Fistweavers should stack mastery in m+

Classes Monk
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EDIT: Did a major update since this got way more attention than I expected. This is a Guide for using Ancient Teachings of the Monastery legendary (ATOTM).

Talents:
Mistwrap
Lifecycles
Invoke Chi-ji, the Red Crane
Rising Mist

So to talk a little about the talent choices here, mist wrap is pretty standard for M+ content. The big change here is that I recommend Lifecycles over Mana Tea, which is contrary to the vast majority of monk guides. The reason why is that you can benefit from it on nearly every single vivify/enveloping mist cast if you do it right, and it ends up being much more mana saved than mana tea and it’s much easier to use.

Covenant:
Overall, the covenant doesn’t really matter all that much. You can play whichever is most fun for you or play whichever will get you into the group faster (usually the dungeon covenant). None of the covenants directly buff ATOTM by some considerable amount.
Kyrian - Weapons of Order resets your Essence font and grants a ton of mastery. The essence font reset is okay/fun but in high hps scenarios you really are just popping WoO for the huge mastery buff it gives you.
Necrolord - Bone Dust Brew makes it so you can simultaneously do a little burst window of damage and healing. You will want to have Thunder focus tea as well as 3x stacks of Teachings of the Monastery before using it so you can fit in double RSK as well as BoK fish for reset. From my experiences, it’s not very good for healing but is better used for just doing damage. You can also use it on a big AoE pull and spam SCK.
Nightfae - I haven’t played night Fae so I don’t have much to say here. I will update it when I do play it some. It has a high mana cost and short range so it mostly useful for dealing damage when you can spare the mana.

Stat Priority:
Mastery up to 100%, haste to at least 10% and then the rest in crit/vers.
Mastery is a very very strong throughput healing stat. You can stack more than 100% if you are struggling with keeping people alive, but at around 100% is a sweet spot where you can do the majority of low HPs Healing with just ATOTM and using renewing mist to trigger gusts of mist on injured targets without having to cast vivify. Also, having it at around 100% makes Chi-ji a potent cool down too since it scales with mastery.
On certain affixes you may want to use more than 100% mastery (grievous fortified says hello, or fort bursting weeks) because it really does make a huge difference in throughput. If you are playing a crit/vers build you will have to burn so much more mana to keep people alive than with mastery. You lose out on some* dps though (but realize that the amount you lose on is marginal there is a lot of discussion below about dps but it’s seriously a tiny amount that is way over exaggerated by certain people in the thread; the throughput increase is much much much more significant and valuable than the tiny dps loss).

Rotation:
The primary goal is to maintain 100% uptime on Essence Font on the party by extending the HoT effect with Rising Sun Kick, but not to cast Essence Font until ATOTM buff is about to fall off. (There is about a 5 second window where EF is available but you still have ATOTM and you want to avoid pressing EF early because it’s just going to drain your mana over time).

When stacking mastery, the rotation changes slightly, with the primary change being how you use Renewing Mist.
In traditional fistweaving guides, it is reccomended that you use Renewing Mist on cooldown in order to extend their durations and have as many active as possible for vivify cleave.

But when your mastery is at 100% or higher, its better to just hold onto Renewing Mists until damage goes out. This way you can trigger gusts of mist on injured targets, and because of Essence Font and the Resplendent Mist conduit, it heals for a lot and you can keep DPSing without casting vivify.

Opener- Typical opener looks like: Enveloping Mist on the tank and then channel essence font. This makes it so the full channel of essence font is magnified on the tank from mist wrap. Then, cast renewing mist on the tank as you get in melee range so you can immediately Thunder focus tea rising sun kick.

Now you have two choices for ATOTM:
1)Alternate Tiger Palm and Black out Kick (results in the most RSK resets and Is a steady stream of healing)
2)Build up Tiger Palm to 3x and Black Out Kick
(Results in the most burst healing)
I think it’s best to alternate dynamically between the two. As you get experience with the play style you will know when to stop alternating and start to build up to 3x stacks. Examples include whenever predictable damage is going out like Soggodon’s seismic wave, or when the tank is going to get hit by a tank buster. You will learn to line up your 3x stack and/or delay your RSK or black out kick dump for immediately after these events to benefit the most from ATOTM healing.

One of easiest and most effective ways to improve your mana efficiency as a monk is to never cast Enveloping mist unless you have a Rising Sun Kick available. Never cast 2 or more EVMs unless you have 2 RSKs available or a RSK and 3 blackout kicks banked up.

