Monks have no raid utility?

[Kisho]

Like I said, if monk is totally viable class at the highest level of gameplay then can you show it? I have heard from various sources that monk may not be, but I wanna make sure who is right.

Monks can top the DPS charts, Monks have great use on several fights, you will have fun and excel as a Monk if you put the effort in.

I don't know about being the 'best', but that doesn't matter at all unless you're in a top 100 guild. But in your own words, Monks are a 'totally viable class'. Viable, indeed.

[Deleted]

May I just ask why you care about performance "at the highest level of gameplay" when from everything you said here so far it is quite obvious that you are neither understanding nor possibly willing to commit to those standards? Don't take this personally - most people are just not material for those top end guilds (neither am I, I am too old, don't have the time and energy for those tedious progress phases), so stop trying to apply what's useful for them to what's fun for you. It won't get you anywhere apart from that point where you already at - doubting a class you have fun with.

[Radio]

Currently: Monks of all specs are mid-range, they're not the best class you can roll, but they're definitely not close to the worst. You are going to have opportunities to compete on DPS / HPS meters, you are going to have abilities that can make or break a boss fight, and you (if played correctly) can tank the hardest bosses in the game without your healers batting an eyelid.

In 5.2: Monks are going to be way better, raid utility will still be a tad low but you will see large performance increases across the board in all 3 specs in PVE and PVP.

In 5.3: Who the fuck knows which class is going to be #1, the game changes way too often to get hung up over classes. I've raided at a high level as a hunter, druid, shaman, warrior and monk and all I've learnt is that sometimes a class will be terrible at everything, and sometimes that same class is the best guy around and every guild wants to be their friend.

[Fenixdown]

OP, you are not a top end raider. You never will be a top end raider. Stop worrying about top end raiding. Accept your limitations, and accept your class as it is, and have fun playing the game at your appropriate level of play.

In other words, play your monk, don't listen to Paragon and Method and vodka. Do normal modes with whatever guild you're in and enjoy them. If you can't do that, if you still think you're somehow the cream of the crop, then apply to those guilds and be continuously shot down again and again and again until you quit the game and whine about how "elitist" the top 20 guilds in the world are or switch to PvP and whine about how overpowered everybody else is but you.

I play a holy priest. Know how many holy priests are used over discipline priests in hardcore raiding right now? Few. Know how much I care? None. I'm still 4/16 heroic and enjoying every second of it.

Play what you like. Don't listen to others. That's all I, or anyone else, has to say to you.

[Deleted]

I'm playing Windwalker monk since the release of MoP. I came from priest that I played for 7 years (and mostly played shadow in those years).
My experience is that WW Monk starts slowly and I felt being carried during raid progressions. Especially during the start I was mostly the bottom dps. This was really frustrating for me since I came from shadow priest which was mostly top dps. On top of that, I do not bring any notable raid cooldowns.

But, my guild leader believed in me and kept me playing the WW Monk class. And now, to this date, we progress through heroics on a decent pace and I'm mostly in the top 5 dps (25 man raiding guild). I still don't bring any raid cooldowns, but guess what; that is not the most important thing you can bring to progress raids. What is? Good use of *all* your skills. Survivability and movability (mentioned several times already) is key for WW Monks, but other skills are equally as important as they contribute to the whole: killing a boss as a guild.

On top of that: I actually like playing my Monk. Even though it plays totally different than shadow priest.

My 2 cents.

[arisoh]

I kinda understand his situation. If you're in a 10m guild, you want as many buffs as you can get with the limited spots available.

If for example, there was one spot for melee in a 10m, between a warrior and a monk, played by the same player who can put out decent numbers for both, I'd take the warrior. Things like Battle Shout, Banners, Rallying Cry, Intervene are very useful. A WW really has nothing comparable.

If you really prefer your WW, talk to your RL see if you can work things out. If you're carrying your weight in the areas that you CAN do something about, then it shouldnt be a problem.

[pokiemokie]

I kinda understand his situation. If you're in a 10m guild, you want as many buffs as you can get with the limited spots available.

If for example, there was one spot for melee in a 10m, between a warrior and a monk, played by the same player who can put out decent numbers for both, I'd take the warrior. Things like Battle Shout, Banners, Rallying Cry, Intervene are very useful. A WW really has nothing comparable.

If you really prefer your WW, talk to your RL see if you can work things out. If you're carrying your weight in the areas that you CAN do something about, then it shouldnt be a problem.

Can a warrior CC? Can a warrior soak one-shot mechanic dmg, like Elegon HC or WoE HC?

Place everything in context. Warriors have GREAT raid-wide cooldowns, in no way am I denying that. But don't forget that that is not all that matters.

