Mistweaver Monk Guide

[Affiniti]

Take this as you will, as specific healing comp etc has a huge effect on what we are capable of doing, but here's some logs for people to pick through to compare your jab x2 Uplift (old playstyle) vs my SCK rotation. (this ends up being more about spirit vs throughput because empress I jabbed a lot this week)

For reference, I am dropping to ~12k spirit based on how raid went last night, I MIGHT drop out of more later, but i'm doing it in small batches just so I don't totally screw my regen over

I'm going to use Gnorrior as an example since I can easily find his logs, this is by no means me saying anyone is bad but just a flat comparison to show differences:
Garalon
Affinichi: 132,499.4 HPS 51.27 mill healing done over a 6:25 kill
http://worldoflogs.com/reports/rt-ko...?s=4157&e=4543
Total Jabs: 0

Astralos (Gnorrior): 111,135.1 HPS 42.89 mill healing done over a 6:24 kill
http://worldoflogs.com/reports/rt-g4...?s=3512&e=3897
Total Jabs: 56


Grand Empress:

Affinichi: 82755.1 HPS healing 71.13 million over a 14:19 kill
http://worldoflogs.com/reports/rt-ko...s=9788&e=10647
Total Jabs (and I had way too much mana lol 3shamaan this week): 100

Astralos (Gnorrior): 73375.7 HPS healing 58.2 million healing over a 14:20 kill
http://worldoflogs.com/reports/rt-g4...=15905&e=16766
Total Jabs: 92

There is value behind each playstyle, each set of spirit values. I've had way too much mana on some fights (Grand empress last night I ended with way too much mana) and other fights not so much (Garalon mana was very tight, but I did more healing).

The tradeoff here is basically more regen = you can spam more abilities (If you decide to jab jab uplift you can do that even more effectively here with more spirit as well if that matters) vs more throughput, but more time sitting there doing nothing.

Is there a right or wrong answer here? Probobly not. It goes back into one of those "play what feels right and do what you do" as for the most part, the differences SHOULD be marginal.

In an ideal world, as far as snipe healing is concerned, more throughput stats vs regen would allow you to burst higher with jab jab uplift to snipe quick heals, however with how few RM's are out it's not entirely practical or a very solid way to heal around sitting there doing nothing until a) you have your TFT Rms rolling and b) damage goes out.

What works for me doesn't always work for you. As far as me having TOO much spirit? I don't really agree. As we become more comfortable with mana changes then yes I'll pull back a bit, but I don't feel like I am doing anything more wrong than you are


Keep in mind that Jab for whatever reason still only costs 9k mana instead of it's increased mana cost to 11.5k like it was supposed to be hotfixed last week with the other mana cost increases, so what you are healing with isn't necessarily intentional as far as regen is concerned. Since JAB's mana cost isn't technically increased, it will appear to be more efficient than your other spells as those cost ~43% more than they did prior, and jab remained the same. This is a bug, and NOT intentional.

[Luqt]

Thank you for providing some quantitative information to make this argument more reliable Affiniti. Just looking at the Garalon parses presented in more detail some interesting factors can be observed using rough figures:

Chi:
- Affiniti generated 135 chi (52 SCKs)
- Gnorrior generated 149 chi (71 jabs)

Uplift + chi burst + Eminence (from B/O kick and Tiger Palm) healing (expended chi healing):
- Affiniti: 13.7M
- Gnorrior: 15.8M

Chi generating ability healing (expel harm, jab and SCK):
- Affiniti: 8.8M
- Gnorrior: 1.8M

Gift of the Serpent healing:
- Affiniti: 5.4M
- Gnorrior: 3.9M

Overhealing done:
- Affiniti: 32.8%
- Gnorrior: 33.2%

The most interesting and yet predictable observation is that Affiniti did approximately 38.5% more healing through Gift of the Serpent than Gnorrior, even though he only has 1221 mastery rating whilst Gnorrior has 1541.

