Progress report

It's been a few weeks since our last video and we figured this was a good time to post an update regarding addon development.

That's all for now.

Posthaste

Haste is now assuredly more consequential

We were never a fan of Haste in build 21215.  You might have noticed already, but all the videos in the previous post were recorded with 0 haste.  As we'll discuss further down the page, haste was the stat to avoid, just as mastery is currently the stat to avoid in Warlords.  There wasn't much point in showing you our rotation at 30% or 50% haste if doing so would compromise our throughput.  (After all, who* wants to push more buttons and deal less damage?)
* ...okay, but besides me, who wants to do that?

It turns out the developers didn't think haste was all that great either, and they overhauled it for quite a few classes.

For Monks, Haste now decreases the cooldown of Fists of Fury, Whirling Dragon Punch?, Rising Sun Kick, and Rushing Jade Wind*.

* It already decreases the cooldown of Rushing Jade Wind.

To explain how much of a difference this makes, we compiled a table of every haste benefit we could think of, spanning from Warlords to Legion ... to Legion again.

We should mention that we are bad at designing tables, so we hid this one away inside this spoiler tag that may or may not work when you click on it.

Haste benefits

	Warlords	Legion, build 21215	Legion, build 21249
Faster autoattacks	Depending on the encounter, autoattacks were worth 15-20% of our damage in entry-level gear, and 10-15% of our damage in full HfC gear.	Autoattack value unknown	Autoattack value unknown
Faster channeled spells and DoT effects (does not affect total spell damage)	Fists of Fury, Rushing Jade Wind	Fists of Fury, Spinning Crane Kick, Rushing Jade Wind	Fists of Fury, Spinning Crane Kick, Rushing Jade Wind
Faster Energy generation	Increased benefit from the Ascension talent. Additional Spinning Crane Kicks (weak AOE).	Increased benefit from the Ascension talent	Increased benefit from the Ascension talent
Additional Jabs/Tiger Palms (as a consequence of faster Energy generation)	Jab does weak damage but may proc free Tiger Palm (maintenance buff) or Blackout Kick / Chi Explosion, worth 1-2 Chi	Jab does weak damage but may proc free Blackout Kick, worth 1 Chi	Jab does weak damage but may proc free Blackout Kick, worth 1 Chi
More Chi (as a consequence of additional Jabs/Tiger Palms)	Additional Blackout Kicks / Chi Explosions.  These attacks do moderate damage and generate Tigereye Brew stacks.	Additional Blackout Kicks / Spinning Crane Kicks.  These attacks do light damage and have no additional effects.	Additional Blackout Kicks / Spinning Crane Kicks.  These attacks do light damage and have no additional effects.
More Tigereye Brew (as a consequence of additional Blackout Kicks / Chi Explosions)	Tigereye Brew stacks are consumed to temporarily increase all damage by up to 60%	N/A	N/A
Reduced cooldowns	Rushing Jade Wind (moderate AOE)	Rushing Jade Wind (moderate AOE)	Rushing Jade Wind (moderate AOE), Whirling Dragon Punch? (strong AOE), Rising Sun Kick (moderate ST), Fists of Fury (strong all-purpose)

Don't want to look at all that?  That's okay, we probably got the details wrong.  We'll summarize the important stuff:

In Warlords, we get more Blackout Kicks/Chi Explosions (moderate attack) and more Rushing Jade Winds (moderate talent).  That alone increases our damage by a fair amount, but we also generate Tigereye Brew more often (as a side effect from BoK/CHEX).  TEB stacks are consumed to temporarily boost all damage by 60% -- that includes the damage from our strongest attacks, which are otherwise unaffected by haste.

So, Haste didn't let us use our strongest attacks more frequently, but in return we got to amplify their damage more often, and so it stayed useful to us.  We reluctantly admit that doesn't sound much like "haste".  In fact that sounds like a more active version of our existing Mastery*. 

* which is kind of amusing because our original Mastery back in Mists was a more active version of our Haste

In Legion build 21215, we get many more Blackout Kicks (which is now a weak attack) and slightly more Rushing Jade Winds (moderate talent)... and that's it.  Tigereye Brew is no longer linked to how many BoKs we use, and haste doesn't affect any of our other abilities.