[Deleted]

Can a warrior CC? Can a warrior soak one-shot mechanic dmg, like Elegon HC or WoE HC?

My 10m actually used a fury warrior to soak on Elegon HC, so I guess that's a yes.

[Deleted]

Windwalker is a good spec and you don't have to feel that your being carried if your playing the class correctly. However, a decent pair of 1H's really make a difference in terms of our DPS - apart from that its completely down to the player. We hit hard and bring along nice single target/AoE damage/dps - the cleave will be fixed for us in 5.2 with SE&F.

In comparison to other classes I can see why this spec isn't as appealing to bring along as others as we don't bring anything amazing to the table in terms for the raid.
I don't reckon this is anything to get hung up over though, at least I'm not, there are so many Windwalkers that out dps other specs/classes in Heroic raids (both Melee and Ranged) and you do need dps to bring down an encounter.

[Moozhe]

Unless you are in a top 100 world guild, which I am sure that you are not, then bring the player not the class is the best way to way to fill a raid roster.

What this means is that if you are a good enough player then you can get into almost any guild regardless of your class or spec. So you can play whatever you want to play. Even top guilds generally have at least 1 main spec Windwalker on their roster.

If you want to compare DPS classes based on raid utility, you could equal say that Windwalker has no raid utility but neither does a Rogue, Death Knight, Feral Druid, Enhance Shaman, Hunter, Mage, or Warlock.

It depends how you define raid utility. All classes have minor tools. Windwalkers have Paralyze, Leg Sweep, Disarm, etc., and they also have two soaking abilities, Diffuse Magic and Zen Meditation. I don't define these as raid utility, they're just minor tools. Every class has them. Rogues can Tricks, Hunters can Misdirect. Death Knights can Grip and AOE Grip. These abilities almost never make or break a raid but it's nice to have a versatile class comp so you have a variety of tools.

I think that most hybrid ranged DPS can be said to have raid utility based on their healing cooldowns and offhealing. Balance Druids, Elemental Shamans, and Shadow Priests all do a substantial amount of healing. In my raids they are each worth about 1/4 to 1/3 a fulltime healer, so having some in the raid can be the difference between 5 healing a fight and 6 healing a fight. So sure while Warlocks and Mages are top DPS right now, I think a good healer hybrid is more than worth giving a raid spot.

My point is that every class has some kind of tool that makes them useful. And in the interest of gearing up your raid you want to have a diverse roster. Sure you could stack your raid with 6 warlocks, 6 mages, and 6 DPS warriors but you would have a tough time gearing them all up. And at some point you would want a "tool" that another class has like a AOE Grip or a Mass Dispel and you wouldn't have it.

I think even for high ranking guilds a good rule of thumb is to try to have 1 of almost every spec (except maybe a couple with the least utility/worst dps) and simply stack 2 to 4 of the better specs based on how good they are.

In addition to comparing raid utility and minor tools you have to also compare DPS. Windwalker Monks have good single-target DPS but we have no cleave or multidot capability. Most fights this tier benefit from cleave or multidot. There are only a few fights we're really good on (Lei Shi, Feng, Gara'jal). So when you consider the lack of real raid utility in addition to the fact that our DPS is low on most fights, most top guilds would not want to have more than 1 Windwalker.

But the point is if you are a good enough player you can get into any level of guild you want as almost any spec. However if a guild has the choice between an equally skilled Windwalker and Fury Warrior they are almost always going to take the Warrior, unless they already have 2-3 warriors and 0 Windwalkers. Then they might want one just for diversity.

[Callimonk]

Background: As of last night, my guild is 15/16 HM. I'm personally 13/16, having missed our heroic Lei Shi due to holidays and Empress for various reasons.

Our Tsulong would have been very difficult - though not impossible - without me.

* AE stuns on adds were very useful
* We were able to bring in one less healer due to plenty of offspec DPS (myself included) using heals on Tsulong. My Chi Wave healed for nearly 1M on our kill, which is 1M less damage we needed to worry about. In previous attempts, it topped out at 2M healing during Day Phase (thanks to a 650K crit...).
* During Night Phase, I was able to help stabilize the raid with Chi Wave. It did cost me some damage overall, but we got the kill.
* During our Night Phases, I was top 5 to top 10 DPS, typically (25m, with 6 healers).
* In addition, during Day Phase, we debated if we needed me to AE stun the small adds, or take care of one of the side adds - I had utility with either, being our most mobile melee and being able to solo one (not to mention, stun it). I ended up staying on the small adds, and acting as a "panic button" backup when adds began to reach the boss (I could typically Touch of Death at least one or two of them per day phase, and slow them with FSK).
* Also, Windwalkers can act as an emergency tank for a few seconds, if need be. It's not the best use of Touch of Karma, but it works - we also have Sparring, which has been helpful.

