[GUIDE] Fury of Fistfire: Windwalking in [6.2]

[Kickbuttmario]

Hey. Asking for a friend.

If the MS cap is at 59%, does this mean that if our gear allows us to get our MS to 59%, should we start eating verse food? I want to know too, since I am not sure if its 59% unbuffed or fully buffed. THanks.

[Babylonius]

Hey. Asking for a friend.

If the MS cap is at 59%, does this mean that if our gear allows us to get our MS to 59%, should we start eating verse food? I want to know too, since I am not sure if its 59% unbuffed or fully buffed. THanks.

If you can get to 59% MS without MS food then you're pretty much in BiS Mythic gear and it doesn't matter. But technically, yes, if you can hit that point then vers food would be better.

[FayrenPickpocket]

Hrm, so I was thinking. With our 2pc, 4pc, and trinket giving us so many free procs and such, couldn't we make a case for Hurricane Stikes now instead of Serenity. I mean, it seems like there are a lot of procs during serenity that would go to waste.

[Kickbuttmario]

If you can get to 59% MS without MS food then you're pretty much in BiS Mythic gear and it doesn't matter. But technically, yes, if you can hit that point then vers food would be better.

Funny enough, a friend of mine told me that there is food in darkmoon that gives 1% vers while 125 verse food gives about .98% instead... Unless you are panda.

And nah, my friend hit ms cap already. Just took mS gear.

[Deleted]

59% fully buffed, a tad less if you plan to use BHoTM. Yes, versa food is better after 59%, as Babylonius said.

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Hrm, so I was thinking. With our 2pc, 4pc, and trinket giving us so many free procs and such, couldn't we make a case for Hurricane Stikes now instead of Serenity. I mean, it seems like there are a lot of procs during serenity that would go to waste.

HS dmg is supbar. Even if it was good, I don't see any encounter where you would want to play HS instead of Serenity or ChiEx. Still good in pvp iirc.

[FayrenPickpocket]

59% fully buffed, a tad less if you plan to use BHoTM. Yes, versa food is better after 59%, as Babylonius said.

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HS dmg is supbar. Even if it was good, I don't see any encounter where you would want to play HS instead of Serenity or ChiEx. Still good in pvp iirc.

Based on my logs, I only gain around 157.5k damage from Serenity (replacing 5 jabs with 5 blackout kicks). Hurricane strikes has half the cooldown and would do about 160k with TEB up. I think it has potential, especially if you're running with Soul Capacitor and can have RNG on your side.
Yeah, serenity is good for filling in energy regen windows and stuff too, but like I said, we have a lot of free procs. The biggest difference would be TEB generation.

Regardless, I'm going to test it next week probably. If WoW has shown me anything it's that paper =\= actual play.

[Kickbuttmario]

I think you also have to remember the RSK procs more than anything, if you got the class trinket.

[Babylonius]

Funny enough, a friend of mine told me that there is food in darkmoon that gives 1% vers while 125 verse food gives about .98% instead... Unless you are panda.

And nah, my friend hit ms cap already. Just took mS gear.

I'd like to see your friend's armory then because he'd need nearly 4k multistrike, which is just about the full secondary stat budget for 710 ilvl. Unless your friend is counting with BHotM proc then he may be pushing it but thats only 20s out of 120 and would require Tiger Strikes and weapon procs all at once.

[Weriik]

I don't think Hurricane Strike is as bad as everyone makes it out to be, it certainly has a lot of uses and I think it is best for any fight with a decent amount of movement that you aren't using Chi Explosion on.

Take Kormrok for example, you are going to be delaying Serenity on the pull because he is going to leap away and force you to miss a few kicks. On Mythic you also need to go soak a puddle which can delay serenity by a good 20 seconds or more. However if you take Hurricane Strike you have enough time to do the full opening before he leaps away (TP, RSK, CB, BoK, CB, TeB, FoF, Jab, HS)

And what if a fight ends before you can get another Serenity off? Since HS is half the cooldown of Serenity there are certainly instances where you could cast Hurricane Strike 11 times compared to only 5 Serenity casts.