[Oratory]

Looking at Garalon, Blood Legion's raid group took quite a bit more damage than Promethean in the same kill time:

Damage Taken:
- Blood Legion: 307M
- Promethean: 268M

If we pretend Promethean took the same damage and assume that their healing team is able to up their heals, and that Astralos's healing percentage (16.62%) stays the same with the rest of raid then the additional required healing bumps him up by (307-268)*16.62% = 6.48M; which brings the total healing numbers closer together:
- Affinichi: 51.27M
- Astralos: 49.37M

Factor in better usage of mastery spawned healing spheres for Blood Legion and the #s are within 500k. Quite interesting IMO.

[duroyprofundo]

Not to derail the spirit discussion too much but one interesting thing I noticed in the logs is the amount of healing being done by both of you using Chi Torpedo. Are you using roll on CD into the largest group on a fight like Garalon where there's constant AOE damage or is there some other strategy to maximize healing?

[Allyrion]

We agonized over this discussion for almost the entirety of Cataclysm on the Shaman forums. When it comes down to it, haste (besides breakpoints) does not increase the HPM of spells. Crit, Mastery, and Intellect all do. Having to spend more mana for your healing just means that you have to offset it with more Spirit, which inevitably makes the stat cost more than it's worth. Why should I get 2500 haste and 500 Spirit to pay for it when I can just get 2500 Crit and drop 500 Spirit.

That said, Monks especially hate haste because:

1) It doesn't reduce the GCD. That implicitly makes it increase healing on even less spells than Resto Shaman, and haste is already their worst stat, do the math.

2) It doesn't just not increase HPM for RM and EM, it's worse. It shortens the time of the buff which reduces the time for Uplift or TFT spreading for RM and for the Soothing increase for EM. This makes being right at breakpoints much more important than for any other class that has DoTs or HoTs. So no, sitting between breakpoints is not viable, it's wasting stats.

3) It doesn't affect Jab Chi generation. That makes it a simply worse stat than mastery or Crit if you're fistweaving, Jabx2/Uplifting, or Jabx2/Chi Burst. With Jab being our most efficient Chi generator even beyond Soothing (which is unreliable) and Chi not affecting any of the Chi-spenders except EM (which is only affected at breakpoints), you can go entire fights with haste-affecting heals being less than 30% of healing. That's just plain awful when you could get Crit and increase the healing AND HPM of every single spell.

Seriously, haste is bad. Unless you have any argument that somehow makes Haste better than mastery or Crit point for point, it will remain bad. You can't just list off what haste does in a vacuum as if that means something, saying "haste makes our healing faster" is a meaningless statement because all it proves is that haste is worth something rather than absolutely nothing. Unfortunately, that something is far less beneficial than crit or mastery.

I wasn't trying to make a case for stacking haste in-between, below or above breakpoints. Just that it does more than add one tick. It also reduces the time between ticks.
I don't have to make an argument that haste is better than crit point for point because I wasn't talking about point for point. Reaching the breakpoint is assumed, and I'm simply saying dropping crit for the second breakpoint is worthwhile. Am I wrong in the math pointing to this? The person I was replying to was saying they weren't convinced by that math, so I was pointing out things haste does beyond the extra tick, i.e. faster ticks and faster channels.

You're right that not all of our spells are affected, but the spells that are affected are *always* affected. Haste has always been the 'reliable' stat, but less so for monks because we don't have caste times (just channels and instant casts). However, that still gives it weight in comparison to crit which is not as reliable.
Still, haste drops below mastery when you're not hitting a breakpoint. That really isn't the point though. We were talking about what it does because he wasn't convinced with the math.

[Astraios]

I was going to do homework, but I guess I'll reply here first.

