11.1 Windwalker Monk Feedback

In Development Undermine(d) PTR Discussion
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11.1 Windwalker Monk Feedback

Tier Set

I’ll just state first that overall it’s… fine. It doesn’t excite me by any means and with proper tuning, it’ll perform well enough. However, I think it’s saying something that I was more excited at the synergy possibilities from the first tier set of this expansion more than this one.

Much of that has to do with the very overly complicated wording/design of the tier set that ultimately ends up with no significant build or playstyle shifts, but still is very daunting to read.

My main feedback for this tier set is that gameplay wise you don’t really ever notice the difference. Yes, your Fists of Fury button lights up which is neat, but barring that you can’t really feel the difference this tier set is making. The example of a Tier Set design that does a good job of that is Ret Paladin. You can obviously notice when the tier set is doing its thing and it makes you feel good when it does.

My hope for the next tier is that we get a Tier Set design that thinks ‘outside the box’ a little bit more and encourages different builds rather than a three paragraph essay that ultimately results in your Fists of Fury doing more damage somehow.

Mark of the Crane Removal

In the past, I’ve been a pretty big proponent of Mark of the Crane as I found it to be one of the more engaging aspects of Windwalker Monk gameplay in AoE. So when I first read the patch note that it was removed, I was apprehensive to say the least.

So far at least, I’m delighted to report that I haven’t found this change to be offensive… yet. I do think there is a noticeable void in engaging gameplay design hooks now though.

What I mean by this is when you look at the talent tree which I’ll get more into detail later, you tend to have a hard time brainstorming interesting ways to increase Windwalker AoE damage through talents that plays off of existing effects that isn’t just hamfisting new abilities or tacked on effects.

I’d say Mark of the Crane lent itself gameplay wise to an overall greater feeling of interconnectedness with our abilities which itself lent itself to fit more of our ‘Combo’ nature. It definitely lost its way since Legion and I’m interested to see where our AoE goes from this point as this doesn’t really address our problem in S1 of TWW which was our lack of oomph on larger (8+ mobs) pulls.

Sidenote: With the removal of Mark of the Crane, it really makes Storm, Earth, and Fire feel pretty meaningless as a main offensive CD option. Mark of the Crane was the last reason you could point to as to why SEF still existed. In the distant future, it’d be interesting to see other avenues explored as the buggy pet nature of SEF has reared its head this expansion and will seemingly continue to do so forever. (Perhaps Tigereye Brew?)

Sidesidenote: It’s going to be a real pain in the rear to balance the damage of Spinning Crane Kick versus Rising Sun Kick in Single Target now, and because of how it’s setup, build diversity is effectively killed because of how insane Dance of Chi-Ji is in single target. It makes what is Single Target and what is AoE very muddied in terms of playstyle and build choice since the Single Target options aren’t strong enough and there isn’t a clear distinction of the two on the talent tree.

Talent Changes

To start us off, I’d like to say rest in peace Darting Hurricane 2024-2025. We hardly knew ye.

But enough about that! Out with the old, in with the new is what I always say. The new, in this case, being Slicing Winds. When I initially read this talent I said to myself, “Wow, that’s a neat idea to take from Plunderstorm!” but after many long nights of contemplation, some quality Training dummy time, and a few dungeon sessions, I can firmly say that the current implementation of this needs some work.

I have a few gripes with it: First off, the ability itself. It’s pretty annoying when using it that it moves you so far forward that you often have to walk about towards the enemies you just hit leading to unneeded downtime. Tuning wise, it performs okay but for an AoE centric capstone, I would want it to contribute more in dungeons.

But, I think what stands out the most to me is how the ability just feels tacked on. It doesn’t interact with any existing abilities or mechanics that we have and just becomes another button press every 30 seconds. I think this can/should be accomplished through talents, but more on that later in the ‘Suggestions’ section of the post.

In regards to talent feedback that was untouched so far this PTR, I’d say that the bottom section of the tree is potentially more competitive with Slicing Winds if the kinks can be worked out with that, but there are still a few dead sections in the bottom third. Most notably, the Last Emperor’s Capacitor and Jadefire Stomp sections still have horrendous pick rate, with Jadefire Stomp most likely needing a triple digit buff to see any sort of play. The middle section of the tree has grown somewhat stale with Inner Peace being phased out as we gain more secondary stats and thus not needing the extra resource provided, Drinking Horn Cover and Spiritual Focus being too lackluster numerically to consider, and Rushing Jade Wind is now in somewhat of a strange place without its Mark of the Crane tagging functionality (I’m aware it was buffed).

