On Monks

Blizzcon has come and gone, and among many other announcements, a new class has been announced: the monk. And my initial impression of it is that it has a lot in common with the rogue. Obviously we can’t tank (or heal) like monks can... but it is an Agility leather class, and its resource system has obvious parallels to ours. We spend energy to get combo points, and then spend combo points to do higher-damage moves; Monks are much the same, except they have two flavors of combo points and spend them more incrementally rather than all at once. Hence, their rotation is likely to feel very similar to that of a rogue, even if the details are somewhat different. Hence, I think there’s some interesting conclusions to be drawn through comparisons between Monks and Rogues.

The absence of autoattack
Monks, unlike all other melee classes, do not have autoattack. And at first this seems surprising, as its been a staple of melee classes for many years; on the other hand, autoattack is a fairly minor damage contribution for a number of current melee classes - DKs get less than 15% of their damage from it - and casters have been doing reasonably balanced DPS without autoattack for years. Hence, there’s no reason to believe that the lack of autoattack will have major implications on Monk gameplay - and indeed, when you play a monk (at least, for the first 5 levels or so that they had available), you barely notice the lack.

What it does do is give you direct control of a larger portion of your damage. One of the longstanding issues with rogues is that the difference between a good rogue and a bad rogue - in terms of damage done - simply isn’t very large; and part of that is that so much of our damage comes from passive sources - like autoattack. By giving you direct responsibility for all of your damage instead of only two thirds of it, the effect of differences in skill will be that much larger as well - and that’s a good thing.

One thing that they will need to be careful of is the implications in terms of balancing dual wielding; a major part of the balance of 2H weapons versus DW setups is the increased miss chance on DW autoattacks, and the Monk’s system will bypass that entirely. If you perform a strike that does full MH damage and half OH damage, and compare it to the damage a 2H strike does at equal ilvl and AP, one finds that the DW strike hits about 10% harder; hence, other mechanics will need to be added to ensure balance between the two weapon types.

Its also worth noting that it means Monks have no penalties for target switching at the resource level. Not only do Light and Dark Force accumulate on the Monk rather than on the target (like combo points do), but you don’t even lose damage from being out of melee range for short periods of time. As long as your energy doesn’t cap, you lose no damage to being out of range - this makes them the first class in the game that loses nothing by being out of range or having to swap targets. All other melee classes lose autoattack damage if nothing else, and all ranged classes (and a number of melee classes, to boot) lose GCDs; but a Monk can run out of range for a couple of seconds and do exactly the same amount of damage that they would have had they been in range the full time. That’s a little bit strange, and says to me that they’re going to need to add talents and abilities that make you care about target switches and time on target, or else monks will have monstrous advantage relative to other melee in that department.

The oddities of spending Chi
If I were going to pick two (and only two) ways to allow a primary resource to be expended, I don’t know that I’d pick Jab and Roll. Jab, continuing our rogue analogy, is basically Sinister Strike - its your primary (by which I mean, only) Combo Point builder. Roll is basically Blink - it throws you forward about twenty yards, and while it takes a bit longer to get you there than Blink does, it has the advantage of not being thwarted by negligible bumps in the terrain. I imagine in theory its designed to force you to trade off between damage and mobility, but in practice the decision will always be obvious. If you’re running moderately long distances without a mount (before level 20, or while indoors), you’ll obviously want to roll as often as Chi allows. If you’re in a raid, you’ll want to use Jab almost exclusively, as Roll costs you significant amounts of damage and (as just discussed) taking a little longer to get to your target generally doesn’t. Also note that diving 20 yards forward isn’t the most useful means of movement when your goal is (usually) to wind up within melee range of your target. Hence, the current ability selection seems to relegate Roll to an ability that purely makes you faster running across country than any other class and will rarely be used otherwise, which seems like an odd design choice.

