Mistweaver Monk Healing Rotation, Cooldowns, and Abilities — Dragonflight 10.2.6

If the explanations below seem too in-depth for your purposes, then check out our Easy Mode section for a more quick and concise description aimed primarily at beginner players.

The following information is purely tailored to PvE situations. While some of content is applicable across content types, for a more rigorous look at our spells within the context of PvP, please visit our PvP guide.

The following will be a quick explanation of your goals while healing certain content. Obviously, unlike DPS players, our rotation is much more dynamic and changes based on moment-to-moment gameplay , but here is your aim:

Maintain Renewing Mist on as many targets as possible so that you can burst damage windows with Vivify when needed. Your Invoke Chi-Ji, the Red Crane should be used early and often to counter periods of high damage while also saving you Mana. Essence Font as needed in order to maintain your Ancient Teachings. During downtime, DPS the boss while passively healing the raid, thanks to the aforementioned Ancient Teachings talent.

This build heavily incentivizes casting Vivify, using large ramp windows of Renewing Mist. Our goals are largely the same, however with two major differences: Instead of talenting into Ancient Teachings, we take Clouded Focus, and instead of Invoke Chi-Ji, the Red Crane, we take Invoke Yu'lon, the Jade Serpent.

While playing this build, your goals are very similar to the Ancient Teachings build; however, you want to be looking to drop basically all casts of Essence Font, as it no longer procs a buff for you. The gameplay will be more centered around ramping healing every minute via Gift of the Celestials through your Invoke Yu'lon, the Jade Serpent casts. By using Yu'lon, you will passively stack Renewing Mist on the raid thanks to Rapid Diffusion, only then to finish it all off by channeling Soothing Mist and spamming Vivify.

The specific rotation will look something like this:

1. Use both charges of Renewing Mist;
2. Cast Invoke Yu'lon, the Jade Serpent;
3. Cast Soothing Mist;
4. Cast 4-5 Enveloping Mist;
5. Cast Rising Sun Kick to extend your new HoTs;
6. Channel Soothing Mist into a Tank;
7. Cast 1 Enveloping Mist then spam Vivify as needed.

Used during the proper damage windows, this can lead to some truly unreal healing numbers.

As always, maintaining a wide coverage of Renewing Mist is a top priority; however, in M+, you will oftentimes need to be more concerned with your placement and uptime of Jadefire Stomp. Make sure you are always buffed with Ancient Concordance and Ancient Teachings. Use Invoke Chi-Ji, the Red Crane liberally, as the cooldown is very short. Spam Vivify when things look hairy. Essence Font is banned, there are almost no situations to use it. If single target damage is high enough , then cast Soothing Mist into the target followed by a Enveloping Mist, then spam Vivify

For single-target healing, your bread-and-butter heal is going to be Vivify. If the target is going to be taking consistent damage, then you should channel Soothing Mist onto them as well. If the damage is high enough, you can also apply Enveloping Mist. Enveloping Mist can also be used to preempt damage, as it does not tick immediately upon application.

Renewing Mist should be used on cooldown unless there is no damage to heal or you are intentionally saving charges. This can be done when you expect a period of heavy damage to hit your group and want to be prepared by having a wide coverage of Renewing Mist. However, you should never sit on 2 charges of Renewing Mist. Always have the cooldown rolling.

If things get messy, be ready to cast Life Cocoon on a target who is in immediate danger of dying.

If you are healing raid damage, you need to be aware of the type of damage intake, how many targets are taking damage, as well as how efficient you need to be with your Mana in relation to raid damage.

To begin with, you should use Renewing Mist on cooldown, unless you have a specific reason to hold your charges, like mentioned above.

If there are 3-4+ raid members taking damage, you should use Vivify to top them off; however, only do so if they are in danger of dying, as Vivify is not the most efficient spell in our toolkit. Otherwise, just use Jadefire Stomp to trigger Ancient Teachings and rely on that to take care of the maintenance healing while you DPS.

