11.2 Windwalker Monk Feedback

In Development Ghosts of K'aresh PTR
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11.2 Windwalker Monk Feedback

Bugs

Windwalker still has numerous bugs that are either annoying or detrimental. These include:

Shado-Pan

  • Flurry Strikes will sometimes fail to discharge. Usually this occurs when you attack a target you were not in combat with prior, but sometimes happens at other times.
  • Manaforge Omega 2 Piece Bonus triggers when you Fixate your Storm, Earth, and Fire spirits while Storm, Earth, and Fire is active resulting in you activating the 2 piece bonus Flurry Strikes every global.

General Windwalker Bugs

  • During Storm, Earth, and Fire, if the primary target of your Fists of Fury cast isn’t the same target as your spirits’, they will do secondary target damage to every target (even their target).

    • This can be played around by fixating your spirits and always targeting what they are targeting but it is annoying.

  • Touch of Death will be unable to be cast (greyed out) despite your active target fulfilling the conditions to allow you to cast it (below 15% hp).

    • This mainly occurs in boss encounters with adds from what I’ve noticed and you can somewhat play around it if you target the add then retarget your target but it’s finicky at best. I’ve also noticed this during M+ when a target near your target goes out of range.

Talents

I want to make it clear that I’m not expecting any major talent shakeups this patch first. With that said, I do want to highlight a few talents that could do with some love and with some minor adjustments could change up our build variety a little bit.

Teachings of the Monastery

This is a required talent, but I want to reiterate forever that I think the additional Blackout Kicks this talent provides should benefit from Mastery and other effects that buff Blackout Kick’s damage such as Courageous Impulse. To balance this, lower the damage of the extra Blackout Kicks from 100% to 40%.

One of the results of this would force us further into Mastery as a desired stat, but that seems to be a goal anyway so it shouldn’t matter a whole lot.

Memory of the Monastery

This talent only needs 1 change to see it shoot up in viability.

It needs to have “Multiple instances may overlap.” at the end of the text. Currently, whenever you Blackout Kick the current stacks of the buff are overridden. This makes this talent feel awful since you Blackout Kick so often that you can’t enjoy the feeling of consuming a 4 stack of Teachings of the Monastery into a Strength of the Black Ox proc into another 3 stack of Teachings of the Monastery and having a brief moment of 7% extra haste.

Misc Talents

There are several middling talents in the middle of the tree that seem to never been fully realized that could do with either some tuning or a new talent entirely. These include:

  • Martial Mixture

    • This talent suffers from the fact that Tiger Palm doesn’t do any damage and to fully benefit from this talent you need to also take Shadowboxing Treads which is competing with this talent for pathing. Even if you do try to min-max this, it just doesn’t feel satisfying when Windwalker really needs more single-target oriented nodes in this part of the tree.

  • Inner Peace

    • While having another resource node isn’t a bad thing to keep tree symmetry, extra energy isn’t really that useful anymore. This may have made sense to include at the time, but since we are so Haste focused, we always have an abundance of Energy to work with. In addition, reducing the energy cost of Tiger Palm is actively detrimental to Shado-Pan this tier when you consider their 4 piece bonus.
    • As a side note, I’d really like this node to be replaced with Katsuo’s Eclipse-like effect (Fists of Fury costs 1 less Chi, ticks 2 additional times in the same channel time) to keep the resource node spirit but also to include a Fists of Fury node which is noticeably lacking from this part of the tree.

  • Thunderfist

    • This really just needs some tuning as the effect itself is somewhat interesting but the damage is really lackluster.

  • Meridian Strikes

    • I always try to make use of this talent when I can but it seems like it never really hits the mark. I tried it on Mythic Ansurek, but the CDR wasn’t enough; I tried it on Mythic One-Armed Bandit, but it never seemed to line up right. My suggestion would be instead of increasing Touch of Death damage, it should allow Touch of Death to be used at 35% HP on a mob up from 15%. This would in a way, increase the cooldown reduction gained and give you a small Execute themed option.

Shado-Pan Tier Set Issue

Against All Odds

One issue with the Manaforge Omega tier set for Shado-Pan Windwalker specifically is it seems in order to “min-max” the effect of the set, you need to sustain 20 stacks of the Against All Odds hero talent buff for the duration of your Storm, Earth, and Fire. This can be a little bit annoying however since the duration of the buff is pretty short (5 seconds). This can result in situations where you refrain from pressing Fists of Fury in order to discharge another set of Flurry Strikes with Tiger Palm so you don’t drop your buff.