There was some talk recently about how Feral Druids (in Warlords) avoid haste because it doesn't affect their bleed damage at all, and their direct damage isn't strong enough in comparison to take haste over another stat which does affect bleed.  Replace Shred+Ferocious Bite with Blackout Kick and you have an idea of how this works out for monks.

In Legion build 21249, we get many more Blackout Kicks/Spinning Crane Kicks (weak attacks) and slightly more Fists of Fury (very strong attack), Rising Sun Kicks (moderate attack), Whirling Dragon Punch?es (strong talent), and Rushing Jade Winds (moderate talent).

So, Haste finally lets us use our strongest attacks more frequently.  And if that sounds familiar, there was going to be a stat in Warlords that did the same thing -- Readiness -- but they ultimately shelved it because it "doesn't compare well* against [other] secondary stats".  Combining it with haste sounds like a nice compromise.

* In its place, we got Versatility.  Do I sound bitter?  Tryin' to sound bitter here.

What's our maximum APM?

Pop quiz!  Let's say I mistype a number in the monk simulator and give myself 50% Haste.  Also, the cost of Tiger Palm mysteriously drops to 30 while nobody's looking.  What's our maximum APM?

It's not 60.  I've heard some of you say it's 60, but it's not 60.  Each individual tick of Fists of Fury does not count as its own action.  Off-GCD abilities do count as their own actions.

(Standard Disclaimer: everything written in Dagnerous Padna's bolg is based on napkin math and may contain glaring inaccuracies.)

(Special Disclaimer: the following message is based on napkiner math and may contain glaringer inaccuracies.)

At 50% Haste, cooldowns and channel times are reduced to (1/1.5) = ⅔ of their normal amount.
Fists of Fury lasts for 2⅔ seconds at 50% Haste
Each Fists of Fury is 1⅔ APM "lost" (because we're not taking any actions while it channels)

How many Fists of Fury do we use per minute?
Fists of Fury has a 16 second cooldown at 50% Haste

If we don't take Serenity, we simply use Fists of Fury 3.75 times per minute
for a total of 6.25 APM lost
If we're hitting a button every second we're not channeling FoF, that brings us down from 60 APM to 53.75 APM (on GCD)

But if we do take Serenity (and if our goal is maximum APM, we really should), we use 7 Fists of Fury every 96 seconds (delaying each Serenity 6 seconds so we can fit two FoFs inside the 10-second buff)
7 FoFs per 96 seconds is the same as 4.375 FoFs per minute.
4.375 times per minute, we lose 1⅔ APM
which is a total of 7.2917 APM lost
If we're hitting a button every second we're not channeling FoF, that brings us down from 60 APM to 52.7083 APM (on GCD)

Now we add in our off-GCD abilities:
If we take Serenity, we'll use it every 96 seconds: +0.625 APM
If we don't take Serenity, we'll use Tigereye Brew instead: +⅔ APM
If we take Xuen: +⅓ APM
If we take Energizing Elixir: up to 1 APM
Touch of Karma: up to ½ APM

There are plenty of other ways to gain additional actions: Diffuse Magic, canceling SE&F or Flying Serpent Kick, Rolling in between GCDs, etc.  (Then there's interrupts, potions, extra action buttons, and so on -- but those actions aren't exclusive to Monks, so you might not consider them part of your rotation.)

So, depending on our talent choices and encounter details, we can expect our top speed to be somewhere in the neighborhood of 53-55 APM.

Of course, we can also lose APM, either through mistakes in rotation, or in situations where the enemy is unattackable.  Diffuse Magic's nerf and Nimble Brew's removal may finally get us to back off when the boss does something nasty.

Finally, this model assumes we have unlimited resources.  In practice, we won't have enough resources to fill every single GCD, even at 50% haste.

Next time...

That was a lot of words just now.  We were going to talk about "interesting" vs "boring" artifact traits this week, but we'll save that for later.

Tier 19

Today we're going to examine how the upcoming Tier 19 set bonuses might appear in your rotation.

