Monks are going to have lower hp than dk/paladins/warriors, assuming they are still stacking stamina everywhere.

Correct. Our Stamina scaling is actually not bad, especially since we have a Last Stand-type ability (FB), but it is still inferior. Because our damage reduction scales so much better with other stats, because Stagger design is conducive to absorbing large hits with a modicum of health, and because our Health increase skill is unfortunately tied to our massive damage reduction CD, we are inevitably going to have less health than our counterparts.

Stamina is nice at the beginning of a tier (doubly at the start of an expansion), but I think long-term that DK, Pally and maybe Warrior are the only classes to have any real value in a large health pool. Monk and Druid just have too much passive damage reduction and too good of offensive stat scaling in our active mitigation to justify Stamina stacking.

A quick side-by-side list of Stamina scaling and passive damage reduction on tank classes:
Monk:
Stance of the Sturdy Ox: +20% Stamina, 25% damage reduction
Fortifying Brew: +20% Health for 20 seconds
Death Knight:
Blood Presence: +25% Stamina, 10% damage reduction
Veteran of the Third War: +9% Stamina
Vampiric Blood: +15% Health for 10 seconds
Druid:
Bear Form: +20% Stamina, 12% physical damage reduction, 25% spell damage reduction
Might of Ursoc: +30% Health for 20 seconds
Paladin:
Guarded by the Light: +25% Stamina
Sanctuary: 15% damage reduction
Warrior:
Unwavering Sentinel: +15% Stamina
Last Stand: +30% Health for 20 seconds
Defensive Stance: 25% damage reduction

How often does everyone use Elusive Brew? Do you typically use it at max stacks or hold them until your health is low or there's heavy damage incoming?

If I know I'm going to need it, I save it. Otherwise, any time it's off cooldown and I have 9+ stacks, I use it.

Thoughts on set bonuses? Seem fairly trivial if you are using a hard exp/mastery build.

Brewmasters are the only monk spec that get unquestionably good set bonuses in t14. Both the extra dodge and extra absorbs are useful in pretty much any situation.

Mind that the 4pc has a "triple value" that's not immediately obvious or specified on the bonus text.

- It increases Guard's absorption by 20% (primary effect)
- It also increases Guard's bonus to self-healing by the same 20% - from 30% to 36% (img1, img2)
- It does increase your statue's shields by 20% as well (img)

Hi guys !

I've been working on some Brewmaster stuff recently, and i think it's time to share it with you. It's not finished yet, but it's operational and working already.

5.2 changes, Ox Statue and spreadsheet

This change was petty surprising, as it was well known, from WoL and the like, that the Statue was already quite powerful. Then it was suggested to me that it was just a tooltip change. I must admit that although i've done many tests concerning tooltips and game formulas accuracy, i had never tested whether it was true that you need to do 16 times your AP for your Statue to cast a Guard. Therefore i made a couple of tests, and it seems that indeed, the 5.2 "change" is juste a tooltip update. You already need to deal only 8 times your AP for a Statue Guard in 5.1, and possibly 5.0. The spreadsheets i've uploaded so far have the 1600% tooltip value that i hadn't tested, instead of the 800% actual value.

This has huge consequences on stat weights if you take the Statue into account. Indeed, the value of hit/exp are highly dependent on the Statue, since they are the best secondary stats for dps. Agi is great for the Statue too, but it also has a high non-Statue potential. And crit is a much greater damage increase than haste. Doubling the efficiency of the Statue in the calculations of the spreadsheet modifies the stat weights you can currently get. Agi is empowered, Hit/exp come out clearly ahead of crit/haste, and crit outweights haste by a noticeable margin.

There is a simple way to take the Statue correction in the spreadsheet without downloading a new modified one. Instead of adjusting the Statue cell between 0 and 1, you just need to double its value and make it vary between 0 and 2. This will effectively double its efficiency, making it adapted to the actual in-game efficiency. For example, if you wanted 90% of the Statue hps to be added to your damage reduction, you used to enter 0.9 in the Statue cell. Now if you enter 1.8, you'll have correct values for a Statue being 90% efficient (since 2*0.9 = 1.8).

