Windwalker Logs Analysis: Mythic Plus
Welcome to PeakofSerenity's Windwalker Monk PvE Log Analysis Guide. This guide is designed to be a basic, quick guide for Windwalkers with just the information you need to analyze your own logs.
This guide was created by Grille (younggrille) and Esu (esu) and copied to PeakofSerenity by Babylonius. Any questions, comments, or suggestions, should be directed at Grille and Esu in Discord.
Finally, on this page we’ll be going over Mythic+ runs; what to look out for, what to possibly improve, and how to identify a good comparison log.
Disclaimer: M+ Parses are a meme because it is based on key level+time and not dps. Do not use it to ballpark your performance. In addition, your performance will highly depend on things like key level, pull size, deaths/wipes and your team comp.
For the analysis I will just give you a few points to look out for and how to find them.
General
To start things off it’s important to know, that every M+ run is different, even more so if you are not in a premade group.
But focusing on ourselves, the first thing to do either before or after a key is to search for a good log. Preferably one from a similar week (tyrannical/fortified and other affixes).
You do this exactly like explained for a raid log, but instead of clicking onto Raid and the boss, you simply select Dungeons and the key. Select your spec and “only logged runs” in the dropdown menus to actually get a recorded log.
Here select specific keystone levels or even affixes. I’d mostly look out for Tyrannical and Fortified and just look at the highest keystones. From here on, you’ll have good base to look at or a good log to compare yourself to with the compare function.
But what are the things to look out for primarily?
Talents and Gear
For some keys or affix combos some talents or trinkets/enchants or whatever might be better than others. Look for those differences and try to understand why people are doing things differently.
Timers and Cooldowns
This is the Serenity usage from a random +25 Halls of Infusion log. The first thing you’ll notice are the big gaps around the 10 min mark. In this case the player could have used two more whole sets of his CD’s without losing anything. Especially as an inexperienced player, people often tend to hold cooldowns for the “perfect” scenario, but in most cases it’s simply better to (in this example) get two good and one great set of cooldowns instead of one perfect one.
This can shift to a little more holding, the higher your keys gets and the better coordinated your group is. You can check how to roughly use your cooldowns by just looking at the casts tab and select what you want to know about.
Ability Priority
Not exactly a thing that you can track by looking at logs but important to know for the upcoming point. There are different breakpoint depending on the target count weather or not you should use Spinning Crane Kick and therefor apply Mark of the Crane stacks.
Mark of the Crane
Although Spinning Crane Kick is taking a backseat this tier, Spinning Crane Kick usage with max Mark of the Crane (MotC) is still very important.
It’s a little hard to read Mark of the Crane management in Warcraftlogs. Thankfully, WoWanalyzer has a module dedicated to Mark of the Crane. Simply go to wowanalyzer.com, plug your Mythic+ log, select the player and do the following:
- Select the pull
- Go to the Statistics Tab
This sample shows the very first pull of Freehold, where there are approximately 10 enemies. Here Trill manages to do most of the fight with max Mark of the Crane stacks.
Skyreach/Skytouch
In general Skyreach uptime is not as important as in a single target encounter but you can gain some DPS by optimizing. Simply try to use Skyreach on more targets as a first step and then optimize the spells you use during those windows. Aim for about 25-30% uptime; you can check Skyreach uptime like this:
Funnel Damage
Strike of the Windlord is absolutely worth delaying if it means additional Thunderfist stacks. In a similar vein, foregoing Spinning Crane Kick in favor of Rising Sun Kick and Blackout Kick allows for additional funnel. Remember that Blackout Kick hits from Shadowboxing Treads and Teachings of the Monastery add extra chances to reset Rising Sun Kick‘s cooldown!
Fists of Fury
Similar to the Raid version, maintaining 5 ticks per cast outside of Serenity is important. However in addition to ticks, you also should make sure all ticks hit the max targets possible. You can check this the same way as in a Single target encounter.
