This week on MMOC Monk Archive

[Jocias]

Sounds like thread merge is the way to go. I'll go ahead and take care of it. Do you have a desired title for the archive thread?

[Totaltotemic]

You could just merge it all in to the original that just has the "This Week on MMOC Monk" title with no date, kind of gets the point across I think.

[Jocias]

I added archive to the title to make that more apparent. As long as the title is okay, the deed is done. I added a quick moderation note to the OP.

On a side note, conversation about thread moderation is technically considered off-topic, unless anyone has more ideas for improving Total's weekly threads, we should get back to the actual thread topic, which is discussing what happened this week to monks.

Also, making long posts on my phone is a chore. Sorry for the initial typos in my last few posts.

P.P.S: The link to the 9/16 post is broken since that thread no longer exists.
Here's a working link: 9/16/14

[Callimonk]

You could just merge it all in to the original that just has the "This Week on MMOC Monk" title with no date, kind of gets the point across I think.

That's honestly what I was, more or less, proposing. Heh. Anyway, go ahead and take care of it, Jocias.

[Deleted]

Item - Monk WoD PvP Windwalker 4P Bonus Increases the duration of Tigereye Brew by 3 sec. instead of 7
Really? we already have the 2P Bonus that is really really really bad, and now they nerf this.. i dont get it
A lot of classes have bad bonus set (rogue successfull kick gives 3cp for example), they should start taking more care of those

[Babylonius]

Item - Monk WoD PvP Windwalker 4P Bonus Increases the duration of Tigereye Brew by 3 sec. instead of 7
Really? we already have the 2P Bonus that is really really really bad, and now they nerf this.. i dont get it
A lot of classes have bad bonus set (rogue successfull kick gives 3cp for example), they should start taking more care of those

This made the PvP set hugely important for PvE, which is not what they want. It's unfortunate for PvPers but not the first time one has resulted in a nerf to the other.

[Baneberry]

How is the pvp 2 piece bad? 4 chi for 30 energy every 10 sec = +360 energy/min = 6 energy/sec regen.. holy hell .. who needs haste?

[Totaltotemic]

How is the pvp 2 piece bad? 4 chi for 30 energy every 10 sec = +360 energy/min = 6 energy/sec regen.. holy hell .. who needs haste?

Uptime is so bad in PvP anyways that you typically already don't need haste. A lot of people don't see the value in taking something that you already don't need and making you need it less.

[Baneberry]

Uptime is so bad in PvP anyways that you typically already don't need haste. A lot of people don't see the value in taking something that you already don't need and making you need it less.

Its more of a question in using pvp gear for pve

[Deleted]

No man, "When you use Roll, the Energy cost of your next Jab is reduced by 30 for 3 sec."
Its pvp bonus, for pvp situations, not talking about pve.. and reducing the energy of jab is bad because:
-you may be full chi, so its a waste since u dont have always the time to use roll, use a chi-ability, and jab right after. there are some things called slow, root, stun ecc
-you may use the roll just to escape, and u wont jab the air..
-you may be full energy, and still when u roll to the enemy, you still need to do 2 jab in a row for avoid energy waste
-you may not reach the target with 1 roll
-ecc

[Totaltotemic]

Archive
Most recent This Week

Windwalker

Moving out of the stage where things keep changing, beta discussion turned to performance and balance. Both on-going simultation updates and example logs from raid testing are in agreement that WW is somewhat average when it comes to single target damage. The not-so-surprising AoE results show WW absolutely dominating DPS in any kind of AoE fight via Chi Explosion and SEF. People seem pretty happy with this result, as it at least gives WW a niche that they do very well.

Among other discussions were some confusion over the way the T17 4p works, but after some clarification and a buff to it, it's 3% more multiplicative multistrike damage per stack of TEB consumed. This means that using a 10 stack of TEB causes multistrikes to do 30% more damage, or 39% of base instead of 30%.

Rounding out the relatively slow week for WWs were continued complaints over Hurricane Strike and people's struggles to find situations where it would actually be useful.

Mistweaver

This was one of the most active MW weeks in recent history as Midwinter Mistweaver Monkioh jumped in to get everyone to take a much closer look at raid results since the Uplift buff two weeks ago.

It all started due to the lack of Mistweavers in guilds actually doing raid testing. For months now (ever since the Uplift AoE cap where healing is only spread past 6 targets instead of adding more per target) Mistweaver has looked incredibly weak in situations where people are too spread out for SCK/RJW/Chi Torpedo/Chi Burst to heal them, with ReM and Uplift being the only tools available. That all changed when Uplift was suddenly buffed by 50%.

