Vanguard Monks

So i made it to 50 and about to start rading. Time to figure out a way to max dps. As of right now it honestly seems to me that drunken is highest dps style out there. Here is couple of things i am working on right now and could use some input on that.

1) Crescent Kick and Stuggering punch. Both dont trigger global c/d and with raid buffs u have unlimited endurance, so the goal is for them to go of every time their are up. Unfotunatly just clicking them is not the best way, it takes too long to do it resulting in a sec or so lost between other specials. Best way would be to macro them into every ability and forget they ever existed, Unfortunatlly i am unable to macro them in finisher atacks, is there a way to do this, or should i make actual macros and only use finisher icons to see when they are up?

macro something like that

/cast crescent kick
/cast stuggering
/cast thouthand fists
/cast ... firsts
/cast legendary fists
/cast .... fists

And use that instead of actual finisher icon?

2) Fists of Celenity and Errand Strikes. both 5 min c/d 2.5 fully buffed or 3 not quite sure yet.
Basicaly when u pop both of them up then blow 4 thousand  line finishers then exploding heart chain the logs go nuts. Damage they show is INSANE, it shows 1 hit followed by 6 more in blue. Total 7 hits. Unfortunatly this is not  true. From limited testing that i have done it seems that it hits only 3 times not 7 which is still good tho. Funny part however is that the hits themselves are about 2x times my regular hits.
So atm i am quite confused on how much damage this actualy does. But what i do know is that self buffed i took 49 5 dot in ToT down to 40% in 16 sec, with just 1 crit and fist of celenity ran out before i finished the combo due to lack of crits. With some luck on crits and full buffs it would die under 10 sec.
So question is anyone know how exactly does this work?

I am at work so i dont have the logs but it was something like:

Thousand fists hit for 10k(7k+3k)
You quickly hit target again for 10k
You quickly hit target again for 10k
You quickly hit target again for 10k
Errand strikes hit target for 10k
Errand strikes hit target for 10k
Errand strikes hit target for 10k

it realy seems like triple lines are bogus and one one hit was made, by 10k non crit is still 2x more then my hits unbuffed.

QTM and i saw this a lot when parsing monk damage pre gu 3.  Basicly the combat logs are supper dupper sloppy.

The quickly hits x3 spam for celerity doesnt mean you hit 3 times, same with errant strike.  The only hit that seems to matter is the one hit at top that says "you hit x for yyz dmg (xxx + ZZz)"  its the same for exploiting a weakness at the moment i bleive.

The way the 2 skills work is like follows

Celerity doubles the dmg of a finisher...aka takes a 5k hit and makes it 10k.  Errant strikes is a bit trickier... its ment to be an ae attack to drop a group of mobs who are attacking the defensive target....so as far as i can tell errant strike has 2 checks

1) Is random ae mob targeting your defensive target, if yes go to 2
2) Is random ae mob currently your target, if yes stop attack, if no allow special move to hit

So errant strike doesnt really add any dmg to a target your already on, but if there are 4-5 mobs in the ae range, that 10k thousand fist will hit all 4-5 of them. 

as for why the finisher macro isnt working, its because finishers trigger global cool down so you would only be able to hit the first hit of thousand fists then youd have to press the rest by hand. 

on a second note, i dont mean to burst any bubbles, but drunken arent number 1 dps in raids anymore (of the monks) alot of the sloppy logs just leads people to think that.  Currently its harmonious > Drunken>Dragon  with drunken being only slightly behind harmonious.

This is mainly to do with what you said, in raids you have next to infinite endurance, which cancles out the penalty of harmonious offensive stance if they use aum ti. 

the point is not for presing one button to do whole chain but so every time i do a finisher it would do a check for kick and punch first do them then do the finisher move.

okay parsed for a few fights tonight.

1) Errant strike doesn't work like i thought its not an ae, its another version of fist of celerity.
2) Errant strike doesn't work about 50% of the time if you don't have a defensive target,  i get the buff, log says its cast on me, but no extra dmg, no log of errant adding extra dmg. 
3) Errant strikes and celerity do stack, when used together you gain extra dmg but logs suck,  sometimes it APPEARS just errant is adding dmg and sometimes its just celerity, sometimes its multiples of both, when in actuality both are adding to each hit, the log just doesn't want to display both messages consistantly.  Crits seem to cancel out the messages but the extra dmg is still added.  Like mentioned below, the thunder fist line gives 3 spams per attack because its 3x melee + dmg, overall the first msg is the actually dmg dealt.  This is EXACTLY like weakness at the moment, it doesn't display correctly but its dmg is being added.
3.b) Updated...out of 10 uses i got 3 hits that had their log dmg display both errant and celerity took effect, general conclusion, is they dont want to both display.
4) Fist of celerity/Errant strike don't display correctly in the log if the hits crit.  Generally speaking if a hit crits one, the other, or both of the extra dmg messages are canceled out by crits, even though the extra dmg is being added.
5) ps apparently secret of flame/ice both add their dmg afterwards now in a separate line (someone else mentioned it but i hadn't looked for it since gu3

Update
errant strike/fist of celerity only have 3 combat message spams on the thunder fist line other lines they only have 1, and it only shows if the attack doesnt critical.... on the rare occasion an attack will display 2 errants but it was maybe 2 times in 30 uses....overall id say its completely inconsistent and needs some major revision and clean up.