What I’m most worried about talent wise going into 11.1 is the rise of No SotWL builds. Strike of the Windlord (SotWL) has begun to peter off as the expansion has progressed, partially due to the continued buffs to Courageous Impulse and left side of the tree, but too much of Windwalker’s current design ethos seems to have SotWL in mind as a ‘core’ ability. While there are many awesome talents that increase the effectiveness of SotWL, something needs to be done to increase the potency of the base spell itself to prevent the No SotWL meta from dominating next season.

On a final note, I’d like to comment on the conflicting themes regarding Blackout Kick in our talents. Teachings of the Monastery and the Courageous Impulse ideals seem to contradict one another leading to a confusion design. It’s frustrating to me that for newer players, nowhere does it state that the extra Blackout Kicks from Teachings of the Monastery don’t benefit from Mastery or Courageous Impulse. It feels messy to me.

What I believe should be done is reduce the damage of extra Blackout Kicks gained from Teachings of the Monastery to 33% from 100%, but they would now benefit from Mastery and effects such as Courageous Impulse. This would feel way better as it would be way easier to tune the base damage of Blackout Kick to assure it feels weighty enough when you press it, and it would make Mastery scaling more helpful. I don’t know if there is enough development time for this to come to pass in 11.1, but this needs to be addressed going forward at some point.

Hero Talents

Conduit of the Celestials

When I first read the changes coming to Conduit of the Celestial this patch, I was crestfallen. The Heart of the Jade Serpent window felt very satisfying and while it had its issues with bad RNG, it was the part about Conduit gameplay that I loved the most.

Despite this, I recognized the shortcomings of the Heart of the Jade Serpent window. It emulated the Serenity window (RIP) in all facets including the extraordinary waste of resources that occurred during it. I believe there is a direction that you can turn Heart of the Jade Serpent that is a healthier version of that playstyle that also incorporates the other Celestial nodes so that it truly feels that during that window all the celestials are working in tandem through you.

With the current changes, it makes the Heart of the Jade Serpent window feel lacking, almost incomplete in design. By removing Rising Sun Kick from Heart of the Jade Serpent, you’ve created this issue where there are effectively dead globals in this precious window where you have to Tiger Palm to prevent overcapping Energy or Blackout Kick to fish for an RSK reset that just feels bad.

It also really stinks that a cool new talent is added and it’s clear that care has been taken to give it added synergy with the Conduit hero talent tree, but because you either have to take Xuen’s Bond to align your cooldowns together or just delay Conduit usage by 30 sec each time, you have a hard time making that build work. It would be nice if there was an option in the hero talent tree to increase Conduit’s cooldown to 2 min but raise its damage or something so that you don’t have to waste that precious talent point to take Xuen’s Bond.

It’s no secret that Conduit is the more undesirable of the two hero talent choices for Windwalker and I think the changes to it in 11.1 in addition to the itemization changes (loss of Transmitter) is going to make it harder for Conduit to succeed as a hero talent option, but initial results seem promising. I will detail more of what I’d like to see in the Suggestions section below.

Shado-Pan

Playing Shado-Pan feels like you’re on board a train going nowhere. It almost seems like this is being held together by duct tape because there are so many glaring design failures when you play it that could be so easily rectified that it’s kind of annoying until you become numb to it.

How this went without any changes thus far in the 11.1 PTR is crazy to me and outside of useless nodes there are a few baseline mechanical problems it still has.

  1. Wisdom of the Wall should trigger whenever you proc Flurry Strikes rather than after 10 to prevent weird setup scenarios on training dummies.
  2. The ‘deck of cards’ that Wisdom of the Wall has should reset whenever a boss encounter resets.
  3. There is still an infuriating issue that popped up from the 11.0.5 changes where Flurry Strikes will fail to fire off its charges if you attack a target you haven’t attacked previously in an encounter.

Not to mention the Wisdom buffs are hilariously imbalanced with one another and it seems like the tree is balanced with taking most advantage of Shadow Wisdom of the Wall buff as much as possible. I’m not really expecting or asking for a whole rework to Shado-Pan but sanding up some of its edges this patch would be very welcome.