Soul Capacitor also compliments HS, although it is RNG. Chances are if Soul Capacitor procs while you have Serenity ready to cast you won't get the full amount of BoKs off, while you can easily get a HS cast in the duration if it comes off CD. You also don't need to worry about the hits hitting random targets in that case since it is all getting stored anyway. Someone also mentioned that Sacred Draenic Incense counts each chi consumed in the cast of HS as a potential to proc a free RSK, which means you could get lucky and add a full 3 kicks to the burst. (On a fun note, with 100% multistrike or incredible luck you are looking at a maximum potential of 162 hits of damage over the duration of HS with SEF clones active without accounting for Xuen or RJW being up)

I can also see HS being good on Iron Reaver, Gorefiend, Zakuun, and Mannoroth. Any fight where you might have to hold onto a Serenity CD or might not make full use of the duration, really.

[Kickbuttmario]

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/characte...n/Xes/advanced

[Treeskee]

I know 2h is a bit ahead right now, but was curious. Would I be better off with 690 - Rune infused Spear(crit/multi) or a 705MH(crit/vers), 690OH(crit/mast)? Thanks in advance!!

[pandanaconda]

I don't think Hurricane Strike is as bad as everyone makes it out to be, it certainly has a lot of uses and I think it is best for any fight with a decent amount of movement that you aren't using Chi Explosion on.

Take Kormrok for example, you are going to be delaying Serenity on the pull because he is going to leap away and force you to miss a few kicks. On Mythic you also need to go soak a puddle which can delay serenity by a good 20 seconds or more. However if you take Hurricane Strike you have enough time to do the full opening before he leaps away (TP, RSK, CB, BoK, CB, TeB, FoF, Jab, HS)

And what if a fight ends before you can get another Serenity off? Since HS is half the cooldown of Serenity there are certainly instances where you could cast Hurricane Strike 11 times compared to only 5 Serenity casts.

Soul Capacitor also compliments HS, although it is RNG. Chances are if Soul Capacitor procs while you have Serenity ready to cast you won't get the full amount of BoKs off, while you can easily get a HS cast in the duration if it comes off CD. You also don't need to worry about the hits hitting random targets in that case since it is all getting stored anyway. Someone also mentioned that Sacred Draenic Incense counts each chi consumed in the cast of HS as a potential to proc a free RSK, which means you could get lucky and add a full 3 kicks to the burst. (On a fun note, with 100% multistrike or incredible luck you are looking at a maximum potential of 162 hits of damage over the duration of HS with SEF clones active without accounting for Xuen or RJW being up)

I can also see HS being good on Iron Reaver, Gorefiend, Zakuun, and Mannoroth. Any fight where you might have to hold onto a Serenity CD or might not make full use of the duration, really.

You raise a couple interesting things here. However, I still believe Hurricane strike is far too weak when compared to serenity. It is so undertuned when compared to the other two talents as far as dps goes that it doesn't really stand a chance.
You're right sometimes you have to delay serenity, I agree its pretty annoying. However I wouldn't consider swapping out serenity for hurricane strike for gorefiend for instance. The insane damage you get to line up for each feast of souls is pretty insane. On Iron reaver, Zakuun and mannoroth you'll usually find a way to use serenity without delaying it by more than 5 seconds, unless something insane happens/during phase 1 of mannoroth/when reaver takes off.
You also have to admit so many bosses right now have us on serenity cos they are mainly single target, but sometimes have small ads spawn which could reduce HS damage due to hitbox things.

I'd love if it did what it says, aka prevent you from being knockbacked/others. It used to work on butcher IIRC, but I highly doubt it works vs strong winds (on Iskar) or Mannoroth's spells, since pillar of frost doesn't do shit about that for me.


