World of Warcraft → Monk - Mistweaver Guide

I finally have enough experience with this class to write a guide for those who are interested in playing the spirit side of the monk, rather than the agility side. Feel free to contribute whatever your experiences are. I'll cover everything from leveling to XP to raiding.

Leveling Up
I am a firm believer that with any class, the currently fastest way to level up is with instant queue dungeons. By queueing up as a healer, you will ensure fast and possibly instant dungeon queues. Always go with the random dungeons for the additional rewards. You can begin queueing up at level 15 and go straight from there. You'll continue to do this until level 85, where you'll head out to MoP. Once you hit the 70's area, things start to slow down and you'll repeat several instances. You may prefer to queue up for an instance like Utgarde Keep for speed rather than going into Nexus, which can be considerably slower for XP.

Make sure that you pick up all the BoA gear that you can. Your guild can have up to 3 Boa items that you can wear and you can purchase several more. The monk class also has the ability to return back to the Monk Sanctuary and gain a massive boost to XP for one hour. You gain this boost at every 10 levels (starting at 20) and once per day. If you grab the boost, make sure you have a full hour to allocate to it. This will make your leveling experience happen much faster than any other class. I was typically averaging 1.5 levels per dungeon run with this buff and still an impressive chunk of XP per run at the higher levels.

Once you hit 85, I highly recommend maintaining a DPS set of gear. Quest turn-ins are based upon your current spec. Mistweaver DPS gets to be largely pathetic at around the level 40 range and it is absolute garbage at 85. Get yourself a DPS spec and gear. Once you get into the level 88-89 range, you'll want to start swapping specs real quick to grab a piece of spirit gear.

Abilities

Soothing Mist
This is your basis for chi generation, light single-target healing, combo-casting other healing spells. At lower levels, this is all you have and it is quite potent. At higher levels, this becomes pretty weak, but still very important. Enveloping Mist is going to be your best single target healer and it becomes instant cast if you're channeling Soothing Mist. The bonus? It doesn't stop the channel when cast either. Surging and Enveloping Mist are the only two spells you can cast that will not break the channel.

Archivis Pro Tip: I discovered early on that if you spam this spell, you can receive a double tick. This is extremely valuable for burst healing players at lower levels, but I have found that it increases chi generation by 50% (since you're ticking twice as often). When you're trying to build up points, spamming this ability on a target is a great way to quickly accumulate chi points.

Enveloping Mist
This is your best single target heal available. If you're on tank duty, the goal is to try and accumulate 3 combo points as quickly as possible to keep this HoT rolling as much as possible. It costs zero mana and is extremely potent.

Surging Mist
This is your oh-shit button. You really just want to hope you never have to hit it, because you normally need to hit it more than once. At a 24k mana cost, you can put out 12 of these at level 90 with a full mana bar. 12 casts to empty your bar? No thanks. Still, if you find yourself in a situation where it is more important to keep someone alive than to preserve your mana bar, this is your spell. If you weave this in to part of your regular rotation, you're going to suffer.

Renewing Mist
This spell is absolutely critical in a raiding environment. This is like combining chain heal and renew. You want to keep casting this every time it is on cooldown. Even if you're on tank healing, put this on a player who doesn't have it. This spell will find three other targets who need healing. If you have long-term AoE healing, this actually becomes your bread and butter spell. There are other spells that amplify this ability. With an 8 second cooldown and an 18 second duration, you should be able to keep this HoT rolling on a minimum of 8 targets at a time and with Thunder Focus Tea, you can have it on up to 16 targets at a time.

Tip on Thunder Focus Tea: Do the math. 8 second cooldown, 18 second duration. This means that you can get your first cast off at the beginning, another at the 8 second mark and a third at the 16 second mark. Haste reduces the duration of the spell, so as you get better geared, you want to get into the habit of using Thunder Focus Tea and Uplift right as your Renewing Mist is about to come up for the third time.

Uplift
This spell creates an instant heal on all targets that have Renewing Mist on them. When you have 16 heal targets, this can be a massive amount of AoE healing. By casting Thunder Focus Tea along with Uplift, you can renew the duration of Renewing Mist on all targets and simultaneously heal them. Uplift requires 2 chi points, Thunder Focus Tea requires 1. Remember that when you're trying to time your heals.

