Mistweaver Talent Builds

Hello, and welcome to the Mistweaver Talent Build discussion where we go over many combinations of talents and how your playstyle should change, as well as reasons for selecting each talent. You can find an explanation of individual talent rows by Anomoly in his Mistweaver Talents article.

Dungeon Healing Build

Mist Wrap – Lifecycles – Invoke Chi’Ji / Summon Jade Serpent Statue –  Focused Thunder

In a dungeon, you are the only healer, so you have to do everything yourself. This will involve plenty of sustained single target or tank healing, which means lots of Enveloping Mist casts. Any time Enveloping Mist enters the conversation on a regular basis automatically makes Mist Wrap and Lifecycles simply the best healing choices. Focused Thunder allows for great flexibility in single target healing or group healing and generally provides more benefit than Upwelling. The difference between Chi’Ji and Statue comes in the flavor of sustained single target healing or bursty group healing, so you should pick the one most appropriate for the affixes/dungeons.

Possible Substitutions

Chi Burst can be subbed in for extra damage when farming lower keys or if DPS presents the limiting factor in very high keys. Upwelling has a niche use to aid burst healing by making the double mastery effect from Essence Font last longer, which may be useful at higher gear levels in very high keys. If you are able to have high melee uptime, you can substitute Focused Thunder with Rising Mist. This allows you to extend all your HoTs to make healing easier, while also giving you the ability to do some damage alongside healing.

Healing in Raids

As mana, target selection, and other healers come into play, talent selection gets vastly more complex. While we won’t be covering the 30, 60, or 75 talent rows here, just keep in mind to pick the best talent for each fight in those rows.

We will be starting at the bottom of the talent tree and working backwards as the 100 and 90 rows are far more impactful than the 15 and 30 rows and the former often dictates the latter.

Upwelling

Upwelling provides incredible power in raids. While we still want to cast Essence Font whenever there are 6+ people who are injured in range and we know it will get its full healing out, sometimes that situation doesn’t come up exactly every 12 seconds. Whenever Essence Font sits off cooldown waiting for the damage to actually happen, Upwelling provides free healing by adding on to the next Essence Font. While it will cap out after 18 seconds of Essence Font being off cooldown, you don’t have to wait for that to use Essence Font as any seconds up to that 18 mark still counts to extend the next Essence Font. The HoT duration increase on Essence Font is a very small part of the talent’s value, but is nice to have.

Upwelling generally overpowers Focused Thunder on every current raid boss, in every difficulty. We will discuss Rising Mist later.

Default Healing Setup

Upwelling – Summon Jade Serpent Statue – Mana Tea – Chi Burst

The above should be your default talent setup going into most raid bosses this expansion. Upwelling, as described above, provides a large power boost to Essence Font. From there, you use Jade Serpent Statue to cover any tank or single target debuff healing. Mana Tea should be used during periods of high raid damage to efficient spam Vivify. The default cast sequence should be Essence Font -> Mana Tea -> Vivify until about 1.5 second left on Mana Tea buff -> Essence Font. That way the final Essence Font gains the 50% mana cost reduction from Mana Tea. Finally, time your Chi Burst casts to pass through the majority of your raid during periods of damage. Remember you can pre-cast Chi Burst so it goes off as the damage hits.

Tank Healing Focused

Upwelling – Summon Jade Serpent Statue – Lifecycles – Mist Wrap

Are your tanks dying? Does someone in your raid still think Paladins are the best tank healers in the game? Would you like to make your tanks immortal while also throwing out the fattest Essence Fonts possible? Are you engaged with Fetid Devourer? If so, this build is for you. The ultra efficient Soothing Mist and Enveloping Mist combination provides consistent, reliable, and very strong healing to any target you want with Lifecycles enabling follow-up Vivifys to deliver even more healing if necessary.

Don’t be fooled though, Essence Font, Renewing Mist, Vivify, and Revival still mean you do a lot of healing to the rest of the raid as well. This is by no means “not a raid healing build” but makes you both the best tank healer in the game and an all around solid raid healer because Essence Font is just that good.

Rising Mist (aka Kickweaving or Fistweaving)

Rising Mist has been buffed in 8.3. The spellpower has been increased and they added 2 seconds to the extension so now each time your Rising Sun Kick, your HoTs are extended by 4 seconds. With this buff, we can now use this talent to ramp up the number of Renewing Mist’s on the raid, to align with larger periods of damage. With 6 or more Renewing Mist’s on the raid, our Vivify’s become extremely efficient.

This build does have certain requirements, regarding your ability to always be in range of something to DPS. It requires you to use Rising Sun Kick on cooldown during your ramp period so if there are mechanics that prevent you from being near an enemy, Upwelling will outclass this build. For a more indepth look, read through the Ability Spotlight.

The Rising Mist Build

Rising Mist – Mana Tea – Chi Burst – Summon Jade Serpent Statue

The playstyle ends up being fairly involved. You need to juggle your ramps and damage, along with understanding boss fight mechanics and the upcoming incoming damage to your raid. If you are not effective in ramping for a boss’s larger damage timings, then you will lag behind the Upwelling build. Again, check out the more indepth guide for a large discussion on talents, essences, and azerite traits.

Again, remember that the goal is to maximize damage and healing during certain parts of the fight, not to maximize Rising Mist healing specifically. If necessary, you do have the option of dropping the Rising Sun Kick plan sometimes if Soothing/Enveloping Mist are needed or if you have to go do a mechanic and can’t Rising Sun Kick something for a few seconds. Just make sure these times are not during your ramp.

Refreshing Jade Wind

Refreshing Jade Wind was not explicitly mentioned in the above descriptions as it can be substituted out in any of the build depending on the fight. Refreshing Jade Wind really excels when there are 2 conditions. Constant AoE damage on the raid, and the raid primarily stacked up. This allows for the full use of the talent.

With that in mind, when the fight does cater to this type of damage and group movement (think Stormwall Blockade in BoD), Refreshing Jade Wind can be used.

The Isle of Misfit Talents

There is only a single talent not mentioned above in any of the builds because they just aren’t very good in Mythic+ or Mythic Raids. Let’s shed some light on why:

Chi Wave – The worst misfit, Chi Wave sadly lacks healing potential in every situation. It is also incredibly random and has little damage potential as well. It’s just a bad talent that isn’t good at anything and is outclassed by its competition in every way.