Seing so many spells get the "nerfed for pvp" treatment right now, it could be a cool solution to see some changes to HS, make it reliable and high ST damage when no adds are around/SEF is not up, then we could use serenity for priority target damage in combination with SEF and ChiEx for cleave. One can dream.
However, we seem to be more in the "lets nerf WWs so that no one is playing them when we rework them" treatment. Funnily enough, even without any nerfs, we'd be far from topping the dps metters on any fight, even Council. That's during progress, where we usually have a chance to shine before mages take over every fight in the instance.


In the meantime, arms warrior are 10% above everyone else on any sort of fight.

[Deleted]

I don't think Hurricane Strike is as bad as everyone makes it out to be, it certainly has a lot of uses and I think it is best for any fight with a decent amount of movement that you aren't using Chi Explosion on.

Take Kormrok for example, you are going to be delaying Serenity on the pull because he is going to leap away and force you to miss a few kicks. On Mythic you also need to go soak a puddle which can delay serenity by a good 20 seconds or more. However if you take Hurricane Strike you have enough time to do the full opening before he leaps away (TP, RSK, CB, BoK, CB, TeB, FoF, Jab, HS)

And what if a fight ends before you can get another Serenity off? Since HS is half the cooldown of Serenity there are certainly instances where you could cast Hurricane Strike 11 times compared to only 5 Serenity casts.

Soul Capacitor also compliments HS, although it is RNG. Chances are if Soul Capacitor procs while you have Serenity ready to cast you won't get the full amount of BoKs off, while you can easily get a HS cast in the duration if it comes off CD. You also don't need to worry about the hits hitting random targets in that case since it is all getting stored anyway. Someone also mentioned that Sacred Draenic Incense counts each chi consumed in the cast of HS as a potential to proc a free RSK, which means you could get lucky and add a full 3 kicks to the burst. (On a fun note, with 100% multistrike or incredible luck you are looking at a maximum potential of 162 hits of damage over the duration of HS with SEF clones active without accounting for Xuen or RJW being up)

I can also see HS being good on Iron Reaver, Gorefiend, Zakuun, and Mannoroth. Any fight where you might have to hold onto a Serenity CD or might not make full use of the duration, really.

Delaying Serenity is fine, as long as you don't lose a full cast over the course of the fight. Anyways your points are interesting, so I'll try HS next week on the heroic clear, just for the sake of trying.

@panda Monks are underplayed, but we're doing good on mythic so far : Nihilum, Huge in Japan and Exiled Legion are progressing really well with a ww doing work (look at their logs). While our damage output is as good as the other melees, the main concern is that we excel at nothing, we have 0 raid utility, annoying ramp-up time and average execute/priority target/ST damage. That's why guilds pushing for WF are taking other melees (DK/War/Rogues).
Ret/Enh/Feral are doing worse than us so I'd say we're fine overall (even though I wish we were better).

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I know 2h is a bit ahead right now, but was curious. Would I be better off with 690 - Rune infused Spear(crit/multi) or a 705MH(crit/vers), 690OH(crit/mast)? Thanks in advance!!

Your DW setup is probably better, given that ilvl > all. Sim it if you want to be sure!

[FayrenPickpocket]

People think that serenity is godsend, but really it's just 5 blackout kicks instead of 5 jabs. If timed right, you could use hurricane strikes twice on Gorefiend's feast of souls. An average BoK for me is 39k. Jab is 7.5k, it only nets about a 157k every minute and a half. Hurricane strikes without critting or ms could do 160k per cast, and you could use it twice versus serenity. I don't know, I think it has a chance now that energy regen isn't quite as vital.

Something that ChiEx and Serenity bring over HS is TEB generation. You get a couple free ones because of serenity and a lot of free ones from ChiEx. Then there's the 10 seconds of energy regen versus 1.5 or 2. I think if they made Hurricane Strike increase energy regen by x% per target hit or had it grant 2 stacks of TEB it could be even better without impacting PvP too much.

