With the first season of
The War Within well under way, the developers at Blizzard have been busy preparing for the 20th anniversary of the game with an entire patch dedicated to it! And while the celebration brings with it plenty to do, there's also some significant Mistweaver changes incoming when it goes live to talk about! And while these changes look gameplay defining on the surface, in reality they help to smooth out some of the rough edges present in the toolkit, while also giving some underused abilities new talents to give them strong niches carved out for them.
All Changes for Mistweaver Monk in 11.0.5
There are a handful of new talents added to our specialization tree, along with some older talents being removed or rolled into existing talents with some of the fat trimmed off, and a lot of these changes build on themselves, so we'll take it slow and talk about changes that'll effect all types of Mistweaver players, no matter their preferred playstyle, and narrow it down afterwards.
Ancient Teachings Changes
Ancient Teachings has become a baseline passive for Mistweaver! This type of effect has been a staple of our toolkit in one iteration or another since Mistweaver's inception in
Mists of Pandaria as Eminence, with
Summon Jade Serpent Statue also emanating this damage-to-healing conversion. During the
Legion rework of the specialization, Eminence was removed outright, with only a few talents supporting this sort of playstyle, like Spirit of the Crane or
Rising Thunder, but those talents were competing with others that made it difficult to justify using them. In
Battle for Azeroth's 8.2 patch, the Major Power granted by the
Conflict and Strife Azerite Essence granted us the Way of the Crane PvP talent, allowing us to once again convert our damage on enemies into healing on our allies, though at a steep cost to activate. With that borrowed power system removed going into
Shadowlands, the Runecarving Power
Memory of Ancient Teachings was added and able to be crafted and used right from the start of the expansion, provided you had the materials from
Torghast, Tower of the Damned to craft it, and the item dropped from
Devos in the
Spires of Ascension dungeon. While this
did require you to cast Essence Font and its steep mana cost when you wanted to heal allies with your damage, it was available more frequently and cheaper than Way of the Crane was, so...progress!
In
Dragonflight and its complete talent overhaul though, it simply became a talent point! No more borrowed power, no more steep costs because it could be activated by casting
Jadefire Stomp, which it was connected to, and its only hurdle was the fact that it was in our lowest tier of talents, where the points we wanted to spend were spread thin and there was very little we could do to actually grab it and still heal as much as we needed to in raid encounters—but in Mythic+ it was one of our highest healing abilities because of the consistent cleave we had access to.
With all of that history said and out of the way, in patch 11.0.5,
Ancient Teachings is back to being a passive for all Mistweavers, transferring a very small amount of damage we deal as healing to nearby allies! While
Spinning Crane Kick is still left out of this ability baseline,
Crackling Jade Lightning has been added, giving us a ranged option to contribute to its healing during an encounter. The stronger, limited-duration increase to its conversion rate is still included as a talent, and is now connected to the
Peer Into Peace /
Pool of Mists choice node, as it's now able to be triggered by
Thunder Focus Tea! While solely using
Thunder Focus Tea to activate this will lead to lower uptime on its effect, it does help free up a talent point in the lower third of our talent tree, which is sorely needed for some builds to function. Speaking of...
New, Modified, and Removed Talents
There's some phenomenal changes happening to our talent tree, with talents being merged together, or reworked to be more consistent among all our builds, or some outright removed to make way for more interesting choices.
Ancient Concordance has been removed, but its
Blackout Kick cleave effect has been rolled into
Awakened Jadefire, leaving the increased
Rising Sun Kick reset chance on the cutting room floor. While the cleaving
Blackout Kick hits are at a reduced effectiveness, the baseline damage of
Blackout Kick has been increased, to the point where there's no difference between either Live or PTR version of the ability cleaving and its damage and healing, while being a slight buff in two-target cleave situations. This makes
Awakened Jadefire a single point for all of the increased melee effectiveness we get from
Jadefire Stomp and its underlying talents we get already, freeing up another point for players already taking both underlying
Jadefire Stomp talents to be spent elsewhere.
