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Wednesday, September 19, 2012

Impending Release Mistweaver Review


Moving right along, the Mistweaver is next. The healing spec for monks. The abilities feel great and special to me. While having similar mechanics to other healers, they still do it in a definitely unique fashion.
As I did with the Brewmaster, I'll begin here with what Blizzard describes as the primary abilites.

Primary Abilities:
  • Soothing Mist - Channeled heal that is also capable of generating Chi. The most basic of the heals. The default if you will.
  • Renewing Mist - An AE heal that works like Holy Radiance, but moves like Prayer of Mending. It can go to the closest injured person, or the furthest with a glyph.
  • Surging Mist - The "Fast & Big" heal for Mistweavers it also generates Chi, and becomes instant if channeling Soothing Mist. The last part about the target is used for the Glyph, that makes Surging Mist act like it did early in the beta and heal the lowest HP target in 40 yards. Casting during Soothing Mist overrides the glyph and makes it heal your target.
  • Uplift - has changed quite a bit, the ability used to refresh all your Renewing Mists and that really became the only way Mistweavers healed. Now it simply heals anyone with Renewing Mists on them. Pushing some active healing onto those with the HoT.
In a simple four abilities you can really get a sense of how the Mistweaver heals. It's a combination of hots and reactive healing, of generating and using chi that can be quite elegant. A key ability not listed to prolong your healing ability is Mana Tea. You will gain a stack for every 4 chi spent. When you use the Mana Tea ability it consumes 1 stack per second restoring 4% of your max mana per stack.

Don't ever forget your Jade Serpent Statue either. It provides so much more healing on top of yours it's a must cast skill.

 There's another aspect as well though. You can use the heals straightforward, or you can deal damage, through Eminence, to heal. Having tried my hand at Disc Priest for a while I love the ability to heal through damage and it makes dungeons a whole lot of fun. Being the best Mistweaver you can be will require mastery of both forms.

The rest of the Direct Heals:
  • Enveloping Mist - a 3 Chi HoT this is a very nice ability for picking someone back up from low, or tank healing in general. Like Surging Mist this is instant if you're casting Soothing Mist but also has the secondary ability of increasing your Soothing Mist healing by 30%.
  • Expel Harm - Although it's a self heal, one use is for directly healing yourself for small amounts as you need.
  • Healing Sphere - a most interesting ability, Healing Sphere has many potential uses. Will it be used regularly? I'm not sure. Some ideas include: dropping them next to tanks so they can grab them at will; dropping them to a gather point after some big damage dealing ability; casting them directly as a means to heal as well, making it a fast, small heal.
I thought there'd be more here but most of them were covered with Blizzards primary abilities. The other side of the coin is that Eminence makes all your special abilities heal for 50% of the damage they do. It's important to note that your Jade Serpent Statue ALSO heals for 50% of the damage done, so although it may not be the same target, you do get 100% healing done for all special attacks. So here we'll examine the special attacks available and how they change what you're doing.

Special Attacks to cause healing:
  • Blackout Kick - Blackout kick will of course activate damage -> healing but also makes it so your autoattacks will heal for up to 50% of damage done as well. This moves over to the Jade Serpent Statue as well which would make the total, again, 100% of damage done to healing. You just have to stack it twice to get the full effect.
  • Crackling Jade Lightning - allows you to attack from ranged and also generates chi.
  • Jab - of course, the default Chi builder for Eminence healing.
  • Tiger Palm - Not only does it give you the default ability of ignoring up to 30% of a target's armor but combined with Teachings of the Monastery it makes Tiger Palm hits work like Maelstrom Weapon giving you a Vital Mists buff. This stacks up to 5 times, reducing mana cost and cast time of Surging Mist by 20% per stack (up to 100%). This is great with the Surging Mist glyph, making it not require a target as well. 
It's important to note that Spinning Crane Kick does both damage and healing within its range. This makes it useful for both forms of healing and especially more so if you can make it hit enemies proc'ing Eminence from both yourself and your statue.(My mistake here, it does not proc Eminence. I did read that then forgot about it, TY commenter) Be sure to hit 3 targets to generate Chi on top of that.

Cooldowns play another very vital role in the life of a healer. Knowing when to use Tranquility/Hymn/LoH/Spirit Link has been vital for encounters of the past so knowing the cooldowns available to you and when to use them will make a huge difference in your ability to heal.

Big Cooldowns:
  • Life Cocoon - a 2 minute cooldown that absorbs a massive amount of damage as well as increases HoT healing taken by 50%. This is that single life saving cooldown that could turn a potential tank death into a dead boss. Both reactive and preventative use of this skill can turn the tide of a fight.
  • Revival - 3 minute cooldown, this ability is like the biggest raid cooldowns of the other classes. Not only is it instant, but it also removes ALL harmful debuffs from the raid as well.
  • Zen Meditation - 3 minutes as well but probably won't see as much use as the other two. But still a big group damage reducer from harmful spells.
Mini Cooldowns:
  • Grapple Weapon - yes this is even important to healers. As grappling a "superior" weapon will give you a 5% bonus to healing done.
  • Thunder Focus Tea - at a mere 45 seconds this will double healing done on a Surging Mist or give Uplift its old ability of refreshing all your Renewing Mist spells.
From what I can think of that should give you a good start on healing with the Mistweaver. I just realized I didn't talk about glyphs at all for Brewmaster or Mistweaver so I'll go back through and add those as well here in the next few days.

2 comments:

  1. Spinning Crane Kick and the L30 talents do not proc Eminence.

    You should mention the L30 talents in the MW guide too, Chi Burst can be nice healing when players are grouped up.

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  2. Thanks for sharing, plz keep going and I am looking forward to your next post.

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