[Babylonius]

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/characte...n/Xes/advanced

Yeah, that will do it. Once the figure out whats going on with Soul Capacitor, it will continue to be better than Malicious Censer, which will give some more breathing room, but till then, Versatility food all the way.

I know 2h is a bit ahead right now, but was curious. Would I be better off with 690 - Rune infused Spear(crit/multi) or a 705MH(crit/vers), 690OH(crit/mast)? Thanks in advance!!

Go with the highest ilvl is the general rule of thumb. The average of the 1H is 697.5, so go with them.

[Deleted]

People think that serenity is godsend, but really it's just 5 blackout kicks instead of 5 jabs. If timed right, you could use hurricane strikes twice on Gorefiend's feast of souls. An average BoK for me is 39k. Jab is 7.5k, it only nets about a 157k every minute and a half. Hurricane strikes without critting or ms could do 160k per cast, and you could use it twice versus serenity. I don't know, I think it has a chance now that energy regen isn't quite as vital.

Something that ChiEx and Serenity bring over HS is TEB generation. You get a couple free ones because of serenity and a lot of free ones from ChiEx. Then there's the 10 seconds of energy regen versus 1.5 or 2. I think if they made Hurricane Strike increase energy regen by x% per target hit or had it grant 2 stacks of TEB it could be even better without impacting PvP too much.

Have very similar observations to the point I have played all fights (even ST) this reset with ChiExplo. Most of the fights in HFC are about add/burn priority and serenity just get delayed way too much while making your TeB amount significanlty lower (ChiExp with T18 + SDI with decent haste gear averages 80-82% for me, with some tries over 90% which is crazy).

[pandanaconda]

@panda Monks are underplayed, but we're doing good on mythic so far : Nihilum, Huge in Japan and Exiled Legion are progressing really well with a ww doing work (look at their logs). While our damage output is as good as the other melees, the main concern is that we excel at nothing, we have 0 raid utility, annoying ramp-up time and average execute/priority target/ST damage. That's why guilds pushing for WF are taking other melees (DK/War/Rogues).
Ret/Enh/Feral are doing worse than us so I'd say we're fine overall (even though I wish we were better).

I know we're doing fine, and I know very well about Opfotmjr (I'm even able to write his name without looking it up!), Xes and the rest. Those guys remain a minority, and belong in the "bring the player not the class" spot. I've seen those logs ofc.
Ofc people are going to do fine with basically any spec, specially for a class with no other choice as far as dps spec go. Those guys are extremely good, and got geared really well very early on.
What saddens me is the method they're using, dealing with any balance difficulty with nerfs, aka "We're too lazy to balance demonology, lets nerf it out of the way, we MIGHT look at it later on". Frost DK's were basically unplayable for 2 patches, they didn't bat an eye. We're doing "fine" at the moment, but we still have to consider that with HFC gear things are going to get worse. We're doing fine if you look at some warcraftlogs statistics page, where we're still middle of the pack. However, thats considering we're excellent at padding, and looking at high percentile. If I'm looking at Kromrok, I'm not gonna say "damn warriors are OP, they are 60% damage ahead of us", cos that would be stupid, we all know they pretty much just ravager+bladestorm in the middle of hands and that's where a great deal of their damage comes from. However, seeing Monk middle/low end of the pack on fights where I know the top percentiles have SEF up on worthless adds as much as possible is pretty sad.
We're supposed to excel at council/two target fights, and we're starting to lose even that.
I disagree with you on Ret/Enh/Feral doing worse than us. Granted ferals aren't showing very high in for example https://www.warcraftlogs.com/statistics/8#difficulty=4 . However we all know how feral doesn't benefit as much as most classes from the worthless adds which spawn in pretty much every fight in HFC. However, they excel on the other end at 1 or 2 priority targets and bursting one target down, which is on the other hand what most fights look like. Blizzard has sort of decided to let them be excellent in single target with little to no raid utility, high burst, and leave them at that. They're still doing it (https://www.warcraftlogs.com/statist...ty=4&boss=1777 for instance, https://www.warcraftlogs.com/statist...ty=4&boss=1783 ). Enhance is doing quite well after the buffs, and rets were pretty strong early on. All those classes are keeping their niches, whereas I feel like the longer it goes, the weaker we're gonna feel during T18. I've been afk and couldn't raid in good conditions for the past few weeks. I've been doing fine on most meters on all heroic bosses (specially archi), but dislike the way they're dealing with us.


