Here’s a new spreadsheet, that might change a couple of things :

http://www.filedropper.com/windwalkergearcopy_4

Bug fixes :

- Expel Harm can no longer proc enchants when it misses
- Tiger Palm mastery procs can no longer contribute to Tigereye Brew stacks (but that’s hardly a bug fix, I’ve just bugged the spreadsheet so that it corresponds to the bugged Monk on live realms)
- Elemental Force damage is now increased by the Tiger Stance 20% damage bonus

Hotfixes :

- Many Chi abilities now refund Chi when they are missed/dodged
- Windsong and Elemental Force enchants now use the Real PPM proc system. I assume their internal cooldown has been removed ; I don’t know if it has really been removed, we’ve been given quite a lot of information about these changes, but nothing concerning internal cooldown. The “time since last chance to proc” effect simply makes me think they removed the icd, but I might be wrong. I’ll add it back if needed.

New features :

-I’ve added Neara’s modification, so the spreadsheet might work for Open Office users, but I’m not sure about it, I don’t know Open Office well enough.
- There is now an option for the 3% crit effect on the meta gem.
- There is now an option for the 1/2/3 stacks of the weakened armor raid debuff
- There is now an option for the 4% physical damage raid debuff
- The “FoF use” cell is now automatically adjusted to its maximum value if it was superior to it in an aoe situation ; don’t forget to increase it if you get back to a single target fight afterwards !
- New cells concerning Spinning Fire Blossom. If you put a value like 0.7 in the “SFB / BoK use” cell, it means you’re doing 7 pairs of Fire Blossom (so that’s 14 FBs) for 3 BoKs. Value of 0 means you spend all your non-RSK, non-TP and non-FoF Chi on BoK, and a value of 1 means you use it on FB and only use BoK when you have a mastery proc.

New enchant procs

When you compare the former and current proc systems for Windsong and Elemental Force, you notice that the proc chance, for a Windwalker, has been reduced. But there are much more proc chanceS, since it procs on BoK DoTs (which are quite frequent). It seems that it makes Elemental Force better than Windsong for lower gear levels (even high ones actually, possibly even T14 heroics ; just try your stats on the spreadsheet). I’m not entirely sure about the mathematical reasons behind this Windsong/ElemF switch, my guess is that the higher number of proc occasions is impacting the flaw of Windsong : it has a duration, unlike ElemF, and is therefore sensitive to refreshing issues. Maybe the reason is a bug, yet I’ve checked everything quite a few times. But what’s certain is that ElemF was highly boosted now that I’ve modified its damage via the Tiger Stance.

Yet there's one thing not taken into account by the spreadsheet : when you've got a Windsong Proc, you can use one of your cooldowns like Tigereye Brew to enhance the benefit of the proc. The spreadsheet doesn't do an "intelligent" use of cooldowns. In the spreadsheet, Tigereye Brew is an overall increase of 20% modified by its uptime, and Energizing Brew is a gain of 60 Energy per minute (1 per second). Similary, say if Windsong has a 33% uptime on its three buffs, then it's an overall increase of 500 crit, haste and mastery. But i don't think this is enough to make Windsong cope with ElemF at the gear level available after two weeks of raiding, especially because of the high Windsong uptime, which makes the "intelligent" use of windsong that one can do with their Monk very similar to the "overall" benefit calculated in the spreadsheet.

But Windsong tends to become better for really high gear levels. That’s because the higher your gear, the higher your dps, and the higher your stat weights. The 1500 bonus to one of your stat when you have a Windsong proc is a greater dps increase when you have already a high dps, whereas ElemF is a direct damage bonus that doesn’t scale with your gear.

This is also true for AOE : you’re doing much more dps in an AOE fight, so all of your stat weights increase (except Mastery of course). This makes Windsong better. The reason why it doesn’t become way better is because its Mastery procs are useless for AOE, so you practically lose one third of this enchant’s power.

