Okay. A lot happened this build, mainly centered around talent reshuffling, major Thunder Focus Tea changes, and some spell balancing, as well detailing some of the emerging raid healing builds from testing.

Changes This Build

• Revival buffed from 180% Spell power per target to 200% Spell power.
• Soothing Mist now has a chance per tick to heal the target with Mastery: Gust of Mists.
  • After a bit of testing, it appears that this is on a deck system of 8 ticks with one Mastery hit in the deck. So it guarantees one Mastery heal per full channel, with the chance of two Mastery heals if you end a channel early and the Mastery heal of the next deck is close to the front.
• Thunder Focus Tea has a lot of changes, so let’s take a closer look.
  • Enveloping Mist is no longer instant, but its instant heal has increased from 130% Spell power to 250% Spell power.
  • Renewing Mist empowerment no longer gives an extra Renewing Mist, it instead increases the duration of the casted Renewing Mist by 10 seconds.
  • Essence Font empowerment is removed.
  • Rising Sun Kick is added and, when empowered, reduces its cooldown by 9 seconds.
• Vivify healing on Renewing Mist targets increased from 45% Spell power to 60% Spell power.
• Diffuse Magic and Tiger’s Lust have swapped positions again, making the Level 30 Talents all mobility and Level 75 Talents all defensives.
• Lifecycles‘ mana reduction for each buff increased from 20% mana cost to 25% mana cost reduced.
• Rising Mist HoT heal decreased from 20% Spell power to 15% Spell power.
• Some tooltips have been touched on a bit, so here’s some explanations:
  • Surging Mist was added as a talent line in Soothing Mist‘s spell description. Surging Mist is an Honor Talent that takes Effuse‘s old spell ID.
  • Rising Sun Kick was changed from a charge system to a flat cooldown. This is likely just a remnant from when Pool of Mists was added in Warlords of Draenor, which gave three charges to Renewing Mist and Rising Sun Kick. This change pretty much removes any likelihood of having that added back.
  • If you notice that a new aura has been added to the Mistweaver core passive, it’s not new. It hadn’t had a name tied to the aura, but it added 2 seconds to Rising Sun Kick‘s cooldown. Windwalker’s Rising Sun Kick is a 10 second cooldown, and ours is 12 seconds. The 2000 in this case is milliseconds.

Speculation

Revival buff is good. Not much to say about it, except now it’s not that much of a laughing stock in the world of raid-wide CDs, now that it matches the base power of Discipline Priest’s Luminous Barrier.

The combination of Soothing Mist‘s Mastery interaction and Thunder Focus Tea – Enveloping Mist‘s incredible burst healing potential is absolutely massive. For single target healing, you’ll likely Soothing Mist -> Thunder Focus Tea (which doesn’t break the channel and is off the GCD) -> Enveloping Mist. From there, you can keep channeling Soothing Mist for its now buffed healing, which also comes with the benefit of a potential Mastery heal (buffed by Enveloping Mist, of course). It would be a very niche use in raids, but in dungeons, healing up a Grievous target? Hoo boy.

The Renewing Mist Thunder Focus Tea interaction really strips away the reactionary burst potential of Vivify, but it does set you up for a longer period of more Renewing Mists on the group, instead of plateauing amounts of Renewing Mists every 30 seconds. However, with the Vivify cleave buffs in place this build, the sustain from it as a group wide heal should be noticeable. Also, the increased healing from Thunder Focus Tea – Enveloping Mist, as well as the increased duration on Renewing Mist in tandem is powerful for a nice combo of single target burst healing and sustained group damage.

The Essence Font removal from Thunder Focus Tea really hurts the reactivity of Upwelling, especially since it synced perfectly with Thunder Focus Tea‘s 30 second cooldown. Going from a 2 GCD channel to a forced 4 GCD channel would allow more overhealing on the cast as it continues along, much like the issues Invoke Chi-Ji had. However, in the situations in a raid where you’d take Upwelling over Rising Mist, the damage should be sever enough that you’ll get a lot of value out of the talent still.

Rising Sun Kick being added to Thunder Focus Tea is a huge buff for Rising Mist. Being able to double Rising Sun Kick after an Essence Font pretty much negates the nerf to Rising Mist this build, at the cost of Thunder Focus Tea.

The talent changes are pretty much expected. Having that slider between Defensive and Mobile was nice to have, but would have been hard to balance around. The changes to Lifecycles are pretty substantial for an emerging healing build, which I’ll detail below.

Emerging Builds

The exciting thing about raid testing is seeing how all the class balancing comes together that thrust more niche builds into the spotlight. Remember that this is beta and things are liable to change.

Standard Raid Healing

For your generic raid-wide healing, you’ll want to take Chi Burst, Spirit of the Crane, Invoke Chi-Ji, the Red Crane (a majority of the time), and Rising Mist. This is a very GCD-capped healing style, as all downtime should be spent DPSing for mana through Spirit of the Crane. You’ll want to Essence Font as group-wide damage happens, Rising Sun Kick afterwards for Rising Mist healing, potentially with Thunder Focus Tea for extending HoTs and the healing that comes with Rising Mist. You’ll still keep Renewing Mist on cooldown for when you want to dump mana with Vivify.

The main weaknesses of this build revolve around being in melee of something. If there’s any downtime where nothing is in range and healing needs to be done, this build starts losing some of its appeal. In these admittedly niche cases, Mana Tea and Upwelling could see some use.

Tankysitting (Tank Babysitting)

Mistweaver is one of the best healers for sustained single target healing, while also healing the raid through longer casts of Essence Font. This build rose from active mitigation nerfs to tank classes, particularly in encounters with heavy magic damage. It focuses healing on one target at a time, very efficiently. Talents in this case would be Mist Wrap, Lifecycles, Summon Jade Serpent Statue, and Upwelling. You’ll spend a majority of your time with this build channeling Soothing Mist onto the target, using instant Enveloping Mists and Vivifys on the target to keep them healthy, keeping Renewing Mist going for any incidental cleave healing (but mainly so that Vivify will heal the target for both the single target and cleave heal). Jade Serpent Statue is more healing to the target, while Upwelling allows your Essence Fonts to be more efficient when cast, along with the added benefit of longer Essence Font HoTs (potentially on your single target).