Mistweaver Healing Compendium - Page 5

♦ arison · 05/11/12, 11:57 AM

I've updated the top post to reflect the current build.

Monk AOE healing is currently looking very unappealing and borderline mindless. Renewing Mists really is really quite passive and the short duration boost from Uplift looks like it will be a fair bit of babysitting, and punishing if missed (which could happen during lulls in fights where Chi generation is limited). The 10 target cap is really quite unworkable for 25 man raiding, but uncapped it clearly is either over-powered.

JSS heals of Soothing Mists are only 50% of the monk's SM heals so it doesn't seem too overpowered, but the stationary nature of them seems quite a liability in many fights (well, except the largely stationary DS tier...).

Enveloping Mists is interesting but the cost is pretty high.

dracjin · 05/14/12, 7:14 AM

At the moment Zen Sphere is incredible broken. The explosion now triggers correctly and heals / damage for an insane amount (spammable).

As a brewmaster i am able to heal the entire group (20-40k heals up to 80k crits aoe, nearly spammable every 2nd gcd), and kill all enemies in light speed (damage is a little bit lower).

All healers asked me / the group, if they nerved the dungeon, no it s the amazing 100k+ hps Zen Sphere.... as a tank.

zeraveth · 05/14/12, 11:34 AM

Originally Posted by dracjin

At the moment Zen Sphere is incredible broken. The explosion now triggers correctly and heals / damage for an insane amount (spammable).

As a brewmaster i am able to heal the entire group (20-40k heals up to 80k crits aoe, nearly spammable every 2nd gcd), and kill all enemies in light speed (damage is a little bit lower).

All healers asked me / the group, if they nerved the dungeon, no it s the amazing 100k+ hps Zen Sphere.... as a tank.

Don't see how this is relevant to mistweaver theorycrafting.

kindath · 05/14/12, 5:46 PM

Originally Posted by zeraveth

Don't see how this is relevant to mistweaver theorycrafting.

I don't see how it isn't, given that zen sphere is available to all specs. Zen sphere spam is currently my goto aoe heal, but I don't expect it to last.

Given that mana tea restores 4% mana for every 4 chi spent, 1 chi generated is worth 1% max mana. (max mana is almost the same as base mana, thus far only being modified by ember shadowspirit diamond and hymn of hope.) Could you then just consider the cost of the spell to be the base cost minus (1% of base mana)*(chance to generate chi), assuming that you spend your chi before you cap?

Tikiman49 · 05/29/12, 3:09 PM

Originally Posted by kindath

I don't see how it isn't, given that zen sphere is available to all specs. Zen sphere spam is currently my goto aoe heal, but I don't expect it to last.

Given that mana tea restores 4% mana for every 4 chi spent, 1 chi generated is worth 1% max mana. (max mana is almost the same as base mana, thus far only being modified by ember shadowspirit diamond and hymn of hope.) Could you then just consider the cost of the spell to be the base cost minus (1% of base mana)*(chance to generate chi), assuming that you spend your chi before you cap?

It's an interesting way to model spell costs, and in the long term works out just fine. I would, however, hazard against performing any actual simulations with such a model, as you have to account for times of heavy mana usage (periods where you don't have enough time to sip tea) or times when you're forced to cap out on Chi (Surging Mist spam, for example), when your actual mana remaining matters. That said, I like the concept.

One thing to note with the relatively recent change to Spinning Crane Kick is that we now have another out-of-combat, unrestricted way to generate Chi. If Expel Harm is off cooldown, I've had great results tapping SCK, then immediately cancelling the buff manually. The Chi is generated on cast, not on completion, and cancelling the SCK "buff" which keeps you spinning in circles does not remove the Chi point. What I haven't tried, and will tonight, is a cast -> cancelaura macro, which would be very useful for emergencies, during movement, etc.

As it is, our Chi generators look like this:

Jab - Instant, requires melee range, no cooldown
Soothing Mist - Chance to proc, has a cast time
Crackling Jade Lightning - Chance to proc, has a cast time
Renewing Mist - Instant, 8sec cooldown
Surging Mist - Has a cast time (unless stacked with the Tiger Palm buff)
Expel Harm - Instant, 15sec cooldown
Spinning Crane Kick - No cooldown, mobile

With that list, we have 4 instant casts: one requires melee, and the other two have cooldowns, leaving a SCK macro as the only truly unrestricted Chi generator for movement phases. Just some food for thought.

Edit: It appears that a double-tap macro to cancel the SCK buff does indeed work as theorized.

