Do you guys plan on doing a segment for Mages? I feel like Mage, all three specs are in a really bad place right now looking at Alpha footage. Hard to say if you aren't currently playing, but so far Mages look like they are losing even more utility and gaining nothing in return. I want to play my Mage going into Shadowlands, but it's not looking promising.
Sums up the situation pretty well, I would've put more emphasis on Essence Font being an issue in raids however. Having basically 30% of your healing come from a button press that requires no thought makes the spec very boring in general. It becomes even more of an issue when talenting into RJW, where it's then literally 50% of your healing being untargeted while requiring minimal thinking.
yep seems about right - funny that WW has even less changes than MW.I really don't see how they can mess it up -this- badly, even this early into the alpha. Monks have literally 0 cool stuff back and are butchering the play-style by virtually keeping it the same as it is in BfASure, it's Alpha, but the problem w/ a lot of these specs isn't the lack of old abilities (even though they legit haven't given us anything back besides lame asf celestials that nobody really wants to use) it's literally changing everything about the class, see WoD & MoP for examples. I really hope to see major changes in the future, ESPECIALLY for the talent tree, although I don't have many hopes considering the ONE new talent WW has received thus far is "Dance of Chi-Ji" which is an RNG azerite trait we have, which... why? WW isn't an RNG spec, the one thing RNG about it is the free proc on blackout kick, which doesn't change your entire rotation or suddenly make you do ridiculous damageso yep very cool, maybe if they re-add old abilities that matter, go back to WoD talent tree choices, change CD's and attack power scaling, and a little more, then WW will be saved, but unfortunately sad to see how it's goingOther than that, Shadowlands is looking great, might swap to warrior as a new main since WW is getting abandoned
This spec hasn't felt good, satisfying and exciting to play in a while, I played it since the start of legion and it was nice up until BFA, then it was just ruined, all of its playstyles are so boring to play right now, it doesn't look like they're changing much... Guess I'll stick to holy paladin as my healing main...
I'd like to add to this the Essence Font problem. Simply standing there channelling a 3-second cast (6 seconds if you have selected Upwelling, which will likely be the play in early Shadowlands because of a lower secondary stat budget making Rising Mist feel worse) is not fun. In fact, I'd argue just AFK'ing for 6 second every 30 seconds simply because it does most throughput is unhealthy for the specialization as a whole. It dulls gameplay a lot. Mastery double proccing on targets with your Essence Font HoT effects is a solid interaction (and the only good thing about Mastery at that), but due to your group already being near full health in a raid environment after a 6-second channel you can hardly make use of that. And even if you can make a bit of use out of it, you'll overheal a fair bit. You can only make use of this interaction if you pre-cast it before a big damage event, but due to Essence Font's power being so heavily frontloaded (a whopping 80% is attributed to the direct heals) you're wasting a ton of healing by doing that. A solution would be to shift Essence Font's power into the HoT portion of the spell so pre-casting it feels less punishing.I hope that they'll get Monk right for once. I really liked the MoP and WoD iterations of Mistweaver when we still had Chi and would really love for that mechanic to come back. Adding Essence Font in the first place in Legion was a mistake in my opinion, for me the spec really started going downhill from there.
It would be fun if mastery was changed to something like, a % to make an healing orb appear each time you heal someone with a maximum of healing orb available at the same time obviously.
Unfortunately, minus the covenant ability section, almost the same exact post could have been made halfway through BFA beta. There are so many longstanding grievances like CDs that don't feel good to press at all, wishy-washy commitments to Fistweaving, a nonsensical mastery that clashes with the rest of the kit, abilities being nerfed simply because WW has them, and the ghost of Healing Spheres with all of their problems haunting the spec. It drowns out the new issues brought by the new expansion to keep bringing up problems that have been around for 8 years now, but you can't exactly give up and not mention them. For example, the fact that Bonedust Brew exists and is supposed to be a cool and interesting ability when its design makes absolutely no sense is given a small fraction of attention compared to these old issues. This is an ability that gives other abilities a chance to be replicated on targets in the area, lasts a short amount of time, and is on the GCD. Forget the numbers, say it's something numerically pretty powerful like a 50% chance to do 100% of the same healing/damage. Haha oops, the tank died because I wanted to use my covenant ability and then double up on a big heal and it "missed" twice in a row so I got 2 spells worth out of 3 GCDs. At best it's a slightly different version of Healing Rain that sticks to people it hits, at worst it's bait that gets your group killed for trying to use it every minute. It's a terribly boring ability for WW and BrM too so it just needs a full rework.Weapons of Order on the other hand, is so busted it's not even funny. If the mana cost is ever really an issue (select raid bosses), then you will just rein in your mana expenditure outside of it because its concept is just insane. Essence Font is already one of the strongest healing abilities in the entire game so a CD that just reads "get ~2x base Mastery and make EF heal more for 30 seconds" on a 2 minute cooldown is absolutely nuts. The sheer flexibility of this cooldown is what makes it such a strong design, because you can pump more mana into the window to make it heal as much as it possibly can (including mastery-buffed double Gusts) or you can be more conservative and just make it an efficient use of mana rather than a big bursty cooldown. It fills the toolkit niche that has been missing from MW for its whole existence. I won't even go in to how insane this ability will be in M+, assuming of course they do something about Door of Shadows being the way that it is.Speaking of cooldowns, I don't know why they made something like Weapons of Order give a flat mastery buff but Yu'lon still does quite literally nothing but randomly heal some people for a pathetic amount. It's like they know exactly how to make a good and interesting MW cooldown, but refuse to apply any of that knowledge to MW's actual kit. It's truly baffling.
Thank you for this article. I hope you guys do one of these for every healer.
You've been top tier for years now, it's time to give space to other classes
I realize it wasn't a particularly popular talent, but I really miss Zen Pulse from Legion. It's replacement was lacking and the other talents in the row are as boring now as they were then. I always felt it was as useful as it was fun to drop on a tank in a dungeon. Would love to see it return.
I don't agree with the tangent on Mana Tea, I think being able to cast it while channeling Soothing Mist (The same as Thunder Focus Tea works), would be the best change for the ability, and would help facilitate that feeling of empowering.
Removed
Mistweaver has always felt janky, the dps abilities feel token and flat, especially the 123 teachings. I really enjoyed the positional yuolon vomiting and aspects of WoD and legion fistweaving. I think an aoe builder talent option might be funner. It'd be nice if the new yuolon vomit wasn't smart.One day mist will have it's disc moment