We may not have skull banner etc, but we have our uses.

That being said: we are trying to get a second Windwalker, and a tank of some sort (preferably Paladin or Brewmaster). We have tons and tons of agi users, but have a preference for hybrids because of stuff like Moozh and I pointed out - offheals. In addition, it's just good to have 1 or 2 of every spec, if possible - you never know what might change in the next patch, or what might be removed or added. I also know of a few top 20 guilds that, for the life of them, haven't been able to find a Windwalker that can play on their level and don't suck.

Moozh, I also wanted to counter that: if they had 0 warriors and 0 windwalkers, chances are they would accept both applicants. The Windwalker might see more bench time, unless they can argue mechanics the way some can, and can prove that their class can handle or counter mechanics Maybe we ourselves are not world Top 100, but I'd like to think we aren't doing too bad.

[Moozhe]

For 5.2 Windwalkers might be in a position where guilds will want to run 2 of them. We are getting a slight DPS buff on single target but we are also getting the following:

1. Hybrid offheals

Not many people have considered this, but with the new changes to Chi Wave we are going to be trying to cast it on cooldown as a DPS increase. It will incidentally give free healing to the raid which I think will be competitive with other hybrid offhealers (Balance Druid, Elemental Shaman, Shadow Priest).

As an example of this I use the log from my guild's Sha of Fear Heroic kill in the last phase. In this fight our healers were doing about 30-50mil in healing each. We had 1 Balance Druid, 1 Ele Shaman, and 2 Boomkins who did about 30mil healing combined. Most guilds take them for granted but without them we would have been forced to add an extra healer.

In this same phase I was tossing out Chi Waves periodically when we needed the healing. It was hitting for about an average of 30k per tick. It didn't overheal much because it's a smart heal. In the next patch it's going to be free and it will heal for double the amount but on a 15 second cooldown. So compared to my current gear it should be at about 60k per tick, a total of 240k per use. 4 uses per minute puts it at 960k per minute if used on cooldown with no overhealing.

In the same Sha of Fear fight, our phase 3 was about 13.5 minutes. So I could have theoretically healed for about 13mil with no overhealing and using it precisely on cooldown. We're probably not going to be using it quite on cooldown, I would say we might hit it every 17-20 seconds so we can prioritize our DPS. That would bring the healing down to about 9.7mil. Then there is overhealing which will vary fight by fight. It would be somewhere between 20% and 50% overheal probably, which would mean the effective heal could be as high as 7.7mil and as low as 4.8mil.

With other hybrid offhealers doing around 7-10mil in this scenario I think we will probably have healing on par with theirs.

Most DPS classes contribute zero healing. Often those that do heal are just healing the damage they do to themselves (like warlocks). So I think our offhealing will be a contributing factor to bringing Windwalkers over something like a Rogue or a DK.

2. Melee "multidot"

Previously the only classes that could DPS two targets which are not in melee range of each other for an overall DPS increase were classes that could multidot. These are primarily warlocks, boomkins, and shadow priests.

In 5.2 with Storm, Earth and Fire, Windwalkers will be the only melee class in the game with an equivalent "multidot". Though we don't use dots, it achieves the same effect. Give us a fight like Will of the Emperor and we can DPS both bosses plus an Emperor's Courage or an Emperor's Strength without ever having to move from standing on the boss and doing the dance. We're expecting to get a +45% overall damage increase from doing this.

The fact is that this tier almost every boss benefits from cleave/multidot except for a few. So with Storm, Earth, and Fire we would have gone from being in the top 6 specs on a few fights and middle of the pack on the rest to being probably in the top 6 on most fights period. And our ranged cleave capability will position us as the top melee in fights where the other melee can't cleave but we can.

[Totaltotemic]

I'm going to share something here that I said in another thread:

There's "utility" for doing whatever role you do better (i.e. making sure people don't die) and then there's "raid utility" for doing useful things for your raid not necessarily related to whatever your role is. Life Cocoon is a healing cooldown, but Hand of Protection is a raid utility because it nullifies a lot of raid mechanics and other stuff that no magnitude of heals can do. It's a subtle difference, but it's one that matters. It wouldn't matter if we had Life Cocoon if we could to 1 million HPS, but HoP is still useful even if a Paladin could do 1 million HPS.

It's very important to categorize your utility as being "doing your job better" and "doing a job that no one else or very few other people can do." Let me go through some Monk abilities and classify for them, we can talk about it, but I think most people will find that this makes sense.

