I recently updated with the beginning of my Monk guide and on a second and third read through I realized it wasn’t up to par with what I wanted to put out for everyone. I am very sorry to everyone reading. In my excitement and rush to get it finished, I didn’t proofread it well enough and it isn’t what I wanted. I’m going to take it down, rework it and put it up again soon. I’m still working on the spells article and that will be up soon too.
Again, I am very sorry.
Vibram
The tier 14 set bonuses have come out in the last beta patch and I have to say I’m a lot disappointed. Not in the flavor of the bonuses, intro tiers have always been pretty basic in what they do and I think that works well. We’re still adjusting to what we can do and having our two piece return mana is fine with me. It’s the 4 pc that bothers me.
Mistweaver Monk 4pc as it currently stands is a bonus jump to our Chi Wave. Now, I love Chi Wave. I love it so much I named my blog after it. I use it in my Windwalker leveling spec as a quick self heal. And, even though right now I’m not using it, I’ll be using it situationally on live and in raids. My problem with this bonus is that it takes away our talent choice. In case it was a change some one missed, Chi Wave got moved from being baseline for MW Monks to a level 30 talent a few patches back. I was saddened by that. So if our 4pc is based on an optional talent then, it loses either it’s optionality or we don’t get a 4pc set bonus.
What I really think is that this is a holdover from Chi Wave being baseline and won’t go live. We’ll see though
I have finally hit level 90 on Vibmonk. Which means it’s time to start raid testing and a whole new round of posts! I’m currently working on a series of guides, the first of which is an introduction in the form of a FAQ. I’ll also be doing a talent overview, gearing guide for tier 14 raids and a stat analysis. But for now I’m going to enjoy flying around and exploring the continent from above.
I’ve been kicking around the idea for a while of live streaming or at least recording some boss fights from a Monk healer perspective. With raid testing in full swing and me hopefully hitting 90 this weekend, I’m going to start live streaming at least for some guidies so we can get a head start on Mists Raiding. I’ll post details here and on our guild website when we get that set up. Or you can always look for Vibram (me), Shotul or Lillhianna on Bloodscalp US if you want more info.
Today is more of a WoW related rant than Monk information, but it’ll be an opening into how I think about changes and why I don’t panic about everything.
When I stared WoW I was pretty much terrible. I was spec’d horribly and used any gear I could. This was of course the time when you could find gear with Agility and Spirit on it, it was leather so I wore it. My Rogue was awful. My warlock wasn’t much better until I started looking for guides. The first place I looked was the WoW Warlock forums (I was also using Thottbot back then) and I found a pretty awesome guide written that helped me learn to play. But on the BC era Warlock forums I also found people who literally thought that the world was ending and Warlocks would be completely unplayable in the next patch. And as new as I was to finding WoW information, I believed them. I was genuinely afraid that Blizz’s balancing of a PvP issue would kill my raiding.
When the patch came out I dreaded the download already thinking about starting a new Rogue. I started playing and found out that the trolls and hypochondriacs on the WoW forums we’re wrong. My warlock was just as fun as he had been the day before and was just as fun for two years until I started healing. My Resto Shaman was what killed my enjoying my Warlock. It was nothing Blizz did, I just found something I enjoyed more.
The moral of this story is that I learned not to over react when I read patch notes, especially on beta, I try to think about what could be the reasons for it and what the outcome could be. I saw the patch notes several hours yesterday before I made my post. I digested it and thought about it from as many angles as possible. I’m still not 100% convinced it was a good balance but I’ll see when I get back into an instance later.
I was prompted to write this by an experience I had on beta last night where another MW Monk said that we were getting over nerfed and would suck now. I got offended. If you’re enjoying a class and it gets balanced on one or two spells, you’ll still enjoy it and you’ll figure out how adjust to the changes.
The only time in recent memory that I started getting angry was in Cata with the buff consolidation and my totems got useless. I set my raid group up so well we had every buff and my totems were over written by the Death Knight, Mage and Boomkin. I was dropping only my Healing Stream Totem…
When I see what the change is like healing I’ll update with how it feels, but for now that’s all I got.
One of the things I have really tried hard to not do has been to comment on every change to Mistweaver Monks in beta for the simple reason that it is beta. Nothing is set in stone and things change constantly. Jade Forrest was completely taken out of the game and redone, a fact I’m more than a little excited about because it means I’ll get to see it new for live, so I don’t want to get my or anyone else’s hopes up on anything that may change in the next week. I didn’t even say anything when Chi Wave went from baseline for MW to a talent (it has and I’m sad). But right now I’m going to vent a little.