It would be nice if the duration of Against All Odds was increased by a few seconds to mitigate this issue.

Conclusion

Overall, I’m really happy with the state of Windwalker for the most part. Both of our new tier sets are excellent and are really interactive. Especially the Shado-Pan tier set, I hope that it becomes a baseline part of Shado-Pan after this tier concludes as it really connects the whole set together and makes it feel way more cohesive. Thank you for reading and I’m excited to see what you have in store for Windwalker Monks this PTR cycle.

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Too long didnt read + no dev lol!

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Good post here, hopefully we see some impactful change

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ToD is bugged at detecting the unlock condition at least since BfA and Blizzard never attemped to fix it. It appears that the client needs at least one GCD + network latency to enable ToD.

The problem is not so critical in raid where bosses usually have a big health pool, but it is super annoying in dungeons where mobs usually only have a few seconds from 15% HP to be dead. The issue is even bigger when switching from high HP to low HP targets.

Blizzard should raise the limit of ToD to at least 25% HP to compensate for GCD + latency and make ToD effectively usable in m+.

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The most egregious bug afflicting WW is the channel interrupting bug. It happens mostly with Celestial Conduit and Spinning Crane Kick and both have massive implications on WW’s damage. The WW discord has done extensive research into the cause and have not been able to find the root cause. So we are stuck with abilities that simply do not work sometimes and we have to just pray it channels properly. Its exhausting.

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Howdy fellers

Drastically buffing flurry strike dmg for the shadopan tier set is a balancing nightmare! The shadow bonus is just objectively the best by an absurd margin, and the target scaling makes it an obscene portion of your dmg at high target counts. As a result, it will be very op in AoE if it is competitive in ST

You should figure that out!

Also, no 1.5m on use is really cringe!

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7/3 Update

Tier Set Changes

With the PTR update on July 3rd, there have been some unannounced changes made to the Shado-Pan & Conduit of the Celestials tier sets that I’d like to talk about briefly.

Shado-Pan

I think there is a fundamental misunderstanding of what makes the Shado-Pan tier set strong. With the proposed nerfs, and for those that don’t know this entails basically blanket nerfs to the entire tier set detailed below:

BEFORE

2pc: Flurry Strikes deal 30% more damage and activating Storm, Earth, and Fire instantly grants 10 stacks of Flurry Strikes that trigger on your next attack at 100% effectiveness.

4pc: Flurry charge generation is increased by 100% and Flurry Strikes triggers every 120 energy spent during Storm, Earth, and Fire.

AFTER

2pc: Flurry Strikes deal 20% more damage and activating Storm, Earth, and Fire instantly grants 10 stacks of Flurry Strikes that trigger on your next attack at 70% effectiveness.

4pc: Flurry charge generation is increased by 50% and Flurry Strikes triggers every 150 energy spent during Storm, Earth, and Fire.

If you’re unaware, the Flurry Strike damage increase only applies to the base Flurry Strike damage which is a very insignificant part of Flurry Strikes. The lion’s share (+10%) of Flurry Strikes’ damage contribution overall comes when empowered by the Shadow Wisdom of the Wall, and most of the value of this tier set comes from having Wisdoms up during your CDs.

Nerfing the damage this does doesn’t matter whatsoever, but I want to focus on the last part of the nerf.

I’m not sure if the intention with raising the energy spent needed to discharge Flurry Strikes during Storm, Earth, and Fire is to dissuade a playstyle where you can maintain 20 stacks of the Against All Odds buff, but if it is then it seems like a mean-spirited nerf that doesn’t set out what it wanted to accomplish.

You’ll still be able to maintain 20 stacks of Against All Odds, only you’ll have to purposefully break your Mastery in order to do so. If you’re familiar with Windwalker Monk, some of the worst times this spec has had in terms of feel can be closely associated when we were breaking our mastery on purpose. I would strongly advise against this type of nerf for this tier set and instead lean into the idea of maintaining 20 stacks of Against All Odds during your CDs as it is one of the most engaging parts of this tier set.

It’s entirely possible I’m misreading the intention of these changes, but if these proposed tier set changes go through and there isn’t a corresponding increase to Against All Odds duration to compensate, we are going to end up having a very convoluted and unfun playstyle.