* Specifically, we're going to examine how they might appear in your rotation if Strike of the Windlord's cooldown were 45 seconds instead of 40 seconds, because we're just that bad at reading numbers off Wowhead.

This first video shows off the fastest singletarget build we could come up with.  It's anyone's guess whether this talent setup is actually worth using; we just wanted to maximize singletarget APM.

We managed 36 APM with Serenity.  In Warlords, we had about 46 APM.

Our second video shows off a typical AOE build.

Even without Serenity, we managed 38 APM here.
Windwalker AOE is considerably faster than ST.

The third video shows off the slowest possible playstyle we could come up with.  Pay special attention to how many times we use Strike of the Windlord and (non-Combo Breaker) Blackout Kick.

28 APM.  Quick reminder that some classes get 40 APM baseline.

Set bonus details

(2) Set: RSK cooldown reduced by 2 seconds.

We can now easily fit three RSKs in between every FoF.  That's about all the nice things we can say about it.

Against a single target, this effect chews up an additional 5 chi per minute, when we're already starved for chi.  As we saw in the above video, some talent combinations can't even afford the extra RSKs without dropping some other spell (SotW) from the rotation entirely.  (It is possible to afford RSK+SotW if we take Energizing Elixir, though we don't believe this distinction will survive the first balancing pass.)

Against multiple targets, this effect is almost worse than nothing.  Consider that in AOE fights,

·          we prefer RJW over RSK as our primary chi consumer;

·          we want to take SDS; and

·          reducing the cooldown of RSK only makes SDS harder to use.

(4) Set: Using three sequentially different abilities increases Mastery (damage multiplier) by X%.

This appears to be an enhanced version of Combo Strikes, and it presumably wears off as soon as the player uses the same attack twice in a set of three.  This is an intimidating set effect, and we don't yet know whether the damage bonus kicks in for the third attack, or after the third attack.  

If it's the former, then our rotation is hardly affected at all and we can simply enjoy the damage bonus for our strongest attacks; the only thing we want to avoid is TPing twice in a row before a strong attack (and if we took Hit Combo, we're already looking out for that).

TP > BoK > TP > (bonus activates) FoF > (bonus ends) TP > (bonus activates) RSK >

On the other hand, if the damage bonus doesn't apply until after the third attack, this makes our rotation considerably more difficult.  Our 3-chi abilities become very tricky to use, as we need to plan about 4 moves ahead in order to gain the damage bonus.

TP > BoK > CW (bonus activates) > TP > FoF > (bonus ends) TP > RSK (bonus activates) >

Hopefully this isn't the case.

Either way, mind you, this is probably the nail in the coffin for Serenity. 

If somebody asked us for suggestions, we'd say...

Windwalker Monks can't afford either set bonus.  We desperately need an additional source of energy and/or chi (super-rare legendary gear drops don't count) before we even take set bonuses into account.  We would remind you that we are a single-minded blog concerned only with Fasts Per Minute.  So, how would we adjust the effects while keeping them in the spirit of the original?

2pc set bonus: increase the cooldown of RSK by X%, and also increase the damage of RSK by Y%.  This still increases the effectiveness of RSK overall, while leaving us more chi with which to furiously press buttons, and it doesn't impair our AOE rotation.

4pc set bonus: Using three sequentially different abilities increases Haste (instead of Mastery) by Z%.  The 4pc set bonus is going to be a pain no matter what; any time we have to stop and think about what buttons to press is ... well, it's more time thinking and less time pressing buttons.  So if we have to do that, at least give us a fun reward.  Haste is more fun than Mastery, and it would be nice to get haste from a set bonus as we'll be avoiding it on gear.

Next time, we'll talk about what makes a stat, talent, or artifact trait "interesting" vs "boring", and we'll talk about why Haste is the new Mastery.

Intermission

It's been a few months.  Here's what's changed, in order of severity:

Inner Peace now increases maximum energy by 30 at rank 3.
We now have 130 max energy after upgrades, not counting relics.

Hit Combo doesn't actually proc from what we think of as "combos"; we have a full ten seconds of leeway between attacks.
This is concerning because without rewarding us for making back-to-back chained attacks, there is little imperative for the devs to give us a fast rotation.