Zen Meditation - Is a raid utility, but not in the way that the tooltip makes you think. The redirect portion of the spell does not work in a raid environment, but it DOES allow for any kind of "soaking" mechanic. Whether you're DPSing or healing, you can help the raid a lot with this.

Diffuse Magic - See Zen Meditation, but with half the cooldown.

Off Heals (or absorbs, or raid damage reduction) - Definite raid utility. This includes things like raid Guards and Chi Waves (in 5.2). While not the best in the game (Prot Paladins put out quite a lot of raid healing and the big 3 hybrid casters have their healing cooldowns), it's still useful. Please note that DPS losses don't usually factor in here because you give up something important to get it, like Chi Wave on live.

Mobility - Not a raid utility. It helps you do whatever you do better. It's nice that you can roll to where you need to be or FSK across the room, but if someone else is doing 20% more damage than you, no one cares how mobile you are because no amount of uptime will help you beat that. Mobility is a function of how well you can heal/dps/tank, and does not help the raid.

Survival cooldowns in general - I would not call these a raid utility if they're not used in the sense of being able to soak mechanics. While, yes, I can soak a Spark on H Will with ToK + Fortifying Brew, that's a once in a blue moon situation. If you want to go with the "but you take less damage and thus ease the healing burden" angle, then don't we have to consider Warlock regen, Shadow Priest self-healing, and Aspect of the Iron Hawk as "raid utility"? TL;DR, simply taking less damage isn't raid utility, it's just as aspect of self-healing which, while a nice thing to have, isn't a big enough magnitude on any class to be relevant (a raid full of non-self-healers might have a whole half a healer difference from one where every single class can self-heal or reduce damage taken, it's very small in the grand scheme).

Multidotting/Burst/SEF Cleave shennanigans - NO, ABSOLUTELY NOT A RAID UTILITY. That's really swell if you do 20% more damage when you can cleave, but if your little Mage friend does 30% more damage than you anyways, no one cares that you can cleave. The same goes for burst, it just makes you a better DPS if you can do a lot of damage in a short amount of time to a key add. Monks have no burst cooldowns, but they sure do a lot more damage than an Ele Shaman that has no cooldowns available, and sometimes even when they do.

TL;DR about the only thing Monks in general have in the way of raid utility is huge damage reduction cooldowns to facilitate soaking mechanics and Brewmaster guards. That's it, everything else is just a function of what you're already doing anyways and just helps you do it a bit better.

[Callimonk]

In 5.2 with Storm, Earth and Fire, Windwalkers will be the only melee class in the game with an equivalent "multidot". Though we don't use dots, it achieves the same effect. Give us a fight like Will of the Emperor and we can DPS both bosses plus an Emperor's Courage or an Emperor's Strength without ever having to move from standing on the boss and doing the dance. We're expecting to get a +45% overall damage increase from doing this.

The fact is that this tier almost every boss benefits from cleave/multidot except for a few. So with Storm, Earth, and Fire we would have gone from being in the top 6 specs on a few fights and middle of the pack on the rest to being probably in the top 6 on most fights period. And our ranged cleave capability will position us as the top melee in fights where the other melee can't cleave but we can.

I didn't even touch on SEF because I wanted to focus on 5.1/5.0, given that the post seemed to focus more around current cleave/multi dot - you brought up a point I thought about and simply didn't touch on. Does SEF have a range, or is it limited to melee? From what I've seen, I assume that it has a range - giving us the precedence of having a multidot not limited to melee range. DKs I suppose are not limited to range due to Pestilence and the fact that Icy Touch can be cast from a range - so it wouldn't be the first in-game. However, as a weird hybrid cleave/multi dot, it would be the first non-melee dependent cleave, depending on how you look at it (though, I personally regard it as a multi-dot as it doesn't follow the same mechanics as cleave).

1. Hybrid offheals

Not many people have considered this, but with the new changes to Chi Wave we are going to be trying to cast it on cooldown as a DPS increase. It will incidentally give free healing to the raid which I think will be competitive with other hybrid offhealers (Balance Druid, Elemental Shaman, Shadow Priest).

As an example of this I use the log from my guild's Sha of Fear Heroic kill in the last phase. In this fight our healers were doing about 30-50mil in healing each. We had 1 Balance Druid, 1 Ele Shaman, and 2 Boomkins who did about 30mil healing combined. Most guilds take them for granted but without them we would have been forced to add an extra healer.

In this same phase I was tossing out Chi Waves periodically when we needed the healing. It was hitting for about an average of 30k per tick. It didn't overheal much because it's a smart heal. In the next patch it's going to be free and it will heal for double the amount but on a 15 second cooldown. So compared to my current gear it should be at about 60k per tick, a total of 240k per use. 4 uses per minute puts it at 960k per minute if used on cooldown with no overhealing.

