Dragonflight Mistweaver – 10.2

About The Author

Hello everyone! My name is Sweggles, holder of the world first Mythic Jaina 2 man and Mistweaver fanatic. I raid in the guild Might on Zul’jin. This Dragonflight guide is intended for those who wish to maximize their performance on Mistweaver Monk in raid. It has been updated for patch 10.2.

Table of Contents

1. 10.2 Changes
2. Amirdrassil Tier Set
3. Playstyle Changes
4. The return of Essence Font
5. Playstyle
6. Improving Shaohao Play
7. Builds
8. Frequently Asked Questions
9. Final Notes

What changed going into 10.2

A lot has changed for Mistweaver Monks going into 10.2. Here are the most notable ones (it’s not a comprehensive list):

• Vivify and Invigorating Mist healing increased by 12% but Invigorating Mist now has reduced healing beyond 5 targets (“square root” scaling).
• Enveloping Breath heals for 20% less and hits 5 targets instead of 6. 
• Clouded Focus now stacks up to 2 times for 15% and no longer increases the healing of Vivify or Enveloping Mist before the application of the first stack.
• Misty Peaks proc chance was reduced to 2.5/5% from 5/10% (effectively killing the talent). 
• Essence Font healing increased by 40% but now only fires 15 bolts instead of 18. 
• Expel Harm healing increased by 550% but is no longer able to be used on allies through Soothing Mist 
• The season two 2pc no longer grants mana.

So we end up with a mix of buffs, nerfs and quality of life changes.

Amirdrassil Tier Set

Our Season 3 tier set is very unique and provides both incredible HPS and an interesting playstyle shift. Overall you can expect 8-16% healing from the set.

• Two pc: Our 2pc applies Chi Harmony to targets that receive a direct cast or application of Renewing Mist for 8 seconds. The buff increases their healing taken by 50%. Note here that Chi Harmony only applies to either direct casts or applications via Rapid Diffusion. No bounces, Tear of Morning or Dancing Mists interactions.
• Four pc: Our 4pc accumulates 20% of the total healing done to targets with our 2pc Chi Harmony buff and when it ends or is reapplied it redistributes the healing evenly among all allies with Renewing Mist.

Playing around our tier set

To maximize the value of our set, we want to be casting our direct targeted heals on targets that have Chi Harmony on them. This is a mandatory buff to track on your frames so that you can make sure you are prioritizing them. There are three core ways to play around Chi Harmony:

• Ramping off of a tank/priority target: This is the most self explanatory and you’ll use it most often. Cast Renewing Mist into the target and then press Soothing Mist and spam Vivify. It’s very important to recognize what type of damage your target will be taking. You don’t want to overheal a significant amount so if you identify a target that will take a serious amount of damage in the next 4-8 seconds you can open with an Enveloping Mist as your first post Soothing global.
• Ramping off yourself: Expel Harm was changed in 10.2 to be an incredibly powerful self heal on a short 15s cooldown that does a portion of its total healing as damage. This is really chunky and you can expect 500-1m+ from it so it’s important that we feed this healing into our Chi Harmony buffs. It effectively turns Expel Harm from a single target heal into an AoE heal. Escape from Reality can also be a factor here and you’ll use it in a similar way. Any time you have some downtime during a fight (like on pull) you’ll want to cast Renewing Mist on yourself and then press Expel Harm. It serves three functions:
  • Gets Renewing Mist out.
  • Feeds healing into Chi Harmony.
  • Does a significant amount of damage to the boss (rivaling Rising Sun kick).
• Ramping off a random injured target: You should never really be looking to spam into a target who isn’t taking consistent damage, even if they have Chi Harmony unless it’s during a ramp (discussed more below). Target selection is very important and through the tier you’ll develop a recognition for when someone is about to take heavy damage. This is a very useful skill as a healer. When ramping off a random injured target, cast Renewing Mist onto them and then follow up with either Vivify or Soothing Mist.

An important thing to note about our set is that Chi Harmony applies off Rapid Diffusion which gives us a significant boost to our Celestial HPS as well as only healing those with Renewing Mist. It’s ok to rely on HPS from Chi Harmony but don’t let someone die because you expected them to be healed by it when they didn’t have Renewing Mist.

Other Playstyle Changes in Season 2

Going into 10.2 we’ve seen a lot of changes to Mistweaver though our overall playstyle really has not changed much from 10.1.7. With the buffs to Essence Font we can now incorporate this spell into our kit again, just now with some caveats which I will cover later in the guide.

