Month: April 2016

Quick Alpha Update

Yesterday, a new build deployed, which mainly focused on bug fixes. There are however a few mistweaver changes to note. To boot, Brewmasters have had an intense discussion on the official forums with developers that can be of significance from a healer perspective.

Mistweaver Changes

  • Effuse now costs 2% mana, up from 1.8% mana.
  • Zen Pulse had a minor tooltip correction.
  • Eminence (the PvP talent, that is) now also increases the healing of Mistwalk by 30%.

First off, Eminence now reduces the cooldown of Transcendence:Transfer by 5 sec AND increases the healing of Mistwalk. This is a beautiful case of alpha being alpha, since Mistwalk actually replaces Transcendence (that is still in place, I checked). I assume they meant “or” since we can’t have both buffs, or possibly if they are meaning to revert it so that you can have Mistwalk and Transcendence. I frankly have no idea at this point.

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Blue Posts and Class Hall Upgrades

While I’m finishing up the last work for April’s Patreon rewards, more alpha news has trickled in. Developers have commented on the new Essence Font change, which now indirectly benefits from mastery, and a first look at Class Hall upgrades has also been released. Also, the gold cap will be raised to 9,999,999 gold in Legion. Hue hue hue.

Developer Feedback – Mistweaver

Posted by Sigma, Blizzard.
It wouldn’t be surprising if the mastery has to come down a little, in terms of coefficient, after the EF change (what you’d expect for effectively increasing the number of spells affected by a mastery). It would also rein in the mastery benefit to Effuse somewhat. It’s not bad at all if the new mechanic introduces some more varied use cases for Effuse, but its tuning implications for will be a little clearer after seeing it in action more. Essence Font enabling those options is fine, but it’s important that mana is an important limitation on its uptime.

Effuse cost is already changed for next build, although not by much for now. We like the new mechanic, but Effuse, EF, and Gust of Mists are all pieces of the tuning picture that may shift around as it settles in. The nerf to mastery coefficient is simply to account for the fact that it now encompasses more spells, as would happen with any mastery. In fact, spreading the mastery benefit out slightly is something people have asked for.
–Original Post

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Patreon Sneak Peek – Art of the Cyber

It’s this time of the month again – Patreon sneak peek! The art of my April themed set is called Cyber UI, in lack of a better name. Name-forging is not my forté, mkay? But I make that up with dragons and art that make even me proud, even though I’d say I’m my own harshest critic. I hope you find it awesome too!

Badum- badum- tssh! Here comes the preview or sneak peek of my Cyber UI, though as always, I still have a week to polish it so the finished product might look a bit different. And trust me, if I’m allowed the time, I will fiddle with it until the last minute. It’s like a compulsion, can’t let it be.

Do I have a cool backstory to my UI as I did with the Minoan? Ehm, well. No, to be honest. I just had a really cool idea of what I wanted to do, and I got the idea from a green texture I saw. Yeah, a small piece of texture gave me the idea of the whole UI, and I just worked it from there. Funny how the art grows so organically in the course of the month, sometimes it even surprises myself.

Anyway, ’nuff talking – here it is!

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Essence Synergy and Suramar in New Build

A new alpha build sprung upon us yesterday, right before I went to sleep. But now that I’ve had my morning coffee, I’ve prepared myself for all the Mistweaver changes. There’s not many, but they are notable. Also, a new zone and a new dungeon. Have a look!

Mistweaver Changes

  • Essence Font now has an additional effect. Gust of Mist now heals twice on players affected by the HoT effect of Essence Font.
  • Healing Elixirs has been revised. It is now an ability with 2 charges that heals you for 15%. It still triggers automatically when dropping below 35% health.

A common complaint about Mistweavers have been that Essence Font doesn’t have any synergy with other spells. Now, we not only have the synergy with Refreshing Jade Wind, but also all our direct healing spells for a short while (the HoT lasts 6 seconds). It’s starting to shape up, in other words! And thankfully, Healing Elixirs is less of a catastrophe, though I’ve hard to imagine talenting for it in either case. Damage reductions have very high value, and not to mention that we don’t have that many defensives in our toolkit; Diffuse Magic and Dampening Harm will probably still be the strongest choices.

On a different note, I’ve scanned the Theorycrafting thread on the official forums and came across an explanation of how Renewing Mist and Essence Font choose their healing targets.

Posted by Sigma, Blizzard.
–Renewing Mist will choose a random player who is both injured and without the caster’s Renewing Mist. If there are none, it will not jump.
–Essence Font will attempt to heal 18 people over the course of its channel. On each attempt, it will choose a random target who was not healed in the previous 5 attempts. If there are none, it will not heal.
–Original Post

It’s not new information, but good to have it confirmed.

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Staving off Boredom with Ferocious Tea Drinking

Oh, thy mistiness, Legion will not commence until the last day of summer. Or you know, next-to-last month of summer if you’re American. But I can guarantee you, there’s not a smudge of summer left in Sweden in September. Point being, Legion will launch in a little over four months, and it is such a long, long, long time until then. How does a poor WoW gamer keep herself entertained meanwhile? 

Well, to be technical, the fun will start a little earlier than last of August. The pre-patch will launch a few weeks before launch, and anyone who has experienced a pre-patch knows that it is absolute chaos. Like, fun chaos. The kind of chaos where you get all your delicious new spells and abilities, the wardrobe, demon hunters and everything like that. Then you grab a bag of popcorn, sit back and watch all the salty shalings whine about the spells that are tuned for level 110 being horrendously broken at level 100. Because nothing will work as it is intended at level 100, and it’s not supposed to either. I mean, we will basically be stuck in Legacy content for a short month. It’ll be mayhem.