Suggestions

We’ve finally arrived at the aforementioned ‘Suggestions’ section of the post. The formatting of this will be different from the rest of the post, more akin to traditional patch notes to more clearly outline what I’d like to see change in addition to what has already changed. These are semi-realistic in scope and don’t do too much, but I believe if they were made would made me and many others really excited to play Windwalker next tier.

11.1 Rework Iteration Suggestion

  • Added new UI HUD elements to indicate when the player has Dance of Chi-Ji procs.
  • Updated the UI HUD element for Blackout Kick! to indicate when the player has more than 1 proc remaining.
  • The following talents have been removed:
    • Communion with Wind
  • Strike of the Windlord damage increased by 75% and its cooldown has been reduced to 30 sec.
  • Teachings of the Monastery now causes your next Blackout Kick to strike an additional time for 33% damage (was 100%).
  • Additional Blackout Kick strikes from Teachings of the Monastery now benefit from the damage bonus of Courageous Impulse and Mastery: Combo Strikes.
  • Rushing Jade Wind now accelerates each time it strikes a lone enemy, dealing damage more frequently.
  • Slicing Winds has been relocated to where Communion with Wind was previously.
  • Added a new choice node of Energetic Tempest and Crackling Gale.
  • New Talent: Energetic Tempest - Slicing Winds has 1 additional charge and its cooldown is reduced by 0.25 sec each time Rushing Jade Wind deals damage.
  • New Talent: Crackling Gale - Targets struck by Slicing Winds who are affected by Gale Force have its duration refreshed (up to 20 sec). In addition, Gale Force now also increases the Nature damage your target receives from you, your Storm, Earth, and Fire clones, and Xuen by 25% as long as it’s active.
  • Xuen’s Bond now reduces the cooldown of Invoke Xuen, the White Tiger by 30 sec instead of reducing it when you activate Combo Strikes.
  • Conduit of the Celestials
    • Tiger Palm now extends the duration of Heart of the Jade Serpent by 0.5 sec while it is active. Courage of the White Tiger doubles this effect.
    • Teachings of the Monastery now has an 100% increased chance to reset the remaining cooldown on Rising Sun Kick while Heart of the Jade Serpent is active.
    • August Dynasty has been redesigned - Now increases the damage and healing of Celestial Conduit by 30%, but the cooldown is increased by 30 sec.
    • Flight of the Red Crane’s energy regeneration bonus increased to 40% (was 20%).
  • Shado-Pan
    • High Impact has been redesigned - Now causes Flurry Strikes to apply a debuff to enemies for 30 sec. Enemies who die explode, dealing Physical damage to uncontrolled enemies within 8 yds for each stack on the target. Max 20 stacks.
    • Lead from the Front now grants you an absorb shield for any healing done that exceeds your maximum health.
    • Whirling Steel’s cooldown has been reduced to 60 sec.
    • Wisdom of the Wall is now granted whenever Flurry Strikes occur rather than after 10 Flurry Strikes.
    • Reduced duration of Shadow Wisdom of the Wall to 32 sec (was 40).
    • Wisdom of the Wall now increases the effect of your mastery by 40% (was 25%).
    • Wisdom of the Wall now increases your Dodge and Critical Strike Chance by 50% of your Versatility bonus (was 25%).
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This has a lot of good ideas and feedback in it.

For Slicing winds the 2 choice nodes seem like great ideas to give some flavor to the ability. I don’t like how linked it is with SotwL, both that its locked at the end of its tree and the it also has a 30s cd timing. This leads me to think you’d always want to send SotwL > SW which is kind of boring. Maybe desyncing them a bit by making it 1 min so you have the talent to have an extra charge make it act similar to a 30s if you want it or use the other talent you proposed and make it feel like a power cd you want to use.

For Conduit of the Celestials I’m glad you pointed out the RSK, SW and talent point/cd timings issue. The HoJS window is the bread and butter of that tree. Dumping all your resources to throw out a ton of burst is a cool playstyle even if there is some resource issues after. Without RSK on the CDR it feels like there are dead spots if you dont have good resets. Having SW get CDR is interesting to have some fillers in between HoJS but you will never get 2 casts in that window to get the huge burst. Feels off for the idea of that tree.
Having Conduit of the Celestials be on a 90s cycle with no real supporting trinkets feels off too. The idea was interesting at 1st since it added value to Xuens bond, but Xuen has its own problems and is seen mostly as a tool for invokers delight. Throwing SW into the mix just doesnt feel right.
It would be nice to hear/see what the devs intended this hero tree to be. It seems it should be a spikey burst style, but it cant execute st or aoe properly with how it is now.

