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.