Results were confusing to most of the MMOC MW crew during a time frame where the T17 2p was bugged and its multistrike buff could be extended beyond just channeling Soothing Mist, no one could tell what was real and what was being cheesed by a bug. Due to the difficulty of actually being an active Mistweaver in 5.4 for a guild that would do that kind of testing together, many were left on the outside looking in at what few scraps of logs went through Warcraft Logs that actually contained Mistweavers. What first appeared like MW being weak even after the Uplift buff was actually proven by Suplift and Monkioh to really just be Mistweavers that didn't know how to adapt to the changes.

Slowly, on Friday and Saturday, more Mistweaver logs started to come out. Once the dynamic duo of actually good Mistweaver players convinced everyone to take a second look, people started seeing weird things like a Mistweaver doing more healing than anyone else in the raid (except extremely broken Disc Priests right now). Suplift even sat in Crane Stance for an entire fight (the only known Crane log to date) and still managed to do more healing than a Resto Shaman, and almost as much damage as the tanks.

What we see now is that Uplift was buffed so much that once people figure out to stop doing anything else and just Soothing/Surging/Surging/Uplift with Pool of Mists to spread ReM everywhere, Mistweaver throughput is actually in a very good place, despite what it looked like immediately following the Uplift buff.

However, people still agree that there are issues remaining. GotS still doesn't make sense, Life Cocoon is pretty awful, Revival is good at saving a raid from unexpectedly dying but is terrible at pre-planned cooldown usage, and haste is still pretty terrible due to a variety of factors. None of these will likely be fixed for 6.0, but at the very least throughput is high enough that raids would want a MW just for the pure healing throughput even if they don't offer anything else.

Brewmaster

Discussion still mostly revolves around SimC. Boss damage has been fixed in accordance with the tank squish, a few minor adjustments to the BrM profile made it work better, and bugs continue to be squashed by those working on it. Not much in that conversation is worth summarizing, just day to day details of improving SimC. One important outcome is the identification of Mastery and Versatility as must-stack stats for damage reduction.

Actual discussion, however, did spring from the fact that tier gear will not be available in Highmaul, which means that BrMs will have to go a month or two without tier bonuses. The general consensus makes BrM considerably weaker than other tanks at the beginning because of the strength of the set bonuses for BrM and the fact that BrMs scale very well with stats to begin with. Some are not convinced that BrM being "eventually" good is not worth the risk at the start of the expansion, while others are confident enough in BrM's scaling and banking on bosses not hitting so hard that BrM can't do the content. Time will tell.

[sethers656]

Archive
Most recent This Week

Actual discussion, however, did spring from the fact that tier gear will not be available in Highmaul, which means that BrMs will have to go a month or two without tier bonuses. The general consensus makes BrM considerably weaker than other tanks at the beginning because of the strength of the set bonuses for BrM and the fact that BrMs scale very well with stats to begin with. Some are not convinced that BrM being "eventually" good is not worth the risk at the start of the expansion, while others are confident enough in BrM's scaling and banking on bosses not hitting so hard that BrM can't do the content. Time will tell.

I am so very worried about BrM's at the start of the xpac. I am pretty sure that if things dont change in a major way before release, that I will be maining my warrior as my main tank. I will level my Monk and WW and have him ready to go BrM if they seem good. I do enjoy the BrM playstyle, but I just really dont want to deal with being a lesser tank. I mained Druid Bear for a long time, and while I enjoyed it, they have been known to not be the best at times. I think maining a warrior will be the best for me right now, but I will keep up with BrM changes and I give major cudos to the people running all the sims for us and sticking with our kung fu tanks

[Totaltotemic]

Last week's post

Windwalker

The big thing this week was what appeared to be a nerf to almost every WW ability by almost exactly 5%. As Hinalover pointed out shortly after the fact, this wasn't actually a change to any individual abilities, it just appeared so due to the simplified way that MMO-Champion's database shows damage tooltips. A more in-depth look at the Wowhead tooltips revealed that this reduction only applied to a special coefficient added to lower Dual-Wielding damage to keep it in line with 2h damage, which was still simming ~8% better before this change.

There was a lot of confusion about it because of the way the information is presented in both databases, but at the end of the day what Hinalover was able to explain to everyone (with some more clarification from Celestalon) was that Dual-Wield damage was in general lowered by 5% while Tiger Strikes was buffed for 2h, bringing them much closer in line with each other to about a 3% difference. What this means for WW is that any Warforged 2h is probably now better than normal 1hs, although if everything is equal DW is still better.

Also in the past week was some discussion about Touch of Death and how WW performs in "execute phases" (some conclusions are: generally not great, but ToD has potential to be extremely good on adds), and a continued expression of annoyance at WW's somewhat lack of self-healing compared to other melee.

