Monk 105: 2hb or h2h?

I recall doing a 10 hour parse between the TBM and EoK weapons during beta last year (and posted to those beta forums which is now inaccessible to me). The dual wield set and the 2hb both had higher delays than the previous, and my concern was we were going to lose out on procs from effects. The EoK set performed as well or better than the TBM set in terms of proc amounts. I can't recall the numbers between dual wield and 2hb though. I would agree - there is a proc modifier that evens out the amount of procs for weapons based on delay.

This was always the case. It includes haste as well to level it out to a proc/minute ratio. Back in the old shakerpaging days the idea was to get the warrior slowed which would cause more procs per swing (since all the swings happened at the touch of one button).

Thanks everyone for the good info! So to bring us current: I've hit 105 as of this weekend. I'm using the 2hb drop from Korsha and was the lucky roller on the 20 dmg aug for 2handed weapons. Now to max out that burst of power AA.

So that brings me to a new question: is the Monk Epic really that valuable? Currently, I'm only grouping but would like to raid in the future. Is the epic a must have or just fluff at this stage in the game?

The 2.0, right? Not a must-have, but certainly beneficial. It has a very nice HP boost that comes in handy against hard hitting mobs, heavy AEs, and heavy dots. I use mine all the time.

Can also be nice to click when you know a mob gets mana-burned. I often use it when I'm not using Earthforce

The DD on it is not bad either if you have a boon of the seeress belt since the proc has something like 12-14 ppm

Sounds good and thank you for that! I'll start the pre-quest for the 1.5 here this week as that seems easy enough. Any pointers or tricks to get through the toughest parts for the 2.0? I've found a bunch of walk-through's online so that will help.

It's sad they never came back and upgraded epic's to fit with the new level schema. Has anyone heard any rumors of Daybreak ever thinking of doing a 3.0?

At 105 the epics should be super super cake to do, they were generally soloable like 20 levels ago

Epic 3.0s are always a no, because it takes a dev like 1-2 years of exclusively working on it to finish every classes when they could be working on "real" content

Well, one "dev-year" as it were, which would be spread across the team. A cumulative year's worth of labor that has to be done. So $50k+ or whatever that epics would have to earn back in revenues to be dev-neutral. And epics don't even get to be Prestige/subscriber-only. So they'd have to either generate 1500+ expansion purchases - ones that would not have happened anyhow, or get an equivalent number of people to subscribe just because they're so excited to play with the items

My 1st Spire parses from 2013

1st Spire is a proc modifier - I parsed it long ago and it added nothing. Zero. nada. So I decided to parse it again 4-5 years later.

Setup here is common raid buffs. No Tribute. FOUR damage procs on two weapons, plus Fists of Fury is a proc off of an AA.

NO 1st Spire (control) -

Rate from Fists of Fury AA - 2.50 Procs/minute
Rate from 4 direct damage weapon procs - 18.9 Procs/minute

YES 1st Spire ON -

Rate from Fists of Fury AA - 2.59 Procs/minute
Rate from 4 direct damage weapon procs - 21.02 Procs/minute

Proc Difference % = (1st Spire - No 1st Spire)/(1st Spire)*100

Rate from Fists of Fury AA - 0.09/2.59 * 100 = 3.6% more FoF procs WITH 1st Spire
Rate from 4 direct damage weapon procs - 2.12/21.02 * 100 = 11.2% more weapon damage procs WITH 1st Spire

The parses are 7 hours and 11+ hours long making them well within the range of statistical significance.

With that said, I only use 2nd Spire for DPS. Guaranteed DPS vs. proc related DPS is the way to go during raids.

That's great. Thanks for the info. Do you have an equivalent parse with 2nd spire? I'd be curious to see the difference between 1st and 2nd. With the proc amounts being increased in EoK, 1st might need to be redone.

2nd spire should be easy since it should be a flat 55 dmg per hit, so just melee based hits * 55 / time

I looked, but I do not have my old 1st 2nd spire parses. They were/are on Monkly Business, if that site is ever up again. I'll pull out my monk and do a couple of baselines, and then redo it once I buy the proc AA's.

the 2hb way gains staff bloc aa and u riposte higher dmg standing in front of mob.