This week on MMOC Monk Archive

[Totaltotemic]

I would suggest adding links for your source material or we will get conversation split between the main discussion thread and the weekly newsletter.

The purpose of this is largely to cross post to the battle.net forum, which doesn't have direct links anyways and has the possibility of being flagged as spam if I overdo it. I didn't really even intend for people to start discussing it here, this was just kind of a proof of concept. Either way though, I'm not opposed to some of the things being discussed in this thread as well, we have so much discussion contained in the megathreads that it's not like one more general all-purpose thread would crowd out the page or anything.

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Might wnat to put a "post number" "episode number" or "week ending" field in your title to know when to age out old posts

I did on the battle.net forum post. I just didn't in this post because it was largely about the concept rather than the summary itself. For future posts here I'll be including the date.

[Methosmv]

I'd just like to say thank you to Total, Hinalover and all of the monks that put in the extra time and have the abilities to theorycraft, and do what is needed to help our class and keep us informed well. I've read many of the forums and this is by far the most well run and I feel productive one there.. I have used tons of advice here to improve and help me enjoy my monk that I love and I just wanted to sincerely thank those that put in their time and let them know it is greatly appreciated.

[blackblade]

Was dicking around in beta with my monk.

I'm really liking the new storm earth and fire. (0 gcd, 0 cost). I feel like the spirits haul ass to get on target instead of doing that hop thing they do today.

[Somus]

Excellent thread Totaltotemic. Please keep this up, this is very informative and beneficial to those who can't keep up to date on a daily basis for the Beta changes.

[Mefistophelis]

Well done Totaltotemic. Keep up the good work. I'm one of those MW monks that still hope for some changes before going live.

[Totaltotemic]

It's that time again to sum up the conversation for the past week on the MMO-Champion Monk forum, one of the largest and most active Monk forums in the world.

Windwalker

A wave of panic washed over WWs trying to test on the 6.0 PTR as many people saw a 1.5 second GCD on their characters. It turned out this was just a bug with some older characters and all freshly created or copied characters work just fine.

Hinalover and friends have been trying to narrow down the APL (action priority list) for WW's SimulationCraft module, this week tackling Serenity and its odd issues with energy capping and whether to use FoF at the end of the buff or just wait until it's on CD before using Serenity. Progress looks good, and the module seems like it will be in very good shape by the time 6.0 goes live.

Zen Sphere still seems to be behaving oddly with regard to its detonate function, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't, but no one seems to be able to pin down what exactly is causing it to fail sometimes.

Finally there was some discussion about how the spec will play once 6.0 is out but before level 100 talents, and the general consensus seems to be mostly the same, albeit slower and using FoF on cooldown instead of under very specific conditions.

Mistweaver

As 6.0 looms ever closer, MWs are still worried about the complete and total lack of change in recent builds, wondering if fixes that were talked about (GotS, ReM) are ever going to be implemented or just pushed off until 6.1.

Breath of the Serpent got a heavy nerf because it was over-performing as a talent and overshadowing Chi Explosion and Pool of Mists, so now it is just a 30% SP per second per person heal instead of 50%, but by the end is still equivalent to a Soothing + Surging on every single person it hits over 10 seconds.

The hot topic of the week is Renewing Mists and Uplift. Some analysis by Geodew showed that ReM is, on average, barely even with Surging Mist in terms of HPS and HPM, which kicked off a great debate about whether ReM needs to be buffed or possibly just have its cooldown removed entirely if it's going to remain as weak as it is. This also spiraled into the usual debate about the fact that MWs have no spread healing buttons outside of ReM and Uplift, and both have limited use, forcing a waste of mana if MWs want to continue healing.

There have been a lot of comparisons to Renew and Rejuvenate blanketing when discussing ReM, but in the end everyone agrees that something needs to happen now that Uplift has an AoE cap and it has devalued ReM's importance as a whole, which isn't very good when the entire value of the multistrike stat depends on ReM being a godly spell worthy of being pressed on cooldown at all times.

Brewmaster

At long last from the primordial muck a Brewmaster SimulationCraft module has arisen. Spearheaded mostly by Nestor, the BrM SimC module is in its early stages of forming an effective APL so that we can finally have solid metrics for what increases damage done and what reduces damage taken.

However, the recent tank squish is heavily interfering with these attempts, as mob damage seems to still be overtuned and resulting in tanks dying in a mere two melee hits sometimes. Currently the values of Chi Explosion and Shuffle are hard to determine because no one actually expects mob damage to be what it currently is when 6.0 goes live. It is unlikely that an accurate picture of stats in WoD will be able to be seen clearly until mob damage is balanced appropriately and we can put this tank squish mess behind us.
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Previous This Week on MMOC Monks:

9/10/16

[Enpoli]

These posts are awesome. Thanks for putting these together!