Mana Tea
You have the ability to accumulate a charge of mana tea every time you accumulate 4 chi points. This is a passive ability. You have an active ability to channel your mana tea to spend 1 charge a second to restore 4% of your maximum mana. If you break the channel, your remaining charges still persist. This is an extremely valuable spell. If you have 20 charges, you're looking at an 80% restore. At a 20-second channel, you're looking at restoring 100% of your mana with passive regeneration. It is highly recommended that you don't actually spend 20 seconds restoring your mana, but instead channel when the raid gives you a break to do so. Continue channeling until your mana is at a high enough level or until it's time for you to resume healing. It's normal to get 4-6 seconds off, which is more than enough to get you back into the fight.

Revival
This is a one-time cooldown that is fantastic at healing the raid if your group took a burst of raid damage or if there are a ton of debuffs being passed around. With the 3-minute cooldown, the usage of this is left entirely up to your best judgment. This is a raid-wide "oh shit" button.

Jade Statue
Jade statue will assist you in healing by copying your Soothing Mist and healing lowest health players in your group when you deal damage. This ability is a "set and forget" spell. Place it down before an encounter begins. Try to place it in the area that has the highest amount of traffic with the highest amount of reach (usually at the foot of the boss). You can safely drop this anywhere and it will not aggro anything.

Healing Sphere
Take it off your bar. This spell is only good when triggered by your mastery. I tried finding a way to make this spell not suck when used manually it won't happen. Your mastery's passive will make much better use of this than you will.

Spinning Crane Kick
This is your high-mana cost AoE heal. The great part of this is that it can be your filler when your Renewing Mist is on cooldown and you don't have enough points to cast Uplift. This has a low per-target healing, but it heals everyone in a radius, which is quite nice in a 25-man raid. As long as you hit 3 targets with this spell, you're guaranteed a chi point. Hit this spell to generate chi points if you're good on mana and need more points to uplift the group. Try not to lay on this spell too much. It comes at a hefty mana cost.

Glyphs
I don't know if Blizzard decided that glyphs should be garbage this expansion or if they just wanted people to have personal preference for most stuff, but there are not enough useful glyphs for the Mistweaver. I'll go over the important ones and some of the ones that are popular. There are some glyphs that are recommended by other sites that I think suck bad in practice.

Glyph of Renewing Mists: This is my first choice for glyphs. The ability to have your renewing mists travel at a much higher radius means that when you're stacking renews, you're guaranteed to hit everyone in the raid. It doesn't matter if you're in a battleground or in a raid, those renews have the ability to hop a grand total of a hundred yards plus, allowing you to reach people across the other side of a room. Must have.

Glyph of Surging Mist: A lot of people have said that they don't like this glyph because it removes control of the spell. To explain why I like this glyph requires explaining why this spell actually sucks. Surging Mist comes at a massive mana cost. In most fights you'll never want to use it. This is your oh-shit button. When mechanics are going crazy, you don't have time to play whack a mole and you're just praying you can keep players alive from bursty damage until an encounter ends, this is your spell. With this glyph, you can just close your eyes and spam this spell a handful of times and hope you win. This isn't such a critical glyph because if you're (or your raid) doing everything right, you'll probably never cast this spell.

Glyph of Mana Tea
I thought I'd try this glyph because Icy Veins says this is practically mandatory. Not quite. This glyph causes a 10 second cooldown on your mana tea, having a drip-drip method of getting your mana tea charges to cast. Does it save you time? I guess. You're talking about a 1.5 GCD for 2 charges instead of charging 2 charges for 2 seconds. I guess the mobility helps? But in all reality, there are times when it is safe to channel mana tea and it really hurts when you've got 20 charges and you're only able to grab 2. You could weave them in every 10 seconds to keep your mana full, but now you're consuming a GCD when you really need to be focusing on healing. Don't use this glyph and channel the spell for as long as you need when there's a few seconds to breathe.

Glyph of Life Cocoon
I guess you could use this just because there's nothing else for you to really use when you have three slots. This glyph has extremely limited usage in PVE.

