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All of the latest Mists of Pandaria newsInsights and observations on early Monk DPS mechanics
by Josh Myers 
Oct 26th 2011 at 1:00PM
What do we know about monks?
We know that monks will be agility-based melee DPSers (and tank and healer, but I'm focusing on DPS today). We know that they'll be able to use staves, polearms, fist weapons, and one-handed maces, axes, and swords, which means they'll need to be balanced with both two-handed weapons and dual wielding in mind (that is, unless Blizzard restricts dual wielding to DPS and two-handers to tanking, which is a possibility).
We know the resource system has two parts: first, you have chi. Like rogue's energy, chi starts at 100 and is consumed by using abilities. From Joe Perez's first impressions, it looks like chi replenishes over time, and it also replenishes more quickly by completing combos. The other resource is orbs called light and dark force. These fill up by using abilities that cost chi and are then consumed to use other abilities. The light and dark force abilities don't seem to cost chi.
The last thing we know for sure is that in current plans, monks do not have an auto-attack. Explained in the game as "needing to focus their energy between strikes," this is the main thing that separates monks from all other melee classes. As a result, the ramifications of what this means is what I'm going to focus on first.
Why does not auto-attacking matter?
First things first: Monk special abilities that consume dark and light force are going to hurt. They're going to hurt lots. Since we've only seen them up to level 10 so far, we don't have a scope on how strong they're going to be yet, but Dan O'Halloran has a few comments on the matter. Why will they hurt so much? Well, Blizzard does a lot of things to balance damage-per-second between casters and melee. The main source of this is melee's use of auto-attack vs. caster's high-damage cast times.
As an extreme example, compare an enhancement shaman to an arcane mage. The enhancement shaman has a few high-damage abilities on long cooldowns, such as Lava Lash and Stormstrike. In between their cooldowns, they have a few lower-damage specials -- but more importantly, they have auto-attack. Auto-attack for melee is a constant source of background damage in between specials. It's also generally tied into procs that result in more damage such as Windfury Weapon, rogue poisons, death knights' Killing Machine, or retribution's The Art of War.
Individual melee attacks rarely ever hit as high as a caster's individual spellcast. An arcane mage has Arcane Blast and Arcane Missiles, with no other small damage going on in the background. While melee classes have a bunch of smaller hits going on constantly that add up, individual spellcasts by the arcane mage need to somewhat equal to the amount of damage that's adding up for melee in the same span of time.
Since the only melee cast-time spell in the game is definitely not a fan favorite, Blizzard will probably forgo the route of putting cast times on melee spells for monks. This means that damage will need to be throttled in a different way, so that monks can't pour out all their highest damaging abilities up front. This is where combos will come in. Much like arcane mages who needs to stack Arcane Blast's debuff four times to hit their hardest, monks will need to build up light and dark force to unleash their most devastating attacks. You can bet, though, that once built up, they're going to hit pretty darn hard.
What about weapons?
The other thing that stands out to me about monks at the moment is their use of weapons. First off, I wonder if they'll have off-hand attacks to use while dual wielding and if those attacks will suffer from the 50% off-hand damage penalty. With no auto-attacks, I don't really see the point.
Second, though, I wonder if they'll even use weapon attacks at all. This is where I'm really putting on the tin foil hat, but I'll say it: I think we very well might see the first melee class in the game for which weapons are just a cosmetic choice/stat stick.
My evidence is in the playable demo at BlizzCon. If we look at the abilities presented to us, none of them are the typical percent weapon damage abilities we're used to on melee. Instead, both sites that reported monk abilities reported them as doing static amounts of damage at each level. MMO-Champion says Jab does 5 damage (presumably at first level), while Wowhead News' reports 11. This trend of using static numbers stays consistent through the rest of the monk's abilities, such as Tiger Palm and Blackout Kick.
The second option is that these abilities are the Primal Strike of the monk class -- that is, low-level abilities designed to be replaced by other moves once you get your specialization bonuses. They're designed to be useful to the monk leveling through the Wandering Island but will quickly fall out of common use as you progress through your specialization.
