[treefiddey]

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.