Glyph of Uplift
This glyph can really change how you play this class. The positive is that you're no longer limited to a maximum of 2 uplifts in a cycle (chi cap). The downside is that this costs mana and you're lacking an AoE chi dump, minus some possibilities with talents. At 8500 raid-buffed spirit, I do not feel like I have the "infinite mana" to put this glyph on yet. The expansion is young and mana regeneration is only going to go up. Once your ilevel reaches into the 480-500 range (or higher), you may want to consider this glyph. If you have the benefit of a massive amount of mana regeneration, this can take your AoE healing from an already ridiculously high standpoint and put you at an even higher tier. If you're reading this guide, you're probably newer to this class and probably shouldn't get this glyph.

Detox
A dispel on a cooldown. Thanks Blizzard. Thanks to you, I don't even bother dispelling now. It is handy for clearing a row of debuffs on a target and it seems like Blizzard gave this to Monks just so they could survive a handful of heroics that had a "this debuff stays forever until dispelled" mechanics. Meh.

Talents
I won't go over every talent. I'll tell you what I think is useful and what you should consider. Most of these are going to be personal preference.

Tier 1: Celerity. The ability to get out of the way is an important one. You don't want to waste time running, preventing you from casting. Celerity ensures that you'll always have extra charges available.

Tier 2: This is probably the most important tier for discussion. I personally prefer Chi Wave. The monk lacks the ability to consistently heal on the fly. Chi Wave allows you to do so. At end-game, when the tank is the only one taking damage, Chi Wave can actually put out a massive amount of single target healing as it rapidly bounces back and forth between the tank and its targets. I recommend this over the other two simply because there are better AoE healing Chi dump spells. The only time I would consider a different ability is if my mana pool got to the point where I began using Glyph of Uplift.

Tier 3: Ascension. No exceptions

Tier 4: Your choice. If you're looking to assist with CC, pick up the range on Paralysis. There's really no wrong choice here.

Tier 5: Diffuse Magic is the obvious choice here. Healing Elixirs puts out so little healing that it isn't worth it. Dampen Harm is better for tanks. Diffuse Magic has real raid utility to ensure that when a ton of magic damage is going out, you can last through it. This is equivalent to having Anti-Magic Shield from a DK.

Tier 6: Chi Torpedo. First off, it's the only one that actually heals. At best, the other talent will boost your Spinning Crane Kick damage, but at a chi cost. No thanks. This one basically gives you another heal spell. I have noticed that when the group is in a giant ball, I could Chi Torpedo over top of them 3 times (forward + chipedo, backpedal + chipedo, forward + chipedo) and put out a massive amount of AoE healing. When you're hurting on mana, Chi Torpedo is the way to go. Otherwise, there's nothing too exciting about a top tier tree.

Reforging
There are addons for this. Spirit is king. None of the other stats matter. In my book, the remaining reforgeable stats are all of equal value. The math kings seem to think that mastery edges out over the remainder of the non-spirit attributes. Get Reforge Lite.

Note: The math kings feel that haste rating is important until you can get to at least 8.32%. At this magical number, your Enveloping and Renewing Mists gain another tick. Afterwards, haste isn't so hot anymore.

Gems
Meta: Revitalizing Primal Diamond. It has spirit.
Blue: Spirit Gems
Red: Spirit + Int Gems (Purple Gems). Better than actual Int.
Yellow: Haste + Spirit Gems (Orange Gems).

Get the idea? If it has spirit on it, use it in every slot.

Being a Good Healer
This portion isn't specific to monks, but it is still important if you're not carrying your raids. Your command center is absolutely important. Having a good setup means that you can spend more time focusing on the fight and less time locating and mashing your buttons.

Mouseover Macros:
First things first. Learn to use a mouseover macro. This should be done before you step into your first dungeon at level 15. As you accumulate spells, use more mouseover macros. A simple macro can be constructed like this:
-=-=-=-=-
#showtooltip
/cast [target=mouseover] Soothing Mist
-=-=-=-=-

That's it. Put it on your bars. After that, all you need to do is hover your mouse over a player's bar and press the button that has the spell. If you have a mouse that has multiple buttons on it, find an unused action bar (like a bottom-right) and bind some of the buttons on that bar to some of your spare mouse buttons. You can then place those mouseover macros inside of those buttons, allowing you to heal without ever touching the keyboard. Simply hover over the player's frame and press the appropriate mouse button.