With high mastery, the supplemental healing from Gust of Mists by casting Renewing Mists is sufficient to maintain an ATOTM healing profile much longer. Since GoM heals for so much, you do not have to cast anywhere near the number of vivify or enveloping mists that other monks will have to cast, allowing you to have more uptime DPSing. Even when you do have to hard cast Vivify or EVM, their power is magnified by a ton.

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Interesting, HOWEVER, i could just spend 80% of the dungeon dpsing and having the fallen order guys heal for me. I’ll do more dmg because they do dmg also. Also a healers number one concern in keys if they are trying to push is “how can I pump out more dmg” mastery for MWs is not the way to go in this case. For just a nice cheesy heal build yea sounds pretty cool what you suggested. But damage is so important in keys, so if you are trying to push high as a MW mastery becomes less and less desirable over crit/haste/vers.

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1k mastery – holy cow.

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Honestly not surprised that youd have the AI everything for you. (Sorry Serethia lol I coudnt resist).

Anyways the Venthyr fallen order legendary doesnt count as fistweaving in my book, sorry bud.

Oh gee well I guess if its that simple yea you better not stack mastery! /s

100 iq brain: Oh mastery doesnt increase the damage my abilities do, it must be useless for DPS
101 iq brain: Mastery might not increase the damage of my abilities directly, however, it does so much instantaneous healing that I can continue DPSing instead of casting spells. Perhaps even if I am doing slightly less damage with mastery that the increased uptime results in the same damage done!

zzzzzz

Here is an exxagerated example:
If you can do 5k DPS for 50% of the time, then thats 2.5k dps average.
If I can do 3.5k dps for 71% of the time, then thats 2.5k dps average.
Same total damage done, different damage and healing profiles. Now, how much harder was it to heal with one vs the other? These are confounding variables you have to think about and not just jump to conclusions like “OH mastery doesnt improve my DPS directly must be garbo”.

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Except in no situation is that gonna happen lol. And also because I focus so much in those other stats my RNM hot is usually one of my top heals. And also ATOTM in keys isn’t a good idea, unless your comp is all melee you won’t get good value out of it, furthermore it doesn’t get affected by mastery, so it’s not gonna hit as hard as it could if you put stats into crit or vers. And also those exaggerated examples are just that, exaggerated. In high keys you are gonna struggle much more then the MW running 15-20% vers and balanced stats. Again you do you, but that build would have a very hard time doing high keys, because healing isn’t an issue MWs are going to face in keys, you are literally trying to buff an issue MW doesn’t have, we need to do more dmg, and you can’t do that if your mastery is 154%.

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You do realize that if it ATOTM heals the melee more than the ranged, you simply cast fewer direct heals on the melee and just prioritize the range with your heals? Like ATOTMs 20 yd range is inconsequential. If it’s just you and the tank in melee range, then ATOTM does the same HPS but just on you and the tank and you just use your healing spells on the other party members. It actually helps if this is the case because it acts as a form of RNG manipulation that eliminates some of the randomness of ATOTM. Now you know that it is much more likely to hit the melee and you can use this to your advantage, but really, that’s an exaggerated example too because I’m 95% of scenarios I don’t have ranged out ranging ATOTM.

Yea and that’s not the point lol. Even someone with a 99 IQ brain could point that out Serethia, thanks for noting the super obvious.

I’m always talking about confounding variables for exactly this reason. In your mind, the formula looks like “ATOTM healing is proportional to crit/haste/vers, not mastery”.
in reality, the formula has 20+ other variables in it, because ATOTM is just a portion of your healing profile, and some of those variables in the healing profile ARE proportional to mastery.

So when you consider the number [d(HPS)/d(Secondary Stat)], the rate of change of HPS with respect to a secondary stat, it turns out that this value is a larger positive number with mastery than with the DPS stats for ATOTM, simply by virtue of how fast [d(HPS_GoM)/d(Mastery)] increases relative to [d(HPS_ATOTM)/d(Crit, vers, haste)].

Even if you maximized all of your DPS stats, the opportunity cost is larger because you can do much easier and much bigger healing from GoM. Not only that, but I would argue that the powerful Gust of Mists healing acts as RNG manipulation which improves the odds that ATOTM does useful healing. When you top someone off with Gust of Mists right before using RSK or dump BoK, you have eliminated them from ATOTM’s targeting choices and made lower health targets much more likely to be chosen.