[Gurg]

Nice one! Ty on your time summing things up.
I agree with every letter that you wrote and its stated several times by Celes that they are aware that Monks, specially Mistweavers are in really bad spot atm and that they are underperforming quite good. As he said, number tuning for monks has barely started so we are not even aware what are they planing to do with the class, a simple boost to one spell can completely change whole playstyle.
As for BrM monks, it was well aware and talked quite frequently on this forum, that even before tank squish they are in odd place and kinda squishy, so, again, thats nothing new.

with all that being said.. Im not quite sure from where all those people that are worried arise from in those numbers since, as you say, MMOC monk forums are one of most active forums in the world. So.. im not quite getting did they simply refuse to believe all the talking and theoryc that we did for the last few months or they are simply there to QQ on forums?

Anyhow, good work mate, keep up with these posts, it really helps someone whos not visiting Monk sub section quite often due to no changes to monks.

[Jocias]

This thread is locked.

If you have any questions, comments, or wish to continue any discussions, please find the most recent "This week" thread.

[Rockets]

Nice work, as always.

[Gaje]

Great Info, thanks!

[Totaltotemic]

It's Tuesday, which means another summary post.

Windwalker

An interesting conversation this week about Storm, Earth, and Fire hashed out its current mechanics in beta: off the GCD, shows a debuff on the target (so you can more easily distinguish what has a spirit without an addon), and had a bug for a while where it couldn't be /cancelaura'd to erase it, but that seems to be fixed now.

The Fists of Fury glyph that lets you move while channeling Fists of Fury was discussed, and it was brought up that there are two important limitations of this glyph: it cannot be used with the range-extending FoF glyph, and knockbacks will still cancel the FoF channel. Overall it still works well, but it's an important thing to keep in mind.

Just this morning a new build was deployed that nerfed the T17 2p bonus from generating 4 stacks of TEB every time you FoF down to only 1 stack, although it now actually works with mastery. This appears to be part of a giant tuning pass of tier bonuses that has only just begun because a lot of them were incredibly strong. Sims show it to be about a 1.7k DPS loss (Hinalover).

Mistweaver

Uplift got a godly 50% buff and Renewing Mist now jumps to the most injured target in range instead of the closest/furthest injured target. At first glance these changes seem great, but posters have thought otherwise.

On Uplift: the throughput buff was nice and definitely needed since it now caps its healing at 6 targets (spreading healing after that instead of adding more healing), but it's had a host of other ramifications. Chi Explosion is now effectively worthless as its healing at all levels of chi is less efficient than Uplift. Similarly, Pool of Mists is practically mandatory because heavy reliance on Uplift demands good ReM coverage, and after BotS's recent nerf it's simply not a very good talent anymore. The general consensus is that it's a step in the right direction, but MWs still lack in pure throughput, utility, and cooldowns comapared to other healers.

On ReM: There are very mixed feelings about this. On one hand, some people love the extra couple of seconds that ReM jump targets will be actually injured so that ReM and Uplift will overheal less. On the other hand, this basically makes the glyph mandatory as it still increases the range to 40 yards, which will completely minimize its overhealing. Overall though, no one really thinks it will change much and is an attempt to fix the wrong problem.

There was also some fun with a bug in the T17 2p which gives a stacking buff as long as you channel Soothing Mist that gives 5% Multistrike per stat, but it wasn't falling off properly when the channel ended, leading to some shenanigans of crazy Jade Mist procs due to 60%+ Multistrike. For a brief shining moment MWs were abusing this bug to throw out a lot of ReMs and time it with Revival and such, and they turned out to actually do average healing for a change. Unfortunately, that bug has since been fixed as of this new build.

Brewmaster

Things have been quiet on the Brewmaster front, largely because we are still waiting for the tank tier sets to be re-balanced. With Paladins having hilarious block amounts and BrMs having practically infinite Elusive Brew with the 4p bonus, it's quite obvious that things won't stay in this state, so current observations are not particularly useful.

Also on the tier bonus subject, the 4p does not actually grant EB stacks when using the purify from Chi Explosion, which has caused some concern over the viability of the talent in high-end raiding. We can only hope that they tie the 4p to also proc from Chi Explosion as well, but if they do not then we might have some issues with actually utilizing that talent.
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Previous This Week on MMOC Monks:

9/10/14
9/16/14

[Jocias]

This thread is locked. If you wish to discuss anything from this thread, post in the latest "This Week" thread.

[Callimonk]

Hm. I like this idea, TT. Do you think maybe we should make a single thread? I'd be happy to sticky it for you.