For Shado-pan you nailed it. Its just boring. Flurry strikes has some buggy interaction, the Wisdom of the wall RNG isnt needed, and its defensive choice just seem too weak.

Some generic things i think should be looked at.
Rushing Jade Wind losing its identity without MotC. It was nice because it let you get them out quick and get the SCK dmg up. Now its just a weak aoe ability that is completely in the background with some small affect on the red crane talent in the conduit tree.

Bounce back still being a finicky defensive that doesn’t really work.

Emperors capacitor and power of the thunder king being untouched and looking like just unused talents for another season. Same thing for JFS and its choice nodes.

Normally i don’t care for Randomness in class tier and being forced into talent build because of the tier but since this is the season of gambling it would work to have the jackpot style set and have it charge Emperors capacitor

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The best fix for Shado-Pan would be to change Flurry Strikes from a proc to a normal ability. This would allow to cast Flurry Strikes when it is desirable, e.g. in combination with trinkets or similar dps cooldowns.

Currently it happens often that Flurry Strikes go off when there are not enough mobs around or they are already almost dead, which wastes the proc completely.

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Mostly I just want acclamations gone, and rsk buffed, put rsk splash damage in place of acclamations, and once again allow us to cast abilities during sck channel.

For shado pan I think flurry strikes would work better on a chi basis rather than energy, same for sef CDR.

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does anyone know if clones are going to interact with slicing winds in some way or form ?, because when i use SEF, and then slicing winds clones are just there standing still doing autos.

Also while i like the fact that we got a new button to press to help us in AoE damage, having our aoe ability at 30 sec, i’m not sure how much i like that, hopefully i won’t get the same treatment as SoTW

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WW Monk is just my alt, but one I’ve enjoyed since the end of WoD now.

I don’t know what it means for performance, but from a gameplay perspective I’m gonna call everything done with Conduit in this latest build is a huge win. It’s annoying to be forced to spend the talent point on Xuen cooldown, but the excitement and acceleration around the Heart of the Jade Serpent is a lot of fun to me.

A possible bug? My channeled abilities still seem to randomly cancel. It’s not something that very common at all so I don’t know what I’m doing to cause this if someone know. It also happens to me on live servers.

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January 15th Update

First of all, I’d like to say I’m very happy to see that feedback is not only being read, but acted upon and while I obviously don’t expect all of my wishlist in my previous post to make it to live, I hope that it helps enlighten some of the issues the spec is enduring. My feedback for this post is focused on what was changed this week.

Slicing Winds and the Forced Movement Problem

I think the buff to the damage and change to the distance travelled are both great changes to put Slicing Winds in a position to be played. The distance change in particular is a game changer that makes the spell feel a lot better to use.

I would like to however reiterate my point that it still feels out-of-place in the rotation and could do with more kit interactions like I outlined in my previous post.

The lack of synergy is important to me because as a ‘combo’ focused martial artist, it doesn’t really lean into that at all. I don’t think that everyone of our abilities needs to do so, but when there’s ample opportunity to add some cool synergy stuff since this ability has a lot of ‘required’ nodes to pick it, it leaves me wanting more.

EDIT: I forgot to mention that I noticed during testing M+ Rookery that Slicing Winds has a hitbox problem regarding giant stationary mobs like the final boss where it is impossible to get Slicing Winds to hit that should be investigated.

However, there’s a more important recurring theme I’d like to highlight that focuses on the inclusion of Slicing Winds and the possible addition of Emperor’s Capacitor to our rotation.

One of the more prevalent issues in Windwalker Monk’s rotation currently and, is going to get worse with the inclusion of Slicing Winds, is the inability to cast utility spells while doing a combination of forced movement/channeled spells.

To give an example of what I’m talking about, I’d like to give an example in a dungeon environment. Let’s say you have all your cooldowns and abilities available and there are two mobs that have important casts that you will need to potentially be available to interrupt. You start off the pull by casting reaching max Chi, you cast Xuen and Storm, Earth, and Fire in the same global, and then begins a 5-8 second sequence of spells where it’s going to be significantly more difficult for you to cast any utility spells (interrupt, leg sweep, ring of peace). Windwalker isn’t unique in that it has a ramp up time, but it is unique as a melee class with its abundance of slow channeled spells and forced movement spells that prevent it from doing things.