Do not underestimate mouseover macros. They are the single most important tool a healer has.

Raid Frames:
Whatever raid frame you use is of your own preference. There are entire threads on what HUD people use and what frames people use. Thankfully, Blizzard now provides you with all the frames you need so that you're not required to go out and set up your own UI. In the interface options exists a raid frames setup. You want to go in and turn this on to a method that gives you the most visibility. You should then test your setup by going into Alterac Valley. You'll immediately see that there are some people who are low health, but are too far away. You'll want to darken the frame of these players so that you aren't trying to heal them. Experiment with each of the options to see if they are something that will help or hinder you. The litmus test is that if you can come in first place on Alterac Valley with healing, your UI is good to go and you're ready to raid. You don't need PVP gear and you can come out on top even with non-raid gear.

Don't use haste gems.. Crit all the way for mistweaving..

The soft cap for haste is 1350 which is extremely easy to hit, after that crit>mastery..

The basic idea is to get gems with Spirit and then whatever secondary stat you prefer.

Haste is bad though, especially considering basically every heal in the arsenal is instant cast while channeling soothing...

Also ascencion??? Brew all the way. that talent its self basically adds another raid cd to monk arsenal.. renewing out on the raid, thunder focus renew them all for big inc dmg, sit on 4 chi spam uplift, brew for 4 more chi, uplift again GG..

By having a 5th point, you can spare the point for Thunder focus and 2x uplift. Brew has a 90 second cooldown.

Either way, I think it can come down to personal preference.

Do you even lift?

I uplift.

I see, I prefer to just expel harm to get back that 1 chi from thunder focus

A couple of observations or points as I currently see it. Of note, I’ve only been 90 about 10hrs of game play. I leveled up as prot and moved to mistweaver at around lvl 75.

Ascension- I am currently talented into this solely because it provides one less CD to manage. As I’m still trying to master the class I think it is more beneficial for me to limit my button pushing. However, I do feel that Brew is likely the best option here as it can really provide a good amount of burst healing when needed.

Spirit- I find that I’m still lacking some spirit. Currently setting around 7k unbuffed and have the Darkmoon trinket. I think I’ll be better at around 9-10k spirt when I can get some better gear (iLvL 462 atm). My toon is too fresh at 90 and getting NO love in LFR. I’ve only read that you stack spirit to comfort… I know I’m not there yet for my comfort but it could be that I’m not as efficient as I should be.

HPS- Speaking of efficient even at a 462 iLvL I’m always on top of the healing meter. I may not have the highest HPS but I haven’t actually healed a LFR I haven’t been on top. With that, I find my over healing is always extremely high. I think this could be attributed to 1) my inexperience with the class still and 2) the nature of HoTs. It would be nice if they made the HoTs (Renewing Mist) smart but is likely a stretch to far. My inexperience with the class could also lead to less efficiency and contribute to my spirit/mana issues.

Optional healing methods- I love that you have so many options to heal. It really provides some unique opportunities to mix it up and keep the class fun! While I don’t typical melee heal in raids I do find jabbing to be the best (mana efficient/fast) method for chi building. With that, in heroics it’s often too easy to melee weave if you are getting low incoming damage and/or the other party members are smart enough to limit their love for fire (shiny stuff). I think our ability to raid heal and tank heal is great. I hadn’t found the smashing of Soothing Mist… great tip there! I used that last night and it can really provide some quick chi burst. It does eat mana to some extent though so use with some caution.

In the end, I feel the class is harder to master than some others out there. It provides a great opportunity to min/max that I haven’t felt for some time. I think you can really separate the great players from the marginal ones with the Monk and particularly the mistweaver.

At this point, I think the talents can be a personal preference. If you're going OOM at 7k unbuffed, you may want to look up your rotation. I have less than that and I'm doing fantastic with less spirit. Could I use more? Yes. Am I struggling? No.