Mana Tea Rework

Mana Tea has been reworked to encapsulate some of its former glory from previous expansions. This also introduces a new playstyle, focused on managing uptime of Mana Tea and our Aberrus 4 set bonus.

How does the new Tea work?

For every 25,000 mana you spend, you’ll get a stack of Mana Tea. You’ll also have a chance equal to your crit percentage to get an extra stack for free. At any time you can consume your Mana Tea stacks and channel for 0.5 seconds (per stack) to gain 3000 mana per charge and 1 second of 50% mana cost reduction. At the full 20 stacks you’d gain 60,000 mana and 20 full seconds of reduced costs. You can also move while channeling, though with a 40% movement speed penalty. Your channel time is hasted so the higher your haste the faster the channel. That’s quite useful for us because we already have a lot of haste which will make the rotations flow feel much better.

Mana Tea Choice Nodes

We also get a few new / revamped choice nodes attached to Mana Tea.

Lifecycles now grants your Vivify a 20% chance to cause your next Rising Sun Kick or Enveloping Mist to generate a stack of Mana Tea. Similarly, Rising Sun Kick and Enveloping Mist also have a 20% chance to cause your next Vivify to generate a stack of Mana Tea. Lifecycles is excellent at generating Mana Tea stacks and these “free stacks” can also crit to give you another. Lifecycles will be our preferred talent between the two nodes. We’ll discuss what this means for our playstyle further below.

Energizing Brew reduces your channel time and increases mana restored by 20%. This is an alright talent but it falls behind Lifecycles for mana restored which is what we care about most. You can play this talent if you’re looking for an easier way to apply Mana Tea but I wouldn’t recommend it otherwise.

How to play with Mana Tea

We want to be channeling Mana Tea before any sort of serious mana expenditure but the easiest way would be to channel before you press Soothing Mist > Vivify or before you press Essence Font. Most people would naturally want to put Mana Tea with their Celestial, however, both Yu’lon and Chi-Ji grant mana cost reductions to Enveloping Mist which would reduce the effectiveness of Mana Tea’s mana cost reduction. For this reason, if you do decide to combine them, make it a short 1 global drink to apply the cost reduction to the cost of summoning the celestial itself rather than a multiple global channel to cover the entire window.

Otherwise, you will end up with something similar to this where anytime you need to heal you’ll spam out Enveloping Mist/Vivify in your Soothing Mist window (with Clouded Focus) until your Rising Sun Kick or Renewing Mist naturally come off cooldown. You’ll channel Mana Tea for a single global and then cancel to cast Soothing Mist. As a general rule aim to consume 2-3 stacks of Mana Tea at a time and then cancel the channel to go into your normal rotation.

Why Essence Font?

The 40% buff to Essence Font this patch has pushed it all the way back onto our bars and into our rotations. Sort of. Due to the changes to Misty Peaks and Invigorating Mists we are no longer looking to maximize Renewing Mist count at all times. There are actually times when having fewer Renewing Mists out means more overall healing. We won’t delve too deeply into that in this guide but this video reference is available if you want to learn more. These changes allow us to play Upwelling and utilize Thunder Focus Tea with it, similarly to how we played in season one. The key difference is you don’t have Ancient Teachings anymore, nor Faeline Stomp.

How do I know when to press Essence Font? 

You’ll treat Essence Font as a sort of mini cooldown. It’s very good AoE  burst HPS can be used while moving and you should treat it as such and plan around using it at points where you will either be needing a ton of small healing (that Vivify cleave wouldn’t be good at) or if you need to move and heal at the same time. Aim to have Mana tea’s cost reduction up before you press it since it has a high mana cost. Our combination of Upwelling and Mana Tea makes it affordable.

Do I play Font of Life with Upwelling? 

You can in scenarios where the cooldown reduction would put your Essence Font into a better timing with damage patterns. On average you will get around ~7 seconds of cooldown reduction on your Thunder Focus Tea when you channel Essence Font meaning if the boss has damage windows better suited for these timings then you can play Font of Life. If this is not the case however, you will just play the alternatives as Font of Life is not otherwise better than them.

Can I play Ancient Teachings now?

If you’d like. It’s less HPS than Clouded Focus and it’s a weaker healing profile for progression since your spot healing will be a lot worse. The 10.2 tier set will also contribute quite a lot less healing than it would in Clouded Focus builds since you can’t target who is hit by Ancient Teachings.

How do I play?