[Totaltotemic]

Honestly I only post a copy of these here because people want me to. These are really meant for the battle.net forums but people like these here too apparently. I think a sticky might defeat the purpose, since these are really only relevant the week of and I'd like to avoid the megathread style thing we have going on where people have to scroll through pages and pages to find what's actually relevant to them. I suppose I could edit the first post with whatever the most recent summary is, but people do have a tendency to completely glaze over stickies and I think this way lets people know more easily that this is new stuff. Also discussions have generally popped up in the last two of these I've done and this keeps them self-contained and relevant.

If it's a forum clutter issue I wouldn't mind if the backlogged threads were completely deleted instead of just locked and I could just archive them myself. I'm just trying to present the information to people in a way that tells them that it is new and relevant without having to scroll through a dozen other posts first, and a sticky is kind of the antithesis to that.

Realistically though older threads probably don't need a new post when they get locked (which I did ask Jocias to do), I think the last one was like 3 threads from falling off the first page anyways. I just wanted locks so they don't get bumped again and go away without confusing anyone.

[Deleted]

Hm. I like this idea, TT. Do you think maybe we should make a single thread? I'd be happy to sticky it for you.

This is coming from someone who 'never' looks at the Monk forums. I'm only here because someone mentioned a 200+ page thread on MW on the druid forums.

I like the single posts. I don't think many people read stickies, just as people don't read FAQs or manuals. So this is a quick way to catch up on what's going on and it's being put right in your face as it's on the front page while it's important and then moves to the back of the forums quickly.

[apepi]

This is coming from someone who 'never' looks at the Monk forums. I'm only here because someone mentioned a 200+ page thread on MW on the druid forums.

I like the single posts. I don't think many people read stickies, just as people don't read FAQs or manuals. So this is a quick way to catch up on what's going on and it's being put right in your face as it's on the front page while it's important and then moves to the back of the forums quickly.

Ironically stickies are there for things that you should want to read >.>.

But thanks for getting this together TT.

[Jocias]

Yeah. I'm going to echo what Total said. It's nice to have a short thread where people can discuss what is occurring this week. The information and most of the discussion from the previous week are largely obsolete or irrelevant by the following week anyway, and to have all the conversation on a single omnibus thread can cloud discussions with info from weeks prior.

I don't like the idea of deleting the old threads in case something from one of them is relevant or a conversation continues from one thread to another.

I did realize the fact that I essentially necroed that thread after the fact. In the future, I'll just edit the last post to include the lock message to avoid bumping the old thread.

I do have something of a middle road between stickying and locking old threads. We could merge all the old threads into a single locked thread. That way, there are only ever two threads. One with all the old stuff, and one that is for the current week.

I like the merged threads idea, personally. If you'd prefer to continue to keep each thread separately locked, I don't think it adds enough forum clutter to be a nuisance.

[apepi]

Yeah. I'm going to echo what Total said. It's nice to have a short thread where people can discuss what is occurring this week. The information and most of the discussion from the previous week are largely obsolete or irrelevant by the following week anyway, and to have all the conversation on a single omnibus thread can cloud discussions with info from weeks prior.

I don't like the idea of deleting the old threads in case something from one of them is relevant or a conversation continues from one thread to another.

I did realize the fact that I essentially necroed that thread after the fact. In the future, I'll just edit the last post to include the lock message to avoid bumping the old thread.

I do have something of a middle road between stickying and locking old threads. We could merge all the old threads into a single locked thread. That way, there are only ever two threads. One with all the old stuff, and one that is for the current week.

I like the merged threads idea, personally. If you'd prefer to continue to keep each thread separately locked, I don't think it adds enough forum clutter to be a nuisance.

That does not seem like a bad idea.

[Totaltotemic]

I do have something of a middle road between stickying and locking old threads. We could merge all the old threads into a single locked thread. That way, there are only ever two threads. One with all the old stuff, and one that is for the current week.

I like the merged threads idea, personally. If you'd prefer to continue to keep each thread separately locked, I don't think it adds enough forum clutter to be a nuisance.

I didn't even know you could do that, it would work a lot better probably to just have one locked archive thread. I can keep direct links to the last three so that anyone can have access to a full month's worth of conversation in ~10 minutes, but any more than that would probably clutter the post.

It's cool that we're still working things out. After all, what we're trying to do here isn't something I've ever actually seen done before for WoW; typically this is like the final evolution of a class-based site like HowToPriest or Totemspot. The difference is that there is no one central site controlled by a third party that could just stop playing the class at some point and fall into disrepair. As long as we just have a forum instead of blogs with forums on the side, we can get discussion instead of pontificating so that everything is checked and double-checked before it's presented somewhere. If we can keep this up we could tap into an entire demographic of Monks that doesn't feel like reading/participating in forums a lot but would also like accurate information instead of whatever guide site says or an individual blogger might say. Thank you mods for your cooperation and helping to make this work.