This sequence goes as follows:

Strike of the Windlord (to apply Gale Force)

Fists of Fury

Rising Sun Kick

Slicing Winds

Whirling Dragon Punch

Spinning Crane Kick

This might not seem like much and it isn’t, if the pull contains mobs that are simple enough. What causes frustration is when you encounter mobs such as the Darkfuse Jumpstarters that continually spawn death puddles on the ground. It creates a stressful situation where if I use my Whirling Dragon Punch or Slicing Winds at the improper time, I just die. This doesn’t happen to really any other Melee spec in the game.

Long-winded rant aside, my message here is that it would be really nice if there were some more quality-of-life improvements to Windwalker’s rotation to ease the burden. It seems like there has been a concerted effort to cut down on mechanics that Windwalker has to think about in its rotation so I don’t think it’s entirely out of line to ask of these.

This has been an issue in the past but due to the increased value of haste and therefore Fists of Fury being channeled more often combined with the Spinning Crane Kick channel change, it’s become sort of overwhelming and with the addition of Slicing Winds and possibly Emperor’s Capacitor in the mix, I can foresee some frustrating interactions coming in our future.

Specifically, It would be nice to be able to:

  • Cast Spear Hand Strike during Fists of Fury/Spinning Crane Kick channels without stopping them.
  • Move while channeling Crackling Jade Lightning
    • This will be important because of the Emperor’s Capacitor buffs and is a common sore spot for people about that talent. Perhaps a compromise would be to take the channel time reduction from Power of the Thunder King and attach it to Emperor’s Capacitor, albeit at a reduced value.
  • Have greater control of movement during Whirling Dragon Punch.

Talent Diversity

I’ve been very pleased with the recent buffs to Last Emperor’s Capacitor and Slicing Winds that result in a greater potential of build variety in the lower third of the talent tree. It has been fun to me as a veteran Windwalker player to be excited to experiment from patch-to-patch. There seems to have been a concerted effort to patch to move us away from the middle cluster of nodes and into play styles we haven’t explored much this expansion thus far due to poor tuning.

I know this is a short PTR cycle, but it would be nice to see this effort also directed towards the middle third of the tree as that area is suffering from talent diversity as well.

To start, I’d like to reiterate that Strike of the Windlord feels like you only pick it’s required for the nodes that follow it. I outlined what I’d like to see done to it in my previous post.

Furthermore, I’d say that Rushing Jade Wind needs some extra flavor added to it as it feels sort of bland after the removal of Mark of the Crane and now lacks that utility aspect it had before making it more reliant on tuning which seems (so far) is missing the mark.

Lastly, I wanna touch on a few nodes that could use some love:

Spiritual Focus has been undertuned the entirety of the expansion and with the recent changes to Conduit of the Celestials where you gain a Heart of the Jade Serpent window every time you use Strike of the Windlord, it would be nice if this was buffed significantly to see some play in that regard.

Inner Peace started off as a solid option in the middle, but as we gain an increasing amount of secondary stat and start to become more flush with resource, this node loses a lot of its luster. I’m not really sure what could be done here as another resource gaining node that doesn’t path to anywhere important is not very appealing.

Meridian Strikes has largely been ignored and even in the niche situations where it could have valuable (Queen Ansurek P2 comes to mind), the CDR is a little too inconsistent to make it align correctly. I think it would be interesting if the CDR portion of this talent had the conditionals that Xuen’s Bond previously had where SEF spirits count towards the CDR as well. This could open this node up as a niche pick on execute fights or on fights where you can line up ToD on important adds consistently.

Martial Mixture and in the same vein, Touch of the Tiger seem rather listless with the removal of the S1 TWW Tiger Palm centric tier set and could both use some love in order to increase diversity on how you path down the tree.

Hero Talent Diversity

While our spec talent tree diversity is increasing, our hero talent tree diversity remains universally stagnant and the choice nodes need significant work to become competitive.

Shado-Pan

For every Shado-Pan, High Impact needs to be evaluated as its value since the Flurry Strikes change in 11.0.5 is resulting in this node contributing a measly 0.01% damage overall in a M+ dungeon. Prior to 11.0.5, there was a possibility that while Flurry Strikes were firing out, you could quickly tab target and ‘mark’ several mobs to gain increased value from this node, but it’s no longer possible and frankly was extremely unenjoyable gameplay when it was possible.

Lead from the Front needs to either be buffed significantly as the output from the spells affected is so little that the healing is unnoticeable, or make the healing give you an absorb shield if it overheals instead to give this node some edge over the on-demand self-healing that Protect and Serve provides.

