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
Brume enveloppante, reducing it by about 7%.
Finally, the most surprising change,
Regain has it’s spell power reduced by 10%, however, it will now trigger
Maîtrise : Bourrasque de brume 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
Regain 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,
Armes de l’Ordre, and even
Breuvage poussière-d’os now will all increase the healing of
Regain just through their interaction with
Maîtrise : Bourrasque de brume. This will turn
Regain into essentially a full raid heal under certain circumstances. Overall a great change to our traditional raid cooldown.
The mana cost reduction on
Brume enveloppante is just a nice addition. We are already casting
Brume enveloppante 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
Invocation de Yu’lon, le Serpent de jade to trigger
Harmonie céleste a bit easier to handle. You will still want to utilize a mana cooldown like
Thé de mana during
Invocation de Yu’lon, le Serpent de jade, but you will save more mana over the course of a fight now.
Next up we have the damage increases to
Paume du tigre,
Frappe du voile noir,
Coup de pied du soleil levant, and
Coup tournoyant de la grue. 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
Enseignements ancestraux du monastère.
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
Enseignements ancestraux du monastère. This lets us put out even more efficient healing through that legendary. It also has the side effect of just making
Enseignements ancestraux du monastère even stronger. This means none of the new covenant specific legendaries will be played at this point.
Also, with the
Maîtrise : Bourrasque de brume trigger added to
Regain, 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
Regain. We may now want to pre-cast
or get a huge
Breuvage poussière-d’os cast off on a clump of raid members for additional healing on our
Regain. 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.