I disagree with stacking spirit until you're comfortable. When you're "comfortable", switch over to Glyph of Uplift and begin blasting through that mana again.

HPS is an awkward measurement in Recount. You want to look at actual healing done. With the way the monk is structured, you cannot prevent overheal and there are times when you need to overheal just to generate chi (keeping soothing mist up on a full HP tank). Just dump overheal from your head, never look at the numbers again and forget the entire concept.

As for the double-tap on soothing mist, double taps means double mana consumption. You can definitely feel a massive difference from 460 ilevel to 470 ilevel. I think I'm sitting at 472 equipped and I still have several slots of gear that are in shitty shape. I'm still using an engineer trinket with cogs and a fucking PVP trinket with spirit on it. I think if I can break 480 I'll be in fantastic shape.

I went through LFR last night and crushed the healing spot by a massive margin. There are some encounters that I was putting out 22-23% of the healing while second place was putting out about 15-16% of total overall healing. I heard the mistweavers are getting the nerfbat with one less hop for renews. That's going to hurt.

I have to disagree with your preference on leveling. Having just leveled my druid to 82, I dont think that doing all dungeons is the right idea.

My experience is to queue specificaly for dungeons that you can do quest in, then not do them anymore. This provides a better boost of experience. I found that questing is much more efficient for leveling than dungeon grinding.

I can do upwards of 5 quest in the time it takes me to do one dungeon, and the xp from those out weighs the nominal bonus xp from doing random dungeons.

Obviously, once you unlock your various tiers of dungeons, going with the random the first couple of times is better, youll probably get several that you havent done already anyways.

-EDIT-

I should say that once you get the ability to fly, questing is much more efficient, especially if you can afford the max flying speed. Its a lot easier with Druids because you can collect items for whatever quest while still in flight form, but the extra 1.5 seconds to mount up again shouldnt be too much of a hassel

Run Halls of Lightning over and over again and tell me you can find a faster method to get from 80 to 85.

Yeah, it may suck, but with 3x BoA, the occasional rested and this WoW token, nothing is faster than that zone.

Thing is, if you get Halls of Stone for example, its just a huge waste of time going through that RP event. Not to mention, I have run into situations where people are just complete idiots. Whatever that dungeon is in Cata where you have to stand in front of the purple beams to prevent the twilight guys from morphing. So many wipes on that...

Too much variance!

I also experience "burn out" on random dungeons so much faster.

Wait, Halls of Lightning from 80-85? Are you soloing this or just 2 manning it? Unless they changed it, isnt the XP just terrible there, considering the 79-80 xp needed is ~800,000 and 80-81 like 2,000,000?

Five-manning it. I prefer a leveling buddy. One of you tank, one of you heals. By doing that, you can control the entire instance. You *can* two-man it, but the idea is to just over-gear the place and crush the levels.

I'm forgetting the level range on Halls of Lightning, but you pretty much want to queue up for that dungeon the instant you hit the level range and after you've exhausted every other dungeon with quests, you go back and queue up for Halls of Lightning again until it expires from your LFD tool.

The XP is reasonable, but the key to HoL is that there are a massive amount of NPCs across multiple rooms with little to no hold-ups for traveling, boss fights, NPCs, etc. You can fight several of the bosses on top of trash, dragging it with you as you go.

Krisnatharok and I did this, doing nothing but moving the entire time through content. We would pretty much never stop moving unless we were on the last boss or the second to last boss, which forced you to conquer them without taking down trash.

We cleared all the trash, not just some of it. You don't just carve out a path in the instance. You clear out all the trash. The first massive room in HoL is guaranteed to give you at least one bar of XP alone. The instance was getting us several bars of XP and we were getting our runs down into the 7-minute range. Run that puppy 8 times in an hour and you're going to accumulate levels fast.

Mmm. Makes sense. Yea, HoL is available at... 77? Somewhere there, unless you are reference heroic, which is 80. But either way, if you can do a 7 minute HoL run then thats a different story, and I can see that being really effiecient. But your talking a duo of experience players in key roles.

Im talking solo queueing. Once Greenapples and Ashane catch up to me, we will definently be LOLstomping 5 mans.