The Mistweaver Experiment, Part Two

Penbrooke, who only about a week ago was level 5, is now level 59, and has made her first sojourn to Outland.

Having played through many if not most of the vanilla dungeons, I think I now have a better picture of how Mistweaving works, or at least can work.

While one can separate out the Fistweaving and Mistweaving styles, it appears that the best way to play is to combine the two. With a bunch of heirloom gear, you can typically keep your party healed with just your melee attacks, though Renewing Mists is one pure healing ability you'll want to weave in. Renewing Mists is an instant-cast HoT that has an eight second cool down and will jump to two additional targets. It also generates one Chi, which actually helps you take advantage of the Muscle Memory passive to its maximum even if you're trying to get a Blackout Kick in there.

Renewing Mists, coupled with Spinning Crane Kick (which will heal friends and damage enemies, and I believe that damage also causes Eminence) really opens up your AoE healing capabilities. It's pretty rare (in vanilla dungeons) that you'll have to worry about people other than the tank given that Renewing Mists will prefer targets that are wounded.

It strikes me that there's nothing about pure Mistweaving (standing in the back and casting) that makes you a worse healer, but given the low damage people take in vanilla dungeons and the fact that  you can contribute only slightly less damage than you would as a DPS spec makes it a solid idea to primary fight in melee.

So far, things are feeling pretty solid. I imagine that the Serpent Statue that one gets at level 70 will make things even stronger (as it duplicates your Eminence Healing,) but as of yet, I haven't really been put in challenging dungeon situations. I expect that I'll have to wait until Cataclysm content to really feel that, but I think that with these nearly 60 levels of working on healing, I should be able to meet the challenge.