Ohhhh Boy! We were lost, and now we have been found. Yes, Blizzard has found Mistweaver Monks and provided us with some substantial changes. So let’s go through what those changes are, explain why they have potentially been made, and how does all of this impact the overall spec in 9.1.
First up the changes, in rapid fire:
Blizzard increase our damage across the board, with buffs to the following spells:
We also received changes to the mana cost of
Bruma Envolvente, reducing it by about 7%.
Finally, the most surprising change,
Reviver has it’s spell power reduced by 10%, however, it will now trigger
Maestria: Rajada de Brumas on all targets hit. We get another spell added to our Mastery triggers.
So now that we got the changes out of the way, what do these mean? The
Reviver change is a clear targeted buff to our classic raid cooldown. Rather than give it just a straight spell power buff, they added another mastery interaction to the spec. This looks to be aimed at just both making mastery better in terms of a desirable stat and also give us additional interactions with our Mastery.
HoT’s,
Armas de Ordem, and even
Cerveja Pó de Osso now will all increase the healing of
Reviver just through their interaction with
Maestria: Rajada de Brumas. This will turn
Reviver into essentially a full raid heal under certain circumstances. Overall a great change to our traditional raid cooldown.
The mana cost reduction on
Bruma Envolvente is just a nice addition. We are already casting
Bruma Envolvente much more often than we have in previous expansions so it is great to be able to use it even more often. While not a large change in how we will use the spell, it does make casting it during
Invocar Yu'lon, a Serpente de Jade to trigger
Harmonia Celestial a bit easier to handle. You will still want to utilize a mana cooldown like
Chá de Mana during
Invocar Yu'lon, a Serpente de Jade, but you will save more mana over the course of a fight now.
Next up we have the damage increases to
Palma do Tigre,
Chute Blecaute,
Chute do Sol Nascente, and
Chute Giratório da Garça. These are, in a word, great changes. In the current game, where healer DPS is a meaningful metric, pushing our damage higher is always a good thing. We were, in our first iteration of a spec, a melee healer that utilized our damaging abilities to do damage and heal. Buffing these spells reinforces that play style again. At a 10% increase to our 3 single target abilities, this will directly translate to 10% more healing if you are utilizing
Ensinamentos Ancestrais do Monastério.
So what does this mean for Mistweavers moving forward? Are we now the meta healer? In short, no. I do not think the above will greatly shake up the meta at the highest levels, at this time. What I do think it shows is an indication Blizzard may be moving to reinforce our melee play style more. The damage buffs are also a direct buff to
Ensinamentos Ancestrais do Monastério. This lets us put out even more efficient healing through that legendary. It also has the side effect of just making
Ensinamentos Ancestrais do Monastério even stronger. This means none of the new covenant specific legendaries will be played at this point.
Also, with the
Maestria: Rajada de Brumas trigger added to
Reviver, we see another interaction for our mastery, which to be fair, has been absolute trash since its inception in Legion. Again, this doesn’t make Mastery our most desirable stat, but it does make us think a bit before just throwing out
Reviver. We may now want to pre-cast
or get a huge
Cerveja Pó de Osso cast off on a clump of raid members for additional healing on our
Reviver. It again, seems like Blizzard is working to incorporate more things into our kit, and more spells that play off of each other.
All in all, these are really good changes that reinforce our melee style of healing, and offer more chances for our mastery to interact with our kit. They are not crazy enough to push Mistweavers to the top of the healing rankings, but these are really good buffs that only make us more powerful going into 9.1.