Tea uses over a fight (which is turned into a minor throughput cooldown with the 4-Set Bonus) in order to keep pace with the encounter, which adds another layer of complexity to this class.
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.
For more information on playing Mistweaver Monk, please see our class guide updated for Dragonflight:
Mistweaver Monk Guide