The choice between Whirling Steel and Predictive Training may be one of the more polarizing choices in all choice nodes for Hero Talents as if you are ever able to gain any value from Predictive Training (or are a Brewmaster), the near permanent 10% damage reduction is invaluable. However, on the flip side if you are unable to gain value from this node then Whirling Steel is a disappointing consolation prize. Personally, long term I’d like to see this node just redesigned entirely, but in the interim, I think a sizable buff to Whirling Steel would be nice.

Conduit of the Celestials

With Fists of Fury and Spinning Crane Kick dealing an even larger percentage of our damage in all situations, it further makes the choice of Temple Training vs Xuen’s Guidance redundant.

Getting Rushing Jade Wind for free from Restore Balance is nice, but unexciting. Yu’lon’s Knowledge’s duration increase doesn’t really do anything at all and it would be interesting to see if there can be something done to either Rushing Jade Wind itself or to these nodes to make this a more meaningful choice.

With August Dynasty affecting Jadefire Stomp which has a near 0% pick rate, this isn’t really a choice, but as I highlighted in my previous post, it could be an opportunity as one of the problems Conduit of the Celestials suffers from is inflexibility. Being a 90 sec CD makes this hero talent option entirely reliant on the availability and strength of 90 sec CD trinkets in that particular season. With S2 of TWW, there aren’t any 90 sec CD trinket that are strong from the raid and you have to settle for a delve trinket which can only reach Hero track. Replacing August Dynasty with a talent that increases the cooldown of Conduit to 2 min would save you a talent point on your spec tree from not having to pick Xuen’s Bond, and would allow you to play this hero talent option more often.

SCK and Big AoE

The removal of Mark of the Crane and subsequent 80% increase to Spinning Crane Kick’s damage is a major change and one that we have finally gotten some time to test and analyze the repercussions from.

One immediate side effect is that Dance of Chi-Ji becomes a required talent pick in all situations and because of this, Spinning Crane Kick is usually in the top 3 of damage sources even on Single Target. This is alarming to me personally as it feels unhealthy that our highest damage on Single Target is the same as our highest damage in AoE. This does have a knock-on effect of making our low target (2-5) cleave very strong. This is an area that we have usually suffered in the past and it does feel good to have a strong niche.

The same cannot be said for our large target (8+) AoE. This situation kinda feels hopeless with the current design and we are just destined to fall behind every other spec in that situation as there isn’t a talent option or anything we can do to increase our effectiveness there. In an extreme anecdotal example, on a large first pull in Cinderbrew Meadery, I did roughly half the DPS of a Destro Warlock. Now, I don’t think Windwalker should be good at everything, in fact I think it’s healthy for specs to excel at different things, but the delta there seems to be a bit much. I think moving forward, if there is a want from the developers/class balance people to make Windwalker more effective there, the soft target cap of 5 on Spinning Crane Kick and maybe other spells would need to be raised to 8 as just increasing the damage of Spinning Crane Kick would make it even more dominant in situations where it feels like it shouldn’t be - like in single target.

Thank you for your efforts thus far in this PTR cycle and even if nothing more changes, I appreciate the effort put in to make Windwalker feel different this patch.

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Before I go into “feedback mode”, I want to stress that I was really happy to see the most recent changes and how closely they followed the suggestions we’ve made since the ptr has gone live. Such a direct response was highly unexpected but greatly appreciated, so thank you.

I can’t agree more with the suggestion of making Slicing Winds and (incidentally) Jadefire Stomp more interactive with the specialization’s mechanics. Both of these spells lack a resource cost, do not generate any resources, do not have any cast conditions like Whirling Dragon Punch, and have no other effect on other Windwalker abilities. Any one of these factors can be added to make both abilities feel more like they’re part of the kit rather than tacked on. The ideal solution would be a unique interaction with other abilities, similar to how Bonedust Brew interacted with Spinning Crane Kick. More on that idea in a second.

I think the qol issues with the forced movement from Whirling Dragon Punch and Slicing Winds can be fixed extremely easily with a solution that is already used for (at least) two other specs: Augmentation Evoker’s Breath of Eons and Outlaw Rogue’s Killing Spree both cause any damage taken during the spell’s effect to be staggered, either for a large portion or its entirety. There is no reason to not add this effect to Whirling Dragon Punch and Slicing Winds, if only to mitigate the consequence of mistakes.

