IiPunch - Monk Guide

Varga Purnikawa definitely benefits from a retrofit for your TP set leaning more into critical hits, and I agree with Maru Kala simply being "ok" as a WS.

I will note that you definitely need it at stage 4 / 5 before outpacing other options, though. At stage 3 I wasn't impressed and Godhands beat them clean.

Which weapon is better highly depends on what WS you want to use and what outside and native buffs you have. Veret is only good with Impetus and using vsmite for example. Godhands are for sure the most versatile and the most useful.

Also how long the fight is.
GH in sortie are fantastic because everything in your kit is available especially Footwork

In this scenario Vere is going to have a very hard time competing unless you are just using vs but TK is going to outshine that.

Personal experience with v25 ngai
I tried both on multiple attempts but
Vere felt to be the best choice due to the duration of the fight the damage difference per ws was not to significant when impetus was down and the white damage made up for the loss

Basically nothing is a DPS check anymore though, so who cares about +/-5% overall damage? Pretty sure you can do all content with Dyna D h2h technically.

Id argue at least some or most of your group need to be in that +5% to clear v25 content

This probably goes doubly so for doing it without doing a double ki

And if we are talking about nonstandard h2h
Sakpata fists but for that much work yeah gh or su5

Vere is better for Ngai. STR/Att and AM3.

Some run the sim on Prime s4/5 vs Vere/GH for science.

I did many times. It really depends on the buffs. Aria or not, highly over capped attack or just slightly, footwork/impetus, warcry from WAR, DT on the mob etc.

I was always curious how the crit rate from the stage 5 worked
Because of my beloved destroyers

Prime weapons also have the hidden dmg boost like relics?
Does it work on both hands?

I personally have never found it to be specifically "better", for Ngai or otherwise. I used to think this, but after experimenting for a long time, "it depends", lol.

With Impetus UP and an AM3 lead during the fight (Ask Sash pre-Boost), Smite and white damage is going to smack pretty good with Verethragna, but the weapon falls off insanely hard the moment Impetus falls, and Godhands shines for those 2 minutes afterwards. In some cases, I don't even bother switching back to Verethragna because, like Simon mentioned, different buffs contribute to a mix of results (Warcry, Tomahawk, (Box Step, Dia) etc) and it just made sense to keep trucking along with whatever I had equipped. Also, none of the Gaol fights to me felt like dps races, so the damage difference between Godhands and Verethragna seemed inconsequential at the end of the day. It was always about survival, and I never once looked at a fight and felt we would have won if I used one weapon vs the other. For Ngai specifically, the moment he turns his hate to you, your DPS is going to fall because you're going to want to swap to a full MDT reduction set. If this occurs during Impetus, you will not see the same level of dps when Ngai is not targeting you, because you will likely trade your empyrean body for something else (Adamantite, Nyame, Malignance). Ditto if it is fetters mode. There's just too many instances to consider and damage isn't the priority at this point in the fight, so I struggle to give Verethragna the edge in a fight where the monster fights back and you can't utilize it's full potential.

With that said, if I had to pick the better weapon for MNK, I would say Godhands. (I don't have a prime h2h, but) Godhands is busted, especially with Warcry and Footwork. I find myself using it more than Verethragna for most things nowadays, but I am team switch-weapons style of MNK. I don't consider "losing TP" to be an issue, because it's not. You get TP in 2-3 attack rounds, and you can switch weapons immediately after a WS so the loss is minimal. It's not as much of a detriment, not sure why people still mention it as if it's a detriment (I still swap weapons on NIN for certain instances too).

Someone who has it can correct me but it should be the same as relic and just proc on 1st hit of the 1st fist swing

Interesting. I also prefer GH as a go to in general but not on Ngai. Always felt it was better to hold TP with AM3 on Ngai. I've only won that fight 3 times but probably fought him 30+.

I do have a mental bias that "longer" fights = Verethragna wins, "shorter" fights = Godhands wind, but I don't have any numbers to support this besides my play style, visual experience and comparing my damage to others in live scenarios.

When I've started short fights (like Ambu) with AM3 Verethragna/Smite vs other monks who went full Godhands with all the buffs, I noticed I would always lose the parse, because Impetus takes a long time to catch up, even though I started with AM3 lead. I had to concede that VS really wasn't as strong as Howling and Tornado when the right buffs are up. Even holding TP seemed to favor Godhands way more than spamming or holding TP on Verethragna did, but again this could be my personal bias. I've just seen many situations where Verethragna did not appear as strong even though on paper out should be. Even farming Limbus trash on 130/135, Godhands felt stronger. Just my experience, ymmw

Really what gives Verethragna the advantage is Impetus when you can build up to the high damage potential. The moment you can't do that or its interrupted, I don't feel it's a significant lead over Godhands. Again, all depends on buffs and situations. It's really hard to say which one is better, but I just have a feel for which one I observed was "stronger".

Veret is the only empy that has AM working only for 1hit per round, which technically makes Prime hidden effect pretty much the same as Veret AM1, but on the other hand both are just mediocre. MNK has usually at least 3-4 punches and a kick per round. This means even with Veret am3 you are getting only like +20-25% white damage, while for example AM3 Ukonvasara is white damage +100%.