The empress kill on my end is not a very good representation of the style for a few reasons, one, discrepency in debuffs (same fixate, I had one more vision, and 2 heart of fears) and second I died due to a vision and no dispel. I had got to that phase of the fight with nearly 100% mana, and was far from oom when I was killed. In a case like that (dying), gearing for spirit wouldve given me significantly more mana and I would've been able to sustain stronger healing...but I don't gear assuming I'll die. Further, I wasn't using chi torpedo like I should've been, I left xuen on from wind lord/amber shaper (as far as I can tell, getting 2 good xuen's, one to cleave during second phase transitions and once at the end with the large damage increase was more beneficial to the raid then more healing in general times because of chi torpedo.) One of my revivals was called for at a time which wasn't optimal for it's healing, etc. Those are the big things, and why I wouldn't really reference that kill for it, but I do appreciate having strong logs to compare against for once.

As well, theres the general discrepency in total healing which had to be done (on both fights?), and then the discrepency in our tanks somehow doing ridiculous amounts of healing comparing to yours.

Something else I should bring up is that on H Garalon these weeks, it's really felt like if our disc is playing right then half the time theres little to heal, so I really wouldn't link my logs on garalon as being impressive at all. This is probably the first time I've beat my disc, normally she does 120k and I do 100k or some such. It varies in there are times where she goes low and I've easily hit much higher numbers, but garalon really isn't that much of a throughput fight these days. Though I am curious how you got another 4mil healing from chi torpedo with less spellpower, likely just used it more often, guess I'm a baddie. Overall, the thing I'm most interested in is your low overhealing. Generally speaking, the logs I was looking at with SCK had significantly higher overhealing, with SCK around 50% and uplift closer to 30%. Yours is...reversed. Which is confusing.

What's really telling, is that in the heroic raids we run, monk throughput can work either way. Because frankly it's through the roof. I prefer uplift with jab because it just tends to feel more bursty to me, which is the only moments I feel scared for my raid currently.

What's more interesting, is how some random guy gets logs like this:
http://worldoflogs.com/reports/khr0f...?s=6549&e=6947
Dat uplift?

I mean empress I was oom, so I wouldn't call it a good comparison, and garalon is entirely what your other healers do. I ended the fight with over 60-70% mana (and was meter padding with my second revival the last 20s~ since we didn't need it) and thus could've done much more "throughput" like the monk linked above, except he just seems to be carrying his other healers that specific fight.

I also notice you do seem to take chi brew over ascension. Glad we agree on something XP

PS: The only time I've ever really felt a "need for throughput" was H Tsulong night phase. But that's not really a fair comparison because you weren't using chi torpedo on the last log I can find of you on H Tsulong.
Affiniti: http://worldoflogs.com/reports/rt-3t...?s=6093&e=6211
Gnorrior: http://worldoflogs.com/reports/rt-3g...=18778&e=19253
Obviously you have to zoom in to certain regions to see night phase healing.
Some estimate of first night phase goes:
Affiniti: times [6093-6219]: http://worldoflogs.com/reports/rt-3t...?s=6093&e=6219
Gnorrior: times [18781-18900]: http://worldoflogs.com/reports/rt-3g...=18781&e=18900

Affinitis healing for said night phase: 15.4 mil/129k hps
Gnorriors healing for said night phase: 18.3mil/153k hps

If you had dropped RJW and picked up chi torpedo, you'd probably drop 800k~ from RJW bonus to SCK and gained 4mil~ from chi torpedo, averaging out around 18.4mil with very rough napkin math. From that, we can see that, apparently, both styles of healing are relatively equal in total (effective) throughput. The difference would then be that SCK is more blanket and uplift is a little more single target-y.

Ultimately, I think the real point to be made here is we can all pick random logs to show what we want, but that specific numbers from logs aren't very important because a lot of factors influence those, healing comp and raid comp esp., as you noted at the beginning of your post.

