Patch 5.2 on PTR – Early Monk changes

 Brewmaster, General Monk, Mistweaver, Windwalker  3 Responses »
Dec 222012
 

Patch 5.2 PTR notes are here tonight! (What, you were going out/on holiday tonight? Psh. Priorities, man, priorities.)

As always, datamined data is datamined.

EDIT: Official (draft) patchnotes went live as I was writing this. Rewriting patch notes to make analysis sense and adding links as appropriate.

  • Deadly Reach has been removed.
  • New Level 60 Talent: Ring of Peace
    • Ring of Peace forms a 8 yard sanctuary around the target for 8 seconds, causing all enemies in the area of effect to be silenced and disarmed.
  • Paralysis is now a physical, non-magical effect, and can no longer be dispelled, grounded or reflected, and its base range has been increased to 20 yards.
  • Charging Ox Wave now has a 30 second cooldown (was 60 seconds).

Ranged. AoE. Silence. Holy crap. Leg Sweep just got a contender, and COW got a nice buff too.

  • New Windwalker and Brewmaster ability added at level 30: Nimble Brew. Nimble Brew removes all stun, fear, and root effects, and reduces the duration of those effects if they are re-applied by 60% for 6 seconds. It has a 2 minute cooldown.

Remember how windwalkers were supposed to be mobile in PvP? Yeah!

  • Chi Wave now does 100% more damage and healing, and no longer costs Chi, but now has a 15 second cooldown.
  • Zen Sphere now has a limit of 2 (was 1), now detonates when either the recipient reaches 35% health or the Zen Sphere is dispelled, and no longer costs Chi.
  • Chi Burst now does 100% more damage and healing, no longer costs Chi, and now has a 30 second cooldown.

DAMN. The no-chi cost completely changes the calculus on these things. Chi Wave still does pretty much the same thing, except WW/BM is much more likely to use it now. Chi Burst becomes a mini-group healing cooldown of sorts. Free Zen Sphere detonations? Have to think about that one, but pretty sweet for PvP.

  • Tiger’s Lust and Touch of Karma no longer have a Chi cost.
  • Tiger’s Lust can no longer be used on targets that have other temporary speed increases active.

So much for super-speed TL, but the Chi cost removal makes it a viable choice in Tier 1. Chi cost removal for ToK makes my windwalker so, so happy; no more pressing it as an oh crap button and not having the chi to use it.

  • Dampen Harm can now be used while stunned, and its cooldown will now begin when used, not when the effect ends.

“This is how I frustrate Rogues.”

  • Healing Elixirs now heals the Monk for 15% of maximum health (was 10%).
  • Chi Torpedo now deals 15% more damage.

Needed buffs. More useful now.

  • Path of Blossoms has been removed.

What spell was that again?

  • Mistweaver
    • Healing Spheres will now heal for 50% of their original value if they expire without being picked up. This healing will factor in relevant Mastery.
    • Healing Spheres now have a duration of 1 minute. Healing Spheres generated by Mastery: Gift of the Serpent now have a duration of 30 seconds.

Well, mastery just became relevant again. 6 yd radius on the autoheal; have to see how smart it is.

  • Life Cocoon can no longer be dispelled.
  • Zen Focus, the 4-piece Mistweave set bonus, is now more responsive.
  • It is no longer possible to use Thunder Focus Tea while silenced.
  • Xuen will now fixate on the Monk’s original target.

No more lolcocoon! Also, yay bugfixes.

  • Windwalker
    • New Level 75 Ability: Storm, Earth and Fire
      • The Windwalker can summon up to two elemental duplicates that mirror damaging abilities that the Monk uses while they are active. For each spirit summoned, the Monk’s damage is reduced: 1 spirit causes the Monk and the spirit to deal 60% of the Monk’s normal damage, while 2 spirits will cause the Monk and both active spirits to deal 40% of the Monk’s normal damage. Each spirit lasts until the ability is canceled, or that spirit’s target dies or otherwise becomes unavailable.

Whoa, whoa, whoa. First, awesome, windwalker needed some more complexity. Second; this appears to be a cleave type ability: I’m assuming you can’t use it on a single-target fight (else you always would, 120% > 100%). Third, three copies of Xuen? AWESOME!