The third (and this is what I'm most hoping for) reason is that Blizzard is designing these abilities purely off an attack power coefficient, much in the same way that spells are designed with only a spellpower coefficient. Since you're not auto-attacking, you won't actually need your weapons to do damage. As a result, weapons could become pure stat sticks, much in the same way staves and other spellpower weapons work now. This is definitely the most farfetched theory but also the route I'm truly wishing Blizzard will go. It's also held up in a small way by the idea that Blizzard wants to normalize melee classes so that they all use similar weapon speeds in Mists of Pandaria, which has been said in a few forum posts.
This all might change!
No matter which route Blizzard chooses go, the monk is looking to be a truly fresh and exciting class in Mists of Pandaria. Their gameplay is different than any melee we've ever seen before, and I can't think of any reason not to be excited about that.
It's important to note that we're not even in the friends and family alpha yet and that everything can change. Auto-attack can make a comeback, light and dark force could be scrapped entirely, and everything I wrote in the post could be proven false -- and that's all fine. All I can say is that I'm terribly excited and eagerly anticipating any more news about the monk class, even if everything in this speculative post turns out to be wrong.
The news is out -- we'll be playing Mists of Pandaria! Find out what's in store with an all-new talent system, peek over our shoulder at our Pandaren hands-on, and get ready to battle your companion pets against others. It's all here right at WoW Insider!Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, BlizzCon, Monk, Mists of Pandaria
Reader Comments (Page 3 of 4)
Teaspoon Oct 26th 2011 7:12PM
People talk about spell hit cap like it's hard to reach, but...
For a melee player to land all their yellow hits on a boss they need 781 expertise rating plus 961 hit. That's 1742 total rating. What's the caster hit cap? 1742! Same total rating spent on not failing at hitting, but the system is kinder to melee because it's easier to stack medium amounts of two stats than a huge amount of one, but the same amount of rating points must be spent either way. The other bit that's less painful for melee is that they only need 615 to hit an 87 so it's another 1127 rating to get boss-capped and the extra rating is completely wasted outside of boss fights. For a melee player it's 1442 (721 hit and 721 exp) to cap on 87s so there's only 300 extra rating to swap in for boss fights.
It might be a good idea if Blizzard were to tweak things to make spell penetration the caster equivalent to expertise, or something like that. It just hurts feels better to have two medium caps that each have only small increases for bosses instead of one medium cap that goes huge for bosses.
I think I should make a little note here about how hunters follow melee hit cap rules but don't need expertise and thus get boss-capped for only 961 rating. So... nerf hunters ,etc, etc.
Task Oct 26th 2011 1:32PM
The orb resource reminds of the one used by the Druid and assassin classes in D2 LoD. I honestly hope they do keep it in as it'll be fun new mechanic to learn.
If they don't keep it though, I'll be a sad Pandaren face...
Phantom Oct 26th 2011 1:33PM
Basically, auto attacks are like a perma-DoT while in melee range. I'm sure Monks will have DoT abilities to keep their damage throttled and control burst, but that doesn't need to come from an auto-attack.
Diop Oct 26th 2011 1:43PM
Personally I got the feeling that jab was the monk's method for stopping incredible burst damage, a light damaging attack that you have to constantly weave into your rotation to do anything else, seems a pretty decent balancer. For example of the 3 attacks we know, the third one requires 2 dark points, when you can only have a max of 4 that means at best you're going to get 2 of that finisher in before you need to start jabbing again (unless you kill someone)
Nyold Oct 26th 2011 1:56PM
On your section on auto-attack, you didn't address one point:
What's keeping Blizzard from scraping auto-attack completely for all classes and have, say, rogue special attacks and death knight strikes hit super-hard? I still don't get why auto-attack is NECESSARY for melee. If it's to make sure procs proc, then they can make it a chance proc off special attacks, much like how nature grace and clearcasting is.
Ilmyrn Oct 26th 2011 3:25PM
For a non-gameplay reason, it's so classes that favor slow weapons (whether for flavor or gameplay reasons) like DKs, Arms Warriors, or Ret Paladins are more visually interesting in combat.
