Monk Mondays: 10 December

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?