On another note, the more I see it, the more I like the look of our t18 set.



On serenity vs hurricane strike:
you'd need to use energizing brew or strong haste procs to use Jab/BoK 5 times in a row without delaying any of your jabs; your energy regen shouldn't be way higher than 12/sec I guess, lets say 15 for the sake of it, so during the 10 seconds of serenity, provided you're starting at 30 energy for instance, you'd generate 150 energy and waste... 60 energy, which means 3 chi, one and a half blackout kick? With T184pc you'd have a way easier time filling those GCD's, I admit, but we're not at a point where we energy cap all the time yet.
Another very important element you seem to forget is that serenity gives you a lot of Tiger Eye Brew. This might remind you guys of mastery and sound bad, but actually with 30% mastery, serenity will grand you 6-7 TeB Stacks, which means 40% damage increase over 15 seconds (even better than that in practice.) Keep in mind that Hurricane Strike spec has a pretty low TeB generation rate.
Plus, TeB is way easier with Serenity: TeB for strong FoFs, TeB for serenity/BHotM, line all that with the right procs and you're good to go. If you're trying to fill HS and FoF on your TeB's, you have far less freedom to line it up with procs, and by delaying HS a bit each time, the shorter cooldown means you're more likely to lose one full cast.


You're probably right, the Hurricane Strike APL deserves some improvement and would perform better than we believe. However, you're oversimplifying serenity and denying many of its strengths. Even if we're a bit wrong on hurricane strike, serenity is so far ahead atm that I don't think there is much room for HS. Specially considering the way the damage splits.


EDIT: Don't you guys think energyzing brew could get pruned? Is someone really in love with this ability? I mean I've gotten used to it and it would feel weird without it, since its part of my burst habits and stuff, plays very well with ChiEx... However on each tier it feels like it ends up being useless at some point and doesn't add much to the gameplay. Just makes it harder for beginners.
Maybe it could just be a talent that's strong early on in the expansion/in combination with ChiExplosion and gets dumped later on when we fill our GCD's up?

[Kickbuttmario]

Okay, so I did more testing with the chiex builds on sims, with ascension/chibrew or rjw/xuen... Its becoming more obvious that haste isn't as strong as it was before the 2p/4p and class trinket, so its possible we're hitting a cap where haste is truly valued. Its like the certain haste cap with Mop 5.4 where more of it wasn't really needed and it was just a dps loss.

Thoughts?

[Treeskee]

Yeah, that will do it. Once the figure out whats going on with Soul Capacitor, it will continue to be better than Malicious Censer, which will give some more breathing room, but till then, Versatility food all the way.



Go with the highest ilvl is the general rule of thumb. The average of the 1H is 697.5, so go with them.

Thanks for the quick reply, wasn't sure if that was still the case.

[Deleted]

Okay, so I did more testing with the chiex builds on sims, with ascension/chibrew or rjw/xuen... Its becoming more obvious that haste isn't as strong as it was before the 2p/4p and class trinket, so its possible we're hitting a cap where haste is truly valued. Its like the certain haste cap with Mop 5.4 where more of it wasn't really needed and it was just a dps loss.

Thoughts?

Haste is still the best ChiEx stat when you're in full Mythic T18 BiS, but secondary are closer than they were in T17. Haven't played MoP, but according to simcraft and stat-weights, haste won't be a dps loss in this tier (with ChiEx).