If you're just standing around doing nothing while you wait for your real attack to come off cooldown, that's pretty boring.
Jyotai Oct 26th 2011 4:20PM
As the poster above me notes 'standing around doing nothing'...
The animations for the weapon classes are triggered around auto-attack.
The Monk -is- going to end up 'standing there' if the player ain't smacking the keyboard - but its going to be animated so this looks normal.
(Unlike say, my tauren warrior, that just stands there with her sword and shield at her sides if I stop using auto-attack.)
Teaspoon Oct 26th 2011 7:55PM
I'm loving the idea of removing the mixture of autoswing+instants and I'm keen to play a monk and try that sout. Meanwhile, I'd love to see them try the opposite idea with warriors and ditch instant attacks and convert everything to on-next-swing. I don't play Fury, so I haven't really thought through how dual wielding would work under this model, but I think Arms in particular would be pretty cool with thunderous two-handed smashes on the swing timer instead of mediocre white hits on the swing timer and bigger yellow hits just popping in out of nowhere every GCD, which always irked me. If your weapon's so chunky that it takes you 3½ seconds after a swing to get it lined up for another swing, how the hell are you also landing a full-force hit with it every 1½ seconds?
Also, there's an Arms Warrior in my raid team who is pretty close behind our Arcane Mage for damage, but the Warrior can only hit hard enough to interrupt Rageface's Face Rage if Mortal Srike crits while he's got Colossus Smash up, while the Mage hits hard enough to interrupt it with most of his Arcane Blasts. The warrior damage output is smeared across too many puny hits for a Warrior to be able to useful against mechanics like Face Rage. 2H weapons have swing timers comparable to Fireball cast times, so if the damage was only happening on the swing timer then we'd see Fireball-sized Warrior attacks.
I did briefly ponder how this idea would work for Prot (as it's my main spec), and it seems like it would be OK. We can have Devastate, Revenge, and Rend on the swing timer, while Shield Slam would be an off-swing-timer instant attack (with its own cooldown, like it already has) because it doesn't actually use the weapon. I suppose Thunderclap, Shockwave, shouts and the like would also be non-swing instant attacks, again with their own cooldowns. Perhaps using the non-swing-timer instant attacks would slightly delay the swing timer so that there's still a time cost in using them.
brain314 Oct 26th 2011 11:27PM
You can't get rid of auto-attacks. That's how warriors and bears build their rage. Also, there will be times where you burn all your rage/combos/runics/runes/etc, and everything else is on CD. It'd look pretty stupid for a melee to just stand there with nothing to do for a few seconds until the next skill comes up.
Teaspoon Oct 27th 2011 2:35AM
"You can't get rid of auto-attacks. That's how warriors and bears build their rage."
This is true for DPS warriors (bears and tanking warriors get most of their rage from being attacked rather than attacking) *under the current system,* but obviously changing the attack mechanics of warriors would require significant changes to the resource system that the attack mechanics are tied to.
The current rage system is pretty clumsy and hasn't changed much since Vanilla except for normalization when the scaling issues got too far out of control. With Blizzard's experimentation with the Barbarian's "Fury" resource (which started out as a copy of WoW's rage) in the Diablo 3 beta, it wouldn't be too big a stretch for the rage resource system to see a chunky revamp in 5.0 based on what they learned through the D3 beta.
Last time I read up on Barbarians, the deal was that ALL damage done (even by special abilities) generates Fury, so clever ability selection allows you to get good momentum and keep it while bad choices will dump you back to an empty bar. Basic (white) swings will always give rage, combo-builder-like attacks will have low enough rage costs that they still build rage, and the big finishers will have high costs. There'll be tactical combos along the lines of using Colossus Smash before a Mortal Strike so that Mortal Strike will hit hard enough to be rage-efficient, plus there'll be situation-dependent stuff like whirlwind's damage-per-enemy making it horrible on single targets but great on packs (because you generate extra rage per enemy hit).