When 6+ raid members are taking damage, and it is off cooldown, use Essence Font. Essence Font heals targets within 30 yards of you. Since you can cast Essence Font on the move, do not be afraid of accidentally moving and canceling the ability. Essence Font is our highest priority AoE healing spell , assuming enough targets have taken damage, so it is important you use this ability often to get full value out of it. Also, it is wise to take full advantage of your ability to move and cast the spell in order to effectively increase its range.

Essence Font places a HoT which lasts 8 seconds, that causes the recipient to benefit from Mastery: Gust of Mists twice. It is very important, regardless of how much Mastery you have, to make use of the double Mastery procs from Essence Font. After every usage of Essence Font, if damage warrants it, you should immediately follow up with casts of Vivify. The only things that take priority over this are Rising Sun Kick (if talented into Rising Mist), Chi Burst It goes without saying that you should heal people without the Essence Font HoT on them if they are about to die, but you should try to avoid healing people without the HoT in general. Finally, as mentioned previously, the minimum number of targets for Essence Font to be efficient is 6. However, you should aim for closer to at least 10. This is because roughly 25% of Essence Font's healing comes from the HoT it places after the bolt heals a target. If there are only 6 available targets, then Essence Font is guaranteed to overwrite the HoT and lose a significant amount of throughput.

If you have Refreshing Jade Wind talented, and 6 targets are within range of you, cast Refreshing Jade Wind on cooldown.

Finally, if you are using the Chi Burst talent, you should use it on cooldown provided that you can hit 6+ damaged allies with it.

The 8.3 patch brought significant buffs to Rising Mist, making it a default pick for most content. The healing was increased by 33%, and the amount that it extended the duration of our HoTs was doubled. Before, the amount of time gained from extending our HoTs was almost completely lost to the GCD of Rising Sun Kick itself. Now, we can rack up to +100% of the original duration of the HoT, allowing for large burst windows or just increased efficiency. We will be going through how you should think about these HoT extensions for each of our spells and then how you can put it all together in whatever content you are running.

This is an often overlooked aspect of Rising Mist, but it is important to know. Since Enveloping Mist lasts for 6 seconds by default, each Rising Sun Kick is a 66% increase to that duration. The Mana efficiency gained from that is insane. In a situation in which you would otherwise be casting back-to-back Enveloping Mists, getting 2 Rising Sun Kicks effectively gives you a free Enveloping Mist. This also says nothing about being able to put two Enveloping Mists on each Tank during raids. Of course, these are only really powerful if they are not overhealing, so the Tanks must be taking significant damage, but it is something to keep in mind.

Of the three HoT interactions, this one is the weakest, and there is little to talk about. It is a nice bonus that does not generally get played around.

The interaction with Renewing Mist is what makes Rising Mist so powerful. Without even trying, you can extend the duration of every Renewing Mist by 8 seconds, which increases its efficiency by 40%. But more importantly, this also increases the power of Vivify as well. In fact, once you reach 5 Renewing Mists, it is actually more Mana and throughput efficient to cast Vivify instead of Essence Font (though this does not take into account the double Mastery procs from Essence Font). So your goal should be to get the longest duration Renewing Mist that you can. This means if you have a charge of Renewing Mist up and you see that Rising Sun Kick is coming off cooldown, it can be smart to wait until Rising Sun Kick has 1.5 seconds left on the cooldown before casting Renewing Mist in order to more closely align those abilities.

In Raids, your general goal with Rising Mist is going to be to maintain large amounts of Renewing Mist, enabling you to burst during damage windows, and sustain through rot damage with Essence Font. If the tanks are going to take large extended damage, hard cast Enveloping Mist into them before extending with Rising Mist. It is worth noting that if the Tanks need additional healing during this time, Vivify will act as both triage for them, and group cleave healing for the 4-6 targets with your Renewing Mist.