How do we use Clouded Focus

Clouded Focus is at its most effective in any situation where you’d want to press Vivify or Enveloping Mist onto a single target to either gain more healing via Invigorating Mists or to gain more healing from Chi Harmony. A standard cast pattern (with 4pc) might look something like this:

Inside Celestial

Outside of your Celestial

Outside of your Celestial you want to use Clouded Focus wherever it makes sense. If the raid is about to take big damage and you have 5+ Renewing Mists out then channel Soothing Mist on a tank or someone in danger and cast as many Vivifys as you feel is necessary to keep the raid healthy. You can continue to use any instant Vivify casts as you would now but if you’re going to cast more than a single Vivify at once then channel Soothing Mist first. Due to Clouded Focus nerfs you can just cast Vivify by itself without Soothing Mist if you’re only casting one. Be careful not to blow through all of your mana.

Consider the following priority list outside of cooldown windows:

1. If needed to keep someone alive, cast Vivify. If you’re planning on casting more than one at a time, and the target will live for a second then start with Soothing Mist first.
2. Apply Renewing Mist when at two charges to keep it on cooldown.
3. Cast Rising Sun Kick to extend heal over time effects and heal affected players.
4. Soothing Mist -> Vivify as covered above if the raid needs more than a little healing.
5. Use Expel Harm and Chi Burst when available if they are not needed for specific timers. 
6. Cycle Blackout Kick and Tiger Palm to reset the cooldown of Rising Sun Kick if you are talented into Teachings of the Monastery.

Important Concepts

Mana Tea gives us a ton of mana but not an infinite amount. You’ll still run out of mana even playing conservatively if not for one key ace up our sleeves.

Escape From Reality

This talent is still usable in 10.2 but it has been nerfed due to the SpellID of Invigorating Mists being changed. It now only grants you a refund based on self-casted Vivifies regardless of if Renewing Mist is on you or not. You can still utilize this to reduce the cost of Vivify if you know you are going to spam or if you would like to gain some bonus healing for your Chi Harmonies. It is important to note that Escape from Reality is still a refund and not a reduction meaning that if you have no cost to your Vivify you will refund 50% of the original cost of it, because of this it is good to pair it with Innervate or Mana Tea.

Thunder Focus Tea

You will still want to be using Thunder Focus Tea as often as possible on either Renewing Mist or Essence Font. If you are talented into Upwelling you want to almost exclusively be using Thunder Focus Tea on Essence Font. If you recognize that you will not be channeling Essence Font until 25+ seconds into the pull then you can use Thunder Focus Tea before the pull or at the beginning of the pull on Renewing Mist.

Shaohao’s Lessons and Veil of Pride. When and Why?

With the nerfs to Misty Peaks we now have 2 free talent points to spend. These two will go into Sheilun’s Gift and Shahao’s Lessons in most scenarios but there are times when this will change.

Shaohao’s Lessons

This section is going to be a little complicated so we’ll use some pictures to help out. Re-read it a couple of times and then get some practice in. Sheilun’s Gift can be a little tricky to understand – every 8 seconds you generate a cloud of healing that you can directly cast on someone to heal your target + 2 nearby injured players. It heals for more for each cloud that was consumed. Now for the fun part, Shaohao’s Lessons gives you up to 30 seconds of a random buff when you cast Sheilun’s Gift. We don’t get to choose the buff however each of them is fairly good so it won’t matter too much which one we get at any given moment. Each cloud summoned by Sheilun’s grants 3 seconds of the buff and they are independent so you can have multiple buffs up at once.

The strength of these buffs means that you’ll want to line up Sheilun’s Gift with meaningful raid damage. This recognition of damage patterns is important to understanding when and how to use Sheilun’s with Shaohao’s. Your bread and butter is to use it during a major cooldown like Revival, Chi-ji or Yu’lon. Further down the page we’re going to go into some advanced detail on how to use it with each in specific scenarios.

Shaohao’s with Clouded Focus

Due to Uplifted Spirits giving us Revival cooldown reduction on Vivify cleaves along with direct hits, it means that we are able to utilize the crit buff from Shaohao’s Lessons more effectively with Clouded Focus. In short: we want to be saving the critical strike buff for when we know we are going to be doing significant amounts of healing with Vivify.

Upgrading your Play: Shaohao

Outside of Cooldowns

Recognition of damage patterns and of your capabilities to heal with Renewing Mist windows become crucial. It’s fairly easy to cast Sheilun’s Gift with major cooldowns, however you’ll also need to utilize it outside of them to ensure you do the most HPS possible with it.

Here we can see the damage patterns of Terros:

These are hard hitting but very predictable bursts which makes them a good example.

