How To Improve As Mistweaver Monk — The War Within (11.0.5)

Whenever you cast Soothing Mist, be sure that it is with the intent to follow up with additional casts. It is too easy to fall into the trap of casting Soothing Mist just to make subsequent casts "instant", when doing so on multiple targets is actually slower than just hard casting. Soothing Mist does not make casts instant in the same way a Power Word: Shield is instant. Power Word: Shield is usable on demand, while moving, whenever and on whomever you please, whereas Soothing Mist + Vivify requires 1 second of prep time, can not be cast while moving and is punished by target swaps. It makes spells instant as more of a solution to a coding and systems issue, rather than as an outright buff to Monk; given that you cannot cast two spells at once in the game, Soothing Mist makes one instant instead. It is a small distinction, but an important one.

While this advice is not important if you are not running Rising Mist or not actively DPSing, it is valuable to get into the habit of keeping an eye on where your Rising Sun Kick is in its cooldown. You always want to cast Blackout Kick as early into the cooldown of Rising Sun Kick as possible. This means that if you get off-cycle and have 1-3 global cooldowns before your next Rising Sun Kick, then its wise to do something else. You can spend a global cooldown or two casting Renewing Mist, or just catching up on healing in general before going back to DPS. If you really want to optimize, if you know your character just auto-attacked, then casting Crackling Jade Lightning for a single tick will be more DPS than Tiger Palm.

Casting Renewing Mist as close to on cooldown as possible is incredibly important as it is the driver for Vivify. In the past, Mistweavers could get away with letting a few casts slip here and there, but that type of play is much more punishing now. This is not to say that holding charges is a bad idea, but you should only do so with intent and for specific situations.

This is probably the biggest problem new Mistweavers have. Thunder Focus Tea is tremendously powerful over the course of a fight, and there is essentially never a situation in which we would want to hold it.