Jekerdud · 06/17/12, 7:17 AM

One thing to note, I spent most of the past few hours healing a bunch of dungeon runs. Some with glyphs, and some without (took me forever to get a TJS run). Anyways, it appears that when you are glyphed for Surging Mists, the chi generation is gone, unless it is coupled with Soothing Mists. I went back and watched some of my video from my stream and that's what seemed to be happening.

So, you can have the choice of a Chi generator in which you have to target like any main castable heal from another class. Or, you can glyph, have the smart heal, which only generates Chi when coupled with Soothing Mists.

I personally think it is a fair trade, as if you glyph for it, you'll more than likely be generating Chi through jabs (if "melee healing" is your style), and if you have 5 stacks of Vital, it's a pretty powerful free heal in which you don't need to change targets. With it being a free smart heal at 5 stacks, I can see why Blizzard wouldn't want Chi generation. Coupling it with Soothing still gives it a mana cost, and a reason to generate 1 Chi.

Adornus · 07/11/12, 12:10 PM

Originally Posted by Jekerdud

One thing to note, I spent most of the past few hours healing a bunch of dungeon runs. Some with glyphs, and some without (took me forever to get a TJS run). Anyways, it appears that when you are glyphed for Surging Mists, the chi generation is gone, unless it is coupled with Soothing Mists. I went back and watched some of my video from my stream and that's what seemed to be happening.

So, you can have the choice of a Chi generator in which you have to target like any main castable heal from another class. Or, you can glyph, have the smart heal, which only generates Chi when coupled with Soothing Mists.

I personally think it is a fair trade, as if you glyph for it, you'll more than likely be generating Chi through jabs (if "melee healing" is your style), and if you have 5 stacks of Vital, it's a pretty powerful free heal in which you don't need to change targets. With it being a free smart heal at 5 stacks, I can see why Blizzard wouldn't want Chi generation. Coupling it with Soothing still gives it a mana cost, and a reason to generate 1 Chi.

I personally think that using that glyph is more of a detriment to raiding than not. Being able to target someone with a heal is much more important for single target than having it be a smart heal, IMO. You can still gain 5 stacks of vital, use a free heal, and target it at who you want while meleeing (you dont have to switch targets, you can use a mouseover). Having surging completely ignore chi generation makes the glyph even worse.

I know that post is a bit old, but I can't see a single reason to ever use the surging mists glyph in it's current form.

There are a couple things I think mistweavers need.

1. AoE on demand spell, that can either hit 10 targets with a CD and a smart heal, or spammable and a 2.0 second cast time that is not smart but hits all but has a DR after 6. As of it's current form, uplift + ReM only benefits 10 in the raid and sticks to those ten. If uplift added a smart heal past the ReM 10 it may be better, but you'd have to decrease throughput on uplift then.

2. A throughput CD. Thunder Brew and Revival are not true throughput CDs. I think of DF, AW, Treeform, PI as throughput CDs. Revival is a small heal plus a mass dispell on a ridiculously long CD. If they moved it from 3 minutes to 1 minute it'd be better for Revival.

♦ arison · 07/14/12, 11:20 PM

OP updated with the latest build. Good news, Thunder Focus Tea can be cast while channeling Soothing Mists. Other changes seem mostly to be Chi Torpedo becoming pretty strong, Zen Sphere still being OP (though Chi Burst looks prett decent), and the big AOE game of refreshing Renewing Mists with Uplift no longer being sustainable.

zerocipher · 07/22/12, 3:49 AM

I love the mastery of monks actually. It really helps out of you have a group that pays attention and they're green and you don't have to click to pick em up. Much more useful than a light well. Also if you have three of your own orbs you can get extras VIA the mastery. Saves mana for more intensive phases. I haven't noticed if they spawn near players though. Will research more as I have time.

♦ arison · 07/22/12, 12:55 PM

I spent some time in heroic 10s yesterday (finally) and did some more number crunching and have come to the conclusion that, as-is, Eminence isn't really viable in raids. It works great for shorter fights like five mans, but when in a raid, the mana cost is just insanely high. The only thing Jab has going for it is Chi generation; the mana cost of doing any reasonable rotation, even assuming perfect Mana Tea usage, is ridiculously high. Hopefully these numbers will get tuned back into viability, but even in scaled gear, mana disappears laughably quickly.

This leads to other issues in raids -- lack of solid Chi generation. RM is great and usable on rotation, but assuming perfect use (once every 8 seconds), it just barely isn't enough to pay for one uplift every two casts. If viewed as "chi per second" then Jab is our best at 1.0, Surging Mists is pretty good at around 0.7, Spinning Crane Kick is decent at 0.5, and then we have a big gap for our other abilities at around 0.12-0.24 per second (Soothing Mists, our filler spell, averages 0.24 per second). Lack of a great, inexpensive Chi builder means less Mana Tea which means less mana returned, forcing us to rely more on Spirit regeneration.