Conduit of the Celestials

Coming alongside the above proposed changes is a change in the behavior of the Heart of the Jade Serpent triggered by Slicing Winds from the 2pc bonus. Previous to this build, it stacked alongside any existing Heart of the Jade Serpents, but now it overrides them entirely.

This creates a very clunky and unintuitive playstyle where you mostly ignore the fact that Strike of the Windlord grants Heart of the Jade Serpent in your cooldowns and override that one with Slicing Winds, and outside of your cooldowns you need to be vigilant in tracking the duration of any existing Heart of the Jade Serpent to not override it with Slicing Winds.

This causes you to avoid pressing Slicing Winds in moments where it comes off cooldown in your rotation as the optimal choice to make in your rotation. This feels absolutely horrible and I would strongly implore the developers to find a different way to nerf this 2 piece while reverting to the previous behavior.

Perhaps you could reduce the duration of the Heart of the Jade Serpent triggered by Slicing Winds to 6 seconds, or reduce the effectiveness.

As it stands now, Windwalker Monk went from 2 great feeling tier sets in 11.2 to having two (unintentionally?) clunky tier sets to play that only further increase the complexity of playing an already difficult to play spec.

In addition, we’ve gone through 3 PTR builds now with literally 0 notable changes that doesn’t involve tier sets. As I mentioned in my initial post, I do think Windwalker Monk is in a good spot but there are blemishes present in the spec tree that could have been iterated on and without any class changes in the minor patches, I don’t think it’s an entirely unreasonable request to get a few talent tweaks to keep the playstyle fresh.

Thank you for reading and I hope that these tier set issues get ironed out as I was very disappointed with the changes.

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The changes this week feel a bit concerning, for both of our sets.

Shado-Pan

Note that the SP changes at least don’t seem to actually be live on the ptr servers yet.

Increasing the SEF energy threshold from 120 to 150 feels… wrong. It may put the rotation during SEF exactly in the gray zone where you might have to repeat cast Tiger Palm in order to maintain your Against All Odds buff. I shouldn’t have to point out that incentivizing repeats is the opposite of what you’d want to see on Windwalker.

If the intent was to nerf the power that came from keep AAO up all the time during SEF, well, first off, why? But in any case, this is a poor way to do it.

The tuning change to Flurry Strikes damage is just really odd. Flurry Strikes currently doesn’t really do any damage, it all comes from the Shadow buff from Wisdom of the Wall. Even in single target, the base Flurry Strikes damage isn’t really impressive.

I have a few suggestions:

  • Redesign the Flurry Charge system slightly. Make it a static amount of Tiger Palm casts, ideally 4, maybe 5. For Brewmaster, this number can be increased a bit and include Spinning Crane Kick and Keg Smash as triggers. The tier set effect can then lower the required amount to 2 while SEF is active. This would make the proc much easier to track, and prevent any awkward interactions with energy reduction talents like Inner Peace and Emperor’s Capacitor. I do like the idea of a direct benefit to energy management and have advocated for it in the past, but this particular iteration is causing more problems than the flavor is worth.
  • Greatly buff Flurry Strikes’ baseline damage. As the root talent of the hero tree, this is frankly a no-brainer. Adjust other Shado-Pan talents to compensate, but make it so Flurry Strikes itself doesn’t look so pitiful on the meters. Ideally this would include an aoe component to achieve the same in multi-target scenarios, such as a revisited (but baseline) High Impact effect, or a baked in Shadow Wall effect.
  • Please take a closer look at Shado-Pan’s defensive nodes. They suck. They suck to an unbelievable degree. It feels like we’re still using the first draft of an idea that was never completed, nevermind tuned.
  • As originally pointed out by JFunk, increase the AAO duration. Any powerful 5 second buff is bound to feel bad. It’s just way too easy to waste, especially with a trigger that isn’t too easy to control. A longer duration would also make it much easier to balance around the increased frequency of Flurry Strikes during SEF.

Conduit of the Celestials

This week, the interaction between stacking Heart of the Jade Serpent windows was changed, basically giving the “big” Heart from Unity Within priority, but otherwise not allowing Heart windows to stack. While understandable to a degree, it does basically remove the “supercharged” feeling from the overlaps.