The other qol suggestions by Jfunk for Fists of Fury and Crackling Jade Lightning would also be immensely appreciated, of course.

Back to the mention of Bonedust Brew, it seems clear to me that the main difference between Dragonflight, where Windwalkers were relatively strong in aoe, and The War Within, is that we lost a whole offensive cooldown in the rework. I very much support the removal of Bonedust Brew for various reasons that I’ve talked about in the past, but unfortunately it hasn’t been properly replaced. It seems fair to say that Gale Force was intended to replace the bulk of Bonedust Brew, albeit in a more reliable yet weaker form. While it fulfills that purpose in single target situations, the main strength of Bonedust Brew in aoe was its Chi refund when striking affected targets with Spinning Crane Kick, effectively making it a 1 Chi cost spell during Bonedust’s duration.

It is possible that the addition of Ordered Elements was intended to replace that secondary effect, but the fact that it requires Rising Sun Kick as a trigger makes it far less effective in multi-target situations.

We can kill two birds with one stone here. By adding an interesting interaction with Spinning Crane Kick to Slicing Winds, you can make it a more integrated spell and restore Windwalkers’ aoe potential to what many people expect from it. My suggestion would be to have Slicing Winds apply a 10-15 sec debuff to all targets it strikes, which causes Spinning Crane Kick to have a % chance to generate 1 chi if striking the same target. The percentage can be adjusted for balance, so that one can expect an extra chi every 1-3 casts. Less involved options could be to simply add additional damage events when striking affected targets with Spinning Crane Kick, with a set amount of AP%, or straightforwardly increase Spinning Crane Kick’s own damage if the targets are debuffed.

The above suggestions would likely exacerbate the single target problem with Spinning Crane Kick which Jfunk pointed out, but that is a problem that requires its own solution anyway. Simply adding a passive effect to Spinning Crane Kick that makes it deal 20% more damage per target struck up until 5 (or more) targets would be fairly simple and undo any damage done by the removal of Mark of the Crane.

Lastly there is Strike of the Windlord, which I’ve talked about plenty before, but I’ll gladly repeat myself as often as needed: the aoe scaling is absurdly poor and should be increased. Even adding square root scaling after 2 targets would be a significant improvement, but there is no good reason to not let it square root scale after 5 like our other aoe abilities. This would, again, be a major boon to our currently mediocre aoe burst potential and help greatly with our viability in mythic+ dungeons. I would also like to point out once more that the tooltip is highly deceptive for casual or less informed players, making no mention of its terrible scaling.

I think most of the changes I’ve suggested here can be combined with pretty much everything Jfunk has suggested already.

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Someting I forgot to mention in my last post is that, among the early sims we’ve run so far, builds that completely drop Strike of the Windlord and its follow-up talents are coming out on top. This would be yet another reason (as if more are needed) to restore SotWL’s aoe. We could then run builds with Emperor’s Capacitor in single target content and SotWL for cleave and m+ (build variety yay).

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Sometimes my tiger palm doesn’t gain chi so I have to use it again to gain chi which causes to cancel my mastery combo. Does anyone know why this happened or is this just me ?

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You probably got parried.

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yeah probably you just got parried making it just useless, in that case just use any other ability then tiger palm again, or if you’re not running emperors capacitor, do a quick CjL, like for a tick and then Tiger palm again

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I wouldn’t recommend a cjl tick just to keep mastery up, tbh. If your TP gets parried and you end up with 0 chi, full hc, and nothing else to press, then maybe. But cjl is such an expensive button for the non-existent damage that almost any other option is preferable, like throwing in a bok, eating the hc loss (if you’re still gathering a pack for example), or just going straight into SEF even. If you’re running Flurry of Xuen, the double tap isn’t even that bad either (especially next season).

It’s all extremely minmax ofc, but spending 20 energy on nothing is really a last last resort.

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can we plz remove the root from whirling dragon punch and give it a longer activation window as well? Cant tell you how many times I lose the proc because RSK reset or FoF came off CD, its disorienting to plan ahead for a combo rotation and lose an ability and have to micro adjust. Cant tell you how many times I think its safe to use and get clipped by a swirlie or frontal and take avoidable damage.

I like that it has interaction with the core rotation but its such a burdensome ability that playing it can feel like a chore. Esp with how important it is for set ups.

If we cant get some QOL changes for the ability atleast make some of the other capstones interesting/viable

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