Stunning Fist v Stunning Blow

[Yaga_Nub]

Ok, for a newish monk type which is really better?

[rimble]

Stunning Fist is almost always better. There needs to be like a 20 point difference between your Strength and Wisdom for Stunning Blow to be better. Stunning Fist is a 6 second cooldown too, so you can use it twice as often as Stunning Blow with it's 15 second cooldown.

[Trillea]

Ok, for a newish monk type which is really better?

Go STR based, with a highish WIS, be a dwarf, and get both. Dwarf for the tactics enhancements.

For further fun, go light path, get Kukan-Do and pick Sap for a feat, and nothing moves around you very much...

[dkyle]

They both have the same effect, it's just cooldown, save DC, and ki cost that separate them.

The ki cost (10) of Stunning Fist is irrelevant, or at least it should be.

Stunning Fist is WIS-based DC, but gets half-Monk-level added. Stunning Blow is STR-based DC, but has no direct benefit from level. At level 20, the breakeven point is STR that's 20 higher than WIS.

The cooldown is probably the biggest difference. Stunning Fist can be used once per 6 seconds, about a third the length of Stunning Blow's. So you can use it about 3 times as often.

In short: if your WIS is decent, Fist is better for the lower cooldown and potentially higher DC, but if your STR is also good, you might want both.

[maha0201]

end game for me blow 33 fist 34 (blow 34 with rage) i started 16 15 16 8 12 8...
so both

[GBantaR]

You can pretty easily do both, especially with a Strength-based Monk. I actually have a Str-based HOrc Ftr/Monk built around Stunning Fist AND Stunning Blow and I have great DCs on both - each lands about 75% of the time and I'm only using +4 stunners atm (level 9).

The best split I've found is 13/7 Monk/Ftr, gives you lots of Monk levels for Stunning Blow DCs and Ftr 7 gives you Stunning Blow +3 enhancement.

[Junts]

Ok, for a newish monk type which is really better?

Fist is easier to bring to extremely high levels and has a much shorter (6s vs 15s) cooldown

However, without stunning blow, you can only take racial and not class-based tactics enhancements. Fighter strat: stunning blow will also modify stunning fist, but its unavailable unless you have both feats. Racial tactics (wf/dwarf) modify all tactical feats and will modify fist universally.

Even as a str or dex-based monk its quite easy to get a good stunning fist dc (I have a str-based wf with 24 wis and a 41 dc), but having both can also be great, primarily because stunning blow gives you something to use to begin fights when for whatever reason you lack ki, or the enemy gets quite lucky and resisted a stunning fist, etc. Getting sblow high on a monk is pretty difficult, but it can be brought up to being a useful 2nd option if you want it to.

[Leatherneck]

Ok, for a newish monk type which is really better?

Leveling up my light monk I found both useful. Now with all the shintao prestige stuns at level 19 I am considering switching it out. It all boils down to playstile and what points you have in wisdom and strength. Stunning fist is my main stunner where blow just helped augment my mob control ability.

[Carpone]

Ok, for a newish monk type which is really better?

Whichever has the higher DC.

For a pure monk (or almost pure monk), that will be Stunning Fist. For a buildout like my monk/fighter, Stunning Blow is better.

[TPICKRELL]

I've got toons with one or the other and a toon with both.

They both work very well, but I find them to be very different in terms of usage for my toons.

Stunning Blow is the heavy hitter with a long cool down, so I find it much more difficult to use continuously in fights (other than in epics). The DC on Stunning Blow scales with Strength, so it can get really high, especially for the bursts when you are raged, titan gripped, power surged...

Stunning Fist fits much better in the flow as an every mob weapon for me. By the time I stun one mob, kill it and move to the next mob Fist is coming off timer and about ready to use again. The burst DC is lower than Blow but my base DC is generally higher and the shorter timer makes it fit in the flow of battle much better at least for me. While Fist costs 10 ki, the extra ki from hitting stunned mobs generally make it a ki generator at high levels.

They are both good options, so if your DC is good enough take both. Particularly on a dark monk.. With Kukan-do, having a third stun option is a bit less useful for a Shintao monk.

[Kinerd]

Stunning Fist costs 15 ki, which can be difficult to have lying around on a new monk. You can always switch out feats later (so long as you keep in mind that Stunning Fist can only be taken as a martial monk feat), I recommend getting both to start and phasing out Stunning Blow when you don't use it anymore.

[Hecore]

Whichever has the higher DC.

For a pure monk (or almost pure monk), that will be Stunning Fist. For a buildout like my monk/fighter, Stunning Blow is better.

I don't completely agree. It seems to me that if your Stunning Fist had a 33 DC (and let's say it stuns 50% of the time), and your Stunning Blow has a 38 DC (75% stuns) then even with the huge DC difference Stunning Fist wins out - you get 2.5 attempts using Fist in the same time it takes to try a single Blow.

[Kinerd]

I don't completely agree. It seems to me that if your Stunning Fist had a 33 DC (and let's say it stuns 50% of the time), and your Stunning Blow has a 38 DC (75% stuns) then even with the huge DC difference Stunning Fist wins out - you get 2.5 attempts using Fist in the same time it takes to try a single Blow.

This is an interesting way of looking at the problem that I had not considered previously. We can compare the probabilities of at least one stun going off as follows: If Stunning Fist has an X% chance of stunning, it has a 1 - (1 - X)^2.5 chance of generating at least one stun in 15 seconds. Stunning Blow will have a min((X + 5 * Y), .95) chance, where Y is the difference in DC. We can restrict ourselves to the cases where Y is less than (1 - X)/5 to get rid of the minimum bit but to use a technical term that leaves us with an "ugly" equation, so I'll just solve numerically and make a graph:



That is, if Stunning Fist has a 15% chance to stun, the Stunning Blow DC needs to be 4 or more higher for Stunning Blow to be the better option in terms of stuns per 15 seconds.

A really interesting result comes off the edges of the graph, though: starting at 70% Stunning Fist chance, 1 - (1 - X)^2.5 has a value higher than 95%, so it is better than Stunning Blow no matter how much higher its DC is. It also should be mentioned that the 5% Stunning Fist point has the caveat that the 2 DC difference is 2 effective DC, because fumbled saves means Stunning Fist will always have at least a 5% chance of success. A 15% Stunning Blow is better than a 5% Stunning Fist, which means for instance that (against a 19 save) 20 Stunning Fist to 22 Stunning Blow works but 10 Stunning Fist to 12 Stunning Blow does not.