Hi, I’m Dhaubbs, the Mistweaver and videographer for Big Dumb Guild. I’m also a moderator in the monk discord Peak of Serenity, as well as an occasional spreadsheet tinkerer.
You might also recognize me from an appearance on Finalboss. Check me out on twitter & twitch @Dhaubbs where I wax lyrical about this class.
Gameplay IssuesSo Mistweaver has been in a weird, unintuitive spot for most of legion. The ambitious redesign of the class attempted to retain the flavour of old spells, but just missed the mark on their implementation. The team tried to keep iconic spells such as
Beruhigender Nebel by making it free. The problem with this is in order to balance a free 5 minute channel, mana costs of our other spells needed to be inflated to compensate. As such, Mistweaver is designed around a certain amount of dead time. However
Beruhigender Nebel is too weak to ever be a good cast (if damage on the target is light enough for
Beruhigender Nebel to make a difference, then you should be DPSing anyway) and as such, the correct talent pick for raiding was nearly universally
Geist des Kranichs. This talent at least gives us some HPS return on the forced downtime. Paradoxically, a large number of our spells are only efficient through repeated spam casts, or buffs. Take
Einhüllender Nebel - on its own it’s wildly inefficient, and depends greatly on repeated additional casts to take advantage of it’s 30% healing bonus to break even. Or take
Essenzborn - It gains no benefit from mastery, unless we pump yet more spells into targets with the
Essenzborn HoT (HoT chasing). Finally if that wasn’t enough,
Beleben isn’t an efficient cast unless under the effects of
Manatee or Uplifting Trance. All of the examples above, are situations in which the Mistweaver is forced into casting overcosted spells over and over in order to gain the benefit from their designed interactions, leaving no room for the mitigating factor of
Beruhigender Nebel.
Now I just touched on
Essenzborn and HoT chasing but there’s actually a pretty huge problem with how that whole gameplay system works. So assume the raid takes a big hit, and is knocked down to 50% hp. You cast
Essenzborn, and now the targets you hit with
Essenzborn are no longer the targets most in need of healing because they took the upfront healing of
Essenzborn. So you, as a healer are put in this awful feeling situation of choosing between being a good monk, and being a good healer. Either you heal the targets with
Essenzborn and get the double mastery proc, or you heal the targets most in danger of dying. It’s this bizzare consequence of adding a proactive element to the end of a reactive spell. A better solution in my opinion would be to remove the hot from
Essenzborn, and just make the buff a longer duration, and augment the next heal you cast into that target - be it a shield, or a small healing splash or something. Anything that doesn't punish the player for picking “low hps, high danger” targets
Finally, I’d be remiss if I didn't mention it, but our mastery is an absolute farce. Every other healer has a mastery that multiplicatively affects their spells. Ours is just a flat spell power value, and while that's not bad necessarily, the problem arises from its implementation. Because our mastery only triggers from our single target spells (the overcosted inefficient spells I mentioned), it doesn’t affect 50-70% of our raid HPS. Not any of our golden traits, revival,
Chistoß, RJW, or
Essenzborn which doesn't see a mastery benefit until 6 seconds after casting, if at all.
State of Mistweaver on AlphaMistweaver has seen some pretty healthy changes in terms of design on the Alpha. Quick TL;DR -
Sheiluns Gabe and Effuse are removed,
Beleben’s mana cost was reduced by 20% and now only cleaves onto
Erneuernder Nebel targets, and
Beruhigender Nebel is once again an active spell that costs mana. So let's talk about the star of these changes at the moment:
Beruhigender Nebel. It’s just super efficient now, as well as allowing you to instantly cast
Beleben and
Einhüllender Nebel. In one swoop it went from being a spell meant to bait new players, to a powerful workhorse. For context, if you cast both
Beruhigender Nebel and
Einhüllender Nebel into a target, the
Beruhigender Nebel heals for more than the Enveloping. Now, it’s alpha and numbers are likely to change, but currently,
Beruhigender Nebel is in a spot where it’s allowed to be good. In the past, it needed to be weak since it generated chi directly, then it was used to facilitate spells that generated chi, then finally in legion, it needed to be weak because it was free, and lasted 5 minutes. Now the design space is such that it can be its own thing. Whether this is a good or bad thing remains to be seen, since it does create some weird and potentially awkward GCD usage, but for now it feels pretty good in low level dungeons.
Next we have the removal of our artifact. The loss of our traits didn’t feel too noticeable, with the exception of
Erweiterte Heilung and
Tanzende Nebel, which at times makes us feel
Erneuernder Nebel starved. This is especially important now with the new
Beleben. Pressing
Erneuernder Nebel on cooldown is basically our number one priority now. One interesting interaction to take note of, is the primary target of
Beleben can now also get hit with its “cleave” since the cleave linked to
Erneuernder Nebel. From a design aspect, I enjoy that they’re adding more interactions between our spells, but there are still some wrinkles left to be ironed out. Like mentioned above, now that
Erneuernder Nebel is only 20 seconds, and can’t replicate, there’s a real feeling of ReM starvation, that I imagine is going to get worse in raids. Currently, you can only have 2-3 out at a time without the use of
Donnerfokustee. Not only that, but due to
Erneuernder Nebel jumping from overheals, it’s possible for you to cast
Erneuernder Nebel on a target, only to have an older
Erneuernder Nebel jump in before the new spell completes, causing the
Erneuernder Nebel to “munch” itself. This happens all the time on live, and while annoying, it isn’t a huge deal, but because
Beleben is now tied to it, it's devastating to munch a
Erneuernder Nebel. Hopefully Blizzard adds the ability for
Erneuernder Nebels to have charges on players to avoid this munching, and/or other solutions to address our ReM output
Finally, the removal of Effuse and
Sheiluns Gabe. This is wonderful change. These two spells essentially locked Mistweaver into our terrible mastery. Our mastery, because it’s a flat heal, could never be “good” with cheap/free spells to trigger it. Now the only spells that trigger mastery are either expensive, or on a cooldown. This also has the ancillary benefit of slashing the total number of spells that can trigger our mastery by 40%, which makes it much more likely that Blizzard is going to take a look at it (since having a mastery that can only be triggered by 3 spells is a pretty big meme). I’ve got a lot more to say here but I'm running out of space, so I’ll just conclude by saying I’m pleased with the changes, they still need work, and some polish, but I’m excited for the direction Blizzard is going.
