Mistweaver Monk in Five Minutes

Mistweaver Monk in 8.3

Upwelling | Rising Mist

Core Healing Spells

Essence Font. Your most efficient spell and a large portion of your overall healing. You’ll want to cast Essence Font whenever there are 6 or more injured allies nearby. It’s ok to hold it for a few seconds if there’s some significant damage coming up.
Renewing Mist. A smart HoT that automatically bounces to a nearby ally if the target is at full health. You get two charges and you can pretty much throw them out on cooldown.
Vivify. A powerful medium-efficiency single target heal that cleaves to any allies with a Renewing Mist.
Enveloping Mist. A powerful short single target HoT that buffs all of your healing on the target while active. Expensive. You’ll use this when a tank or prominent debuffed ally is taking huge damage.
Soothing Mist. A channeled single target heal that allows you to cast other single target heals on the target without breaking the channel. It’s tempting to cast soothing on a target before every Vivify but it isn’t particularly efficient to do so unless you plan on spam healing the target for an extended time.
Mistweaver also has fantastic utility and mobility with Leg Sweep, Ring of Peace, Chi Torpedo and Transcendence all being top of their respective classes.

Cooldowns

Revival. The Mistweaver raid-wide cooldown. It isn’t quite as powerful as a Tranquility or a Holy Word Salvation but it’s instant. Your raid leader is likely to assign this to a specific moment in the fight.
Life Cocoon. A huge single target absorb. Don’t save this for your worst pull of the night. It’s a powerful life saving tool that you should be using frequently.
Fortifying Brew. A powerful personal defensive. You’ll get another from your talents which makes Mistweaver one of the most durable healing specs in the game. Like Life Cocoon you want to be using this regularly. If you’re a star player who never stands in the fire then use it to mitigate damage during high damage phases.

Talents – Upwelling

The talent tree is reasonably fixed but the following variations can see occasional use:

You can trade Chi Torpedo for Tiger’s Lust to improve raid utility at the cost of slight personal mobility.
You can trade Refreshing Jade Wind for Jade Serpent Statue on very spread fights where it’s difficult to consistently hit six people with RJW.

Remember that the Rising Mist build has been separated into its own guide which you can find here.

Azerite

Full Article: Mistweaver Azerite

Our best mistweaver specific raid traits are Font of Life and Secret Infusion. Font of Life does drop a lot in value after the first so you’re unlikely to wear more than one and even the first can occasionally be beaten out by Secret Infusion and large stat traits. Use QE Live to take the heavy thinking out of Azerite.

FAQ: The elephant in the room: Font of Life in high parses

Despite Font of Life only being strong as a one-off trait, you will see a lot of them in high parses. You might wonder why this is since it conflicts with both the information given above and gearing tools like QE Live. Analysis of the logs reveal the Font of Life traits doing as little as ~700 HPS per trait – even in these specific high logs. The stat traits they are often giving up to wear them such as Heart of Darkness add about three times that. There is not a strong reason to wear triple Font in your best in slot set.

Majors

You have two options for your major essence:
- Conflict & Strife
- Memory of Lucid Dreams
In raid your choice is basically always going to be Memory of Lucid Dreams. We pick it to fit more spells into any given fight, not necessarily to curb mana issues caused through poor spell selection. Vision of Perfection is not optimal at this time.
Minors

You’ll use the following in your minor slots. Ranked from strongest to weakest.
- Conflict & Strife
- Ever Rising Tide
- Formless Void / Unwavering Ward.
The battle between Formless Void and Unwavering Ward mostly comes down to content type. If you’re pushing through heroic raid then Unwavering Ward is a great choice, whereas Mythic favors Formless Void as it better scales with your throughput where Ward is mostly flat healing. If you don’t have Conflict and Strife at rank 3 (I know, I don’t like to PVP either) then use QE Live to pick your final minor from the selection you own.

Corruption

When gearing your Mistweaver Monk you’ll decide between two major corruption builds. We’ll call them “Severe & Friends” and “Full Vers Stack”. I can’t tell you which to pick, but I can discuss some advantages of each to help you make your decision. There isn’t a large gap in throughput so you hopefully won’t have any buyers remorse regardless of your path.

Severe & Friends
Full Vers Stack

Advantages
- Higher average throughput.
- Severe, Strikethrough and (occasionally) Deadly Momentum act as multipliers off each other at high gear levels to further push up the value of your set.
- You can finally realize that 100% crit dream you had three expansions ago.
- There is crit on the Mechagon ring set, legendary cape and artifact neck so you tend to have higher base crit than base vers.
Advantages
- Strong passive damage reduction which is particularly valuable in Mythic+ and PVP.
- No need to play or gear around a 100% crit cap.
- Great synergy with Thunder Focus Tea, particularly in Mythic+ where spending your Thunder Focus Tea on Rising Sun Kick can already be an ideal play.

If you mostly focus on raid I’d recommend the Crit strategy, and if you’d rather push high keys or PVP then Versatile might be more your style. Both builds should opt include the Flash of Insight Drest’agath weapon, optimally at 475 but a 460 is acceptable.

Quickfire Tips

A significant portion of our healing comes from Essence Font. Don’t let its high mana cost fool you, it’s incredibly efficient. You can cast it whenever six or more allies are injured.
Get into the habit of casting Thunder Focus Tea on cooldown. In raid you’ll want to use it with Vivify most of the time but if no nearby allies are injured then you’re better off using it with Renewing Mist than letting it sit unused.
As a Mistweaver you have powerful defensive cooldowns in Fortifying Brew and Diffuse Magic. Use them liberally and you’ll survive through a ridiculous amount of damage. They have very short cooldowns; don’t save them just for your worst pull of the night. Use them frequently.
The WoWAnalyzer Mistweaver module is excellent. Use it to improve your play.

Mistweaver Streams & Vods

Coming Soon.