Rotational Complexity
The resource system as written doesn’t seem to lead to particularly complicated rotations. As we’ve seen with Rogues, there’s generally an optimal move to spend combo points on; with Monks there may need to be two (one that spends more Dark than Light, and one that does the reverse), but fundamentally it points toward a rotation where you do three moves in whatever order is necessary to keep any of your three bars from capping out. With the moves available at level 5, your single target rotation would simply by Jab, Jab, Tiger Palm, Tiger Palm, Blackout Kick, repeat. And I suspect that would get rather boring in a hurry; hence, they are going to need to add additional mechanics to ensure the rotation stays interesting. There’s a couple of obvious ways of doing this.

First, you could put cooldowns on the “best” moves - if you can’t hit Kick of Awesome Darkness every time you have 4 Dark Force, you’ll have to spend resources on other, lesser moves in the meantime; thus, your rotation would need to focus on having the right amount of Forces for your best moves as each comes off cooldown without wasting them in between. The problem with this approach is that the 4 and 6 second cooldowns you see on most other classes don’t really work here - for expensive moves you could easily need cooldowns of 20 seconds or more to appreciably affect the rotation, which means that in the short term your rotation is still somewhat repetitive.

Second, the could have a significant portion of Monk damage come from DoTs, self-buffs, or debuffs - much as rogues need to spend combo points maintaining Slice and Dice and Rupture rather than using them all for Eviscerate or Envenom. For Rogues this isn’t an ideal solution, as we already have a high reliance on passive sources of damage (autoattack and poisons), but for Monks - who, as noted before, appear to have no passive damage at all - its a far more viable approach. I don’t know how well it fits with the martial arts theme of the class, though.

Another approach would be to add additional Chi moves. While you wouldn’t want to add too many - there’s something appealing about having simple Chi moves with the fancier stuff coming from Force expenditure - I think there’s room to add a few more options - say, Uppercut and Kick. If you had to think about which move was the right one to do rather than blindly mashing Jab every time your Chi started getting high, the rotation would wind up more interesting as a result. The trick, of course, is how to set this up such that one move isn’t “best” in all circumstances - but I think there are tradeoffs you can make in terms of damage done vs Force generation that could be interesting for burst situations, and the ability to generate Light and Dark force asymetically also has the potential to be interesting. Consider, for instance, if Kick did 50% more damage than Jab, generated 50% more Force - 1 Dark, 1 Light, and 1 random - but cost less than 50% more than Jab (say, 55 energy). Usually this would be better than Jab; but if you were at 3 Dark (or Light) Force, it might well be better to use Jab to ensure you got full benefit from the Force generation (similar to how rogues use Revealing Strike). I don’t think this is a full solution by itself, but having multiple options with different Force generation properties seems like it could be an interesting supplement to the other approaches.

There are certainly other approaches that could be adopted as well, such as moves that depend on (but don't consume) resources - for instance, a strike that uses Dark Force but does bonus damage based on your current Light Force or Chi levels - but the fundamental point is that there needs to be *something*. If Monks just have simple strikes that directly damage their target, the rotation that results will be neither fun nor interesting.

A quick thought on Pandas
One of the racial benefits of Pandaren, Epicurean, provides a larger damage benefit than any existing racial - not to mention the stamina it provides. And while there’s nothing inherently wrong with the new race being the best, I do worry about the continued escalation of racial power - the gap between a Pandaren Rogue and an Undead one is now larger than the profession benefits, and exceeds what you get from upgrading a piece of gear in most cases as well. I’m not saying that they shouldn’t give Pandaren cool toys of this nature, but if they’re going to keep introducing powerful new racial bonuses they badly need to revisit the older races as well - flippy jump and an extra 3 racial agility just doesn’t compete with what a Worgen gets, much less a Panda; so if they want the older races to remain viable - and they should - they need to give them DPS benefits that are at least somewhat competitive in ways that they currently aren't.

A final thought
As my guild is recruiting rogues, I’ve spent a fair amount of time lately looking at parses from many different rogues lately, and there are some curious trends I’ve noticed among them; hence, I’d like to do an informal study to examine the scope of these trends. If you feel you’re a good rogue, and have a parse where you feel you did well - preferably most or all of a Firelands clear - please send me a link. Don’t worry - I won’t call you out by name or even link your parse publicly without permission - I’m just looking at some general trends and need more parses to determine how widespread they are. Thanks.