Windwalkers - State of DPS 5.4

[Totaltotemic]

Putting the entire meta-forum discussion aside, TEB has been changing so much that I can't remember which build the conclusion that Ascension was still barely better than CB came from or whether that discussion included the 4 piece, which has also received a significant change since it was first revealed.

So starting from square one, we know that the chi-granting portion of Chi Brew is the same even if it's on a charge cooldown now, functionally it is the same except it will have slightly less variance over the duration of a fight. We also know that the TEB granting portion that was added this PTR is worth exactly 4% damage (2 6% stacks that last 15 seconds on a 45 second cooldown) on an infinite timeline, although because it starts off cooldown it is anywhere from a 24% damage increase on a 15 second or shorter fight, approaching the 4% mark as time gets closer to infinite, but probably around 5% for our purposes. Prior to the T16 4p nerf those 2 stacks would account for half a chi, but now only accounts for one fifth of a chi, putting CB at 2.2 chi per 45 seconds, or 44 energy, which is oddly very very close to 1 energy per second, but I'll call it 1.25 based on the same estimate as The TEB stacks (from 4% minimum to 5% estimate).

Ascension is worth 1.25 energy per second when base generation is 8.333 energy per second, which we clearly start off with, so even with the 4 piece Chi Brew does not even come close (roughly 30% less with current haste values [highly varies depending on what your haste is like]) in terms of pure resource generation, but what about that TEB? Honestly, I don't know.

Anyone that can figure out whether 5% damage is better or worse than ~0.7 energy per second deserves a cookie, have at it.

Oh, also no clue if the TEB stacks benefit from mastery or not, does anyone know?

[Deleted]

I actually agree with you here. I stated earlier, "I'll wait until the final damage pass to determine that they will be suffering in 5.4, and so should everyone else. Not because I don't think it's a good idea to give progressive feedback, but because any feedback we do give to Blizzard will be met with 'patch not done.'"

Oh, my bad then. I'm still having some troubles understanding everything here due to language problems, sorry for that.

I tend to think that Blizzard doesn't actually care what feedback players have to give. They're way too egotistical for that. If the opposite were true, they'd leave the PTR in action for 2-3 weeks after the final damage pass. As such, I don't think progressive feedback is bad, but that it's useless to give to Blizzard because they ignore it or misuse it. What will help us is feedback after the final damage pass. The "patch not done" line can't be used, and it gives us the opportunity for some quick changes immediately before or after the patch launch (as we saw in 5.2). I'm not saying it's a guarantee, simply that it's the only (short) time period where our opinions could potentially be heard.

Well, I'm still a bit more optimistic in that regard. Though history clearly agrees with you on this point.

A perfect example is this: Chi Brew was changed to rival or perhaps even exceed Ascension in 5.4's PTR. Where is the discussion revolving around this (rather important) change? Instead, we get people complaining that it's not enough or, even worse, immediately disregarding it without consideration of any kind. I constantly find Chi Brew being tossed aside in every single thread about 5.4 Windwalkers, with no math, no experience, just an emotional assumption. Why aren't we talking about Chi Brew? Why aren't we talking about how it could affect our stats, or how it relates to our new Mastery and 4-piece? Instead, we just complain. Repeatedly. That's where whining and negativity has taken over, which, ironically, causes more negativity.

As already pointed out, this was discussed at least a bit in another thread.
Why not more in depth? I don't know. The reasons you give could be true in this regard, and that's sad. Probably it's also because of the numbers. Nerf A hits for 20%, buff B for 20%, so the talent which makes 2-3% is lacking a bit in terms of attention (numbers just as an example to make the point).
On that topic, though, I only can speak for me, and I haven't gone into detail for every change (haven't even an active account right now). But it seems:
- short fights prefer Chi Brew
- better gear prefers Chi Brew (increase in the haste cap)
- overall it could be tuned to be a bit better, since Blizz clearly stated they want active talents to be minimally better than passive ones.
- still sucks to miss out on Chi 5.

[e] On another note: Chi Brew and Ascension are incredibly difficult to compare analytically, because they work quite different. The one is a passive bonus, always active. The other a CD, which can help in times of energy starvation due to bad procs, and generates stacks of your CD, which can be used lined up with trinkets etc. Then on some bosses with certain damage / ae phases like Jinrokh (or, almost every boss) does shift that thing again, etc...

[Frogged]

I think Chi Brew was discussed in another thread, and was found to be superior for bursty type fights, but in the long term Ascension was still best bet.

I'd love to have a link to that thread if you can find it. I've never seen Chi Brew discussed other than running it through SimCraft.

Putting the entire meta-forum discussion aside, TEB has been changing so much that I can't remember which build the conclusion that Ascension was still barely better than CB came from or whether that discussion included the 4 piece, which has also received a significant change since it was first revealed.