I can see the D3 Fury model having the same out-of-control scaling as WoW's Rage used to, because basing rage on how hard you hit means that at some gear level you'll hit hard enough that you generate more rage than you can spend. I'm sure there are ways to normalize it, though. They could have abilities cost a portion of max rage but have the max rage scale with AP instead of being the static 100. They could make it generate rage based on how many swings' worth of damage you do (ie, if your character sheet says you swing for 6k, a 9k hit is "1.5 swings"). They could give each attack a set cost with a set return per target hit (ie, whirlwind costs 50 rage and generates 10 rage per target hit) and maybe throw in some "reduces the rage cost of the next X attacks by Y%" effects on some of the other abilities to allow good combo-buildups.
So anyway, there are heaps of ways to rebuild the resource system to match a rebuilt attack model. I'm not too unhappy with how it works now either but I think it's worth considering other models that might lead to more interesting or even just more intuitive play.
Drakkenfyre Oct 27th 2011 2:56AM
They aren't going to remove autoattacks. In fact, Monks are likely to ship with them. They already said it was extremely controversial around the office, and it might not end up like that in the final version.
And who the hell wants Hunters to have to click fire for EVERY attack? No one. If you want to replicate that now, get on a Rogue or Warrior. Equip a throwing knife. Find a target dummy. Use throw. Now, attack the dummy for half an hour. That's what a Hunter without autoattack would feel like.
Wally Oct 26th 2011 2:10PM
I may be mistaken but from what i've seen i was under the impression that monks were getting the choice between 2H or a single 1H.
Oskiee Oct 26th 2011 2:23PM
to be honest, this whole expansion seems really lackluster. I dont know if its just cause ive been playing wow since launch and im just tired of it, but everything annouced didmt seem all that great. A new class is cool and all. And weve been wanting panderan since BC, but i read about the whole thing, and all i think is ...meh.
But anyway. The monk class looks like itll be cool. No auto-attack can turn out to be fun and interesting.
Jack Mynock Oct 26th 2011 2:35PM
If I had to bet, I'd put my money on auto-atack having to be implemented for monks. I anticipate this causing problems in pvp because all of their attacks are going have to hit harder. Ask any melee in pvp, I'm sure they'd love to have their auto-attack damage rolled into their specials instead.
plgrmsun Oct 26th 2011 2:44PM
The prediction I'm going to make is that some of the mechanics of the monk will go the way of Chakra and Inner Rage before Cataclysm. Both mechanics sounded really cool, but when they hit the beta they were both altered tremendously. I'm not so sure on the evolution of Inner Rage, but the word I kept seeing regarding Chakra was "clunky". It sounds like the lack of an auto-attack and the skill use that goes along with it could very easily be clunky.
The same can be said of some of Monk healing, based on the little bit that I saw.
I like the idea of the Monk class. I like most of the stuff I see related to it. I'm just not convinced all these innovations will make it to live.
Boobah Oct 26th 2011 3:05PM
Well, yeah.
At this point, DK Runeforging was all about choosing which runes you were going to put on your weapon; I don't mean Fallen Crusader vs. Lichbane or whatever, but whether you were going to go with the balanced approach of two each, or maybe 1 each frost/blood with four unholy. With the implication that you could carry different weapons forged with different runes depending on the situation.
plgrmsun Oct 26th 2011 3:30PM
@ Boobah
Oo, forgot about that one. It's another good example.
Zachariahs Oct 26th 2011 3:52PM
I know a lot can and will change with the monk class, and there's still a lot unknown, but I really hope that they keep the tank, dps and healing for them. This way I can FINALLY have a gnome that can play a class that can do all 3 roles.
Jyotai Oct 26th 2011 4:16PM
I can't see why they wouldn't.
And while I don't play gnomes, they've long needed first a healing option, and now at least, along with forsaken, 2 healer classes like almost everyone else.
Nipah Oct 26th 2011 3:54PM
As a person who plays an Enhancement Shaman, and loves fist weapons, I can see myself enjoying a Monk quite easily.
Here's hoping they don't have the same silly special attack animations as my Troll does though (that little spin he does when he has 2 maces + stormstrike is... bad).