Mistweaver Monk DPS Guide — The War Within (11.0.5)

What separates good healers from great healers is their ability to find moments during the fight in order to deal damage. Your job as a healer is the same as anyone else in the raid: to make sure the boss dies. If you have nothing to heal or your other healers have a damage event covered, then it is best to not try and force extra number onto the meters, and waste your Mana.

• Rising Sun Kick is your main DPS ability on a cooldown.
• Tiger Palm is your generator ability.
• Blackout Kick is your your spender.
• Spinning Crane Kick is your main AoE spell.
• Crackling Jade Lightning is your ranged DPS ability.

Teachings of the Monastery is a buff applied by Tiger Palm that stacks up to 3 times. Each stack causes your next Blackout Kick to strike an additional time. This ability also passively gives Blackout Kick a 15% chance to reset the cooldown on Rising Sun Kick.

Compared to full DPS specs, Mistweaver rotation is fairly simple, however it is one of the more nuanced of the Healer DPS rotations. For simplicity's sake we will be listing the basic priority queue, however later in the guide we will go into more detail about stack management and high value vs low value Rising Sun Kick resets.

1. Use Rising Sun Kick on cooldown
2. Use Blackout Kick at 3 or 4 stacks
3. Use Tiger Palm to generate stacks of Teachings of the Monastery

1. Use Rising Sun Kick on cooldown
2. Use Blackout Kick if you have remaining Teachings of the Monastery stacks
3. Use Spinning Crane Kick

1. Use Spinning Crane Kick

As mentioned before there is a certain amount of nuance in how to play around your stacks of Teachings of the Monastery. First, it is important to know that all the cooldowns on your DPS abilities are reduced by Haste. This means that no matter what, even as the cooldown of Rising Sun Kick decreases, you will always be able to fit the same number of GCDs in between each use of Rising Sun Kick.

In total, after casting Rising Sun Kick, you will be able to cast 7 more spells before the cooldown is back up. This divides into our rotation very nicely: it allows you to cast 6 Tiger Palms and one Blackout Kick. After your first Rising Sun Kick the cast sequence could look like this:

• Rising Sun Kick
• Tiger Palm x3
• Blackout Kick
• Tiger Palm x3
• Rising Sun Kick

After the first Blackout Kick in that sequence, if you get a reset, you can repeat the cycle again, however if you get no resets, after the second Rising Sun Kick, you know have 3 stacks of Teachings of the Monastery that you can instantly spend to try and get a reset.

This leads us to the topic of high-value resets. In the example mentioned above, resetting on the GCD directly after Rising Sun Kick is the most ideal situation, while resets that happen more than halfway through its cooldown are not exactly desirable. You never want to cast Blackout Kick in the GCD or two right before Rising Sun Kick is about to come off cooldown, because it wastes the cooldown reduction. If you find yourself in a situation where you have maxed out your Teachings of the Monastery stacks, but there is only a few seconds left on the cooldown of Rising Sun Kick, it is better to cast a heal or set up a Renewing Mist instead.

If you are playing with the talent Awakened Jadefire then the rotation becomes much simpler and smoothed out, as it causes Tiger Palm to strike twice, granting you two stacks of Teachings of the Monastery. For pure damage, you just hit Tiger Palm twice then Blackout Kick, and if you want to fish for early resets of Rising Sun Kick, then only Tiger Palm once instead.