I am rebuilding my monk knowledge from the ground up and I thought I would point out an addon that I have found to help me in said task. In the first few dungeons that I have DPS’ed and LFR raids (luckily the DPS role and Tank role in LFR gives the same loot) I have relied on Bitten’s SpellFlash: Monk to highlight the next logical ability to use in order to maximize damage.
Consider it training wheels for windwalker, you use it to get more comfortable with the ebb and flow of the DPS priority system. One of the main benefits for this is that it highlights the cooldowns as they become available (other than Xuen which you have to watch) It tracks the buffs and debuffs as well as it will figure out when in the rotation to add fists of fury to make best use of it. It is helpful but I would suggest learning WHY you need to push the button, rather than blindly following the add-on. I will hopefully go through that more as I break it down.
Brewmaster it is not that great at. I actually turned it off when I got the hang of the priority system, because use of defensive cd’s should not be decided by an add-on. Once you get the hang of keeping up shuffle, using guard on 3 stacks, and expel harm when < 90% health, the priority system feels much simpler than WW.
As I delve further into BrM and WW, I’ll let you guys know.
I didn’t get to update most of the weekend so I thought I would let you all know what is going on with my monk as some fairly drastic changes have occurred. The first and foremost is I have given up chasing progression for the sake of progression. The amount of stress and the time investment doesn’t make sense for me anymore. There was a time I could do that, but I have other things going on right now.
That being said, I moved back to my old server (Proudmoore, alliance) and joined up with some buddies for casual raiding. They were in need of a tank, so I stepped up and dusted off my agility gear (ilvl 464 atm). It is like learning a new class from scratch as I have been completely focused on mistweaver for the past few months of prep and launch. I will try and keep some posts up for the mistweaver spec as I know a few of you guys come here just for that spec, but I will also be exploring the brewmaster and windwalker specs more now.
Ok, so I have had a couple of questions regarding my stance on mistweaver mastery and its priority in gearing and reforging. I thought I would muse upon this since there is a lot of disagreement within the monk community.
First off, what is the mastery bonus and how does higher mastery help? Our mastery is called Gift of the Serpent and it is healing spheres that have a chance to spawn with all of our heals including eminence heals. These spheres are free and increasing your mastery rating just increases the chance per heal that one will spawn. It will spawn at a random location close to the target of the heal and will heal anyone that walks over it as long as they aren’t full health.
Confirmed the Zen Sphere: Detonate fix, and we now have 30% lower healing on spinning crane kick. This is important information as it will adjust how you manage your aoe healing. Uplift / chi burst is looking like the only real options for AoE healing and based off the WoL rankings I’ve seen we have been quite dominant.
Still, by reducing our output they are in danger of overcorrecting and making us ineffective. I am keeping my eye on these changes and will have to relearn (again) how to heal effectively to max effective HPS.
Monk
Detonating Zen Sphere now does progressively less damage when more than 10 targets are affected.
Zen Pilgrimage: Return now ensures that the journey is round trip.
Rising Sun Kick now always properly applies the Mortal Wounds effect to targets it damages.
The healing generated by Spinning Crane Kick has been reduced by 30%.
Quite the week ahead of us. Heroic Mogu’shan Vaults is open for those guilds who cleared 6/6 normal last week and at the time of this post Blood Legion and Vodka are both 2/6 H 25m, and I would expect big things from them. The rest of us can look forward to using LFR to help the gear up and progression through normal as I expect the majority of guilds going 6/6 this week or next depending on their gearing RNG.
My guild ended last week with 4/6 and Elegon was the hardest fight I have had to heal so far. Instant dispels needed, constant raidwide damage and punishing melee healing. My healing was going between 29k and 42k depending on the attempt but I was having mana issues and tanks were dying as the breath was coinciding with annihilation. Between me and the holy pally I run with we could not keep the tanks up through the first phase. It being the end of the raid week we called it after a dozen attempts where we got to phase 3 a handful of times. The only bright moment was when we one shot Spirit Kings after only about 4 attempts the night before.
I’m looking to get some LFR gear and hopefully easing my mana concerns. Good luck to anyone attempting heroics this week, I see Spiritbinder being one of the first stumbling blocks followed by Elegon.