I'll let you try this and observe the changes.

Brewmaster Simulator

This is the maint point of this message. I've programmed a simulator simming a Brewmaster tanking a boss. It is based on the spreadsheet file, the first sheet will look familiar if you have already used the spreadsheet. But the nature of the results is entirely different. The spreadsheet is a calculation dealing with averages and probability, while the simulator is acutally simming a real fight, much like SimCraft. A side note, "details" such as Gift of the Ox or Swift Reflexes are also in the simulator. Note that the simulator has the current mastery scaling, not the 5.2 one which is buffed by 25%.

But the problem is that it differs from SimCraft in one aspect : it is an Excel program. Why i used Excel to do this is mainly because more people will be able to use it, and because i already had written many functions for the spreadsheet that i can use for the simulator. Yet, Visual Basic might not be the fastest programming language, and i am clearly not the best programmer ever, nor am i among the less lazy ones. The simulations thus take time before the results are displayed. If you want accurate results, you'll have to ask Excel to run many simulations. As an example, the screenshots i'm giving later in this message are the results of twelve thousand simulations of 10-minute fights : one thousand simulations with the base stats, and one thousand simulations for each of the 11 stats, with a +3000 in the corresponding stat.

It took more than one hour and a half, nearly two hours, for Excel to run all of these. Depending on your computer, it could be faster, but that's about the time you'll have to wait. Be prepared to double that time if you're using enchants on your weapons. I simmed without enchants because it reduces the calculation time by a large margin. You can run not as many simulations if you want, doing 10 simulations for each stat will take about one minute, but the RNG in dodges/parries/etc will greatly reduce the accuracy of the results. Don't expect to produce useful results under 100 simulations. My advice is to begin by running small numbers of simulation to test your settings, mostly the settings about Purifying Brew and the use of Chi, and once you're happy with it, run the big huge 12000 simulations (with or without enchants, if you use one it will take more time).

Settings

Here is a sample of the settings in the second sheet :



The "Preferences" section is clear enough, i think. Enter number between 0 and 1 in the cells. Modifiers can vary between 0 and 1 (eg 0.7 in "Healing taken" means you take 30% less healing).

In the "Simulation settings" section, you can change the settings of the simulations (yeah). You can choose the fight duration of all the simulations (the default duration is 600 seconds, which is 10 minutes). The "Number of sim" is the number of simulations that will be run with the stats you enter in the first sheet. The results of these simulations will be averaged and displayed in the first sheet, in the "Damage avoided per second" cell, "Shuffle uptime" and in the "Analysis" section. The "Nb of scaling sim" is the number of simulations that will be run for each of the 11 stats. If you enter 0, then there won't be any scaling and the simulator will just display the results of the base simulation. The "Scaling delta" is the bonus stat that will be added to each of your 11 stats when their simulations are run. Note that this number has to be big enough for the results to be somewhat accurate. Even running 1000 simulations with a mere +10 stat won't be enough to be compared with the base +0 simulation. The default delta is +3000 that will be added successively to your 11 stats to determine their weight. You can chose different deltas for hit/expertise, since these two can be capped and a +3000 hit will mean nothing as you'll be over the cap. Finally, the two "spike" cells are use to determine how the Spikiness is calculated (see the Spikiness part of the message).

The "priority" section defines how you spend your Chi. If ou enter 1 in the "100% uptime" cell, then the simulator will try and maintain Shuffle, by not using Chi on something else than BoK if you don't have Shuffle. Unfortunately this will not ensure a real 100% uptime, i still need to work on it.