  • Combo Breaker is now a passive ability granted at level 15 that grants a 12% chance to make the Monk’s next Blackout Kick or Tiger Palm cost no Chi.
  • New Mastery: Bottled Fury — Increases the damage bonus provided by Tigereye Brew by .2% per Mastery per stack.
  • Tigereye Brew now increases damage by 1% per stack (was 2%), but is now improved by Bottled Fury.
  • Tigereye Brew now gains 1 charge after spending 2 Chi (was 4 Chi).
  • Tigereye Brew will now stack to 20, but only 10 charges can be consumed per activation.
  • A user interface alert now displays upon reaching 10 stacks of Tigereye Brew.

This was hugely needed, as mastery was getting completely devalued by high haste (running out of GCD’s means free abilities don’t mean as much). Not sure about the other TB changes; at 1 charge per 2 chi spent, the uptime is going to be really high. Becoming more of an Inquistion/SR type ability?

  • Brewmaster
    • Mastery: Elusive Brawler now provides 25% more Stagger per Mastery rating.

Also hugely needed, as mastery wasn’t effective enough vs. Stamina for building tank EH.

Great changes all around.

Monk Mondays: 17 December 2012

 Uncategorized  No Responses »
Dec 172012
 

No news to talk about this week, so let’s get to the links!

General

  • As promised, I wrote up a longer column exploring the math behind Ascension, which is here. TLDR: Good for windwalkers, but will run into massive scaling issues as people gear up (especially next tier); average for brewmasters, mediocre for mistweavers. That said, there’s lots of criticism about the mediocre for mistweavers part; I suspect lots of people are not using their Chi heals as often as they should.
  • I never realized this, but apparently the cooldown for Power Strikes starts when you get the buff, not when you consume it. This means you have 20 seconds from getting the buff to consume it before you start cutting into the efficiency of the talent, not immediately. This is cool.
  • I updated my brewmaster guide for 5.1; mostly focused on reworking the stat weights, since the thinking has evolved significantly there. Still need to get to windwalkers, mistweavers, and the general pages.

Brewmasters

  • I liked this post by Kisho over on MMOC where he talks about scrutinizing your debuffs on World of Logs to see the uptimes on your stagger debuffs. Good coaching tip.
  • This post by Xarmon recommends a different playstyle for a mastery/stamina build (heavy focus on Shuffle uptime, PB constantly) and the bosses that need it (H WotE/Empress/Sha). Lots of good discussion immediately following about whether it’s worth it to do mastery/stamina at all. That may be the topic for my monk column next week (stat weights in general).

Mistweavers

  • Unfortunately, the MMOC thread on mistweavers has degenerated into a flaming war about whether it’s viable to not stack spirit as MW; very little good discussion there or on EJ this week. My TLDR thoughts: By not stacking spirit, you risk a lot to gain a little. Sure, it’s a throughput gain, but you have to be very vigilant of your mana use to ensure you don’t become useless. (There’s some fun games you can play with Mana Tea and Jade Spirit, I’d imagine.)

Windwalkers

  • A nice post from Crevan over on EJ where he uses Simcraft to explore the DPS gain of various combinations of set+offset gear for windwalkers. End result: The set bonuses are terrible, so you’re generally best off not worrying about them too much and just using the best pieces (meaning haste/crit) you can get.
  • The general consensus seems to be emerging that you want to shoot for about 4k haste (with ascension) or 5-6k haste (with power strikes) then go for crit instead. This tracks with my observations that higher levels of haste sim well but are difficult to play optimally.

As an aside, I’m still looking for other sources of intelligent monk discussion; please leave a comment or send an email if you’ve got a blog or something, and I’ll add it in.

Brewmaster Guide updated for 5.1

 Brewmaster  No Responses »
Dec 152012
 

Really not too much to update.

  • Added discussion about Ascension.
  • Removed bit about Black Ox Statue being bugged (that got fixed a while ago)
  • Minor fixes/changes
  • Completely reworked the stat weights: rather than summarize, here’s a cut/paste.

Gear, Stat Weights and Reforging

I was planning on doing a gear list: they take way too much time. Just check out wowhead‘s sorted list, and generally grab the highest ilvl stuff you can, excepting trinkets which need some more thought (TBD).

Stat weights are…complicated. Agility is clearly the best stat, but the importance of secondary stats varies dramatically depending on how effective Gift of the Ox is for you and the level of content you’re doing.