In Mythic+, Rising Mist will be used to passively increase your damage While allowing you to sustain a large number of Renewing Mists. You will be able to pretty easily maintain Renewing Mist on most of the group, while also reaping the benefits of the single target Enveloping Mist extensions mentioned above.

As a Mistweaver Monk, you have a number of cooldowns in your arsenal, which you must use in tandem with your regular rotation.

• Thunder Focus Tea should be used as many times as possible during the encounter. You should normally use this spell either on Essence Font in raids, and either Renewing Mist or Rising Sun Kick in Mythic+
• Life Cocoon should be used on the tank or another target who is about to sustain a large amount of damage. You should time this in such a way that its effect coincides with dangerous encounter abilities.
• Revival is a raid-wide heal, and it could be considered a raid cooldown, in which case your raid leader may ask you to use it at a specific time. Otherwise, just use it when the raid is dangerously low or when you want to dispel the entire raid.
• Invoke Chi-Ji, the Red Crane causes certain DPS abilities to proc your Mastery of two targets while also empowering your Enveloping Mist. This should be used during periods of extended damage, during which you are able to melee the boss.

The information we provide above will set you on the right path towards healing efficiently as a Mistweaver Monk. Indeed, you can probably perform to a relatively high level just on what we have written above; however, to fully reach the maximum potential of your character, you must understand several subtleties and complexities about your class and spec.

There are many mechanics that, together, make up the complex playstyle of Mistweaver Monks.

Soothing Mist is a cheap, efficient, channeled heal that allows us to instantly cast all of our other single target abilities onto that target without breaking the channel. It also has a 1-second global cooldown, as opposed to the normal 1.5, meaning it is faster to channel Soothing Mist then Vivify than it would be to just cast Vivify on its own. However, you are not actually gaining any GCDs; you are just front-loading cast times, so if you are ever swapping targets, the "borrowed" time from the instant cast will catch up to you as soon as you need to hard cast. There is a strong temptation to precede every ability with a Soothing Mist, but it is important to remember that the SooM -> instant spell combo is a Faustian bargain of sorts; it delivers the healing of your powerful abilities after just 1 second, but it costs 2.5 seconds of GCDs that need to be paid eventually.

Rising Sun Kick is a core DPS and healing ability for Mistweavers and our strongest single-target damage ability. Its cooldown is augmented by 3 separate mechanics, offering some on-the-fly randomness and variation to our rotation. First, haste will reduce its cooldown such that it will always be in sync with your GCDs. Second, Teachings of the Monastery give Blackout Kick the chance to reset Rising Sun Kick. Third, Thunder Focus Tea can reduce the cooldown by 9 seconds. This reduction happens before the haste reduction, so you will always have 1 global cooldown in between your two Rising Sun Kicks.

It is a good idea to plan out your Blackout Kicks in such a way that they provide high-value resets. For example, using a 4-stack Blackout Kick when Rising Sun Kick has 3 seconds left on its cooldown and is generally pretty weak when you could save it and get a very high chance for a 1st GCD reset.

Rising Sun Kick is also a large driver of our healing through talents such as Rising Mist, Rapid Diffusion, and Ancient Teachings.

Your Mastery: Gust of Mists causes each of your Soothing Mist, Renewing Mist, Enveloping Mist, Vivify, to also heal the primary target for a certain amount (determined by how much Mastery you have). The primary target mention refers to the fact that only the player you cast Vivify on is healed by the Mastery, and only the first heal of Renewing Mist (on the initial target) triggers a heal. The exception to this is Revival will proc Gust of Mists on everyone it hits.

It is also worth noting that players under the effect of the HoT applied by Essence Font benefit from your Mastery twice, meaning that each of the above-mentioned heals trigger two Mastery heals on them instead of just one.

Thunder Focus Tea is an active ability with a 30-second cooldown that empowers your next Renewing Mist, Rising Sun Kick, Enveloping Mist, Vivify, or Essence Font cast within 30 seconds (the cooldown does not begin until the effect has been triggered). Depending on which spell you use the effect on, it has the following consequences.

