To the surprise of no one, the new tier bonuses for WW are disappointing, so it’s time to make the obligatory make stuff better post of the patch.
IMO, Blizz tries to overcomplicate things more often than not. As such, I’d like to suggest a simple 2 pc and 4pc.
2pc bonus: Rising Sun Kick has two charges.
4pc bonus: The critical strike chance of Rising Sun Kick is increased by 30%. Your Rising Sun Kick critical hits also reduce the cooldown of Strike of the Windlord by 5 seconds.
Simple bonuses, but both improve our rotation in some regard while also giving us something new.
Since our tier is Chi-Ji themed, here’s another.
2pc bonus: After Fists of Fury finishes channelling, your next Spinning Crane Kick deals X% more damage to your primary target OR your next Spinning Crane Kick will also cast Rushing Jade Wind for free.
4pc bonus: Fists of Fury now benefits from Mark of the Crane, and deals damage to ALL targets within 8 yards of you. So you basically have 360 degree FoF. [Applies with Turbo Fists too, so it grants 360 degree 100% parry].
Bonus crits on RSK are rather irrelevant given the crit rate is 80-100% for most of your damage regardless
Effectively the entire tier would be the strike reduction, which is rather poor.
SCK would require doing something close to 900% more damage on single target to be worth the press over RSK after FoF. Additionally, whats the point? You cast SCK over RSK? A free RJW proc on an SCK would be aoe only
The 2nd 4piece also does effectively nothing in single target, and while decent in AoE, not particularly exciting
Making tier sets is a rather complicated design space post the talent rework and they’ve restricted themselves with how hard locked windwalker is to Stomp and Keefer’s (about 20% of your damage occurs in ~8% of the fight)
I thought about doing something with Thunderfist, but decided off on it. Two charges of RSK helps catch some over efficiency and inefficiency we might get in our rotation and makes our burst hit a little harder. It’d also add some planning to our rotation seeing as we could get two guaranteed RSK crits after an FoF.
I wouldn’t consider the crit rate irrelevant because that means we get a soft crit cap and it lets us dump stats into mastery for more damage. If the aforementioned combo of two guaranteed RSK crits goes off, you’ve essentially cut SotWL’s CD by 25% and are poised to do so again in about 10 seconds because the CDR also goes to FoF. You could possibly see SotWL’s CD become halved. 75% if you’re lucky.
The thought behind it wasn’t to beat RSK. It was to mix things up in the rotation a little and beat BoK while also showing some love to a dead talent with some style.
At a base level, the 4pc would be an 18% buff for FoF, and it only gets stronger if there’s adds or extra targets. Honestly, I designed this tier set more for style.
I don’t think it is so complex to warrant our current tier which essentially boils down to flat damage buffs with extra steps that don’t alter our rotation.
Yea… I’m not a big fan of either of the talents. Skyreach could just be boiled down to 10 extra yards of range on all our abilities and moved higher up in the talent tree. I’d like to see the crit go. It feels like it drags the base damage of our abilities down to compensate for the high chance to crit when it comes to looking at it from the perspective of design.
FLS is beans. Apart from forcing the mobile melee dps to play rune of power after they just got rid of it for mage being a bad take, Blizz could have just brought back the RSK damage debuff from MoP/WoD and saved us a button and a talent point.
So did you want like a flat damage buff to our abilities on our tier like we do now even though it could be argued to just buff our base damage instead of having FoF and RSK rely on tier to prop it up like it has for the last 2 seasons?
Or did you want whatever RNG oogabooga blizz spit up at us for us to see with 10.2’s bonuses?
RSK is quite strong irrespective of any tier sets. FoF is more arguable.
Realistically they should aura buff the spec via bok/sck/fof to the tune of ~5% in ST and add new talents in the final row of the spec tree while removing FLS and possible bone dust brew. There aren’t a significant amount of changes that windwalker needs to be very competitive, as it is currently competitive on live.
Tier sets being tuned to be ~10%-15% damage in single target is nothing out of the ordinary and the current tier set falls within that range. The issue is next tier the trinkets and tier set are rather terrible for windwalker, so it will naturally fall behind specs who dont have terrible sets and trinkets.
Yea… but it’s not a good look when the last 2 tiers have amped RSK by 20-30%.
FLS and BDB should have never left SL. You’re not wrong when you say WW doesn’t need a lot of changes to be competitive. However, there are a myriad of improvements and changes that could be made to optimize and further improve WW too along with a crap lode of nerfs that could be reverted.
I think most people’s issue with the tier is the RNG and potential for some of the CDR to get eaten.
In what regard? Like it doesn’t do enough kind of bad, or bad for balance/design reasons kind of bad?
Also I think the RNG and the CDR are two separate concerns. My first thought wasn’t “oh man, it’s gonna be RNG for extra CDR.” It was “damnit why more RNG damage at all? Even if it is on BoK.”
Every BoK instantly refreshing RSK and FoF is a few % damage gain. A combination of mastery, chi generation, damage profile, and damage sources, make CDR quite bad, even if the SCK requirement was removed.
It doesn’t particularly matter if people disagree with damage variance. Windwalker will have variances because the game plays better with some variance. Windwalker is still qutie low variance wise compared to most other specs
I don’t follow. Does the CDR not convert to more/enough FoFs and RSKs for it to be meaningful, or are we unable to keep up with however many extra FoFs and RSKs are generated?
Yea and it used to be damn near zero bar crits, and whatever tier might have been in play at the time.