In the same Sha of Fear fight, our phase 3 was about 13.5 minutes. So I could have theoretically healed for about 13mil with no overhealing and using it precisely on cooldown. We're probably not going to be using it quite on cooldown, I would say we might hit it every 17-20 seconds so we can prioritize our DPS. That would bring the healing down to about 9.7mil. Then there is overhealing which will vary fight by fight. It would be somewhere between 20% and 50% overheal probably, which would mean the effective heal could be as high as 7.7mil and as low as 4.8mil.

With other hybrid offhealers doing around 7-10mil in this scenario I think we will probably have healing on par with theirs.

Most DPS classes contribute zero healing. Often those that do heal are just healing the damage they do to themselves (like warlocks). So I think our offhealing will be a contributing factor to bringing Windwalkers over something like a Rogue or a DK.

I have to agree, and I'll take this as being agreed with - we will be unique with the fact that our offspec heals A) scale with our AP vs. SP, and B) the fact that we can use them while losing a minimal amount of DPS (I believe Paladins lose more by casting their offheals than we do, just focusing on melee hybrids. Same with Druids, though Heart of the Wild - ignoring its 6min CD - showed to be pretty powerful).

Again - I hadn't even considered 5.2, as my thoughts were more on current tier than next tier. If we had the buff to Chi Wave on live currently, and considering using Chi Wave each breath, I could have easily done 4M healing vs. 1-2M. This would have placed me at the very top of hybrid heals.

Last night, I was also able to see heroic Empress for the first time. Our strat requires us to use healthstones quite librally... I think I only found myself using a health stone every other time other people did, simply because I could Expel Harm, or already had a CD up that nullified the damage. On Tsulong, I already used it on CD in hopes to take some pressure off of our healers.

On that note: on Tsulong, our offhealers did a total of ~70M just by taking advantage of the Breath/Bathed in Light. That amounted to just under 30% of the healing of the healer assigned to Tsulong for the full duration of the fight. It also shaved off much, much time - our kill took a total of 7 minutes.

Also: you just reminded me of how much I am not looking forward to Sha of Fear on Sunday. 13.5 minutes... oy.

---------------

Off Heals (or absorbs, or raid damage reduction) - Definite raid utility. This includes things like raid Guards and Chi Waves (in 5.2). While not the best in the game (Prot Paladins put out quite a lot of raid healing and the big 3 hybrid casters have their healing cooldowns), it's still useful. Please note that DPS losses don't usually factor in here because you give up something important to get it, like Chi Wave on live.

My healing on Tsulong begs to differ. It still added up to dealing with an incredibly short last phase.

Mobility - Not a raid utility. It helps you do whatever you do better. It's nice that you can roll to where you need to be or FSK across the room, but if someone else is doing 20% more damage than you, no one cares how mobile you are because no amount of uptime will help you beat that. Mobility is a function of how well you can heal/dps/tank, and does not help the raid.

Yes it is. And nobody is doing 20% more damage than me; all of our DPS are roughly within 1% of one another, typically. If you're doing 20% less damage than your raid's top DPS, something is wrong - whether there's a glaring gear deficit, your rotation is wrong, or you're lagging, that needs to be fixed. I'm not saying YOU specifically are doing 20% less damage (you seem like a good enough player that your numbers ought to be on par), just that I'm not seeing the point in your argument when Windwalkers aren't parsing 20% lower than anyone.

Mobility is quite important, too. As I pointed out, I had two potential roles in Tsulong - dealing with the adds, or AE stuns. We just chose to go with AE stuns, though in reality I did a hybrid of the two.

Survival cooldowns in general - I would not call these a raid utility if they're not used in the sense of being able to soak mechanics. While, yes, I can soak a Spark on H Will with ToK + Fortifying Brew, that's a once in a blue moon situation. If you want to go with the "but you take less damage and thus ease the healing burden" angle, then don't we have to consider Warlock regen, Shadow Priest self-healing, and Aspect of the Iron Hawk as "raid utility"? TL;DR, simply taking less damage isn't raid utility, it's just as aspect of self-healing which, while a nice thing to have, isn't a big enough magnitude on any class to be relevant (a raid full of non-self-healers might have a whole half a healer difference from one where every single class can self-heal or reduce damage taken, it's very small in the grand scheme).

We brought 2 windwalkers in my previous guild specifically for their soaking powers for WotE. Granted, our hunters seemed to suck at deterrance, so there's that.