• Renewing Mist: extends Renewing Mist's duration to 30 seconds;
• Enveloping Mist: makes Enveloping Mist instantly heal for an additional 200% spell power;
• Rising Sun Kick: reduces the cooldown of Rising Sun Kick by 9 seconds;
• Vivify: removes the Mana cost of Vivify;
• Essence Font: channels the ability 100% faster.

It is also important to note that Thunder Focus Tea is not on the global cooldown, and can be cast during channeled spells, like Soothing Mist and Essence Font.

Most of your Thunder Focus Tea casts should be used on Essence Font in raids, and Rising Sun Kick or Renewing Mist in Mythic+. Enveloping Mist can also be used in a pinch to counter extreme damage on a target you were already channeling Soothing Mist onto, but its applications are much more niche than the others.

The reason for the difference in choices depending on what content you are running stems from not only the damage patterns you will be encountering but also from the talent builds you will have selected. In raids, we will be running Upwelling as well as Secret Infusion, so cutting the cast time of an elongated Essence Font in half while also getting a sizable Haste buff is incredibly powerful. Whereas in Mythic+, you will be more actively trying to gain the HoT extension from Rising Mist as well as the extra damage you will deal.

Life Cocoon is a single-target healing cooldown, which places a damage absorption shield on the target, lasting for 12 seconds or until broken by damage. While the shield is active, the target also receives 50% increased healing from healing over time spells. It is not on the global cooldown and will not break Soothing Mist's channel if cast into the same target.

Invoke Yu'lon, the Jade Serpent can be a somewhat awkward cooldown to maximize the efficiency of. It oftentimes requires an Innervate, as well as fairly specific group positioning or damage patterns. An optimal situation (for reasons we will explain in a moment) would involve some large, extended group damage in which your raid can stack up or at least be clustered in 4 groups of 5.

The way this cooldown functions is it summons an effigy of Yu'lon lasting for 25 seconds that will periodically heal several members of your raid. Additionally, after you talent into Enveloping Breath, your Enveloping Mist casts during Yu'lon will apply a HoT to up to 5 players within 10 yards of your target.

The main portion of this cooldown's power comes from Enveloping Breath. Each of the HoTs applied a tick for half as much as an Enveloping Mist, making them extremely powerful. Lastly, the duration of these HoTs is the same as Enveloping Mist and is also affected by Mist Wrap.

The ideal rotation for this cooldown should look like this:

• Invoke Yu'lon, the Jade Serpent
• Innervate + Enveloping Mist
• Enveloping Mist x3
• Essence Font
• Rising Sun Kick
• Mana Tea (or Innervate) + Enveloping Mist
• Enveloping Mist x3
• Essence Font

In other words, within the windows of each Mana reduction cooldown, you want to cast 4 Enveloping Mist, then end on Essence Font. The reason for that is that 4 casts of Enveloping Mist is enough to blanket the whole raid with Enveloping Breath. As you might imagine, however, positioning is often not this clean, and also, depending on your haste level, you will often find yourself able to cast more than just 4 Enveloping Mists before your Mana cooldown falls off. These sorts of situations will require more on-the-fly thinking, just remember that you want to refresh Enveloping Breath on the lowest duration first.

Lastly, a small tip to remember is that oftentimes, the tanks will be farther than 10 yards away from the melee. A good way to ensure that they are hit by the splash of Enveloping Breath is to use yourself as a bridge. You can position yourself inside the boss' hitbox, equidistant from the tanks and melee, then cast Enveloping Mist on yourself in order to hit everyone.

Invoke Chi-Ji, the Red Crane is the Mana-friendly version of Yu'lon that allows you to leverage your DPS to do tremendous healing. It causes all your Blackout Kicks, Rising Sun Kicks, and Spinning Crane Kicks to trigger a Mastery: Gust of Mists proc on 2 allies. Equally, each kick will also give you a stack that reduces the Mana cost and cast time of your next Enveloping Mist by 33%.