In the current (well, upcoming) beta build, Soothing Mist has had it’s healing reduced by approximately 50%. It is right now healing for 41096-47744 over 8 seconds. WoWHead’s patch notes have it reduced to 20552-23872 over 8 seconds. This is both a really big change and a moderate one. Right now Soothing Mists is getting two uses. We use it as our method of direct healing and it is cast from our Jade Serpent Statue at the same time. We get two Soothing Mists for the price of one. Which, with the spell at 40k (80K from us casting and the statue) is a large amount of healing. So with it reduced we are healing for still 40k total. In a raid or boss environment it’s not a HUGE loss but still more than I think we need to be hit with.
The big hurt I see from it is on trash pulls. I tend to do more direct ranged healing on trash than I do on bosses but because of the CD on Jade Serpent Statue I can’t drop it every pull.
This has been a frustration of mine for a while. It could be because I’ve been playing a Shaman for too long but I want to be able to place my statue any time I want!
Overall this doesn’t look to be “game breaking” because it wasn’t the only heal that got “nerfed” (healers don’t get nerfed, we get balanced): Chi Wave took a hit and so did Zen Sphere. It makes me think that Monk healing is a little high than it should be. This is beta though so we are here to test and test I shall!
Tomorrow I’m hoping to post about my talent choices and what “build” I’m currently using.
I finally got to heal another instance, life has calmed down enough that I can play semi regularly and can continue the grind to 90 (I finally dinged 89 this morning). I ran Mogu’Shan vaults, which I hadn’t done in over a month. Heck, I hadn’t healed in over a month, and it went incredibly smoothly. I had an angry German tank (not sterotyping, he was both angry and German and a tank) who liked to macro spam so we knew exactly what CD he was using but we didn’t wipe and no one died on a boss that didn’t stand in anything.
My goal in the instance was to try to heal the way that Ghostcrawler described in a blue post over a month ago (yes, it’s been that long since I got to test anything). I used Roll frequently to get up close to the action and, as I like to tell DPS to do, punch the boss in the face. A lot. And I healed doing it. I keep Renewing Mists up constantly (I glyphed it to keep ranged healed when I was away from them) and it kept the group topped off when I wasn’t directly healing them. It is a nice change of pace in healing style from standing back and keeping everyone alive. Which I did also.
There were times when DPS healing just didn’t seem to be viable due to boss mechanics (specifically the last boss with all the AoE damage that surrounds the boss), which was easily adjusted to by Rolling back out and using Soothing Mist on one target while my trusty Serpent Statue healed another player. For years I hav eloved Shaman totems, but Serpent Statue kicks the poop out of them. Depending on what I’m doing it either radiates my healing or directly heals someone. Best. Totem. Ever.
Monk healing to me feels very instinctual and fun. I’m still loving it and getting impatient to start it on live. Speaking of live, I left Bear Patrol to start a new guild with several friends that I have been playing with for years and we are looking for more awesome people to join us in progression in Mists. Check us on on Bloodscalp, ask for Shotul or Vibram in Mutinous.
That’s about all I got for today, but I’ll be back soon and more often.
In case it hasn’t been terribly obvious I have been gone for a little while, life took an expected stressful turn. I was living in Louisville KY and worked in one of the top restaurants there and we had the KY Derby in town. 1400 people fed over 5 days, it was great. But right after it lead to my next stressful event, I moved a good way across the country to be with a woman I met in WoW.It’s pretty awesome and I’m stoked. But I’ll be back hopefully more often with Monk observances. I’ve been watching patch changes and everything looks to be mostly balancing. I haven’t seen anything too major that is class changing. Blizz said recently that they see two very different styles of Monk playstyle that use different spells in the toolkit. I kind of see that, but I disagree with what spells both are using. I like the melee oriented healing, but I still have been using Soothing Mists and Surging at the same time.
I’ll be doing a more in depth post about it soon, life is calling. I am very glad to be back.
Vibram
Another new patch hit today, more changes including talents! Coincidentally, I had finished my post on the LAST patch so it’ll be a little while longer before that post goes up and I’ll discuss talents because we got some new ones (that I actually like!)
A new patch hit beta servers yesterday and it brought some nice tuning to Monk healing. Mana regen is mostly up, AoE healing is a little better, the terrible bug of not being able to see who has Renewing Mists on them has gone away and the Mana cost of Jab has been reduced! All should be well!
But it isn’t, the aspect of Monk healing I’ve been most excited about still isn’t working as it should be. Jab, while significantly lower in Mana isn’t doing enough damage to make the heal worth it. Jab costs 3% of base Mana (4,800 Mana at 87) but only heals for half the damage it causes. So it’s healing for right around 1k HP. I still can’t punch things in the face to make my group feel better. I think an easy solution would be to increase the healing it does to 200% of the damage done. It’ll keep the heal lowish, not increase our damage done (which is one of Blizz’s concerns, that Monk healing with do too much damage and healing at the same time) and let us use Jab as a way to generate Chi faster.
Tomorrow, well at a normal hour, I’ll be posting a real review of the changes and what they mean for us at the moment.
Chi Wave 