Mistweaver

The question of MW viability has somewhat hit a stand-still as Mythic testing hasn't happened in a while (and no one is sure if it will happen in the future), but further analysis of recent logs has upheld the idea that MW throughput is generally average. There isn't much more anyone has found to add to the subject, except that there are more people asking about Crane Stance every day and there's a disappointing lack of logs of people actually using Crane in a raid situation, so anyone doing LFR or Normal testing as MW would be appreciated if they could do some logs using Crane to the best of their ability.

(I am personally heavily involved in the following section about Gift of the Serpent, as such the views expressed are largely my own with a good dose of Hamlet's input as well via Twitter) Full thread: http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/14729563047

After months of complaining about it and a lot of work, GotS scalars (hidden coefficients that change the actual proc rate of GotS per ability) have finally been looked at again. After what amounts to somewhere between a 15-25% buff to GotS (depending on what talents/spells are used), it's still the worst stat you could possibly have, but at least it's a step in the right direction. Something that is agreed upon by everyone at MMOC Monk though is that it is far too complicated. Some want a new mastery entirely, other want GotS to work a different way, and some would just be happy if it was the same thing but a lot less complicated (the suggestion I've personally been kicking around is GotS to only proc from ReM so there is one scalar instead of 17 to deal with).

Brewmaster

There has been a continuing question over how much someone should actually Purify in 6.0 and beyond. Serenity and Chi Explosion are at such opposite extremes that the trade-off between tankiness and damage is murky and highly dependent on what you do within a fight and which talent you take outside of the fight.

At the same time, there are also a lot of people still unhappy with the WoD tanking model and how little individual heals like Expel Harm heal for. It's a very stark difference between beta and live, and even those not unhappy with the amount of self-healing have questioned the point of Desperate Measures if Expel Harm isn't actually going to heal for a lot.

Finally, the discussion of Brewmaster viability in Mythic raiding keeps coming back around. The general consensus of that question has been that BrM will be initially weak, but scales better and won't be weak forever, and also has some unique tools that make a BrM as a second tank valuable. Whether that's enough to offset how weak BrM is in T17 pre-Tier bonuses is up to each individual person. Any argument one way or the other has failed to come to a definitive conclusion of whether BrM is "good" or "bad", proving that it's more of a mixed bag of pros and cons, unlike Warriors which are strong is pretty much every way imaginable.

[Colors]

Like always thanks for this Total.

[Totaltotemic]

How do we actually stack up with other classes in this regard? Because it was specifically cited as one our perks before WoD rolled out, and it was of my favorite things about monks.

Certainly we still have better healing than Warriors and Rogues right? And I assume our self healing is still better than 2 DK DPS specs. So that really only leaves Paladins who I have read have strong self healing, which I guess they get to keep along with their plate armor and all their ridiculous cooldowns.

Don't forget that Ferals and Enhance exist too. Rogues also have great self-healing because Recuperate got huge buffs. Basically what's bothering most people is that all of WW's actually good self-heals are cooldown limited and the sphere from Afterlife is really, really bad. The only actually good self-heals are Expel Harm and Chi Wave, but they each have 15 second CDs.

[Volibear]

Uhh, dat Chex nerf though

[Pandragon]

I've been hearing alot of bad things about monks for WoDs. I'm really not looking forward to possibly havign to switch my class. So I have some questions to make sure I didnt miss anything about WW changes.

Do we still have our mobility? Roll/Lust/FSK all still the same?

Do we still have our "soak anything" type of defenses, karma, zen med, dampen/diffuse?

And finally. Do we still have our massive aoe capabilities?

[Totaltotemic]

Do we still have our mobility? Roll/Lust/FSK all still the same?

Do we still have our "soak anything" type of defenses, karma, zen med, dampen/diffuse?

And finally. Do we still have our massive aoe capabilities?

Yes, literally all of those are the same (although Karma is now only 50% of max health instead of 100%) and improvements to SEF make insane WW AoE even stronger, typically the best AoE spec in the game in almost all logs of testing.

[Pandragon]

Yes, literally all of those are the same (although Karma is now only 50% of max health instead of 100%) and improvements to SEF make insane WW AoE even stronger, typically the best AoE spec in the game in almost all logs of testing.

What does that mean for karma? it makes it weaker? Other then that im perfectly fine then with w/e they do for ww as long as those stay the same.

[Totaltotemic]

Yes Karma is a bit weaker, it's relatively the same in PvP but in PvE things do more damage along with the doubled health pool, which makes Karma's reduction hurt.