Each time a major damage event went out there was a cast of Sheilun’s Gift to go along with it, ensuring there was always a buff up for any relevant damage taken. Each window of damage on this fight wass only 6-10 seconds so there’s no need for us to sit on 7-10 clouds. We’re better off casting it more regularly here for better coverage than saving up for 2-3 big damage windows. This recognition of boss damage patterns is important and you should be utilizing Warcraftlogs’ “Damage Taken” tab to see where you should be using your casts of Sheilun’s Gift.

You can also precast Sheilun’s Gift before a major raid-wide nuke to ensure little overhealing. This can be beneficial for fights like Raszageth where you can track the timers of the Static Charge exxplosions or the Shattering Shroud absorb on Mythic.

Shaohao’s Lessons also have an alternative in Veil of Pride but this is quite a bit weaker comparatively. It only really shines in heavy single target healing builds which shouldn’t often be necessary.

Shaohao during Celestials

Scenario 1: Plenty of Clouds active

This is a scenario where I have 8 or more clouds prior to using my celestial. In this case I have Jade Bond so I want to make sure that my Shaohao’s Lessons window covers the entirety of my Chi-Ji. To do this I would anticipate when I want to use Chi-Ji and cast Sheilun’s Gift prior to using Chi-Ji. Keep in mind you still want to set up your Chi-Ji accordingly with 3 Tiger Palms, applying all charges of Renewing Mist, and casting Essence Font to spread hots and proc Ancient Teachings. This is the simplest scenario.

Scenario 2: Few Clouds

This second scenario is a bit more complicated and requires some understanding of how Shaohao’s Lessons work. Since the duration of the buff scales with the number of clouds, sometimes on fights where you would want to Chi-Ji early on you will not be able to do scenario one because you don’t have enough time to collect 7+ clouds. Instead, we’ll cast Sheilun’s Gift during our Celestial instead. If you are running Gift of the Celestial then you DO NOT want to cast Sheilun’s Gift during your Celestial. You want to be casting it beforehand as the reduced duration of the Celestial will compensate for the smaller Shaohao window. In this screenshot I go into my Chi-Ji with 3 clouds; knowing that, I do not want to precast my Sheilun’s because I know that a majority of my healing with Chi-Ji is going to be coming from my Enveloping Mist and Enveloping Breath. If I were to use Sheilun’s Gift at 3 clouds before using my Celestial I would lose half of the effectiveness of my buff from Shaohao’s as I have very little relevant healing being done in the first 3 seconds of my Celestial.

To counteract this dilemma we want to be casting Sheilun’s Gift midway through our Celestial similar to how we would cast Essence Font. Note that the cast of Sheilun’s Gift does not replace Essence Font, you still want to be casting Essence Font during your Celestial to refresh your hots and your Ancient Teachings. Casting my Sheilun’s midway through my celestial allowed me to do significantly more HPS than I otherwise would have done casting it beforehand, or not casting it at all. This is the key distinction and recognition that needs to be made in order to maximize the effectiveness of Sheilun’s Gift and Shaohao’s Lessons. 

Shaohao & Revival

To utilize Shaohao’s Lessons with Revival you simply want to cast Sheilun’s Gift prior to the global that you would cast Revival. This can be done at any amount of clouds so long as the next global is Revival.

Veil of Pride and when to use it 

Veil of Pride focuses on the healing from Sheilun’s Gift itself rather than the buffs that you can receive from Shaohao’s Lessons. Situationally this talent can excel in raid and with our tier set providing us with a form of overheal protection we can now more safely play Veil of Pride in situations where we really need to focus on priority healing because you will be generating clouds so much more often with Veil of Pride it is important that you are not sitting on the 10 cloud cap. The best way to do this is to treat Sheilun’s Gift as a hard cast of Vivify. Whenever you need to do spot healing you will look to see if you have more than 4 clouds, if you do then you can use Sheilun’s Gift to heal instead of Soothing Mist and Vivify or Vivify directly. It is good to note that you can gain a lot of Chi Harmony healing by casting Sheilun’s Gift onto a target affected by Chi Harmony. Try your best to line them up.

Legacy of Wisdom

This talent makes Sheilun’s Gift hit 2 additional targets and cast much faster. It is good for encounters where you will be needing to focus on healing multiple priority targets at a time. It can see some play but I do not think that you will be playing it over the alternative talents unless you seriously need the 5 target healing for a specific fight objective.

Stats for Default Raiding Build

Intellect >> Haste >= Crit >= Mastery (Chi-ji) > Versatility >> Mastery (Yu’lon)

You’ll generally start out by pursuing high item level gear with Haste and you generally want to end up in the 27-33% range. It’s important you don’t give up any item level to reach it though. You can use QE Live to compare specific items and sets of gear.