Tornado Kick has been redesigned and is now a boring damage increase to RSK.  It no longer counts as a separate ability from Blackout Kick.
This makes Serenity considerably less useful, and it makes the Hit Combo+Serenity combination nigh useless.

Strike of the SkyWindlord now deals damage equivalent to Rising Sun Kick in a cone-shaped area of effect.
This ability is finally worth using ... which means we lose another 3 Chi every 45 seconds ... and we're already starved for Chi.

Artifact traits no longer reduce the cost of Fists of Fury.
The reduced cost of Fists of Fury was interesting because it made the ability more comfortable to use, and it softened the penalty for mistakes in our rotation.  I am sad to see this go.

Serenity replaces Tigereye Brew and reduces cooldowns.
There are two major consequences which stem from Serenity halving the cooldown of Fists of Fury:
1) we occasionally have to hold off on FoF for up to ten seconds while Serenity recharges or risk missing out on a free FoF.  Since FoF is a major energy refund, not only do we hold off on FoF but we often hold off on all other attacks as we have no energy to use them.  The irony is that we take Serenity to use faster attacks but we end up waiting around anyway.
2) we have to FoF during Serenity.  This means we press 7 buttons instead of 10, which is a big loss in the button-mashing department.  Don't try to hold FoF until the end of Serenity either, as then we'll lose the TEB damage bonus.

Tigereye Brew (but not Serenity) has multiple charges, and Strength of Xuen now increases the duration of Tigereye Brew (but not Serenity).
This makes Serenity even less appealing.

Next time, we'll post some videos.

In Which We Speculate Wildly

Video first.  Then words.

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OK, details:

6-7% downtime is pretty good compared to previous raid tiers.  Enhancement Shamans are still in the lead, with 0% downtime at every level and talent combination.  Not that I am bitter.

The character shown here has +20 max energy from Inner Peace, saves 1 chi per FoF via Fists of the Wind, and (crucially) is using Tornado Kick.

The current tooltip for the Tornado Kick trait reads: "When you use Blackout Kick, powerful energy from the Skywall Cestus is unleashed into your body, causing Tornado Kick to replace your next Blackout Kick."  At the moment, we have no idea what the Tornado Kick attack actually does, other than it apparently replaces every second Blackout Kick. 

I'm going to make a guess here as to its intended purpose: Tornado Kick counts as a separate ability from Blackout Kick for the purposes of Mastery: Combo Strikes.

This finally makes Hit Combo viable.  We can fill enough GCDs to build up Hit Combo for Fists of Fury without resorting to using an AOE attack like Spinning Crane Kick (and in AOE situations, we should take Rushing Jade Wind instead of Hit Combo!).  Serenity makes a lot more sense too.

For comparison, Xuen contributes around 4-5% of my overall damage in a typical Warlords encounter, so I need 9-hit combos on average to keep up with him.  We saw just how (un)feasible that is without Tornado Kick.

Xuen remains useful for encounters that force the player to leave melee range often.

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Hey, one last thing:

I've been learning how to program in Lua.

WoW 7: Return of the Simulator

These changes are legion, for they are many

Blizzard just released their monk blog, and changes are rolling in. 