So we will have to wait about 2½-3 months before things liven up again. What does one do in the meanwhile? Well, there’s of course plenty of stuff you can do. My shenanigans are almost entirely made up by gold farming, alt raising (oh yes, 14 level 100 alts is not enough for me), and my Patreon work which is creating new and cool UIs. My guild raid a few times a week still, though only one day is main raid now, when we down Mythic Manno and Archie. Them cheeky buggers cannot be allowed to live, even for a week.

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A Quick Alpha Update

Morning, dear readers! I am currently knee-deep in my Patreon work, so I haven’t been able to update the blog until now. There was a new alpha build a few days ago (though it took awhile before data diffs appeared), and here are the mistweaver changes!

Mistweaver Changes

Rising Sun Kick has reverted to its old cost, bumping up the relevance of Fistweaving 2.0 slightly. Spinning Crane Kick has had a serious buff that partly addresses the problem with leveling that I mentioned in the previous post.

Some of the other class halls have had a few updates, but we have yet to see that in the Monk Class Hall. Hopefully, we’ll get some more Monk-themed interior. It is still very much the same as when you level a Pandaren of any class. But we’re still in alpha, so there is lots of time for updates still. Speaking of which, Blizzard has now released all classes/specs on the alpha, all dungeons heroic/mythic, and almost all zones. Max level has increased to level 110 on the leveling servers. We’re getting closer to a beta, I believe.

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The Feel of Legion Mistweaver – Part 3

There are still many aspects of the Legion Mistweaver I haven’t touched yet that I’d like to dig into. Having discussed the basic toolkit and the talents, let’s have a look at our damage rotation. Though not as proximal as other aspects of the new Mistweaver, we will still need to level as Mistweavers since we are initially locked to a single artifact. In raids we will spend downtime dealing damage which, however briefly, impacts the overall feel of the Legion Mistweaver. 

In Legion, Mistweavers’ damage spells remain melee oriented, though the spec counts as a ranged spec. To safeguard us from killing the raid when we stand in melee, mechanics that would instantly wipe the raid if a ranged player stand in melee will not hit Mistweavers or Holy Paladins (who also have a few melee-based spells).

(Excerpt from official post)

For example, a Chain Lightning or Void Zone targeted at a random player with no warning will wipe or seriously disrupt the group if ever targeted at a person in a melee clump. If you can get targeted by it, there is no option but to avoid being in melee at any time during the encounter. Mistweavers and Holy Paladins should not be targeted by these sorts of abilities.
–Original Post

Having said that, the damaging spells we have in our baseline kit are:

Jab has been baked into Tiger Palm, and since we no longer have Chi, we have instead the passive Teachings of the Monastery to incentivise to use Tiger Palm. The rotation is Tiger Palm (30% extra damage on RSK and BoK) > Rising Sun Kick, then Tiger Palm > Blackout Kick until Rising Sun Kick is off cooldown. Spinning Crane Kick can be used independently for AoE damage.

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Teahouse Reoccupied

After a short, but wonderful holiday to Edinburgh, Scotland; I am now back in action again (although slightly marinated). While I’ve been away there’s been a new Alpha build, which unfortunately only brought another batch of tooltip proofing for mistweavers. But other fun stuff has hit the alpha, so there’s no lack of news for me to talk about. I have prepared my tea cup.

Another build would have meant some new mistweaver changes for me to talk about, but in the shining absence of said changes, let’s talk a little about the legendaries and the new glyph system.

Monk Legendaries

These actually came in a while ago, but I haven’t had the chance to comment yet. So here goes!

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The Feel of Legion Mistweaver – Part 2

A few days ago, I wrote a post about my thoughts on mistweavers’ toolkit in Legion alpha. My opinion is generally positive to the changes; we have a more adaptable and flexible toolkit that allows the mistweaver to tackle different types of encounters with greater ease. (If you haven’t read that post yet – you can read it here.) Expanding on that discussion, here’s part 2 where I review the new talent tree.

The Talent Tree

In my mind, the purpose of a talent tree is to give depth to a base toolkit, and you should be able to create depth with different builds that emphasize different strengths. There should be opportunity to talent for greater AoE healing vs single target healing, or more mobility, add control, damage, passive healing, or active healing, etc etc. Ideally, the talent tree can deepen the strength of characteristic that are important within the same raid tier as well. It’s not interesting to talent for greater mobility unless some of the encounters have mechanics that make mobility an attractive choice.

Since I haven’t done any raid testing yet, I have to review the talents without a Legion raid context. It’ll be my preliminary opinion, bound to change once I have more experience of the content. But there’s still value to give feedback, even at an early stage like this. And once again; I will overlook the numbers for now and focus on the feel of the talents instead.

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Patreon March Complete – Minoan UI

This month’s Patreon is complete! Thank you so much for this month’s support, I have had a lot of fun creating the art for this UI and I’ve learnt a lot in the process. I encourage you to experiment with the art and create a lot of new things (maybe stuff even I haven’t thought about), but here’s a post with some weakauras to get you started!

Example of UI set-up with the art!
Example of UI set-up with the art!

This month’s theme is inspired by the ancient Minoan culture, which as you may have noted is similar to the Egyptian culture (and therefore Uldum). I wrote a post about it before, explaining the inspiration to this piece. You can read it here.

Elvui Profile

I’ve done a complementary Elvui profile for those who like to use Elvui. You can import it by copying the export string and then go in-game, to the elvui menu with /ec > profiles > import and paste the code there. Remember to check for unnecessary blank spaces at the end of the code (otherwise you’ll get an error message)!

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