  • Hit and Expertise increase chi generation and GotO procs. They also significantly increase DPS (much more than any other stat). If you’re tank swapping, though, Expertise becomes less good (since you can attack from the back when off-tanking, and still build up your Shuffle duration).
  • Crit directly boosts Elusive Brew, which is great for “must-dodge” encounters, and makes GotOX/EH healing more effective.
  • Haste is great for AoE encounters since it decreases the channeling time of Spinning Crane Kick (which directly translates into more GotOx orbs). In general, it increases your energy regen and indirectly helps accumulate Elusive Brew stacks and Shuffle uptime.
  • Mastery is generally mediocre, but shines when you’re facing bosses while undergeared, similarly to armor/stamina. Really, though, if you’re going up against bosses that have a possibility of bursting you down, you should be stacking stamina, not mastery.
  • Parry/dodge is kinda meh. It’s helpful, but I’d never consider stacking it in any situation.
So, yeah, my advice:
  • 5-mans or sharing gear with a windwalker set: Hit/Exp to 7.5% cap, then haste, then crit, though all the stats are very close in value. Here, you’ll want stats than can boost your DPS to power through trash. Reforge out of mastery/parry/dodge, in that order. Agility is worth almost exactly 2x the other stats in this scenario, so your choice on gems, really.
  • Raiding, solo-tank fights: Same as above, though agi is no longer 2x as good as hit/exp/haste/crit so you’ll want to focus on gemming those stats.
  • Raiding, tank-swapping: Agi drops in value dramatically, as does expertise. You now have agi slightly above haste and hit as your best stats, with crit and then expertise much farther behind. Basically, you’re stacking haste so you can get as many stacks of EB and super-long duration on Shuffle while you’re off-tanking, to then focus chi on Purifying Brew while on-tanking.
If you want specific numbers for stat weights, download Venyasure’s spreadsheets and plug in your own numbers.
 Posted by at 10:30 pm

Monk Mondays: 10 December

 Uncategorized  4 Responses »
Dec 102012
 

I’ve struggled with writing lately. It’s not the typical writer’s block of having nothing that I want to write about; it’s more  the feeling that anything I write isn’t good enough to publish. Basically, I have to get my groove back(TM). As such, I’m going to take a page from a few other blogs and try to stick to a designated posting schedule: henceforth, Monk Mondays! I’ll recap the last week’s news and posts, and see what develops from that. For this first week, I’ll be reaching back a bit, so apologies if I cover anything that’s old hat at this point.

Patch 5.1

So, yeah, there was a big patch and stuff. :) I wrote a brief post summarizing my initial thoughts on Patch 5.1, and then expanded it to include some of the follow-on hotfixes for an article at WoW Insider. TLDR: Mistweavers got nerfed bigtime, enough so that there’s already been a blue post about possibly re-buffing them to bring them back up (though that may be a PvP thing). I agree with Dayani (though I can’t find the thread now) that mistweaver mechanics were, to some extent, designed around them having higher throughput than other healers (due to them being less able to target heals). Unfortunately, now that mistweavers got whacked, they’re in a similar position to resto druids. For the vast majority of players, that’s fine, but for those pushing heroic content, the inability of MW’s to effectively raid heal will likely get them exchanged for a priest or shaman.

For everybody else, there wasn’t much. Windwalkers got a ton of bugfixes, which in turn is impacting theorycraft (also Ascension, below). Lots of discussion about haste vs crit at the moment. Brewmasters were pretty much unaffected, though there was a Keg Smash hotfix some time ago that limited it to 5 targets. You can thank Ta’yak for that one. Err, Mel’jarak. Dammit, Blizz, why is the boss with Blademaster adds the Wind Lord and the boss who does tornadoes the Blade Lord? Isn’t that a little backwards?

Ascension

I’d like to take a closer look at the new Ascension theorycraft.  The current consensus is that it’s recommended for windwalkers, but not for the other specs. In my brief trial run with it, it felt inferior to Power Strikes for windwalkers; that said, the majority of my playtime right now is killing things that die quickly, which naturally hurts a passive talent.

Guide Updates

I plan to update the spec guides for 5.1 (both here and on the forums) as I get time and I can pull myself away from playing Borderlands 2. :) Once I finish them up, I’ll post again here. In the meantime, if anyone has seen any good 5.1 patch roundup analysis, please drop the link in the comments, and I’ll cite it when I can.

Anybody done Brawler’s Guild on a monk yet?

 Posted by at 6:48 pm