Despite what I just said, I'm going to use those logs for this following calculation (since we had similar overheal %'s):
What's really the crux of the issue, in my opinion, is overhealing on SCK. Without a doubt, if SCK had lower overhealing, it would be far superior to jab and uplift (outside of TFT). But whenever I use it, I experience things like the 50% overheal in your tsulong log, and when SCK has 57% overheal and uplift has 35% (similar in both our logs),
SCKx2/uplift goes from something like 240k x 2 + 360k = 840 -> 103x2 + 234 = 440
(jabx2/uplift)x2 goes to something like (giving this side a big benefit here at 6s, so we'll multiply by 5/6 for a rough guess)(my average jab dmg here was 10k~ with 0% overhealing from eminence) so 12k*4+360*2 = 768 -> 12k*4 + 234x2 = 516
Adjusting for time difference: 516 *5/6 = 430
Meanwhile this is using estimated numbers on valens calc with my gear. if you're using SCK your SCK/uplift would be doing slightly less than the jab in comparison. For a rough estimate, your uplifts healed average of 3k less (after overheal). Assuming 7 targets, thats 21k, bringing SCKx2/uplift down to 419k.
And that rough napkin math is where the basis for my int/crit stacking over spirit comes from.
Of course, overhealing is random (for the most part) and hard to predict reliably. So getting a real calculation becomes tough. I will continue to prefer my jabbing and int stacking in the current environment for the benefit of potentially saving raid members with stronger heals than I would prefer to blanket heal with SCK, but maybe that's a personal choice. As you've shown, and seen above, the two styles are relatively equal on most fights****.

****This assumes equal raid damage taken and other healers doing the same thing...which is impossible to have happen or to measure.

As for jab mana being increased, I don't expect it to screw me that hard (most fights on farm I've had zero mana troubles in my raid once incorporating chi torpedo...and by zero troubles I mean 80% mana at the end of a fight etc.) However, it's pretty obvious it exists, and it was posted on live forums hours after the hotfix went live. It's been week(s?) and took them 2 days to nerf our mana when it was "OP". So what does that mean to me? That I feel like they think MW are weak enough that they don't need another nerf (even if it is just a bug fix.) Especially with so many complaining about mana already.


**********Part of your post was regen vs throughput, and saying that extra regen would benefit jabbing as well. With the current costs (IE until blizzard fixes jab costs, see above) jab is far more than sustainable at my current spirit it would seem, I don't remember a time I've gone oom w/o dying, and during intense times of healing [read any time I feel its worthwhile to jab/uplift, which is the only time I would SCK], I am filling every global. So more spirit wouldn't really help here, IMO.

[Deleted]

Uh crit is fairly reliable for us monks, since we have such a ludicrous amount of individual crit rolls it approaches the value pretty quickly.

[Astraios]

Thank you for providing some quantitative information to make this argument more reliable Affiniti. Just looking at the Garalon parses presented in more detail some interesting factors can be observed using rough figures:

Chi:
- Affiniti generated 135 chi (52 SCKs)
- Gnorrior generated 149 chi (71 jabs)

Uplift + chi burst + Eminence (from B/O kick and Tiger Palm) healing (expended chi healing):
- Affiniti: 13.7M
- Gnorrior: 15.8M

Chi generating ability healing (expel harm, jab and SCK):
- Affiniti: 8.8M
- Gnorrior: 1.8M

Gift of the Serpent healing:
- Affiniti: 5.4M
- Gnorrior: 3.9M

Overhealing done:
- Affiniti: 32.8%
- Gnorrior: 33.2%

The most interesting and yet predictable observation is that Affiniti did approximately 38.5% more healing through Gift of the Serpent than Gnorrior, even though he only has 1221 mastery rating whilst Gnorrior has 1541.

So 2 things are evident here:
Gnorrior definitely wasn't spending all his globals on healing.
Probably because he didn't need to since there was no healing to be done. (reference: Blood legions group took significantly more damage somehow)

Affiniti has similar overhealing to gnorrior even though affiniti is using SCK, which blantantly heals pets and other targets which dont need healing...which means his group was likely on average experiencing lower health such that he could obtain lower overheal, or he is some god of SCK targeting for low overheal.