A secondary but just as noticeable is the playstyle change. With three different triggers for Heart of the Jade Serpent and no benefit for stacking or overlapping, we are now strongly incentivized to spread out the Heart windows as much as possible. This is complicated by the fact that the increased cooldown speed applies to 2 of the triggers themselves, making any mistake in management exponentially impactful. That would be annoying enough, but we also have effects from talents that we’re trying to overlap, such as Gale Force (which is also triggered by one of the Heart triggers). We’re moving towards a point where clean management is too complex to be reasonable.

Suggestions:

  • Rather than overriding different Heart buffs, make them extend each other. This might require some fiddling with the “big” and “small” buffs, but just having the big buff transition into a small buff when its duration expires would be ideal.

Misc

  • Please delete Storm, Earth, and Fire. It still causes new issues every single patch, and still has issues that haven’t been fixed for years. Serenity and Tiger Eye Brew are right there for inspiration. The nostalgia for WC3 can’t justify a broken, boring, and weak class cd forever.
  • Give Whirling Dragon Punch the Blade Dance treatment. Have it be a purely visual animation while the character hitbox remains grounded and mobile.
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I don’t have 2 be nice bc I don’t have a silly class discord role

@Blizzarddevs

ur changes were rly bad for this ptr cycle! Keep it up! It’s really cool that you both

  1. Have no idea what you’re doing with changes
    and
  2. Don’t put any effort into communication at all lol!

Praying for a riot MMO ASAP to get devs that actually care :raised_hands:

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3rd of July Tier Set Changes

Firstly, I would like to echo the feedback of Jfunk and Seiryoku.

Secondly, these changes don’t seem well thought at all and the changes to specifically the Conduit tier set makes me quite sad. I had a blast with Conduit tier set last week during raid testing as the cyclic nature of what it brought about when stacking Strike of the Windlord and Slicing Winds HotJS buffs together felt very natural and smooth.

I really do hope Blizzard reconsider these changes because, as stated above in other posts, they do seem a bit out of touch with how the Windwalker Community would expect these tier sets to be nerfed.

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Blizzard should also fix that surprise proccs which end the cooldown of Rising Sun Kick don’t deactivate Whirling Dragon Punch anymore.

The Rotation to enable Whirling Dragon Punch should be more predictive.

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i think this skill while “classic” , it feels outaded and always buggy somehow , i have no idea how to fix it or what other skill could be introduced…i would kill for something like Seven side strike (D3) (even if it uses clones to do the attack so u dont get moved like the old killing spree)

they removed the empowered from FDK breath because it breaks the rythm, yet slicing wind still has it … i dont think i ever used it empowered at all ,maybe pvpers use it more for movement

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Kinda doubt Blizzard gives a crap about our silly class discord roles anyway :slight_smile:

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Whichever dev may see this thread, please take to heart that playstyle nerfs are much more unappreciated than just damage tuning nob nerfs. The Shado-Pan set felt so amazing, the cd window of Conduit had such a fast feel and flow to it- please keep those playstyles and nerf the numbers of what you want ww to be more in tuned with.

I play this class not to be this massive meta damage machine, I play it (and I assume others) because its fun to play, do not ttake away the potential to have a fun feel- seeing as now we may have to break mastery for shado-pan set to maintain 20 AAO.

Seriyoku and Jfunk’s feeback is 100% what most WWs feel right now.

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What bothers me the most is that the set changes look thoughtless, impacting gameplay vs number tuning - forget the plethora of bugs at the back of it all…

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The channeling bug is really quite annoying, feels like it happens back to back sometimes.

Also just want to put my vote towards removing storm earth and fire in favor of something else or at least let it be a choice. I can’t stand using this ability. It’s clunky, buggy, and really ugly. Blizzard really seems to be pushing the forced summons and character model swaps on abilities for a lot of classes and I’m not really here for it. I don’t spend all this time making my character look cool for him to be replaced by a transparent purple robe 50% of every encounter.

Like the OP said there are other skills that exist like serenity for inspiration. If I hear my monk go “huh!” While blackout kicking another 900 times during storm earth and fire I’m going to lose it. Going back through some shadowlands quests and seeing the animation for weapons of order (just the animation, not talking about the actual skill here) just makes me sad that what we’re stuck with is storm earth and fire, really?

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For what it’s worth, this only happens on human characters afaik.

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