The rotation is fairly simple; before pressing Chi-ji, it is important to make sure you have 3 stacks of Teachings of the Monastery ready to go for a Blackout Kick as soon as you pop the cooldown. From there, you just want to DPS and spend your "bird stacks" to get Enveloping Breath on as much of the raid as you can. Keep in mind that it takes the same amount of time to cast Enveloping Mist at 2 stacks as it does at 3 since you still have to take the Global Cooldown into consideration, so if you mess up your rotation and only get 2 stacks, that is fine.

While DPSing, you only want to stack your Teachings of the Monastery to 2, since that will give you 3 Blackout Kicks (and therefore 3 bird stacks). Keep in mind; you will need to also Rising Sun Kick from time to time, and so following or preceding the use of RSK, you will only want to stack your TotM once.

Revival is a raid-wide heal, which also removes any Magical, Disease or Poison effects from all targets. Revival also procs Mastery: Gust of Mists on everyone it hits, so if the damage patterns allow, it is a good idea to cast Essence Font prior to proc the double Mastery buff.

In most cases, you should use it for the heal it provides (which is quite powerful, considering the number of targets it heals), but it can also be used as a sort of "mass dispel". The spell has a 3-minute cooldown and a 40-yard range. If a fight requires your use of Revival, but the Magic dispel would cause a wipe, then talent into Restoral instead. The spell functions exactly the same, just without the Magic dispel and with the added perk of being able to be used while stunned.

Chi Burst should be used only when there are 6 or more damaged raid members that you can hit with the spell, in which case it should be used on cooldown. Alternatively, in dungeons, it is a great spell to pre-cast before your group pulls a trash pack, as it will apply Mystic Touch to all enemies it strikes.

Mana Tea should be used as often as possible throughout the fight, ideally during periods of heavy damage when you can gain the highest overall Mana cost reduction, while also making sure to not overcap your stacks

In raids, Jadefire Stomp is mainly used to proc Ancient Teachings, during periods of low damage, as it is much cheaper than Essence Font. However, in Mythic+, this spell basically replaces Essence Font entirely. When combined with Awakened Jadefire and Ancient Concordance, and when facing down large groups of mobs, the buffs that these series of talents provide to our DPS kit (and therefore our healing via Ancient Teachings) cannot be understated. It causes Blackout Kick to hit multiple targets, as well as Tiger Palm to strike twice, granting us 2 stacks of Teachings of the Monastery. This means that while standing on your Jadefire with these talents selected, your DPS rotation will change such that you only ever want to press Tiger Palm once before pressing Blackout Kick.

Roll is an ability that allows you to quickly move 15 yards in front of you. It is a useful mobility ability, which you should use extensively for quickly traversing short distances. Here are a few facts about Roll:

• Roll has no resource cost and no cooldown. It is based on a charge system.
  • It has a baseline maximum of 1 charge, and this charge has a 20-second recharge time.
  • The Improved Roll talent grants you one additional charge of Roll.
  • The Celerity talent also grants an additional charge, and reduces recharge time to 15 seconds.
• Roll is off the global cooldown, but while you are rolling, you are unable to use any other ability.
• Roll will always send you in the direction that your character is currently moving (including backward). If your character is stationary, Roll will send you in the direction your character is facing.
• You cannot roll through objects or obstacles. If you encounter an obstacle, your Roll is ended prematurely.
• Your movement speed while rolling is greater than while running, so rolling off a cliff will push you further than if you were just running and jumping.

Transcendence allows you to place a copy of yourself behind for up to 15 minutes. If you then use Transcendence: Transfer, you will be instantly moved back to the location of your copy. This can be useful in a wide range of situations, typically those where you know you will have to return to a certain location after moving away from it.