As far as mastery goes, that's because SCK procs a lot more mastery than jab/uplift, and because I wasn't using nearly as many globals. (Since my raid was topped.) Part of those mastery procs are due to SCK, which is part of SCK's healing, and should be accounted for as such.

[Luqt]

So 2 things are evident here:
Gnorrior definitely wasn't spending all his globals on healing.
Probably because he didn't need to since there was no healing to be done. (reference: Blood legions group took significantly more damage somehow)

Affiniti has similar overhealing to gnorrior even though affiniti is using SCK, which blantantly heals pets and other targets which dont need healing...which means his group was likely on average experiencing lower health such that he could obtain lower overheal, or he is some god of SCK targeting for low overheal.

As far as mastery goes, that's because SCK procs a lot more mastery than jab/uplift, and because I wasn't using nearly as many globals. (Since my raid was topped.) Part of those mastery procs are due to SCK, which is part of SCK's healing, and should be accounted for as such.

But that's exactly what I wanted to bring up a couple of comments ago and which you have stated yourself: "Gnorrior definitely wasn't spending all his globals on healing". Since Affiniti has a greater amount of spirit compared to your monk, on an encounter such as Garalon, he'll be filling more globals than you will. Not just because "your raid was topped".

He isn't a god of SCK targeting, he simply recognizes situations in which SCK will be effective and react to them. SCK heals pets yes, but so does ReM + uplift (to a lesser extent now thankfully).

As for the mastery observation, that is exactly what I was trying to point out. The advantage of using SCK in that sense is precisely the increased mastery procs which are also effective healing.

Please don't take this as negative criticism of some sort, you don't need to explain yourself or give excuses, you did a good job on your parses and so did Affiniti and the purpose of this discussion is purely from an analytical point of view to further increase our knowledge of the spec.

[Astraios]

But that's exactly what I wanted to bring up a couple of comments ago and which you have stated yourself: "Gnorrior definitely wasn't spending all his globals on healing". Since Affiniti has a greater amount of spirit compared to your monk, on an encounter such as Garalon, he'll be filling more globals than you will. Not just because "your raid was topped"..

Actually I can tell you gnorrior (Astraios, myself) was not spending his globals because his raid was topped, not because he was limited by mana, as evidenced by ending the fight with near max mana w/o conc potting. I'm merely stating that since your goal seems to be knowledge of the spec, this seems like a pretty important part.

As well, I love affiniti, but theres not much "he simply recognizes situations in which SCK will be effective and react to them" when he was using it as his primary chi generator other than expel harm. Not alternating between jab/sck. I included the mastery healing portions of SCK in my napkin math above, as well btw.

I actually don't think either of my parses are a "good job" they're pretty bad (as far as looks go) for me, but thats what happens (impossible to get high parses) when you get to farm content with 5 other very good healers, regardless, the things above are more important bits about the playstyles for your further analyzation, and less me defending myself.

[Deleted]

You guys really are bringing this farther than it needs to go, spirit is an effective stat because it sacrifices throughput for a safety net and longevity. crit/mastery/int are more effective for pure output and will obviously pull ahead if you are comfortable and know you can survive an encounter with that amount. Some people just prefer a buffer for phases they find hard to heal.

[TheWindWalker]

I'm normally a Windwalker but tonight I've been asked to go Mistweaver and DPS on Garalon. (passive healing while still keeping up DPS) What's a good strategy for avoiding going Oom (my jab glyphed and unglyphed is still saying 11700 mana) and maximizing my DPS?

[ChrisKoe]

Well, full out DPS would be Jab*2->BoK + Tiger Power up, Xuen on CD and obviously sticking to your melees for attacking as many legs as possible (might depend on your strategy).
For mana: if you're progressing the boss, try to advance your personal breakpoint of Mana Tea usage (i.e. the point were you end the fight at 0% mana without losing DPS), Glyph of Mana Tea would be mandatory here.