Yeah, you bring up a lot of good points, especially about how Chi Brew received a lot of changes in quick succession. Personally, I saw no value in it until the patch that put it on a charge system similar to Roll, giving it an extra free charge at the start of a fight. This also gave it the ability to "sit on cooldown" while the other charge is working, which is incredibly important. No longer does it lose effectiveness when you're capped as it comes off cooldown, or if it comes off cooldown at a bad phase of the fight. I also think that Chi Brew did lose a lot of value when TEB was changed from 90 to 60%, and I hope that Blizzard has something in store to make up for that fact. Their nerf to TEB for PvP reason indirectly affected the balance between Chi Brew and Ascension.

Prior to the TEB change, the charge system had put Chi Brew in a position where it was actually a good deal ahead of Ascension, passively. Even with the TEB changes, what I still like about the possibility of having a balanced Chi Brew is the fact that it's a Charge system and allows you to choose when you want burst. This type of tool, in comparison to a passive, gives so much more opportunity to make use of RNG. Good trinket procs, TEB procs, etc can all be enhanced greatly by the ability to get all of those Chi and TEB stacks on demand. That's something you can't bring to the table with Ascension.

However, I do see a lot of potential for Chi Brew to still fall behind Ascension as TEB stacks are more prevalent and the TEB buff itself is less and less valuable. What I do like is that it seems like we're pretty close to being at the point where we at least have a choice. It would be nice to swap Ascension over to Chi Brew once or twice in 5.4. My hope is that they don't end up leaving Ascension balanced against mid-PTR Chi Brew, well before any of the changes. I feel that would completely ruin all of the work they put into developing it.

[Callimonk]

- short fights prefer Chi Brew
- better gear prefers Chi Brew (increase in the haste cap)
- overall it could be tuned to be a bit better, since Blizz clearly stated they want active talents to be minimally better than passive ones.
- still sucks to miss out on Chi 5.

CDR should also affect whether or not we use CB, just based on how much it lowers our haste cap.

[Deleted]

Fantastic, 8 more days to go and our current change was a Cooldown adjustment.

Prepare to be mediocre

[Rife]

Seeing spriests say "Still, 10-man is the majority of groups, and atm shadow doesn't fit well" makes me think the joke's on us.

WW's in 10's is going to be rare thing indeed.

[Qinling]

CDR should also affect whether or not we use CB, just based on how much it lowers our haste cap.

Yes it lowers our haste cap but remember RPPM/Meta/Cloak all scale extremely well with haste so sacrificing our haste to stack 16.2k (unbuffed) mastery (whats needed to hit 100% in a raid) or crit actually hurts our dps. On PTR my best dps was when I maintained 8k ish haste, and had 11k (unbuffed) mastery and enough crit to be at 46%. When I dropped my haste to 3.4k in order to get 16.2k mastery and still have over 8k crit I saw a loss of dps due to the less procs from the multi strike trink, and less meta/legendary damage. I also testing maintaining 100% up-time on TeB and found that the breakpoint for mastery rating (unbuffed) is between 16k-22k. In that range we generate enough stacks of TeB that our average damage boost per minute (maintaining 100% up-time vs 30-50%) was 33% (15-33% is avg for 10 stack consumption and 50% mastery). If we maintained TeB 100% up time we would need at the least 35.2k rating (unbuffed) in order to average similar to RoRo TeB numbers (45%). Even then that is only matching the low end of RoRo TeB average (43-96%).

Note these values are based on my monks gear (536 live, 545 ptr).

Update: I did my spreadsheet math and found out when I normalized the mastery proc rate across all mastery levels there is never a time when 100% up-time on TeB beats consuming only with 10 stacks.

[Hinalover]

Fantastic, 8 more days to go and our current change was a Cooldown adjustment.

Prepare to be mediocre

You do realize that since making that comment Hilanka (sp?) backtracked a bit and said "at the earliest." Which could be true since there have been patches where they said "at the earliest" and the patch didn't go forward until 2 weeks later.

[Deleted]

Yes it lowers our haste cap but remember RPPM/Meta/Cloak all scale extremely well with haste so sacrificing our haste to stack 16.2k (unbuffed) mastery (whats needed to hit 100% in a raid) or crit actually hurts our dps.

Haven't they changed most rppm procs not to scale with haste for 5.4?

[Deleted]

Haven't they changed most rppm procs not to scale with haste for 5.4?

That's correct. And of course it also shows one of the problems with WW at the moment. The unsteady state of knowledge of many who complain about mechanics or try to spread their believe of knowledge.

[Deleted]

I think this thread is more doom and gloom by the minute. I'm finally happy that I can somewhat control TeB stacks for potions or trinket procs a bit. All in all it spells more control for situation based fights (RJW is also more control - if you want good aoe, bring a ww monk), which is one of the lackings of the spec. More controlled burst makes a lot more sense to me.