Yes, prime weapons have a hidden boost that works like relics. It's 20% double damage proc at stage 4, and 30% triple damage proc at stage 5. I can confirm that it only affects the first swing and not the second punch. It's no different from empyrean aftermath. The screenshot below is taken from Hurkan with a couple trusts. With just trust buffs damage numbers are a little low but all we care about here is isolating the triple damage from normal swings. You can clearly see that two triple damage procs occurred in this series of swings with no misses in between. There are 5 normal swings after the first and four after the second, ruling out the possibility that a triple attack occurred and only the first swing of a TA round counts. The triple damage is main hand only, and from experience I can also confirm first swing of a multi attack round only as well. This is how we would expect it to work so it's not surprising that it does indeed function this way.

My response to this is the same as Simon. I can't give a clear answer. I've been playing around with monk a fair bit in neo-limbus to feel the two out, and I'm currently leaning to liking Varga a bit better. The main takeaways I've come to are that

1. When Impetus is up, Varga puts out victory smite numbers that rival Vere. 213 base damage versus 178 and 15% crit rate on the weapon makes for some very impressive smites with impetus up

2. Maru Kala is a mediocre, but consistent weaponskill. Its damage never impresses me that much, but it's always around the same numbers. I primarily use it to get aftermath 3 up. raging, howling, tornado and dragon all put up bigger numbers than maru when they triple attack, and do similar damage as maru when they don't.

3. Varga needs a different mindset to use than most other primes. Whereas the bread and butter of my other primes is the prime weaponskill, Varga's strength lies in the weapon itself. I generally spam sarv with pinaka, ruthless with mpu gandring, and disaster with Laphria and use very few other weaponskills (save rudra's to break up weaponskill wall in sortie). But with Varga I use maru kala sparingly and run a rotation of standard monk weaponskills during their optimal windows.

Playing with varga is more or less the same as playing with Godhands; I just hold tp a little longer and weaponskill around 2000-2300 tp rather than 1500-1800. The rotation is straightforward. When impetus and berserk are up I'm heavily spamming smite and throwing in a few raging fists. When impetus and berserk fall I throw up footwork and switch to dragon and tornado kick. When footwork falls I rely largely on howling fist until the cycle resets. Maru kala is mainly used to maintain aftermath, but its best utilized with berserk so I occasionally sprinkle one in alongside raging and smite here and there. Yeah, I know. Basic monk stuff right? I've swapped between Godhands and Varga quite a bit in limbus now, and varga feels just as good to me as godhands. I like the prime quite a bit. It's definitely in the same tier as godhands is.

It's more because MNKs WS are very powerful especially when they multi hit, not because Maru is mediocre or ok. WAR has literally no good gaxe WS to use with Laphria beside Disaster. Gandring has only Rudra, but Rudra is not that strong unless with Climactic. Gkt has only Fudo if hybrids aren't working and fudo is also significantly weaker. Polearm has nothing. Scythe has only cross reaper etc.

H2h has vsmite during impetus, tornado/dragon during footwork, raging and howling. In super buffed scenario Maru might be the best WS overall because it would consistently push 99k. While something like Tornado would be 70-99k. This could change if there is 50% DT on target for a example in limbus, because tornado can spike way over 100k (even over 200k) then before reduction.

Also playing with Godhands you don't hold tp at all. That's a DPS loss. You can hold TP with Prime. That's usually break even or slight gain for dps.

For clarity, I didn't actually mean that you should hold TP with Godhands, but I was comparing the damage to Verethragna when I did hold TP (like for example during Ngai when you have hate and don't want to fire off WS and get caught in wrong set). But it probably looks like I was implying this is the way to use Godhands:


The word even is doing heavy lifting here. I was basically saying "even if I do hold TP, it still felt stronger than either spamming WS or holding TP with Verethragna". But I wasn't advocating for that play style with Godhands.

MNK is sitting at +950 TP Bonus with Mpaca head, Moonshade, and Godhands, so you're pretty much guaranteed effective 2k TP. With Warcry from WAR you're so close to 3k it's a risk to hold TP and waste DPS, and especially since Footwork is so short, you want to make the best use out of that minute buff.

Impulse Drive is not bad - with Shining One.

A lot of WS are good to great with specific weapons, but I'm talking about using weapons with WS that is not specifically boosted by that weapon.

It's worth mentioning that holding tp a few moments longer with Varga isn't a big deal either. Monk builds tp extremely quickly and the animation delay for weaponskilling, while small, is still a factor to consider. It takes very little time for varga to go from 1k to 2k+, and I'm confident its white damage and weaponskill strength make up for any differences. The fact that varga has base damage 213 means every weaponskill is that much stronger.

I don't have Varga, but I doubt it would beat out AM3 Vere with Impetus and VS spamming. I would be very curious to see actual sim numbers though as PDL is a tricky stat.

Sounds like most agree that GH is just generally better though. Most fights you want to bring MNK you are either relying heavily on Skillchain damage or you need to switch weaponskills so you don't wall and GH does so much better in those situations. I am generally disappointed in Vere's performance as the only times I am punching things I end up having to put on GH.

Is Kparser still being maintained, or is there some modern equivalent? I wouldn't mind gathering some data over the course of a month or two and see what I get between the two weapons. Scoreboard is fine for general analytics, but it doesn't break down weaponskill data by specific weaponskills, and kparser has a much broader range of things it collected data on.

It's been a hot minute since I've seen a memloc update for kparse

Scoreboard is rather inaccurate

Godhands have 221 damage, not 197, unless you somehow have few Prime weapons and unaugmented Godhands :)

Yeah, my bad. Updated that.

This is what I use, it breaks down a lot of stats: Crits, Multi hits, accuracy, separates WSs & skill chain damage, shield blocks, evasion, etc:

https://github.com/flippant/parse