Then you state how you'll use Purifying Brew. If you put a non-zero number in the Stagger/health cell, Purifying will become a priority if the total amount of Stagger you have divided by your health pool is superior to this number (and if you have Chi, of course). For example, if you have 500k hp and you enter 0.2 in the cell, the simulator will purify if you have more than 100k stagger in your Stagger debuff (not 100k damage per Stagger tick, but 100k total Stagger combining all the ticks remaining). Entering 1 in the "Yellow" and "Red" cells is asking the simulator to purify when your Stagger is yellow or red. If you enter a non-zero number in the "Stag / bossdps" cell, then the simulator will purify if the stager_amount / boss_dps ration is bigger than this number. The boss dps is calculated by dividing the unmitigated damage of a hit by the swing timer of the boss. Entering a non-zero number in the green "Shuffle > ?" cell will tell the spreadsheet to use PB if you have more than this number of seconds remaining on your Shuffle buff. These are all sufficient conditions, meaning that if for example you enter 0.3 in the first cell and 1 in the "Yellow" cell, the simulator will purify either if stagger/hp > 0.3 or if your Stagger is yellow. The red "Shuffle > ?" cell is a necessary condition, meaning PB will not be used unless the remaining duration of Shuffle is greater than the number you enter in the cell. This cell is a good way of forcing 100% uptime on Shuffle.

And in the end, you tell the simulator how it should use Guard. If you enter a non-zero number in the first cell, then Guard will be used if your Stagger amount multiplied by this number is superior to the absorbtion your Guard should do with your current Vengeance value. The default value is 2, meaning your Guard will be used if its absorbtion is superior to twice your Stagger (the value of 2 comes from the fact that Guard costs twice more Chi than PB). Of course Guard will not be used if its cooldown is not over. You can also tell the simulator to use it on cd no matter what your Stagger is like or with a X delay in seconds between two uses, X being the number you enter in the cell (please don't put a number inferior to 30, Guard's cooldown). The Shuffle cells are like those for PB, the green one induces a use of Guard as soon as the duration of Shuffle is superior to the cell, while the red one prevents the use of Guard if the duration of Shuffle is inferior to the value you enter.

Not Yet Implemented

The "glyphed guard" cell, and the "AOE", "Tank switch", "T30 healing talents" and "Special damage" sections are not yet implemented. I'm working on them. You can put whatever you want in those cells, it won't have any effect. Note that there is enough space in the "Special damage" section to simulate a whole fight against the Sha of Fear's Dread Thrash...

Results

You just have to press OK on the first sheet to launch the series of simulations. Here is an example of results. They are the results of 1000 simulations for each stat, the other settings being the same as the defaults settings of the downloadable version of the simulator i link later i this message.

First one with a boss swing timer of 1.5, 300k unmitigated damage per hit (but this was a little early test, Power Strikes had not been implemented yet) :



Second one with a boss swing timer of 1.5, 400k unmitigated damage per hit (with Power Strikes) :



I'm glad to seed that the stat weights for damage avoided per second are really, really similar to the spreadsheet results. Except for haste which is a little low. And mastery, which is much lower. I acually began this simulator project to try and see what a simulator could do with mastery, as a simulator is able to purify when it's best, especially right after your Stagger becomes high. But it turns out that the spreadsheet was smarter than i thought. Besides, the spreadsheet uses an optimal Shuffle uptime for damage reduction, while the simulator settings can be used to increase the Shuffle uptime to get closer to 100%. And the more you Shuffle, the less Chi you have for Purifying Brew, making them more rare, thus decreasing the amount of Stagger that is purified, together with the stat weight of mastery.

Spikiness

I programmed this simulator also to analyze how spiky the damage taken is. But i yet have to find a good formula to quantify it. For now :

- if you enter 1 in the "Spike method 1" cell in the second sheet, Spikiness will be calculated thus :

Each time the boss hits you, the value of Spikiness is increased by
(((d + A*s) / hp)^2) / t
where d is the damage of the hit, s is the damage of one Stagger tick, A is the "Spike mod" cell, hp is your health pool, and t is the time since the boss last hit you (with an undodged and unparried hit).