• This feels like the ability pruning we were supposed to get at the start of Warlords.  Jab and Tiger Palm have been merged into one ability, our maintenance buffs are gone, and various talents and cooldowns are in a state of uncertainty.
• Our class fantasy for this expansion is... unarmed combat ...wait... unrivaled mobility ...hang on... fighting games!  It's fighting games.
• Combo Strikes sounds like a good idea, but I don't see it working well with a cooldown-based rotation.  The design works well for a game like Super SMASH Bros., where there's nothing stopping you from consecutively using your strongest abilities (and, indeed, Smash Bros penalizes you for doing so), but in World of Warcraft, this feature only makes a difference for Blackout Kick and Spinning Crane Kick, both of which are among the weakest abilities in our toolkit.  Even if we could use Rising Sun Kick or Fists of Fury with no cooldown, we wouldn't have the resources to do so twice in a row.  It feels like the real penalty for messing up Combo Strikes is breaking your Hit Combo, and then only if you have taken that talent.
• Hit Combo, on the other hand, is amazing.  I argued last year that my favorite aspect of 5.4 Windwalker was the "fluidity" of consecutive chained abilities.  With Hit Combo, we'll actually be rewarded for long attack chains -- though I'm still skeptical whether our current resource generation can support the playstyle.  I'm hoping the mechanic will lead to interesting situations where we have to choose between using an expensive ability immediately or delaying it a few seconds for cheaper attacks to keep the combo going.
• Storm, Earth, and Fire changes: SEF is now slightly less powerful in 3-target situations (150%, down from 165%) and hardly useful at all in 2-target situations (100%, down from 140%).  Remains to be seen whether 2-target Chi Explosion remains viable, although due to the Tigereye Brew changes, I doubt Chi Explosion is still in the game.  I think automatic targeting will benefit me more often than not; I've lost count of how often I've tried to /cast [@mouseover] Storm, Earth, and Fire on a different enemy and ended up hitting my main target instead.
• I don't like the look of the new Tigereye Brew.  The old Tigereye Brew mechanic drew inspiration directly from classic fighting games -- build up a resource bar with basic attacks, then spend one or more full bars on a "super combo".  The new Tigereye Brew doesn't do that.  I don't necessarily want to see the old Tigereye Brew in its place, but some sort of "super meter" mechanic that builds as we deal damage would be nice to have.
• Our ramp-up has been reduced!  Tiger Power is gone, RSK no longer increases damage taken, and TEB doesn't accumulate charges.  We should be much better now fighting against swarms of short-lived enemies... provided we can switch targets quickly enough to keep Hit Combo up.  Are we getting any tab-targeting improvements in Legion?
• It turns out Multistrike was actually a fighting game mechanic all along!  It's better known as "Auto-Double".  Our attuned stat should still be Haste.

(Q: why isn't a monk in smash bros already)
(A: because all smash bros characters can double-jump)

Now let's try out the new changes in the simulator and see how they feel.  First though, since we haven't been given the complete picture, we get to make some assumptions.

Simulation assumptions

• Hit Combo requires each non-channeled attack to already be queued by the time the GCD rolls around.  (A grace period between GCDs isn't really in the spirit of a "combo".)
• As an exception to the above rule, channeled abilities have a very brief grace period at the end of the channel to maintain Hit Combo, since pressing a button before the channel is over cancels its last tick of damage.  We will use a grace period of 500ms.
• Abilities that deal damage over time still only count as 1 hit for Combo Strikes and Hit Combo.
• Expel Harm is removed.  (We explore this in greater detail later; in summary, if Expel Harm existed unchanged, it would be worth casting even at full health.)
• Serenity is removed, due to our new Mastery.  It's possible that Serenity might be reworked to reduce the cost of Tiger Palm for a limited time, but for now, we'll assume that it's just gone.
• Chi Brew is removed, due to the changes to Tigereye Brew.
• Ascension still exists, and/or Monks will have a Haste attunement that makes up for it.
• Energizing Brew still exists.
• Chi Wave still exists.
• As its name implies, Combo Breaker: Blackout Kick will break Combo Strikes if used consecutively with Blackout Kick.
• Spinning Crane Kick needs to hit 3+ targets in order to maintain Hit Combo.

That's a lot of wild guessing, but for now, let's just take a look at what happens.  First, singletarget:

Singletarget feels like it's missing something -- some talent or ability that the devs haven't announced.  Multitarget, though, is a different story:

("Chains" are what I called "combos" in the previous set of videos -- consecutive keystrokes which don't necessarily trigger Combo Strikes.  I tried to attack exclusively with Combo Strikes while recording these videos, so the "chain" indicator is fairly redundant.)

