Common Monk Weapons Parsing - DPS and Damage Taken
 

Hi all - like a lot of you I was curious about how the various monk weapons compare, and whether things like Tstaff are really worth the money. While soloing in high keep, I decided to do some parsing to compare DPS and damage taken for various common monk weapon combinations. For example, it's conventional wisdom (and common sense) that 2HB is for tanking, because of fewer ripostes and Tstaff proc is a great threat generator. Fine, but how much better is it compared to Epic/SoS or Adamantite Club, etc...? This is what I tried to quantify.

The experiment: while lvl 58, kill a body guard over and over, without any buffs except Celestial Tranquility, always keeping under the weight limit. For each weapon set, I killed about 50 - 75 body guards, to try and smooth out the random nature of these relatively short fights and any level differences that the body guards might have from one spawn to another. All parses are shown below, with the median and standard error (standard deviation / sqrt(number of fights)) calculated.

This is very situational and these results do not apply to all scenarios, but should prove useful for folks looking for weapons to level/solo with.

Damage Per Second
Tranquil Staff = 58 +/- 1.3
Epic / Scepter of Mastery = 55.5 +/- 0.9
Baton of Royal Stature / Adamantite Club = 51 +/- 0.6

Highlights:
- Tranquil Staff really is great, but Epic/SoM is not that far behind.
- Baton of Royal Stature / Adamantite Club parsed about 14% lower than Tranquil Staff and 9% lower than Epic / Scepter of Mastery. Scepter of Mastery has an almost identical ratio to Stave of Shielding, so I expect the DPS to be similar to the more common Epic / SoS combo.

Comparisons to JKlein's P99 DPS Calculator

The DPS calculator predicted nearly identical DPS for Tstaff and Epic/SoM (76, 77) and 70 DPS for BoRS/AC, about 10% less.
In my parses, the BoRS/AC was 14% worse than Tstaff and 9% worse than Epic/SoM. So, when it comes to comparing to Dual Wield, the DPS Calculator seems useful as a way to compare weapons, but doesnt seem very good at predicting actual numbers. I have no idea why the prediction for the Tranquil Staff is so off, but one factor may be better DPS from Tstaff ripostes, as compared to ripostes for a 1H weapon.

Damage Taken (per fight)

Tranquil Staff = 1001 +/- 57
Baton of Royal Stature / Adamantite Club = 1169 +/- 40
Epic / Scepter of Mastery = 1244 +/- 62

The other thing I was interested in was how bad tanking with fast dual weilding really is, so I looked at damage taken, which is the second plot I attached. Pretty bad, is the answer. I took about 24% more damage per fight with epic/SoM vs Tstaff. If we consider that 4.5% DPS difference means ~4.5% longer fights, then about 19.5% of the extra damage taken can be attributed to extra ripostes and lack of Tstaff stun. Again, I know no one really tanks with epic/SoM, but I like seeing the numbers. (Not to mention that Tstaff is great for threat gen).

I was also curious if the dual stun procs from Baton of Royal Stature / Adamantite Club combo would help take less damage while tanking, because they're quite a bit cheaper than a Tstaff. The short answer is "yes, a bit."

Give than the median fight duration with the Baton of Royal Stature / Adamantite Club is 14% longer (because 14% lower dps), the 17% more damage taken with BoRS/AC vs Tstaff suggests that the stun procs are making up for the extra ripostes (as compared to the Tranquil Staff).

Final Thoughts
The data here support a lot of the common advice on these forums regarding weapon choice (though folks are far from unanimous). However, I hope seeing the numbers helps folks make a decision one way or another.
- The Tstaff parses, even across ~60 fights are noticeably more random, as compared to a fast 1H combo.
- These parses were done on ~lvl 45 mobs. This means that the Tstaff is slightly advantaged, because it is more likely to hit for more damage. However, I also wasn't STR buffed, so the 1H/DW combo didn't utilize the flat STR dmg bonus as much.