- if you enter 0 in the "Spike method 1" cell in the second sheet, Spikiness will be calculated thus :

Each time you take damage (whether it be a stagger tick or a boss hit), the value of Spikiness is increased by
((d(i) + d(i-1)) / hp) / (t(i) - t(i-1))
where d(i) is the damage of index i, and t(i) is the time at which you took that damage.

- Then the final spikiness displayed in the results is (1 / spikiness) / fight_duration

I really need to find a satisfactory formula for spikiness, that represents in the best way possible how spiky damage is. The current formula is not too bad, but still, if you have any idea about how you would calculate spikiness, please tell me, any suggestion is wecome.

The problem is that the method 1 isn't at all supporting the consensus that mastery should be used to reduce spike damage. This stat has a pretty poor weight with this formula according to the results (although note that these weights, unlike those for "damage avoided per second", should not be compared in quantitative ways, having a stat weight ten times better does not mean that the stat is ten times better for spikiness, the formula is profoundly non-linear). The method 1 favors streaks of dodged/parried hits (making avoidance stats good in these results), but i expected more effect on reduction of individual hits thanks to mastery.

I've done a couple of tests with method 0 (but they weren't conducted on series of 1000 simulations), and the results were something like agi=stam > haste > mastery > the rest.


Simulator link

http://www.filedropper.com/brewmastersimulatorcopy

Hi Venyasure, nice work with your calculator. It would be even more usefull if there was a way to declare some periodic unavoidable/unstaggerable source of damage such as elegon's breath in the boss behavior. I think it could change the weight of stats in spikyness.

Hi !

I've been doing some stuff about 5.2 recently.

2P T15 bonus

The bonus makes crit give some additionnal Stagger. And i'm interested in knowing how much Stagger one point of crit gives, on average. Here are the four steps to calculating the average Stagger gained by Elusive Brew, which is simply 0.12 multiplied by the uptime of EB. The calculations are made with a 2H weapon (note that actually weapon speed "ws" does not affect the uptime of EB), knowing 1H weapons generate about 1% less stacks.



We now have the average Stagger given by Elusive Brew depending on agility, haste and crit (remember weapon speed does not matter). We just have to calculate the Stagger given by mastery (well, that's an easy one !) which is buffed by 25% in 5.2, and calculate derivatives. As you will see, the exact values depend on your current agi/crit/haste levels. I calculated results with 6k haste, 6k crit and 18k agi :



As you can see, the results are as follow : Agi 14.7 ; Crit 29.3 ; Haste 12.2 ; Mastery 104.2
So this 2p bonus makes crit a bit less than 30% as effective as Mastery for Stagger. On a side note, these results also mean that agi is about 50% as effective as Crit to increase EB uptime, and Haste is just under that.

4P T15 bonus

So, this bonus looks like it gives 6 free PB per minute. But it actually procs on Stagger ticks, and the uptime of Stagger is not 100%. For a precise analysis of this set bonus, we need to calculate the average uptime of Stagger. To do this, we need to know the average time it takes for the boss to hit you after you purify your Stagger.

S = boss swing timer
A = avoidance
Pc = averabe number of chi-consuming Purifying Brew per second
Pp = averabe number of free Purifying Brew per second
T = average time between two Purifying Brew ( T = 1/(Pc + Pp) )
U = Stagger uptime

I'll consider that we purify our Stagger half a melee swing after the boss hits. This is both the average delay observed if one randomly purifies Stagger independently of the time since the last hit, and a reasonable delay for the interface to tell you that your Stagger has been updated, for the player to analyse it and for him to press PB. So, the next boss attempt to hit you will happen after half a swing timer.

The average time between two boss hits is S * 1 / (1 - A). You can calculate this by knowing that probability tells us that this is the result, or by calculating sum( S*(1-A)*n*A^(n-1) , n=0..infinity ). And by substracting half a swing timer, you get : S*(A+1)/(2*(A-1))

And the uptime is U = ( T - S*(A+1)/(2*(A-1)) ) / T. For example, if you purify every 10 seconds, with 40% avoidance and a boss swing timer of 1.5 seconds, the uptime is 82.5%.

