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.