I believe the things we need to consider now is the changes caused by Ascension, and how useful the regeneration is compared to the "raid cooldown" of Chi Brew. Furthermore if the haste cap is worth going for. I've seen a lot of numbers to indicate that we want to go for the new haste cap, and if so, what's strongest of meta gems, as we're passing down on some of the crit chance.

And to just clear it up, Envelope heal for about the same as before, it was simply adjusted to not get buffed due to serpent stance.

I've posted about these over the last few pages, but to sum it up:

-Ascension is inferior to PS and CB for regen. PS is 3000 mp5, CB on cooldown is 2666 mp5. 45k mana + 15% more from tea doesn't even come close to that. You spec Ascension for the higher chi cap; the mana pool bonus is just a nice side effect.
-Going from one haste breakpoint to the next is a net ~5% loss in hps on spells that don't scale with haste for a net ~5-6% gain in ReM and spells that do scale with haste, so it's worth going for as long as ReM+haste spells are doing equal or greater healing than non-haste spells. This is usually the case, therefore go for the 3148 breakpoint.
-Since +2% mana is worthless compared to +500some spirit, Revitalizing is the only game in town for meta gems. You could have 0% crit chance and it would still be better than Ember.

My conclusion mainly is the same from the reading I've done. The Spirit meta do seem still hold better, also the part about another ReM tick seem to show up in every calculation. However I do sit with questions regarding your understanding of power strike granting 3000mp5 as it's a 20 second cd for 1 chi, and in very many situations you wont be using neither, specially if you take into account that you might not be jabbing for biggest aoe heals with thunder focus. However chi brew, while probably correct regarding mp5, it's still a strong cooldown for the simple reason it's used as a small raid cd, and works very well with thunder focus.

It seems to be the question between Ascension and Chi brew that still stands un-answered. If indeed mana is not an issue, Chi brew is still the best choice. However it's needed to consider hpm before ignoring ascension.

More detail on T45 mp5 calculations:

The mp5 value of one free chi is equal to the pre-tea mana cost per chi generated of your primary generator (9k for jab, 16.5k for SCK, 6,222 for soothing in 5.1) plus the average mana tea return of that chi (1% of your mana pool multiplied by 1 + your crit chance.)

My 3000 mp5 for PS is based on 0% crit (since when I first number crunched it the mana tea crit bonus wasn't in yet) and Jab as the primary generator- 3000 mana per tea charge + 9000 mana per jab = 12000 mana / 20 seconds * 5. Note that the power strikes buff refreshes 20 seconds after application, not 20 seconds after consumption, so there's no chi loss for sitting on it for a few globals.

I'll throw some more code at the calculator within the next weekend or two so you can see the mp5 values of the three talents against each other based on crit chance, selected chi generator, fight length, tea usage, etc.

Enveloping nerf was primarily to offset the throughput gain to monk single-target from the haste and chi generation buffs to soothing. At 3145 haste you can almost keep enveloping up 100% of the time now just by channeling soothing mist, which you can basically do forever due to the mana cost reduction.

Thanks Spleener, I guess that makes some sense for adjusting Enveloping Mist.

My statistics/math may be off, so please correct me if I do make a mistake.

The probability of getting at least 3 Chi for Enveloping Mists is a binomial probability distribution problem. I looked up the formula and it is
P(X=x) = (nCx) * (p^x) * (1-p)^(n-x) for x=0,1,2,..n

NOTE: Assume you are only generating Chi with Soothing Mist.

Using 35% as our probability and number of trials is 8 (for Soothing Mist we get 1 tick per second for 8 seconds). Below is the result (I insured they sum up to 1, so hopefully it's correct):
x=0 --> 0.031864481
x=1 --> 0.137262381
x=2 --> 0.258686795
x=3 --> 0.278585779
x=4 --> 0.187509659
x=5 --> 0.080773392
x=6 --> 0.021746682
x=7 --> 0.003345643
x=8 --> 0.000225188

For those curious, you can just use Excel to get the numbers using "=BINOMDIST(x,number of trials,probability of success,FALSE)"

So if we sum up the values for x>=3 we get 0.572186343. In other words, we have at least 57% chance of generating at least 3 Chi for the entire duration of Soothing Mist. If we assume that Enveloping Mist is already on target there is 42.78% chance of it falling off because you didn't generate enough Chi to cast Enveloping Mist. There's also downtime if you only generate the 3rd Chi at the last ticks. I'm not sure how to properly project these values into the uptime of Enveloping Mist. Anyone know how to ballpark the calculations? If we factor all these in and include other methods of Chi generation, can we really say close to 100% uptime (if we wanted) for Enveloping Mist?

Again, for PVP no one is going to let you channel freely so it's still a pretty solid PVP nerf.

As you pointed out Ascension does give you the extra Chi but with the changes to soothing mist/haste you appear to always be bathing in Chi now and having that extra Chi is something that needs to be factored in.

As for meta, the Burning Primal (Int/Crit) gem is definitely the way to go due to regen being ridiculously good for Monks right now.

You need to take into consideration that even at tank healing, you'll still want to keep ReM up, and it's safe to say we're quite likely to manage this part very well, if not at 100%, close enough to manage the tankhealing, which was probably the idea to boost us for 10m.

However I would like to just reply quickly about pvp, while it's not the correct place to be discussing pvp, you need to take into consideration that they increased healing with sphere, and from testing, monk is stronger than before in pvp now. Without "bragging" or somehow else speaking numbers, they're slightly needed to prove point. We're talking 20million heals in eye bg without dying or running oom.

You get 50% of your spirit from items, flasks, etc. (ie not counting the 188 spi you have naked) as hit/exp. Hit and exp soft cap is 2550 and exp hard cap is 5100, so that makes 5288 spirit to never miss from behind and 10388 to never miss from the front. So you'll be soft capped literally without even trying and hard capped fairly quickly in raid gear.

Fisting stat priority is the same as normal healing stat priority- spi until you're comfortable > int > haste to the most convenient BP (most likely 3145) > crit > haste > mas.

All of your instant attacks scale exclusively off of weapon DPS, so when eyeballing weapons just consider it to have an additional (DPS * 7) spell power that only applies to auto-attack/jab/TP/BoK.

As far as 1H/OH vs. 2H goes, going from a 1H to a 2H of equal ilvl (ie Kri'tak to Jin'ya) you lose 10% auto-attack DPS for a 15-20% gain in Jab/TP/BoK damage. This is a net gain to eminence hps in most cases.

You're forgetting that soothing's tick frequency (and by extension chi generation rate) scales with haste. At 3145 haste you get an average of 0.41 chi per second, or 7.3 seconds on average to get 3 chi. So I was a little off in saying you could get 100% uptime just from soothing at that particular haste level.

The base spell has been increased, there has been no buff to the mastery.