We also have the equations : T = 1/(Pc + Pp) = 1/(Pc + U/10) By solving this we get :
T = ( 10 + S*(A+1)/(2*(A-1)) ) / ( 1 + 10*Pc )
We now have an expression of the average time between two Purifying Brews depending on Pc (the Chi per second you have left once you have maintained a certain Shuffle uptime and Guard use), S and A (average avoidance). We can then use this number to know the percentage of Stagger you'll purify if you have the 4p t15 bonus.

So, we'll purify quite a lot with this 4p set bonus !

Mastery looks appealing compared to stats like Armor because it doesn't have diminishing returns. But still, there are hidden diminishing retuns, in the way Stagger is purified ; and these diminishing returns are actually affecting Chi generating abilities. The more you purify, the less each purification is effective. This has been known since MoP beta, but i'd like to illustrate it. If you purify on average every 10 seconds, you purify half the staggered damage :


(yeah, i know, Paint...)
While if you purify every 5 seconds, you purify 75% of the staggered damage :


But in between you stagger half the damage you had staggered when you purified every 10 sec. And you use twice more resources to purify every 5 seconds. So the efficiency of each PB is (1/2) for PB every 10 seconds, and (3/4)/2 = (3/8) < (1/2) for PB every 5 seconds.

Note that this is an average calculation. If you purify 6 times per minute, it does not mean that you purify every 10 sec ; you might use PB 5 sec after the last PB, and then not use PB for 15 sec. But we need to make calculations with averages, otherwise we wouldn't make any calculation. And from what i've tested, they work quite well.

My main point is that if you purify twice more often, Stagger won't be twice more efficient. This means that once you get to a point where you purify abundantly, you won't want to purify further ; i won't be profitable. Hence the "diminishing returns" on Chi generating abilities, namely haste, and to a lesser extent, hit and expertise. It has already been suggested here and on other forums ; once you get the 4p t15 bonus, haste will loose some value.

But still, this set bonus will make Mastery a good stat, right ?

First of all, what i'm saying here is about how Mastery reduces overall damage taken. It's not about its effective health benefit. And as far as overall damage reduction is concerned, Mastery won't become a good stat. As i said, even if you purify twice more often with the set bonus, you won't purify twice more damage. Here is a comparison i once made of Armor and Mastery taken separately from all other sources of damage reductions :


In this calculation, 70% of staggered damage is purified (and you won't purify much more than this with the set bonus). And Armor still has a stat weight of 66 versus 56 for Mastery at 17k5 armor and 4k5 mastery. But well, comparing only these two stats won't help us get a more general picture. That's what bigger spreadsheets are for.

5.2 Spreadsheet

http://www.filedropper.com/brewmaste...sheet52ptrcopy

Bug fixes :

- correction of a bug happening when the spreadsheet was used in a tank switch situation. The 5.1 spreadsheet used to give high values for Chi generating abilities and calculate a rather low optimal Shuffle uptime, using most of the Chi to purify instead of Shuffling. I could suspect it was buggy given that it's quite surprising, but i never searched for that bug. For this new spreadsheet, i found it, and the spreadsheet gives a result that corresponds much more to reality : Shuffle uptime in a tank switch fight is optimal at 100%, and Chi generating stats aren't overvalued as before ; crit and Elusive Brew are winners (assuming you have enough haste to guarantee your Shuffle uptime and a reasonable purification).
- the uptime of Guard giving a 30% healing bonus was too short given the damage taken

Patch changes :

- Mastery is buffed by 25%
- The Ox Statue triggers a shield after 1600% of AP is dealt as damage ; it was already the case in the previous spreadsheet, see my last message above
- T30 healing talents are Chi free and their healing is doubled. The recent PTR patch notes make it hard to guess what the healing of these talents will really be like when 5.2 goes live. Anyway i'll make tests on live realms for the spreadsheet to mirror the real healing, but for now, the healing of these talents is simply twice their 5.1 healing. To select one of these talents, put a number between 0 and 1 in the "Frequency" cell just like before. Only, the cooldown of these spells has increased. Note that you can also enter 1 in the "Frequency" cell and make the cooldown vary, say between 15 and 20 for Chi Wave, if you're more confortable with asking the spreadsheet to use Chi Wave once every 19 seconds rather than 0.8 times every 15 seconds. By default, Chi Wave is selected, and you use it 0.8 times every 15 seconds (which is once every 18.75 seconds).