My hypothesis is that there is some point in secondary stat space — that pyramid shaped thing on Bloodmallet — likely somewhere around 600<M<900 which is most optimal for ATOTM, with the rest in pure DPS stats. I am in the process of tuning to that point and will share when I have more information. Basically just enough mastery to reach the point where healing becomes trivialized by GoM and then all DPS stats

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I know you think that sounds smart but I’m honestly not gonna argue, no MW follows that crazy logic, and if it works for you that’s all that matters. MWs wanting to push will look at icy veins or go on peak and they’ll see that everything you have written is just personal preference and if they really want to push they’ll use different leggos and the right stat weights. But you do you and enjoy the phat mastery healing.

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iq 102 just take dps stats and keep dpsing and let the party fend for themselves and yell at them for not being with 20 yards of you.

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iq 103 clip your EF so you can dps more and don’t cast renewing mist

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Let’s flip that right back around. If you haven’t noticed, everything that is written on icy veins is just personal preference, just the personal preference of someone else.

In case you haven’t noticed there aren’t healing sims out there (regardless of the fact that APL sims are EXTREMELY biased towards the programmer), so those guides are written after iterative processes of trial and error, which is an inherently flawed process considering you cannot guarantee you’ve tried the best option.

Talking about rates of change is a normal thing in engineering career. They are kind of fundamental to everything…. Not using rates of change to sound smart it’s literally how you communicate about these mathematical topics.

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Yea but it’s the preference of experienced and skilled players. No offense psy but I’m gonna take the word of a 2700io MW over the exepierience of a 2100 io mw. It comes down to experience as well, your highest key is an 18, at that lvl ANYTHING could work, but you’ve never experienced high keys so your preference wouldn’t help a MW looking to push high keys

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Yea and we’ve talked about this before. The vast majority of players are not playing these “high keys” of which you speak, so maybe buzz off?

People can always go to icy veins to see “what’s best”.
They come to these forums to see alternative viewpoints too. Some people want to try alternative builds for fun.

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To support Psychi’s build, mastery is stacked in pvp because it adds to our burst healing (afaik, I haven’t looked at the mw meta for pvp in a while). And topping the group off in less GCDs could lead to more damage.

But just because that set up works doesn’t mean it’s what is best.

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Also the “preference” of those players who write the guides is usually correct and ends up being the strongest build, anomaly and abelito spend a pretty large portion of time figuring out what’s good and testing that stuff out.

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Right that’s why I said you do you, but. Was explicitly talking in the regard of a MW wanting to push high.

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It’s very hard to eliminate your own play style bias from your testing without accepting other people’s assumptions and trying their rotations too.

I mean how can you truly quantify how accurately they are trying all of the possibilities? The truth is it is much more likely for them to be exploring a small subset of possibilities that lies closes to their muscle memory playstyle.

That doesn’t even factor in something like the learning curve it takes to understand someone else’s play style and rotation, let alone get comfortable using it. You might try it and suck at it and think it’s bad purely because you didn’t take the time to learn it.

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again I’m not gonna argue, MWs don’t stack mastery, if you wnna stack it by all means stack it and enjoy those 18s.

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It’s so depressing to me that you have such a large influence on the community yet you are so narrow minded. No class community flourishes when there are people like that around — constantly shutting down any other viewpoint without even trying it, without even entertaining the idea.

The best times I’ve had in this game were when lots of people were working together to discover different viable builds. The cool thing about monk is that not only is it super fun to play, but it has an incredible variety of builds!
I want other people to see that, and really Serethia, I think you should try to change that to make the community more inclusive.

We need a forum to talk about different builds and stuff, so let the WOW forums be that. You and whoever wants to “min/max” — lol — can go to the peak of serenity discord but leave my alternative build posts alone please?

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My big reason for not liking mastery is that I want to always have my renewing mist out to extend it with rising mist. So, I’m often casting it when everyone is full hp. So, that healing is wasted.

I personally really like haste for ATotM.

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To be blunt, both Abelito and Anomaly pay close attention to any changes to stat changes with monk. Abelito does a mountain of math to figure out what is working best. So your argument that Peak is based solely on preference doesn’t hold any water. While it may not be something that jumps out, they have several pages with different build options for different playstyles with both math and gameplay reasoning to back the suggestions.

Incidentally, your attitude in how you’ve dealt with this discussion has been disappointing. “You might be smart, but I’m smarter. This is why I think I am.” You didn’t make a post saying “Hey, I started playing this and it works a lot better for me than what everyone else is doing, I thought I’d share.” You made a post saying what you’re doing is flat-out better. If you don’t want claims like that to be challenged, don’t post them.

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