Suplift

Sups · @Suplift

13th Nov 2015 from TwitLonger

My thoughts on reworked monk, and why it needed to happen


Multiple people have tweeted me asking me about the new monk kit, so I thought might as well make one big post I can link around the place.

I'll start with talking about problems with monks right now, and hopefully this will give you an idea of why we needed a rework.

(One thing to keep in mind while you're reading this, I'm talking about both kits without talents in mind. It's important to note this when you're comparing the current kit to the new one).

These are the problems with the current monk kit; RNG on ReM (especially at low gear levels), being forced to press ReM on cd or fall behind, poor 3-4 target healing, lack of a relevant mana dump (especially whilst spread out), Crane Stance in general (More on that later!), Mana Tea, and Mastery. Now I'll touch on these problems individually, and expand on why they are such a big problem for the class.

RNG on ReM: This problem has plagued the class since the nerfs to ReM in 5.1. It's why we fell off so hard in SoO and became the worse healer in the game in 5.4. WoD tried to fix this problem in the baseline kit by nerfing TFT/Uplift and giving us more renewing mists, more often to combat the RNG. The problem is until you reach ~35-40% Multistrike, you can't consistently achieve good ReM coverage to deal with scripted burst damage.

Being forced to press ReM on CD or Fall Behind: This is has all happened to us in MoP. You get a random mechanic, or something forces you to not pay total attention to your ReM cd, and you fall behind on your rem coverage for 20 seconds. It's extremely punishing, and no other class has this problem. You need to play close to perfectly to get the same result as everyone else.

Poor 3-4 Target Healing: The Kit can simply not handle when 3-4 people are taking heavy damage at a time. It's extremely good at healing 1-2 targets, because soothing/surg/enm numbers are massive ever since the hotfixes. You can also deal with 1 target taking random burst damage because soothing surg is both powerful and very quick. This has obviously been a huge problem on fights like Iron Maidens, Iron Reaver, Flamebender, etc.

Lack of a Relevant Mana Dump: SCK is not that great of a mana dump when you compare it to something like Chain Heal, or Wild Growth. It also has the problem of only being a relevant tool while you are stacked up. This means on Fights like Iron Reaver, P1 Gorefiend and P3 Mar'gok, you'll have a ton of mana ready to be used, but simply can't use it because you don't have a spell like Wild Growth to dump that mana with.

Crane Stance: Oh god what can you say about Crane Stance that hasn't already been said? I used to be one of those people who thought it was a good idea. I thought maybe with fistweaving being it's own stance, they can actually make it extremely powerful. Sadly, this wasn't the case. It's damage/healing is horrible without talents. It's slow at low gear levels with a 1.5 second gcd, (it's so slow you have terrible keeping up tiger power and crane's zeal, while keeping up with your RSK charges). It's extremely punishing if something unexpected happens, and you need to switch back to serpent stance to handle the situation, because you don't have 20 seconds to get 9-11 ReMs active, and spam uplift. To top it off, it's just simply not fun. Crane requires gear/talents/set bonus to even function.

Mana Tea: This is simply just a relic of the 1.0 gcd. It was put into place to off-set the advantage of having a 1 second GCD in MoP. Thanks to the shitty rework they did in 6.1 to "fix mistweavers problems with infinite mana" which didn't even fucking exist past highmaul #stillsalty, it fucks low geared monks because all our chi generation spells are balanced around the 4% mana return.

Mastery: Do I even need to say anything.

WoD did attempt to fix a lot of the problems I've listed with talents and set bonuses. But this isn't how talents are supposed to work. You shouldn't be forced into talenting Pool of Mists just to fix the problem with ReM/Uplift. And because you're forced to talent Pool of Mist, you can't talent Chi Explosion for your problems with 3-4 target healing.

Talents are supposed to be cool/fun choices with real decision making. This existed in the class in MoP in the t15/t75/t90 trees, but sadly doesn't exist today.

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So enough bitching about old shit, now to -finally- talk about the new the shit! One thing right off the bat, the class is now a lot more simple to play. That's not necessarily a bad thing.

F I N A L L Y got a new mastery that's actually pretty good. Oh baby A++++++ shit right there blizzard.

For AoE healing specifically, Soothing Mist functions similarly to how extend life works now, and allows us to spot heal/tank heal while doing our AoE healing rotation. This is what people actually want when they say "extend life for new mastery!". Essence Font is basically just a ranged version of SCK, which is a very good thing. Like I said before, the old baseline kit has no spread mana dump.

Vivify and the new super powerful version of ReM is a god send for our problems with 3-4 target healing. Now we aren't instantly going to be the worse healer in the game for fights like butcher! The problem right now is spread out 3-4 target healing. That will require some set up time with ReM. This isn't a major problem in my opinion, and we're most likely going to get talents to help with this problem.

Our main emergency spot heal now is EnM, and it is indeed worse than soothing/surg is now, (however that's mainly because soothing/surg is extremely powerful right now). My hope is EnM will do enough upfront healing in a burst scenario with mastery + soothing + it's first tick, so our spot healing be passable in a raid environment.

On the concern about blizzards comments of "It's okay to have open gcds because soothing mist will cover it". Really nothing has changed, really all they've done is replace the soothing cast, with a CJL cast while soothing is channeling on whoever.

The other concern people have is in high throughput ST phases. Again this depends on the numbers split between soothing and effuse/enm/vivify with mastery factored in. My guess is effuse/enm/vivify on its own will be directly comparable to other healers ST healing, and soothing mist will be treated more as a bonus free heal.

I'm honestly really excited to see how this kit works out with talents/artifact bonuses. There's so many cool things they can do! Like multiple soothing mist beams, or soothing leaves a hot behind on a target if you move soothing off the target quickly. I'm hoping that RJW sticks around so our AoE healing rotation can be RJW ---> ReM/Vivify ---> ReM/Vivify ---> RJW for burst healing scenarios. I'm also really hoping PoM stays because it would suck to be forced into pressing ReM every 6 seconds or fall behind again.

tl;dr old kit sucks, new kit is x1000000452553535 better


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