New features :

- options for T15 set bonuses have been included
- a new cell on the first sheet enables you to force the spreadsheet to keep a 100% Shuffle uptime rather than calculating the optimal Shuffle uptime. If you put 1 in this cell, the uptime will be 100% (and if you put say 0.8, it will be 80%). If you enter 0, the spreadsheet will calculate the optimal uptime.
- item upgrades and 5.2 weapons are not yet included in the "Fill" button. So if you're using weapons that are not ilvl 463, 470, 476, 483, 489, 496, 502 or 509, you'll have to manually enter their weapon dps value in the appropriate cells.

- This one is not really a new feature since it changes nothing to the calculation and results, but i've completely reworked many of the functions i use in my macros to make them much more clear and simple and reduce their number. Just know that the spreadsheet is clearly improved from a programming point of view. This shouldn't have an impact on the results (but bugs are still possible though), and i did check that, before i fixed the bugs i mention above, the results of the 5.1 spreadsheet and the 5.2 one remain the same after these big changes.

Some results

- When you ask the spreadsheet to maintain 100% Shuffle uptime, the stat weights show the thirst for more Chi to purify more : Haste has a very high value, followed closely by hit/exp. While with an optimal Shuffle uptime which is a bit more than 80% (optimal for overall damage reduction, not necessarily for tank survival), crit and haste are more balanced.

- As i said already, tank switches favor Elusive Brew. So crit is high, but haste isn't too bad because it also contributes to EB ; and also to more PB, but in a tank switch fight, you can already purify a lot now that Chi Wave will be free and since you have a lot of spare Chi thanks to Shuffle stacking, and as i explained, increasing an already abundant number of PB is not required.

- The use of T30 healing talents has huge consequences on the stat weights for Agility and the crit/haste ratio, since the healing is quite big, and it can crit, but it's not affected by haste.

- The 4p t15 bonus has the expected results. A decrease in the value of haste, an optimal Shuffle uptime of 100% and a decent purification. With this bonus in a tank switch fight, haste becomes quite poor. And even if you purify more than 80% of your Stagger, Mastery doesn not become a great stat for overall damage reduction (assuming you do include Chi Wave and Statue which profit a lot from the top stats, agi/crit/hit/exp).

I'm planning on doing this. The appropriate cells are already in the second sheet of the simulator. But i haven't implemented them in the simulation yet. I will, eventually.
But first, i must understand why the simulator shows a value for Haste that is lower than what one would expect.

Yes, and in the spreadsheet there is also the difference between crit chance of damaging spells and healing spells, since you have a crit supression if you cast a spell against a target with a higher level.
But Chi Wave has an impressive scaling on Attack Power if you take the four healing bounces into account (although by default in the spreadsheet it does quite a lot of overhealing, since the "Healing efficiency" cell is set to 2.5 instead of 4), assuming it will indeed be twice higher than in 5.1. Hence the huge influence on the stat weight of Agility.

But still it is wise to remember that Agility has an absolute value (Attack Power) and a relative one (melee crit chance, and dodge). At high levels of Vengeance, the AP gained from Agi gems will be less significant regarding the already large AP pool. But its relative part will still give you the same amount of dodge/EB ; and the crit will actually benefit from a high Vengeance, since it enhances the frequency of Statue shields.
On the other hand, when you don't have a lot of Vengeance (typically in dungeons, or against raid bosses that don't really hit hard), the AP from agi will be very effective.