What’s even more surprising is that for low gear levels, ElemF seems to be better than Dancing Steel. Only when you have acquired many epic items in T14 raids will Dancing Steel be ahead. It will then probably remain better (far better) for the remaining of MoP. And it can actually be better earlier than good T14 gears if you consider the following point :

Spinning Fire Blossom

That’s another surprising one.

Let’s compare the average damage output of two Fire Blossoms versus one BoK :

FB :
2 * (769 + 0.665*AP) * (1 + spell_crit_chance) * (1 – miss_chance)
which gives :
(1538 + 1.33*AP) * (1 + spell_crit_chance) * (1 – miss_chance)

BoK :
(weapon_dps + AP/14) * 7.12 * 1.2 * (1 - target_armor) * (1 + melee_crit_chance)
which gives :
(6.21 * weapon_dps + 0.44*AP) * (1 - target_armor) * (1 + melee_crit_chance)

With spell_crit_chance < melee_crit_chance as Agi doesn’t increase the crit chance of spells.
So we can list the advantages of both (they’re all included in the spreadsheet) :

FB :
- Greater AP scaling
- No armor reduction
- Better for Windsong and Dancing Steel since it doesn’t apply a DoT causing refreshing issues (and it’s really better for Dancing Steel given its AP scaling)

BoK :
- Greater weapon dps scaling
- Refunds Chi when missed
- Greater crit chance

On one hand, when you combine the AP scaling advantage of FB and its crit chance not increased by Agi, it seems that Agi is still a greater increase for FB than for BoK. On the other hand, BoK scales with weapon dps. And it turns out that depending on your Agi and weapon, two Fire Blossoms can out damage one Blackout Kick, and that happens more often than you could think. It is the case with the default stat values on the spreadsheet I’ve uploaded. But it’s very unlikely that FB will be better if you don’t have the AP raid buff (which you can deactivate by entering 0 in the appropriate cell).

The better your weapon, the more you should use BoK. And the higher agi you have, the better FB will be. Those two tend to increase simultaneously as you’re gaining more gear, so it’s difficult to see at what gear level you’ll have to use either of them. For instance, with the default values of the spreadsheet, if you replace your main hand by a ilvl476 weapon, BoK becomes better. In any case, the difference is tiny, and using FB will either be a very small gain or a very small loss. You can’t notice it, even after hitting a training dummy for a long time ; the RNG in your dps simply covers the damage difference between BoK and FB.

But on average, one of them should come ahead. If you want to know which of the two you should use, enter 1 in the “calculate optimal use” cell, and press OK. If the program writes 1 in the “FB / BoK use” cell, then FB out damages BoK. IF it writes 0, then it’s the contrary. If you don’t enter 1 in the “calculate optimal use” cell, you can choose your own value for the “FB / BoK use” cell. It’s very unlikely that you’ll get a value between 0 and 1 ; mathematically it could be possible, in which case you should balance their use, but that shouldn’t happen, you would need an extremely precise Agi value for it, like 12345.2457 (non-realistic number). Unless you’re extremely unlucky with the values you enter, the “FB / BoK use” cell should be binary, making one of the two clearly superior. But once again, clearly superior doesn’t mean very superior, the difference will remain small.

The "50% bonus damage" cell refers to the fact that FB damage is increased by 50% if it travels 10 yards. Enter 1 in that cell if you use FB in such cases (or say 0.6 if 60% of your FB travel more than 10 yards). Obviously, putting something superior to 0 in that cell is likely to make FB better than BoK. But you shouldn't modify that cell very often, since you almost never use FB at a long range. Unless you're attacking a boss with a very large hitbox ; if the distance between you and the centre of the hitbox is taken into account to determine whether FB travels more than 10 yards, then using it would be a significant DPS increase agains big bosses. But if the edge of the hitbox is taken into account (i need to do some tests to know which case is correct), then you should almost always put 0 in the cell.