Multidotting/Burst/SEF Cleave shennanigans - NO, ABSOLUTELY NOT A RAID UTILITY. That's really swell if you do 20% more damage when you can cleave, but if your little Mage friend does 30% more damage than you anyways, no one cares that you can cleave. The same goes for burst, it just makes you a better DPS if you can do a lot of damage in a short amount of time to a key add. Monks have no burst cooldowns, but they sure do a lot more damage than an Ele Shaman that has no cooldowns available, and sometimes even when they do.

Is that why guilds weren't stacking rogues/DKs for Garalon?

Wait...

Also, our mages never did 30% more damage than me, regardless of the fight.

We don't have burst - you're right there - but we can still save TeB to some extent in order to "burst" in a phase that might require it. 5.2 will make this an even more powerful mechanic.

[Totaltotemic]

-snip-

All numbers and mentions of other classes in that post were solely fictional for the hypothetical value of proving a point. Also, keep in mind that this is about class balance, it really doesn't have anything to do with skill. In a raid where everyone has the exact same item level and the exact same skill, your DPS will not all be within 1% of each other, the game just doesn't work that way. Now, if every person is within 1% of the person ahead of them, then you have to realize that the difference between the top end and the bottom end is 10-15%.

Guilds stacked Rogues and DKs for Garalon because they were higher DPS. It doesn't particularly matter HOW they got higher DPS, the point is that they do more DPS on certain kinds of fights. It's situational DPS variance, but I don't think anyone goes around specifically recruiting Rogues for their great cleave potential, they do it because, if you randomly pick a fight, the chance of Rogues being one of the better melee DPSers is pretty high.

On survival cooldowns, you might want to take a look at the first line of text in that quote. I specifically mentioned in that section and at the top how important soaking cooldowns are, there's a reason why I put other cooldowns in a different listing.

On Mobility: Again, my numbers were purely fictional for the sense of illustrating a point. Mobility is only useful insofar as it helps you to do whatever your role at the moment is. You could have had tanks stun, you could have had casters stun, you could have had a Shaman throw a Capacitor Totem over there. Mobility for melee is a function of higher uptime on whatever you're trying to get in range of, that's all. If someone got there slower but still did more damage, your mobility wouldn't mean anything.

On Off-heals: I think you're delusional about the impact of your Tsulong off heals. A Shadow Priest spamming Flash Heal during a single breath would have done more healing than you could have done with Chi Wave on every single breath throughout the fight. In this case, it is essentially an addition to DPS. It's not utility, you just made the boss's health move more than another class did. Even so, it's a gimmick fight that is only the second of the past 50+ raid bosses. It's kind of like saying that the ability to Disarm is a great raid utility because you use it once an expansion.


An easy way to tell if something is raid utility or not is if it assisted someone else in performing their role. A DPSer's role is to shrink the red bars and take as little damage as possible while doing that. Therefore, anything that is a simple function of doing more DPS and taking less damage isn't really utility, it just makes you a better DPS.

[DirewolfX]

It does not seem to be enough "utility" because top guilds rarely use monks. I really cant push myself to level another character through pandaria anymore so I am stuck with this stupid monk. So if I wanted to get in good hc raid guild, should I just switch to brewmaster or mistweaving or can I stay in ww?

The kind of guilds that would drop you because a class has weaker performance for a fight are also the kind of guilds that would expect you to have multiple characters raid ready. These are definitely not for you, so I wouldn't worry.

I'm in a modest 25-man heroic raiding guild. By no means are we a top guild, but we are making steady progress on heroic modes. I get in for every fight I want to, because as a player, I bring the skill and raid awareness for us to advance. I'm our only monk, but not because we reject other monks; our other monk had to take a break for RL and no one else re-rolled or applied as a monk.

[Riptide]

Kinda sad that you are considering rerolling based on what Paragon says. I mean sure, for world firsts im sure WW monks probably wont be the optimal class to take in a 10 man environment. I'm 9/16 H on my WW monk and I love playing the class.

I agree, also Ninecatz from Blood Legion was WW for most of progression(AFAIK). The fact that Paragon didn't use one doesn't mean they aren't useful. In fact heroic tsulong would be better with a windwalker than any other dps because of the amount of short term mitigation they have. Which would allow them to take 1-2 breaths and thus only 1 tank the fight. Sure other classes can do it, but not as well.

[Stuffs]

I agree, also Ninecatz from Blood Legion was WW for most of progression(AFAIK). The fact that Paragon didn't use one doesn't mean they aren't useful. In fact heroic tsulong would be better with a windwalker than any other dps because of the amount of short term mitigation they have. Which would allow them to take 1-2 breaths and thus only 1 tank the fight. Sure other classes can do it, but not as well.