Dance of Chi-Ji has been moved to a choice node with a new talent, connected to
Celestial Harmony and
Dancing Mists. Along with this change in position, it also procs more frequently per minute and increases the damage of
Spinning Crane Kick more. However, it's now a choice node with an entirely new talent,
Jade Empowerment. This talent turns
Crackling Jade Lightning into an area-of-effect
powerhouse of a spell. When you use
Thunder Focus Tea, you gain an additional buff with no expiration timer on it,
Wild Walkie, which can stack twice. You can then use
Thunder Focus Tea on any spell empowerment and keep this buff, this buff is
not tied to
Thunder Focus Tea, it's only triggered by successfully casting it. And because
Jadefire Teachings is also strengthened by casting
Thunder Focus Tea in this patch, this means the damage-to-healing conversion is buffed further, turning this into a
strong AoE damage and healing cooldown every 30 seconds. Choosing between either of these talents will likely come down to whether you have consistent access to both
Jadefire Teachings—meaning you have
Jadefire Stomp talented—and access to a consistent supply of enemies to damage. If instead multiple enemies come at set intervals that line up with
Thunder Focus Tea, then
Jade Empowerment should pull ahead with
Jadefire Teachings healing.
However, there's a new talent that has turned
Jadefire Teachings into a choice node;
Rushing Wind Kick. This talent replaces
Rising Sun Kick and inherits all of its effects, with one major difference; it can be cast at range. The damage it deals to enemies is split among them, but adds up to one cast of
Rising Sun Kick before the additional enemy scaling effect, though each enemy hit has its own chance to critically strike. Additionally, you don't need an enemy in the cone to cast it, making encounters that have downtime from melee much more consistent. Additionally, after you cast
Rushing Wind Kick, you also gain
Rushing Winds, which increases the healing of all of your
Renewing Mist buffs active for a very brief moment.
The choice node directly underneath
Life Cocoon, choosing between
Nourishing Chi or
Calming Coalescence, has been heavily modified.
Nourishing Chi has been removed and replaced with
Refreshment, a talent that grants you more
Mana Tea stacks while also granting your target a couple stacks of a modified
Healing Elixir; instead of having to be brought below 40% health for them to be used, they only need to be brought below 80% of their health to heal for 15% of their own maximum health. Meanwhile,
Calming Coalescence no longer relies on
Soothing Mist healing events to increase the absorb of
Life Cocoon; it's now a static 80% larger when this is talented, making it absorb slightly more than it had before it was reduced during
The War Within's alpha and beta development.
Smaller and Miscellaneous Changes
While the above sections cover the full scope of changes we're expected to receive once patch 11.0.5 is brought to Live servers, there's some smaller changes happening to the baseline of the specialization that make some talent pathing smoother, or that help PvP players, or just a clarification for players who may not have looked at resources external of the game itself.
The
Revival /
Restoral choice node now connects
directly to our Invoke Celestial choice node, meaning we can decide to not take either
Uplifted Spirits or between
Energizing Brew or
Lifecycles on its choice node in order to grab either
Invoke Yu'lon, the Jade Serpent or
Celestial Harmony, freeing up a potential point in our middle section of talents, depending on how you want to build your Mistweaver talents.
Dome of Mist has been added as a baseline passive to all Mistweavers. It had been a PvP-only talent since
Legion, allowing dispelled
Enveloping Mist buffs to still maintain value, even if it can no longer increase your targets' health bar. With this no longer taking up residence among our three PvP Talent slots, we can now select something more apt.
Finally,
Overflowing Mists has had a single word added to its tooltip that describes how it functions! The tooltip now specifies that it only triggers when targets take
direct damage, which is in line with other Blizzard styling to mean auto-attacks, or at least not damage from any type of attack.
Closing Thoughts
Overall, I'm really excited about these changes! They provide a breath of fresh air into our talents, letting some underused spells come into the spotlight and have niche use cases, while also offering some new interesting choices when you're creating talent builds. Making more decisions on a per-encounter basis will keep this specialization fun and interesting whenever new encounters present themselves. I'm very much looking forward to them!