But that strategy really doesn't sound too bright in my ears. If you lack healing, go MW to own the s**t out of this boss and have another healer go DPS, MW still is king on Garalon. A MW trying to do as much DPS as possible really is the 11th/26th wheel.

[TheWindWalker]

But that strategy really doesn't sound too bright in my ears.

The issue is that we already have two good healers and I'm incredibly awful at Mistweaver since the last two nerfs hit, and we're going to attempt the "tankless" version of this fight. So bringing passive healing along while having other classes that actually have a cleave is "suppose to" make up for how lackluster Windwalker is on Garalon. We've got a 10m roster that can be found by looking at the bottom of Noxxic's DPS rankings. It's an attempt to squeeze out DPS from other sources.

[ChrisKoe]

Well I get where you're pointing at and if you want to try maxing DPS while Eminence healing, I think the priority I mentioned above should do the trick.

I still like to point out that "other sources" might most likely be the tactics you're trying and/or personal performance (no offence). When to kill legs by whom is quite crucial on this fight (not failing Pheromones and running in the pink circle helps, too).
Though I do believe that a DPS'ing MW might turn the tide in certain environments, I believe Garalon isn't such an environment. The handfull of thousands of DPS you could gain this way, you could way, way easier gain another way.

[TheWindWalker]

Funny story. Despite how desperate and strange it was, it worked out wonderfully. It just required serious cooldown focusing. Like fifth pull of the night.

EDIT: The issue was that we had our only cleaving DPS(ers) standing out front and the body was barely getting any non-mechanic damage because of that. Making them change out of tanking specs and go after the legs/body made a huge dent.

[ChrisKoe]

Funny story. Despite how desperate and strange it was, it worked out wonderfully. It just required serious cooldown focusing. Like fifth pull of the night.

Well, too bad. You're now stuck on the "do that thing you did on the Garalon kill" spot.


Nah, seriously gratz

[Nanaboostme]

Not to derail the spirit discussion too much but one interesting thing I noticed in the logs is the amount of healing being done by both of you using Chi Torpedo. Are you using roll on CD into the largest group on a fight like Garalon where there's constant AOE damage or is there some other strategy to maximize healing?

Chi Torpedo is WAY better than Xuen when the raid is usually grouped up, even in 10man. If you're going to talent into Chi Torpedo, celerity IS A MUST. Just like your tigereye brew stack, try to use it on CD (unless you know when you need raid heals soon). I like to torpedo once out, then torpedo back to my initial position. Keep the 3rd torpedo until another torpedo goes of CD, rinse and repeat. If you have only one torpedo, you can use it, then use Chi Burst.

[Cyberowl]

Is there any discussion going on about Healing Spheres?

A healing sphere costs 6k and heals 38780, a Surging Mist costs 26.400 and heals 52486 on my crappy geared twink Monk... the GCD of Healing Sphere seems to be lower than the regular GCD, so why don't I see Healing Speres being mentioned in any guide? They are damn op when it comes down to fast singletarget healing ("flashing")(if they stand still ofc), even without generating Chi. Is there anything missing or why aren't the guides mentioning them?

[Astraios]

Is there any discussion going on about Healing Spheres?

A healing sphere costs 6k and heals 38780, a Surging Mist costs 26.400 and heals 52486 on my crappy geared twink Monk... the GCD of Healing Sphere seems to be lower than the regular GCD, so why don't I see Healing Speres being mentioned in any guide? They are damn op when it comes down to fast singletarget healing ("flashing")(if they stand still ofc), even without generating Chi. Is there anything missing or why aren't the guides mentioning them?

you are correct in your assumption that healing sphere >>>> surging mist in every possible way except for the clunkiness of clicking on targets.
HS GCD is .5s, normal GCD (for monk) is 1s.