I posted a larger dissection in the beta forums, but right now it seems pretty messed up. This isn't even counting the time lost to using Mana Tea (which, glyphed, means 10% of our GCDs are used for mana return, and unglyphed isn't as time efficient as glyphed, so unless a fight has lulls for regen, glyphing seems to be the way to go).

---

I've begun work on a calculator for Mistweavers. My intention is to do something different from a spreadsheet because spreadsheets are pretty obnoxious: they require someone have Excel (or Open Office, which is its own cluster of wtf); they require the use (shudder) Visual Basic for any automation/simulation/complex calculation; there are relatively few people willing/able to work with complicated Excel spreadheets; and the lack of reasonable ways to use version control means you can't easily check it in somewhere like github to share patches and get other contributors.

Instead, I'll be doing this in Javascript and putting it up on github. Obviously it will be usable from a web browser but I also intend to make it usable from the command line via v8 (or probably any other js engine) for those of us who like to do that kind of thing.

Originally I intended to do the spreadsheet and had begun work but Excel is so tedious to work in that I decided to break from tradition. We'll see how it goes; given most users of tools like this generally change a handful of fields then let the sheet recalculate, I think, so this should hopefully make it much easier for a wider audience to use (basically just requiring a web browser). I intend to keep it completely client side, at least for core functionality, rather than one of those hosted calculators that pop up for classes from time to time that are hidden inside a server where all the interesting stuff happens.

Edit: soothing mist chi generation estimation fix

♦ arison · 07/27/12, 12:54 PM

The calculator I mentioned above is ready for some basic testing.

Mistweaver Calculator

Numbers match my 483 PVP geared character. I'll get it up on github soon. Feedback, especially issues with calculations or formulas, would be greatly appreciated. There is a long list of growing TODOs at the bottom but feel free to PM me with any other suggestions or issues. My hope is to do it this way instead of an excel spreadsheet, so hopefully it will provide similar functionality. Feedback with such use cases in mind would be especially great.

♦ arison · 07/29/12, 4:06 AM

I've been updating the calculator quite a bit and have changed how it handles Chi. I've added calculations for a 'faux hpm' to basically measure the cost of a spell assuming Jab is used to fill all of the Chi for it. The healing from Jab is added to the spell's healing, and the cost of the spell in Chi is converted to Mana (9k per chi).

The result is very interesting. Our Chi spells are very efficient in hpm. Jab, in this context, is pretty cheap. This narrows the problem with Chi, Jab, and Mana down to the relative inefficiency of Blackout Kick and Tiger Palm. For a pure DPS rotation, Jab is just too expensive, but as a way to build Chi, it's very efficient. Hopefully this will be rectified so that melee DPSing is vaguely efficient (otherwise "melee healer" basically means being in melee range to generate Chi and not really doing a dps rotation very often).

♦ arison · 07/31/12, 2:01 PM

Sadly, I can't take part in the 25 man testing today (damn day job!) but I would very, very much appreciate any logs people have. I want to get an initial guess at the efficacy of our Mastery. Also any good 10s logs would be great as well, but 25s especially are interesting.

I plan on updating the OP soon with that info and with info from the calculator (which is getting updated very frequently -- thanks to everyone for their suggestions and bug reports).

Daisil · 08/01/12, 12:45 AM

I can't exactly provide logs for obvious top secret taking-over-the-world reasons, but it was only averaging 8-9% of my total healing for the bosses today (my ISP had an awesome fiber cut today meaning I couldn't attend the first 3). Seems like mastery is more lackluster now than I thought, but I don't remember them nerfing it? I'll have to monitor values tomorrow and let you know what the deal is with that. Overall not as high as I figured it would be, but still more reliable (IMHO) than crit is.

♦ arison · 08/01/12, 1:08 AM

Yeah, the logs I've seen all show it being low. Whether that is because it isn't tied into enough spells yet or whether it just sucks is unclear.

Right now, stat priorities seem to be something like

Spirit and Int > Haste (to 1350 to get extra ticks on RM and EM) > Crit > Mastery = Haste

That is just hand waving though. Spirit until you feel comfortable with mana, then Int, then Haste to 1350. Actually, Haste to 1350 is probably even more important than Int, but I suspect it won't be difficult to get there. From there, it's a wasteland. Haste doesn't affect many of our abilities because of our 1.0s GCD, and Mastery currently looks quite sketchy. Crit isn't great but it isn't horrifying.

Haste really needs to affect SCK, too; why SCK isn't a channeled spell, I have no idea but as-is, you spin while you have the buff.