On Raids...
- These days on raids, I usually use epic/SoM and make sure I have max STR and ATK. I raid with Sanctum, which has a very wide mix of people, some with very high end gear and others just starting out (like me). I often end up in the 3-6th place of the melee DPS, usually right behind much better geared monks, well geared rogues, and beast rangers like Babwe. Given that my gear is basically velious group level, I'm fine with that.
- High end monk weapons are very few and far between, and those looking to improve their DPS might get more bang for their buck by focusing on survivability and maximizing their engagement time. Good MR gear to resist more fears and a few strategically placed uses of a Wort Pot can keep you in the fight longer, letting you do more damage, often by a huge margin. It's very hard to double your DPS if you're starting out at Epic/SoM, but it's very plausible to double your time engaged.

Just some data and opinions, not financial advice.

The 2hb numbers get a touch better at 60 as well with the odd triple attack

Thanks for posting Treefiddy. I found it very interesting

Me too. The data is valuable because it's given with context. Your log files would also be appreciated. You can strip them of chat using the takp tool.

Very interesting. Thanks for taking the time.

I think this is less an example of how bad the epic/SoM is for tanking and how beneficial stun procs can be, presuming a few factors:

If the ratio still holds up
Slow kills/effective stuns is what you hire a pally for. Monks pound per pound are better than a knight outside aggro but dps should always be a goal. The longer it takes to kill stuff the more damage you take unless you can offset a ton of time with stuns.

If the stun lands at all
The Tstaff is legit amazing. 0 check stuns on most high blues is a coin toss at best. Having basically 2ppm in the MH and 1ppm in the OH vs 2ppm from a Tstaff, I would usually pick the Tstaff.

If you are ok with RNG based performance
Per the above there is some luck evolved. Many monks would prefer to sublet gater-interruption-duty to other classes, outside tstaff use that shines for both.

I agree with the other posters in that the tstaff will reach full potential at 60 with the maximum damage bonus and triple attack (plus other melee skills). There will be times other combos may match it but that’s the result of a RNG based game. Over many parses, on average, better weapons beat worse ones. Higher dps classes beat lower dps classes unless significantly outgeared. IMHO outside iffy aggro situations I would bag and ignore everything but the tstaff. Arguably at 60 you could bag a Peacebringer and those two sticks could serve you literarily for anything. Maybe an IFS instead since that would be a great weapon to take down greens with damage shields until you pick up a Facesmasher or Shovel.


PS: I ran a test of the mage air pet on Shady Swashbuckler only trying to determine which pet took less damage. It was a tank test and 58 Air smashed 57 Earth severely. If your example is instead how well a monk can mitigate and dps isn’t a consideration, I can totally see two inferior stun weapons in some group setups. That said, the situation where this might come in handy also likely results in you tanking hard to stun or unstunnable npcs. Or ones that can only be stunned by the tstaff like Uluump.

Is the parse that Treefiddy provided above more aligned with what a *normie* could accumulate?
And by normie I mean what a non sweaty beard (as a 50+ yr old with an actual life) sans playing at work/midnight/weekends/permacamping/etc.

That is way more useful to me (many?) than trashing it as "crap dps so your whole guild is crap" did we not kill velious mobs with kunark lvl equipment/dps intially?

Just askin questions here folks.

While parsing on level 45 npcs as a sub 60 is better than greens it’s not the most ideal measure of performance. Mainly because the bodyguards were removed in the last patch and rarely blues are parsed unless using a specific hypothesis (ie: level 58 monk weapon sets vs low AC level 45 blue dps).

I’m not a critic or a fan outside appreciating the time spent. I just don’t know how to slot this into the understanding I currently have. Vindi, LT, Dain, Aary, Tunare, AoW are probably the best relative examples of things to chew on for extended periods of time. Most people have a parse or a dozen from these targets.

Peacebringer is very cheap and has basically the same ratio as the T-staff but without the proc. So I would imagine the DPS is very similar.

However, I would be curious to see the difference with an Imbued Fighters Staff, which is 38/40. Is the slightly worse ratio (mostly due to 2hb bonus being less ideal at 40 speed) offset by less damage taken from the mob with a slower weapon?

I think if riposte is only 5% of incoming damage than killing the mob faster matters more than avoiding a riposte.

Whatever percentage of incoming damage comes from riposte with a TStaff, it’s gonna be almost double from mainhand epic alone (30 delay vs 16) and that doesn’t even factor in ripostes from all those offhand hits at whatever delay the offhand carries.

Riposte dmg is not negligible and it is far less with a 2hander.