Observations

• We're clearly missing an unannounced ability in singletarget -- we have an obscene amount of downtime, and the devs have already tweeted that we should feel faster than ever.  Without some extra filler ability, Windwalkers will likely spend most of their time waiting for their Energy to recharge to 100, only attacking earlier if one of their stronger attacks is about to come off cooldown.  It will be interesting to find out from the theorycrafters if it's worth flat-out ignoring Rising Sun Kick cooldowns to make Fists of Fury line up with a 10-Hit Combo.
  Having said all that... despite my personal feelings about how much (or how little) downtime is acceptable, it turns out 15% downtime is actually right on par with Mists entry-level raiding.
• I personally should not talent into Hit Combo for singletarget fights.  It will be more useful on multiple target fights, or later in the expansion with much more Haste rating, or when we finally get the missing piece of the singletarget puzzle.  Even then, it is quite possible that a dedicated addon will be required in order to plan ahead for the 10-15 seconds required to make the most use of it.
• In an interesting subversion of Warlords, multiple target fights are vastly more active than singletarget fights.  For now.
• Combo Breaker is less useful now than it ever has been: first, we are discouraged from Blackout Kicking twice in a row after Combo Breaker procs.  Second, Combo Breaker saves only 1 Chi (down from 2) every 0.08 casts -- an average savings of 2 Energy per Tiger Palm.  If Expel Harm still exists, it is worth casting Expel Harm on cooldown in place of Tiger Palm, even if the Monk's health is full, to save 8 Energy (previously, Expel Harm saved only 1.4 Energy over Jab, or did not save Energy at all with the T18 bonus).  This is why we assume that Expel Harm is no longer available.

Wish List (and a frothing 5.4 rant)

• I'd like to see Hit Combo baked into our baseline mastery.  As I mentioned earlier, Combo Strikes sounds nice for fighting games, but it doesn't affect our cooldown-centric playstyle much (and when it does, we're losing +25% damage on our very weakest abilities).  Hit Combo makes Combo Strikes feel more relevant.  I'm also interested in which talents are currently on the same row as Hit Combo.
• I'd like the devs to (sooner rather than later) announce some talents that make singletarget more bearable.  In multitarget, Spinning Crane Kick gives us a little extra energy regeneration while channeling.  Singletarget needs a corresponding Chi spender or a passive boost to Energy regeneration.
• In the unlikely event that Chi Explosion is still in the game, I'd like to see it always cleave, no matter how many resources are spent on it.  Reduce the damage as necessary.  The current mandatory 4-Chi cleave really slows gameplay down in AOE.  The option to cast CHEX at higher Chi levels would remain for players who want fewer keypresses.
• I still want to see autoattacks removed.  Maybe also block attacks while holding backwards?  No?  What if Spinning Crane Kick changed to quarter-circle back, then -- okay whatever moving on.
• Finally -- this is never going to happen -- I still want to see Blackout Kick and Fists of Fury swapped back to their former roles.  One neat thing about Mists was that Fists of Fury dealt considerably more damage per energy than Blackout Kick, while Blackout Kick dealt considerably more damage per second than Fists of Fury.  You wanted to use BoK as often as possible, but you had to channel Fists of Fury occasionally (which effectively refunds Energy while channeling) or you would run out of resources.  As your Haste went up, you could afford to spend more time on Blackout Kick and less time on Fists of Fury -- and you always had to plan a few moves ahead or you'd run out of Energy before you had enough Chi for Fists of Fury.  In Warlords, Haste primarily affects your weakest abilities and the margin of error you have when pooling resources for your strong abilities (but not how often you can use your strong abilities).  In Legion ... you don't even get Tigereye Brew stacks out of it.

Next time, we'll take a look at all the changes coming to the core Mistweaver fantasy, Eminence healing.  Stay tuned!

Tier 18 Retrospective

(This entry was written before the release of the 7.0 Monk preview blog.)

It's been awhile.  So how did Monks really fare in 6.2?

Well that wasn't so bad really until you take into account that this is mythic T18 gear generated for a premade character on the PTR.

Those of you who have actually obtained this gear on your live character have already cleared T18.  More likely, you have already cleared T18 several times over, because the odds of any player receiving their full T18 set on the first clear aren't all that favorable.

Let us make the not unreasonable assumption that the Typical Windwalker Monk isn't going to clear T18 several times over, or at all.  This is how their Raid Finder experience will go:

That's for single target encounters of course.  Multiple target encounters will likely use the Chi Explosion rotation instead.

I was going to record a Chi Explosion rotation, but I decided to boot up Super Mario Maker instead.  It's much more interesting.