Last night we made a push to get caught up a bit on progression and reclaimed our realm 1st with a kill of the spiritbinder. We two healed the fight with me and a holy paladin. I had been used to 3 healing the first 2 bosses so switching to 2 was a bit of a strain but we managed to kill spiritbinder after 10 wipes.
I finally found a fight that the glyph of uplift was worth it and boy was it. If you correctly alternate with the other healer you have in effect unlimited mana until 20% when you can’t go into the spirit world anymore. Keeping renewing mist on all the raid (especially the ones with voodoo dolls) and spamming uplift during the time you are out of the spirit world kept everyone up without too much issue.
Only time it was painful was if you missed a trip into the spirit world like me when I had voodoo dolls for the last 2 totems of the fight. Lucky my healing partner carried the healing for the last 10% or so as I was sucking fumes. Spirit kings attempts continue tonight and hopefully I will have something to report tomorrow.
Link to my WoL is here. I ranked on the fight 75th which is the first time I have ranked so far this expansion.
Happy Monkday everybody, just curious how far everyone got the first week of raiding in MoP. The content was challenging and was not a pushover as everyone was expecting. Our raid went 3/6 and we are trying to push 4/6 tonight so we can get a clear next week.
It appears that Blizzard had fixed the bug where zen sphere was not diminishing with more targets, and it caused me to change my healing strategy, incorporating uplift instead of zen sphere detonate. Due to some pressure to catch up on progression we switched to 10m and one shot feng after a night of wiping in 25. The log for the kill can be found here
We took a stab at spiritbinder but it was already past raid time and we need to work on it more this weekend. Just a fyi for the monks that killed feng prior to the fix you may need to adjust your healing strategy for next week’s clear.
Progression started as both of our raid teams (10 and 25) downed Stone Guards yesterday and started in on Feng. I was middle of the pack in the healers for Stone Guard but when we started on our Feng attempts (29% lowest after about 10 attempts last night) it became clear that monks DOMINATE this fight.
Few notes regarding talents. Rushing Jade Wind and Zen Sphere are a must for this fight. RJW has the same cd as epicenter and draw flame meaning you should be hitting it every stack and heal part of the fight. Same principles of Mistweaver healing, cast renewing mist on cd and use your chi generator of choice (Jab for melee, soothing mist/expel harm ranged) to pool chi for the periods of high heals.
I have 4 chi available for the cast of epicenter and then use zen sphere, RJW and spinning crane kick spam followed by a detonate after I get an additional 2 chi. Use chi brew as a healing cd, after the first zen sphere detonate, chi brew zen sphere and detonate. Follow it with revival if the raid is in rough shape. I was averaging about 70k hps on this fight without mana issues while my fellow healers were going bone dry with 40-50k.
Overall, a hell of a lot of fun. Enjoy raiding this week, I’m hoping my guild can do 3/6 this week and full clear next week to get back on track of progression.
Mogu’shan Vaults has been successfully cleared by 1 guild on the first day of raiding. I am very surprised on the difficulty that top guilds are having with the content, and it makes my first night of attempts seem less horrid. Only 42% of the guilds that have killed the first boss were actually able to kill the second and it drops rapidly after that with only 7 guilds 5/6 as of this posting. No guild on my server has killed the first boss yet (low pop).
My expectation that we would clear normal in one week, and heroics in the next few weeks seems more and more unlikely. I think that is ok since the raid content is challenging and requires every member of the raid to perform or bosses do not die.
Here is what I noticed:
Proper spread of renewing mist is key, with 9+ targets rolling so when overload hits you can bring them up with a quick uplift uplift
If your raid is melee heavy, stay in range. Eminence healing and using jab for chi is more mana efficient but it is a giant flustercuck with chains and traps concentrating around the tank.
Single target heal the people that get chained for the first few seconds they have it as they run together. Then your renewing mist can heal them as they move in and out eventually breaking it.
Stay on top of your mana tea stacks, use them on cd (glyphed) or you will fall behind
Revival if a large group of players hits a trap (aka healing stupid) else save it for after an overload.
Since I was not using SCK I picked white tiger, use him a few seconds before an overload to help get some heals out.
In the end we were hitting enrage and our best attempt got the boss to 2%. It revealed some gearing/skill issues that we will resolve to hopefully power through the first boss as we work deeper into MV. Have suggestions based on your experiences? Leave a comment.
Zen Pilgrimage 