Default Raiding Build Talents

Other Notable Talents

Some other notable talents in the tree that we will highlight here are: 

• Gift of the Celestial: A very powerful talent that changes our 3-minute cooldown Celestials into a 1-minute cooldown with a much shorter duration of 12 seconds. This is a very good talent for Yu’lon and should always be paired with it. It can be played with Chi-Ji in some situations as well if the timers are good for it.
• Jade Bond: A conduit that has been reintroduced on a choice node with another notable talent which we will talk about later called Gift of the Celestial. Jade Bond functions identically its parent conduit but is buffed up to increase the direct healing of either of our celestials by 40%. 
• Secret Infusion: A BFA Azerite trait that now increases a stat by  15% for 10 seconds. The determination of the stat is dependent on your ability usage with Thunder Focus Tea.
• Font of Life: Increases the direct healing of your Essence Font bolts by 25% and gives each a chance to reduce the cooldown of Thunder Focus Tea by 1 second. 
• Yu’lon’s Whisper: A legendary power from Shadowlands which upon activating Thunder Focus Tea, will spew out healing to 5 allies over 2 seconds. 
• Invoker’s Delight: Increases your haste by 33% for 20 seconds after summoning your celestial if talented into Jade Bond, or 8 seconds if talented into Gift of the Celestial.

The Monk Class Tree

The class tree is largely utility and defensive buffs with some major nodes that should always be taken in a raid environment. 

Here is the ideal talent tree that you would play in raid. This covers all your bases defensively, and offensively, and gives you all the required utility you may need apart from some specific scenario nodes like Paralysis and Provoke. Let’s go over some of the key nodes that need to be played. 

The other notable talents in the tree that should always be taken: 

• Fast Feet: Buffs the damage of your Rising Sun Kick by 70% and Spinning Crane Kick by 10%. 
• Improved Vivify: Buffs the healing of your Vivify by 40%. 
• Vivacious Vilification: Every 10 seconds your next Vivify cast is instant. 
• Chi Burst: Good old Chi Burst, not much to say, solid node.
• Ferocity of Xuen: Increases all damage dealt by 4%. 
• Resonant Fists: Your attacks have a chance to deal a small proc of nature damage to enemies within 8 yards adding a small amount of DPS.  

Frequently Asked Questions

What happened to Refreshing Jade Wind?

Refreshing Jade Wind got reworked and now it falls behind comparatively to the other talents available. Generally this talent is never going to be played because of it being on the same choice node as Mist Wrap (which is a major HPS increase with Misty Peaks).

Can I play Jade Bond with Yu’lon? 

Nope, I recommend only ever playing Gift of the Celestial with Yu’lon and Clouded Focus.

Why no Overflowing Mists? 

A cool talent in concept, the idea of your targets with Enveloping Mist being healed for a flat % of their HP whenever they take damage can sound very appealing however, this talent does not proc off anything but direct physical damage making it next to useless for raid. 

Revival or Restoral? 

Depends on the fight and if you need a magic dispel or if a magic dispel will grief your raid. They do the same healing just one dispels magic and one does not. Restoral can also be used while stunned though this is rarely relevant in raid.

Can I play as a ranged Mistweaver?

I know this is going to be a sore spot for a lot of Mistweaver mains out there but I wanted to briefly talk about this to clarify some issues with Mistweaver Monk and how it should be played in PvE content. Mistweaver Monk is considered a melee specialization by the game’s targeted mechanics in PvE content. Furthermore, our kit largely focuses on melee  abilities for DPS and talents that synergistically amplify our healing and damage. For this reason we are going to consider the standard “Fistweaving” build as just being considered “Mistweaver”. Any ranged build option will be considered “Ranged Mistweaver” or as I like to call it “Rangedweaver”. 

Clouded Focus is not a ranged build. You must be in melee or you cannot play this build – you’ll spend 90% of every fight DPSing the boss.

Can I play Gift of the Celestial with Chi-ji?

For sure, if you can get the class trinket you can swap between the two depending on timers although I’d recommend Jade Bond 99% of the time.

Final Notes

Overall I am extremely happy with this iteration of Mistweaver and I hope that you will enjoy it as well. I think we are very strong in a lot of aspects of the meta and we are competitive in all forms of content. It is always a pleasure for me to write these guides for the community. I genuinely appreciate all the help and support of everyone around me and I wish to continue to produce even better content and information for everyone out there to become the best Mistweaver they can be.

If you have any questions please feel free to ask me directly in the Peak of Serenity Discord or on any of my social medias:

Discord: swegglesqt
Twitch: SwegglesQT
Twitter: sweggles1
Coaching: https://mfy.gg/@sweggles