This really needs to be looked at BEFORE they try to parse monks, because i can see how the extra lines of fluff text from weakness exploiting and from fist of celerity/errant strike can lead to an inflated sense of our dps being much higher then it really is.

hmm i m switching between harmonious and drunken every now and then and drunken is hands down more dps if you use errant strike.
with max refresh haste you have either fists of celerity or errants strike up a lot.
doubt harmonious can beat that.
but yeah this kinda requires psi and bard refresh haste but on a raid thats normally no prob.

about the parsing and additional combatlines:
i did  alot of testing lately and these additional combatlines only seem to show for yourself. so if others parse you the dmg is correct.
if u wann parse yourself u need to edit the logfile and kick out every line that involves:
You quickly strike
An errant strike
You exploit

that will do the trick

i parsed a long fighting night with yavlp and it is not adding the extra lines of damage that you mentioned fujitsu.

k cause i cant use yualp, it crashes on vista 64 :-p

This is depressing news guys. I was really under the impression that errant strike and celerity did double dmg x 4  :'(

Soe needs to look at this to make it actually DO double dmg x 4 when using thousand fist line  :smitten:

they do stack, my post says they do ;-p

the only thing that doesnt stack is their text spam.  with both on you usualy only get one or the other (your errant strike hits xxx or you strike quickly for xxx"

So the bottom line with both active you get your hit damage x 4. So my unbuffed thousand firsts that hit for 5k actualy does 20. Am i getting this right? Not uber but in 20 sec and 2 massive chains still pushing 300-400k damage not bad.

I think the thing to note here is that the abilties do stack however due to the messaging issue tere is not a realiable way to figure out exactly how much you are doing....

I took a parse prior to GU3 hitting and stacked Quickening Jolt / Errant Strikes / Celerity and killed a 4 dot 50  at 75% health... my combat spam only gave me 6 or 7 lines of you did 19K-ish  worth of damage per line. Something isnt quite right wit that reporting.

The message here is this: You can still bring the pain... we just dont know how much till they fix the combat spam.

~QTM

I agree

~QTM

idealy id like real time logs, real time parsers also

weaknesses being borked (display wise) and overall redundant text in the log parses ( weakness, celerity, and errant strike) does bother me.   People say it isnt counted on yaulp but i doubt that.  These are the same people telling us that monk and rogues are about even on raids and monks can occasionally out dps a raid boss.

yep thats why i mentioned earlier i edit all this spamlines out of a file before i parse it.
maybe some parsers do that themself alrdy but i had issues when i kept them in.

that said ofc people will outdps a raidmob quite often actually. i dont know why this is an issue tho. a raidmob only can dish out a certain dps until a tank becomes unhealable cause of a limited hp pool.
the other way around this is not an issue you just up the bosses hp.
VG started with quite a number inflation to begin with so we see 10 20k hits a lot for example.

there are encounters where the difficulty isnt ultra high dps from the boss but stuff thats happening around the boss.

on these events ur dps almost certainly will outdps the raidbosses easily but again this means nothing.

you could cut the mob hp in half and the playerdps in half and would end at the same situation.
but people at least wouldnt say anymore: eeek someone out dpsed a raid mob.

in all honesty theres a few things

1) Raid mobs with ae's will have insane dps when you parse it because that 2k dmg they do x18 adds up fast
2) on mobs where you ae, 1 monk ae'ing 10 2-3 dots is doing 5k dmg x 10, so of course their dps looks inflated
3) and yeah the way the game is a raid boss should only average about 5k dps on a single target, a good raid buffed monk should average close to that or more 100% of the time. 

on a side note, i blame drunken monks for carrying around bottles of alcohol..... thats what the developers told me caused the extra spam in the combat log!

Just a heads up on the whole el crappo combat logs:

I did get a chance to chat with SoE regarding on cleaning up the combat spam and confirmed that it is on the short term  "to do" list.

~QTM

Very, very good. Power to the number crunchers !

qtm if u get a chance can you look at staggering punch? drunken monk skill.

Says its doing 75% weapon dmg + xxx.  Last night in raid with buffs i was consistently hitting for 10-20k with this skill and defensive stance and martial sword. 
(http://img246.imageshack.us/img246/1940/staggeringpunchgl2.jpg) (http://imageshack.us)

notice my dps is only 449.7 in that photo, im in defensive stance with martial sword of parry and speed.

That wasn't an errant strike or a fist of celerity.

So they did some parsing last night, ill posts the highlights (aka when i wasnt pulling or dead)

For the average trash mob:

Rog (216,118 total, 2800 dps)
Drunken monk (207,297 total, 2700 dps)
Sorc (switched with rog from fight to fight) ( 2200-2900 dps depending on mob resistance type)

Overall pretty happy that my player made geared monk with player made weapons was able to be in the top 2 to 3 every fight as a drunken.


On a longer boss fight: (10 min fight)  Professor Vers
Rog - 894011 total, 3335 dps
Sorc - 689831, 2574 dps
Drunken monk - 597313, 2228 dps

Again was constantly in the top 3.  Secret of flames averages 2-2.5k dmg a hit on raid targets (1000 spell dmg rating) and having 2 fist of celerity buffs is damn powerful when you get 216k hit on the fourth hit of thousand fist chain. 


I know this is a small subset of drunken monk dps, but its nice to know end game they are probably right where they should be. 

Fuji wingwraiths are extremely vulnerable to melee attacks, all your melee abilities will hit atleast 4x dmg on them.

ah ok that explains the 10k hit