Edit: The spec so far has felt like "Ok, lets wait for those 10 stacks & press I win button" - if you like playing a spec where you are waiting for those stacks, ok, but I want to be able to control my class more situationaly - thus CB makes a ton of sense to me.

In combination to buffing our cleave I find us to be fully viable, sure we don't have a 20% raid CD, but in the end of the day these past 2 pages have discussed 10 man a lot- 10 man is all about the player, not the class. We are not broken apart from maybe the mediocre set piece bonuses.

[Deshi]

Off topic: It would all be so muchmore fun if they just didnt work teb into mastery. Its should been left as it was and they should given us a cool mastery like this one!

Mastery: Red Dawn : Red Dawn gives the monk 15% chance to reset to cooldown on rising sunkick make it cost no chi and hit 50% harder! Red Dawn will always critically hit!

On topic: Been on the ptr and tried out the new mastery and I dont know what to say really! I feel like the new mastery i a waste!

[George Costanza]

That thing would be too overpowered and dull, most people want a non RNG mastery, simply because RNG is not fun... (rogue evasion on live is dull). Aside from that the secondary stats we have currently (5.4 ptr) doesn't give us a "ridiculous scaling" or something like that (as in no RORO, or something along those lines, or mastery being the TO GO STAT OVER ALL OTHERS). Being able to ramp up the TEB faster has been something that has been asked by pvpers alot.

[Totaltotemic]

That's correct. And of course it also shows one of the problems with WW at the moment. The unsteady state of knowledge of many who complain about mechanics or try to spread their believe of knowledge.

Even more confusing is that some RPPM effects (like the meta gem) will scale off haste still, but others (just sbout every trinket) won't. It's supposed to be anything whose proc scales with haste (Agi, Crit, Mastery buffs, which includes Dancing Steel and most tri kets) will not benefit from haste itself, but anything that just generates pure damage (Meta gem, Multistrike trinket, I think the cloak but not 100% sure) will still scale with haste. Yeah, it's a pain.



As for Tigereye Brew and mastery, I think the problem is that TEB has come to dominate way too much of the spec's effectiveness, stuff was a lot easier to tune in 5.1 when TEB was at most 10% of total damage over time, unfortunately that was before WW got Nimble Brew and the whole Ring of Peace fiasco, would probably be grossly OP in PvP if we returned to that state, but the lack of burst might be enough. It's boring, but buffing Tiger Stance to 20-25% while lowering TEB to 30% max and increasing the mastery return rate would be a good fix, just depends on which exact numbers make it a good balance.

[DarkHatred]

Posted in the other thread, but posting here for relevant coverage.

The RJW cooldown is also reduced by haste. So the cooldown will be equal to the duration.

[Rife]

10 man is all about the player, not the class.

I disagree. 10 man is more about the class than the player as long as both players can handle mechanics. The only time picking the player supersedes picking the class is when one of those players is utterly terrible and the other is exceptional, which is very rare. Throw the worlds best 3 WW monks into the same 10 man raid and you're going to have a bad time.
A raid benefits much more from someone doing 100k DPS and being able to mitigate 20% of a raid mechanic or add 100k burst HPS during a raid mechanic than having someone who can't do either of those things but brings 120k DPS and ranks on WoL.
The DPS numbers are an example but the point is that having slightly more DPS pales in comparison to being able to live through a raid mechanic your raid wouldn't otherwise be able to. Progression attempts rarely wipe due to enrage. Having your enhance shaman do amazing DPS and 50k HPS over the course of H IQ is why you got that progression kill.

[Qinling]

That's correct. And of course it also shows one of the problems with WW at the moment. The unsteady state of knowledge of many who complain about mechanics or try to spread their believe of knowledge.

Wow, could you sound more arrogant and full of yourself with the last portion of that. The change was made after I did my testing, doesn't really matter anyways since we are a melee class with auto attack dmg, haste scales that (which is a large portion of our dps) not to mention haste shortens the channel time on FoF, making it cost less potential GCDs to use. Poor example why we shouldn't be sacking haste but none the less haste is still valuable for us beyond just energy regen.

[Totaltotemic]

Wow, could you sound more arrogant and full of yourself with the last portion of that. The change was made after I did my testing, doesn't really matter anyways since we are a melee class with auto attack dmg, haste scales that (which is a large portion of our dps) not to mention haste shortens the channel time on FoF, making it cost less potential GCDs to use. Poor example why we shouldn't be sacking haste but none the less haste is still valuable for us beyond just energy regen.

Less valuable than crit and mastery though, and relative usefulness is all that really matters. Also shortening the channel time of FoF is because it compensates for losing more melee attacks than you normally would, it's just offsetting the damage lost, not a damage increase.

[Vishiz]

Still not a release candidate, so I guess you can keep hoping.

[Rife]

Wow, could you sound more arrogant and full of yourself with the last portion of that.

No one was attacking you. Cipher simply commented on the correction of your previous post; saying that inaccurate information can be a problem, which it is. Calm down.