[Feedback] Mistweaver Round 2

#1 - Feb. 14, 2016, 5:47 a.m.

Inspired by Totalchai's many great feedback posts, i'll be sharing concerns I have for mistweaver moving forward.

1. Fistweaving

This build, with the introduction of Rising Thunder and Spirit of the Crane, has not only brought fistweaving back from the dead, but returned it to a state similar to 5.1 fistweaving. As a lover of the zealweaving/jab jab uplift playstyle, I'm extremely happy about this. This playstyle adds a lot of decision making back to the class, on top of speeding up the rotation.

However, with the re-introduction, I have some concerns with it's continued viability.

1) Will fight mechanics allow mistweaver to safely stand in melee without causing major problems?

1b) If mistweaver on most fights cannot stand in melee all the time, will this talent be superior in terms of hps compared to the other options simply because it's more difficult to stand in melee?

2) Fistweaving talents in general seem to be going against the idea of the rework to monk. Is this just going to be balanced like glad stance, or will this actually be a legit way of playing mistweaver?

2. Sheliuns Gift

As mentioned in other threads, this spell is mostly redundant with TFT-effuse/TFT-EnM. A rework to this ability is necessary, or at the very least, make it proc mastery.

3. Life Cocoon

Again, as mentioned in other threads, this spell has always been extremely weak and mistweaver continues to suffer because of it.

Other threads have mentioned reworking into in a secondary raid cd, just to give the class utility (which is something we lack).

4. Essence Font

This spell has a number of issues.

1) It's far too situational. You can literally only cast this spell when the entire raid has taken damage, making it difficult to always get full benefit out of. This is mainly due to the HoT not stacking when multiple bolts hit the same person.

An idea I had to fix EF and keep its role as a raid wide AoE heal, would be to limit it to a cooldown, and lower it's target cap slightly (down to 10-12 seems reasonable). This would remove the "noob-trap" of spamming this spell, and force the class to focus on vivify as a raid healing tool, and using EF to support that.

2) It has zero artifact support. Seriously every other class with a big ticket AoE heal has some modifiers in the artifact to increase it's output. Light on your feet should be reworked into some form of increase to EF healing. The class does not need more movement speed increases when we already have roll, mist walk, and transcendence.

5. Utility

Since I just talked about utility I might as well bring it up. I know this has been discussed to death in other threads by myself, and other monks, but it is an extremely important issue. We lost basically all the good utility the class had in 6.2. Fistweaving, LoH Revival, interrupt, solo soaking, ToD, and melee immunity.

All those things together made the class extremely strong outside of it's healing, and with those things gone, a question we all have on our minds, why bring a mistweaver? I do not believe tiger's lust is on the same level as utility like wind rush or AV, especially when a class like priest can easily cover tiger's lust whilst bringing their own powerful utility.

I'm well aware now that rising thunder exists, mistweaver does have some form of utility with free healer dps. But if it's difficult to consistently be in melee due to mechanics, or if the talent is worse hps wise compared to the other two, than it might not be a thing to consider as monk utility.

Please consider adding some form of unique utility to mistweaver.

Sigma

Game Designer

#12 - Feb. 19, 2016, 3:39 a.m.

The goal of Spirit of the Crane and Rising Thunder is to enable a playstyle that incorporates melee attacks while healing, for those who desire it (note that Holy Paladins have some similar ablilities and talents, and much of this discussion applies to them as well). We intend for you to be able to use these abilities naturally in dungeon and raid content, without being unfairly punished for being in melee range. However, the Mistweaver situation in Warlords, where the spec is never targeted by a wide range of abilities (even though, the vast majority of the time, it has no need for such treatment) is not one we're happy with. Our goal is to be more judicious about exactly which encounter abilities, if targeted at Mistweavers or Holy Paladins, would preclude playing the spec as intended.

For example, a Chain Lightning or Void Zone targeted at a random player with no warning will wipe or seriously disrupt the group if ever targeted at a person in a melee clump. If you can get targeted by it, there is no option but to avoid being in melee at any time during the encounter. Mistweavers and Holy Paladins should not be targeted by these sorts of abilities.

On the other hand, imagine a debuff that requires you to move away from other players for a short time or move to a certain location. In many cases, we exempt melee DPS from such abilities not because it would wipe the raid, but merely because reducing their effectiveness to near-zero for many seconds would be overly frustrating. We are much less concerned about asking Mistweavers or Holy Paladins to respond to these kinds of mechanics, because they can still use most of their abilities and be reasonably effective while briefly out of melee. In these cases they'd simply be handling the same mechanics that other healers were required to handle.

In summary, choose these talents on alpha like any others and use them as you'd expect, and feel free to report any situations where doing so causes problems that you have no way to avoid.

------------

A few other things:
--We are planning to revise Sheilun's Gift, as we agree it is rather bland.
--Essence Font should be reasonably effective on as few as 6 targets. Tuning is still in progress as always, but the current version should slightly exceed unbuffed Vivify in terms of throughput and efficiency at around that amount (and if not, we'll take a look at that). It will only get relatively stronger from there as the number of targets increases.

Sigma

Game Designer

#24 - Feb. 24, 2016, 6:08 a.m.

Essence Font, as mentioned, should already not be too weak (roughly matching Vivify) when there are 5 targets to heal. But that might not be enough to make it interesting in a 5-player setting--we can move some healing from the HoT to the initial heal to shore it up there. It's possible the HoT causes the spell's use to be poorly messaged, even though it's quite a large heal on 5-6 targets (the aforementioned change would make it closely comparable to Wild Growth). If tinkering with the numbers doesn't succeed in making its usage intuitive, a cooldown is an option in lieu of the HoT--but that would reduce its flexibility, and the current advantage it has on large numbers of targets (and its uniqueness as well).

While there's been a lot of positive feedback on Rising Thunder, I've seen a lot of intimations that it's overpowered (usual caveat that tuning should not be the foremost concern at this stage regardless). I'm curious if this is based on evaluations of the talent that are 1) in the absence of artifact traits affecting Thunder Focus Tea, 2) after the nerf to Renewing Mist, and 3) taking into account the mana cost of Rising Sun Kick. Any theorycraft on RT in those conditions would likely by the most useful.

Sigma

Game Designer

#26 - Feb. 24, 2016, 7:14 a.m.

02/23/2016 10:37 PMPosted by Totallite

I don't think I've seen much theorycrafting on RT without the TFT traits. Typically when most of us talk about things it's either all traits we can access or none of them, and on this build you can have both Dancing Mists and Harmony and Focus which enables a kind of silly ReM spam that in turns allows a ton of buffed Vivifies. These aren't really relevant in playtesting because 5 mans don't have enough people for those ReMs to add extra targets.

Right, sorry, "without the TFT traits" meant "without any traits" would be fine too. Just want to isolate discussion about RT from the interactions with Celestial Breath and Focus and Harmony.

02/23/2016 10:37 PMPosted by Totallite

Rising Thunder is overpowered in a talent-selection sense that it blows Focused Thunder out of the water (one extra TFT'd spell per 30 seconds or an extra TFT spell even before artifacts.. basically whenever the hell you want) as well as Mana Tea (mana savings of TFT-Vivify).

That's the question--does it so obviously dominate Focused Thunder, when it's the gain of 1 TFT buff every 30s, at the cost of 3 GCDs, a nontrivial amount of mana, and a range requirement.

Kaivax

Community Manager

#38 - Feb. 26, 2016, 7:15 p.m.

Locking this thread.

Please continue to discuss this spec in our new Legion Class Feedback forum.

Thank you!