The choice between BoK and FB has a lot of influence on the stat weight for Agi. Using FB makes Agi clearly twice better than Haste in most cases, and that’s important for gemming issues. Remember that Agi’s AP is very beneficial to FB. But remember also that Haste is really great for AOE, and you normally shouldn’t use Agi gems instead of Haste gems if you’re heading for a heavy AOE fight.

There are still two things that need discussing. One of them is armor. The calculations in the spreadsheet are made for a target with the armor value of a MoP raid boss, with 3 stacks of Tiger Power. Hitting an inferior target is hitting a target with a lesser armor, making BoK possibly better, since it’s not as penalized by armor as it is on a raid boss. This is important for fights with lvl 92 reinforcements, or for dungeons/challenge modes. I simply don’t know the armor value of all the mobs in Pandaria, I use the raid boss armor in the spreadsheet, whatever the target level might be. I’m planning on conducting some tests against dungeon bosses, and raid reinforcements, maybe the armor value of mobs is very similar (possibly identical) for creatures of an equal level. But for now, just know that the “calculate optimal use” cell is reliable only against raid bosses.

Also note that having 3 stacks of Weakened Armor on the boss will boost BoK but not FB, which can lead the spreadsheet to indicate that BoK is better. The same thing happens if you've got the 4% physical damage raid debuff.

The last important thing is the global cooldown. Even if the spreadsheet tells you that you should use FB with your current gear, it might be impractical to do so if you’re using Energizing Brew or Bloodlust, in which case you might want to replace it by BoK. Similarly, you could desire to spend your Chi but you can’t or don’t want to use BoK (for example, you’re too far from the boss, or you want to spend an odd number of Chi to spend it all before you use Chi Brew). In such cases, you could turn the small loss indicated in the spreadsheet into a small gain in your dps rotation. But that’s not included in the spreadsheet, since it concerns simulations rather that spreadsheets.

I believe that Fire Blossom is only a concern for t14 raids. Later in MoP, i imagine the agi you gain from your gear and your weapon dps will increase in the same fashion, more or less. But the static agi you gain from enchants, gems, food and flasks will remain the same, and BoK will probably win over FB in most cases.

The glyph doesn't remove the 50% additional damage.

The glyph does not remove the 50% damage increase - however, it DOES grant a DPS increase over not having it glyphed between 50 and 75% base. Tested weeks ago, and it is still happening as of yesterday (10/16)



Edit: it seems they changed it - the damage increase is no longer being applied when glyphed as opposed to not glyphed - I tested this today =(

There's so much misinformation and random speculation here, this kind of post really doesn't belong on EJ. This is the kind of thing that would get a warning in the old EJ rogue forums at least. Sorry man, I don't mean to personally attack you or anything, but I'm just so annoyed at the quality dive this once great forum has taken.

To elaborate your post included no facts at all, and only statements of "I think" plus a lot of misinformation. For example:
1) dps difference between BoK and SFB caused by having to spend more globals on SFB will only happen when you're GCD capped, and if that happens you could just weave in a few BoK's.
2) Why on earth would it matter that SFB has travel time?
3) When people earlier in the thread compared SFB and BoK damage they OBVIOUSLY included the 20% damage dot from BoK in the comparison.
4) You complain about FoF chi cost, but that's a pretty random thing to complain about. I won't go into detail but there are several good reasons for a 3 chi cost on one of our abilities. For example helping us avoid becoming GCD capped (which leads to energy capping/wasting chi).
5) You obviously have to follow the priority system even when using FoF, so that means you want to have TP buff at >~6 seconds as well as having RSK on CD right before using FoF since it's more damage/chi and as such is more important to use on cooldown. (given my gear, according to simc, but I assume RSK > FoF will always be true for any tier of gear in terms of damage/chi, correct me if I'm wrong)

(To be honest my own post would also have gotten a warning because of trying to moderate, but I just feel like someone has to speak up at some point to try and preserve some quality over here, so I apologize in advance.)