Had a longer thing written up, but page crashed so sod it

But yeah, being able to 1 tank was really nice on our kill, I'd ToK+Taunt it when the third breath was about to go out during night phase, and in theory I could eat another breath with diffuse. Mainly would be worried about the melee strikes if you only had Diffuse running so Dampen Harm might be better, but I only needed to eat the one so I didn't mess with it too much.

[Callimonk]

All numbers and mentions of other classes in that post were solely fictional for the hypothetical value of proving a point. Also, keep in mind that this is about class balance, it really doesn't have anything to do with skill. In a raid where everyone has the exact same item level and the exact same skill, your DPS will not all be within 1% of each other, the game just doesn't work that way. Now, if every person is within 1% of the person ahead of them, then you have to realize that the difference between the top end and the bottom end is 10-15%.

So you're going to call me delusional for having helped my raid in a heal-intensive fight while not even using a proper argument? I never said that I carried the raid, simply that I offered two different utilities, and we simply chose one that worked for us. So your point is rather moot. In addition, a logical argument doesn't make up figures - it utilizes hard data. I recommend you do that before calling someone delusional simply for disagreeing with you.

In addition, if you're just going by sims - I outperform my sims every day. I'm only supposed to be doing a maximum of 104K, and an average of 91K. Even without a damage increase buff, I can easily outperform that (Night phase Tsulong, I believe I was clocking ~110 - 130K for the majority of our attempts. Sadly, not for our kill I did much less damage due to clearing stacks more often) Bottom line: sims are great, especially for theory crafting. And I think you'll agree with me that they aren't something to swear by. On that same note - nor are parses. Different strategies will favor certain classes over others.

Guilds stacked Rogues and DKs for Garalon because they were higher DPS. It doesn't particularly matter HOW they got higher DPS, the point is that they do more DPS on certain kinds of fights. It's situational DPS variance, but I don't think anyone goes around specifically recruiting Rogues for their great cleave potential, they do it because, if you randomly pick a fight, the chance of Rogues being one of the better melee DPSers is pretty high.

Really? As someone who's never been in a HM guild... oh wait. I have been. We stacked them for a reason. It's called them being able to hit both the leg and body at the same time - and it wasn't the only fight where WW not having a cleave/multi dot showed up as giant, red mark on our roster. I can easily top the charts on Garalon by focusing down legs, but that doesn't mean I'm the class to bring into the encounter. I believe my guild's first H Garalon kill happend with 3 DKs and 2-3 rogues, and 0 Windwalkers.

On survival cooldowns, you might want to take a look at the first line of text in that quote. I specifically mentioned in that section and at the top how important soaking cooldowns are, there's a reason why I put other cooldowns in a different listing.

I'll give you that - I misread it. You just always come off as a bit of a Debbie Downer in these threads

On Mobility: Again, my numbers were purely fictional for the sense of illustrating a point. Mobility is only useful insofar as it helps you to do whatever your role at the moment is. You could have had tanks stun, you could have had casters stun, you could have had a Shaman throw a Capacitor Totem over there. Mobility for melee is a function of higher uptime on whatever you're trying to get in range of, that's all. If someone got there slower but still did more damage, your mobility wouldn't mean anything.

Due to losing our BrM and our Bear due to RL circumstances, we currently have 1 warrior and 2 DK tanks. Mobility adds up over time, and is typically a thorn in a class's side for one reason or another - for melee because they have to be within a certain range (though melee obv have the advantage of being able to damage while moving, which does make them much more mobile overall), and for casters because (most) cannot cast while moving without hurting their damage in some shape or form (ele shamans, IMO, being one of the few exceptions due to being able to cast Lightning Bolt while moving and having Spiritwalker's Grace in addition to Lava Blast being able to proc instant-cast - but as someone who was previously a shaman, it's still nicer to be able to simply stand and cast). (In addition, H Tsu uses the breath to stun them - the AE stun is for following the breath, to ensure they don't fear the raid around. Obviously, we had Tremor Totem just in case, and our MWs were on standby in case both FoF and Leg Sweep were on CD when the small guys came up - we were just burning the big add down that fast.)

On Off-heals: I think you're delusional about the impact of your Tsulong off heals. A Shadow Priest spamming Flash Heal during a single breath would have done more healing than you could have done with Chi Wave on every single breath throughout the fight. In this case, it is essentially an addition to DPS. It's not utility, you just made the boss's health move more than another class did. Even so, it's a gimmick fight that is only the second of the past 50+ raid bosses. It's kind of like saying that the ability to Disarm is a great raid utility because you use it once an expansion.

