WoD: Big Changes to Monks

• 2014-06-20 10:10:48

At the official site, the latest Warlords of Draenor alpha patch notes have been released, and they come with some pretty hefty changes to monks--Mistweavers in particular. Blizzard has been experimenting with the monk class, and that comes as no real surprise. They were the new kids of Mists of Pandaria, so it's expected that they'll be getting relatively large changes in the expansion immediately following their introduction. Death Knights went through the same thing in Cataclysm, so this seems to be just part of the new class cycle. Keep that in mind as we go over the changes; this is still alpha, after all, and if there were any time for Blizzard to play around and see what happens, it's now.

The biggest changes in the current build involve haste, the global cooldown, and the separation of the traditional healing style of Mistweavers versus the Eminence dps-while-healing style. Like Warriors, a number of the monk changes show a great emphasis on the importance of stances, and how different stances affect gameplay. The monk change notes are after the break, with the strikeouts left intact so as to illustrate the dynamic changes from the last alpha build.

At this stage of the alpha, Blizzard is focusing heavily on the Mistweaver monk and balancing traditional healing play style with the Eminence healing-through-damage (aka "Fistweaving") play style. In order to better separate the two styles of play, Mistweaver monks will be getting a new stance: Stance of the Spirited Crane, which sets the monk's attack power at 100% of their spell power and gives them Eminence, and thus all the abilities associated with Eminence.

The changes are clearly stated to be an effort toward separating the two styles of Mistweaver healing. Blizzard does not want players to be able to overlap traditional healing with "Fistweaving" gameplay, and they've made it impossible to use the fundamental spells of each approach in the "wrong" stance. As a long time druid player, the balancing act Blizzard's attempting here reminds me very strongly of the efforts Blizzard went to over the years to separate bear-form tanking and cat-form melee DPS while they were both still rolled into the single Feral druid spec. In the end, the developers gave up entirely on that model and split those roles into two different specs. Here, you are able to find the largest selection of WoW items!