I’ve decided to do some open world testing of all the covenant abilities starting with monk. So this testing was quite casual and more of a first pass impression sort of thing, I still need to get in to dungeons and do some thorough testing of a lot of them. I made a fresh level 60, went to all the zones and found some level 60’s to do some rough testing on. Thats the basis of these numbers so they may not relate to dungeons very well but here goes, ranked worst to best IMO.
Bonedust Brew
This was a massive disappointment for me as this is what I was planning on going for. I’m hoping that its either bugger or under tuned but outside of a dungeon I couldn’t get any damage from this ability. So in theory this should increase your damage by 12.5% for 10 seconds every minute on Average. In actual fact is ends up more like 10%. Single targets its pretty consistent bit of extra damage. The ability is clearly designed for AOE which is all over the place. The way it reads to get the full affect you are going to have to first get 6 stacks of mark of the crane drop bone dust brew and spam spinning crane kick. When trying this it didn’t seem to proc much and the damage was quite small. When doing 3 target testing I got as low as 5% extra damage up to 11% . I think part of the problem there was fist of fury does reduced damage to the secondary targets so even when bonedust does proc you aren’t getting much from it.
This was the hardest ability to test and I’m going to need to do some further dungeon testing to get a real feel for it. I think having it for only 10 seconds every minute is way to low and also the proc chance is also way low. I would make the proc chance 100% and reduce the damage to 20% to make it more consistent
Weapons of the order
this one was hard to quantify. In my current gear (138 ilevel) It seems to do about 25% increase damage for 30 seconds every 2 minutes which isn’t made. Already its better than bonedust in single target (it would be 25% for 20 second every two minutes if it worked) and its helps making whirling dragon punch a bit easier to use as you can get it out 2 GCD’s earlier. This ability will obviously scale with mastery quite nicely and doesn’t feel too disruptive to your gameplay but its just that for me, a bit vanilla.
Faeline Stomp
This one was quite surprising, first of all the healing component they just added is quite nice, the damage seems to be competitive with Weapons of order single target and It gets stronger when you are fight more targets. I think one of the big bonuses is the 30 second duration and 30 second CD, If you are stood still you can basically have this up 100% of the time. It feels like its adding something to spec which is nice. What truly pushes it over the edge is 6% chance to reset when you are stood inside it, it just feels epic when it happens and can do some massive damage if you are lucky.
Fallen Order
This ability currently feels the strongest by far. at 3 minutes this is the biggest cool down for monks but boy is it worth it. As of this build the fallen order monks are doing about 40% of your DPS. They do a combination of melee damage, Spinning crane kick, fist of fury for massive damage and then you have a chance to get some ox monks doing keg smash which provide some nice extra Aoe or a jade monks that provide extra healing. You can do some truly massive pulls with his CD I’ll be suprised if it doesn’t get nerfed.
So there it is, I need to go do some dungeon testing and see if that changes things a bit. I think 3/4 of the covenant abilities are fine and maybe just need number balancing. I’m currently thinking that if I choose to main monk this expansion I will be going venthyr but we will have to wait an see