And according to your character sheet, you haven't downed Heroic Tsulong. I'm sorry - but if you're going to be rude to me and act like an elitist in a public forum, I don't have reservations about returning the favor - even if it is out of character for me. The fight is 50% healing, and 50% damage - however, for us, our damage for the kill was 3% higher than our healing, so there's that. But that can also be attributed to the fact that our final day phase happened to be incredibly short. The total fight was 7:03 by optimizing healing and damage as much as we could. And, sure - our shadow priest and other hybrids did end up doing more healing than I. I never said they didn't, just that mine served a utility in this case that beat the enrage timer.

That being said, as Moozh points out, Chi Wave is being buffed next patch and will be even stronger as far as an offheal. I'll be pretty honest - I don't see us as super strong offhealers by any means in comparison to a Druid with Heart of the Wild or a Shadow Priest, nor do I think our function is specifically designed around it. Otherwise, it wouldn't have an 8 (soon 15) second cooldown. However, 1-2M HP healed is still cutting off more time before purples - it's like chosing to not use a certain part of your rotation because it only increases your DPS (re: not damage) by 1% - a little bit silly to discount (again, NOT damage - a 1% increase in damage translates much differently than a 1% increase in DPS).

An easy way to tell if something is raid utility or not is if it assisted someone else in performing their role. A DPSer's role is to shrink the red bars and take as little damage as possible while doing that. Therefore, anything that is a simple function of doing more DPS and taking less damage isn't really utility, it just makes you a better DPS.

I'm not sure if I'm having a syntax error, or just interpretting it wrong. So you're saying that raid utility for a DD = doing damage, and not taking much damage while doing that, but then go on to state that accomplishing these tasks is not a raid utility? (My hunch is that you're trying to say that raid utility for a DD doesn't necessarily mean doing more damage and not pressuring the healers more than usual, but rather to provide some assist to the raid as a whole such as Devo Aura - which I agree with while at the same time... don't agree with. I think it's somewhat encounter-dependent.)



And finally: I feel that we don't offer enough utility for a 10m. I think that 25s can fit a WW in their roster, but 10s are so pressed for space that another class would be more suitable. While I have a preference for 25s, I'm not going to discount the fact that the majority of guilds are 10s, and therefore - this is still a thorn in our sides as a spec. Sure - at the level that my guild progresses we have to have as optimized of a roster as possible, but being that I know my spec/class as well as I do, I've found ways that WW can counter certain raid mechanics and provide utility (probably a major reason I see any progression at all). That being said - most classes can do what we can do, only better. Perhaps it's Blizzard's way of "Bring the player, not the class," but if they do it better... why bring the class?

[Totaltotemic]

I can use fictional numbers if I want to and still have it be a sound argument in a hypothetical sense, that's why it's called a hypothesis, there's no real data to support it (yet). If I say that I want to bring class X over class Y because class X gives 2% more raid DPS and some useful cooldowns over class Y's 20k more personal DPS, does it matter if I insert "Warrior" for "class X" and "Monk" for "class Y"? Either way, the point is logically sound.

I don't have to have killed Heroic Tsulong to know exactly how the fight works and know that a lone Windwalker is minuscule in the overall healing done to the boss. Did you even count for 1% of the total healing to Tsulong? If you didn't and ended the fight a minute early... what does it matter if you did less than 1% healing? That's about as useful as a 1% DPS difference on any other fight, it's negligible. I'm not being elitist, I'm being academic. If you're wrong, you're wrong, experience doesn't have anything to do with empirical facts.

I also don't know how you can say that your own DPS had around 16% variance between fights, and then go on to say that no one class ever does 20% more than another class. That's insane, you don't think other DPS vary as much as you do?

You didn't even say anything about mobility except its relevance to doing damage, which is exactly what I said, you just went on about Tsulong as if that's somehow relevant.

Again, there is a difference between being really good at your role and being overall very useful to your raid. Windwalkers currently fall into "pretty damn good at DPS related things" and then "awful" in terms of things not related to doing damage. This means that if all you want is a DPS that does DPS stuff, fine, take a Windwalker, but they don't have the kind of raid utility that can make you bring in a 90k DPS over a 110k DPS (you know, like Warriors or Paladins).


On a personal note, it's very hard to have good discussions in this forum when people don't discuss things calmly and rationally. If you want to disagree with someone, you don't have to make up reasons to attack the points you weren't targeting just because they were said by the same person. If you have evidence, please show actual evidence, anecdotal claims are practically worthless with how much misinformation exists on this forum. I am usually very direct on this forum simply because the signal to noise ratio is so bad that getting anyone to even understand a point can be challenging here, let alone having a real discussion about it (hell, I've had several debates in the past couple weeks on this very forum where people make ridiculous logical leaps or blatantly ignore math or somehow discount it just because it's not what they want to hear). I'm not here to tell people that they're wrong, I'm here to make sure that next time the subject comes up, they're right.