12.1 Windwalker Monk Feedback

In Development Midnight: Curse of Ula'tek Public Test Realm
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First citing the changes

Buffing Tiger Palm (the chi builder) looks wrong, instead the WW monk should get buffs to the chi spenders like RSK and FoF.

Zenith Stomp is still bugged:

When using Zenith, Zenith Stomp, Zenith Stomp and Zenith in a row, then the Zenith Stomp button shows but is disabled. It appears there is a hidden cooldown for Zenith Stomp in place which is covered by Zenith when the button changes state.

That allows that players can hit the Zenith second charge when Zenith Stomp is unavailable but this state is hidden in the UI, leading to the waste of Zenith casts.

The action buttons and cooldown manager should be updated properly to prevent wasting Zenith cooldowns when Zenith Stomp can’t be used.

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When looking at Archon stats 99% of all Windwalker logs are playing Shado-Pan.

I don’t know the real numbers, but Conduit seems to be significantly worse at literally everything and any damage profile compared to Shado-Pan. Conduit got gutted at the end of the beta cycle, and I don’t understand what’s going on here.

Good thoughts as always in the wowhead article, but I plead desperately that something is done to help Windwalker feel better defensively.

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My proposal to fix the Conduit hero builds:

  • Move Summon Xuen from the hero talents to node to the normal DPS tree and make it accessible to all WW monks as it was from MoP until TWW (consider that Xuen was a signature ability of monks in the past)

  • Add Weapons of Order (the original Kyrian monk talent) to the top node of the Conduit hero tree. Adjust DPS bonus and cooldowns of WOO accordingly to bring Conduit on par with Shado-Pan.

Conduit needs to be fixed so that it becomes a viable alternative of Shado-Pan. Currently it is so weak that no one uses it.

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Wanting to bump this up a bit since I’m seeing some positive changes for Mage defensives and I’m wanting to highlight Windwalker still.

Windwalker is statistically one of the highest death classes in raid this season and I think it’s pretty clear to see why.

Touch of Karma and Fortifying Brew are good defensives for dealing with burst but when I look at Monk and compare it to a similar hybrid melee classes in Ret Paladin or Enhancement Shaman, the biggest disparity I see is that they have some form of self sustain.

Enhancement Shaman gets a stacking buff that increases the healing of their self heal so they are able to heal themselves if it comes down to it.

Ret Paladin similarly has quite a bit of self sustain built in to its kit.

Now when I come to Windwalker, we have an instant cast Vivify that we get after every RSK but the actual healing of that Vivify is pretty pitiful.

My thought is why can’t this be made to have a bigger impact so that Windwalker Monk can sustain itself a little better if it needs to in the face of ticking rot, while also maintaining Touch of Karma and Fortifying Brew for those larger bursts of damage

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Wow. In that article only like 2 WW in the entire world have cleared +22s and only 17 have cleared +21 compared to like 597 Dks, or something like that.

That’s very telling and sad for WW

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It did have a massive niche before 12.0.5, but burst got nerfed and that disproportionately affected Conduit, which was THE burst spec.

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I saw in a post on wowhead that nowadays 99% of WW monks play Shado-Pan, because Conduit is so weak and basically broken.

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I can’t speak about deep changes in the rotation in terms of Hero talents and so on as I’m kind of a new WW player, but the one thing I noticed instantly is how squishy this spec is.

In Mythic raiding any kind of passive AoE damage or rot damage destroys you and you have absolutely nothing except that pitiful Vivify to sustain.

I’d argue I shouldn’t be even using Vivifys in the middle of a rotation in PvE, but the spec needs something to increase its defensive power against this passive damage intake. Either give it leech, or some passive DR, but give it something.

I’d also like to mention that Touch of Karma as a defensive sometimes cannot even be used because the damage is environmental or the the target is not in range to use the skill on it, so it feels extremely clunky to me.

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The defensive weakness of WW is that there is only Fortifying Brew as defensive cooldown, and its cooldown is far too long to be feasible.

Blizzard should either reduce the Fortifying Brew cooldown to 1 min or give 2 charges to it.

Touch of Karma should also get its self heal effect back as it worked in past expansions.

P.S.: Touch of Death needs an update as well. Currently ToD gets enabled at 15% HP of the target. The game checks once per GCD (every 1 or 2 seconds) if the target dropped below the threshold. The problem gets created by group content like raid or m+ trash that targets drop from 15% to 0 so fast that WW monks don’t get any opportunity to press ToD because the time window closes too fast.

Increasing the ToD limit to 20% like the warrior’s Execute would help a lot here.

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I’m aware this feedback comes quite late into the PTR cycle but after testing Venomous Abyss and the new M+ dungeons I have a better idea of how the spec is looking.

The Short-Term Problems that should be addressed before 12.1 Release

Defensives

Defensives

Windwalker received a couple buffs this past PTR patch which included a buff to Calming Presence bringing up to a staggering 10% and adding 5% stamina onto Combat Wisdom. These changes are welcome but only chip away at a problem. Windwalker’s activate mitigation is far too weak.

Fortifying Brew feels like it’s stuck in the past design wise and the class tree isn’t doing it any favors. Several class tree nodes such as Celestial Determination and Rushing Reflexes should be reevaluated as their worth is basically naught currently for Windwalker. If the tree was moved around and you were able to pick up more defensives in the bottom third of the tree perhaps this wouldn’t be an issue, but it’s telling that I’ve been playing Windwalker since MoP and this is by far the squishiest it’s been even considering relatively to its peers.

I’d also like to highlight that because 99% of Windwalkers are playing Shado-Pan in most situations, it has made us more aware that for Windwalker Shado-Pan does not have a defensive node. The choice node of Predictive Training and Whirling Steel is a joke in comparison and I’m genuinely surprised it has not been reworked at this point.

Reworking this choice node to actually provide somewhat equal value between Brewmaster and Windwalker would help tremendously with Windwalker’s defensive shortcomings.

Something to the effect of:

(New) Predictive Training: Flurry Strikes reduce all damage taken by 1%, stacking up to 10 times for 8 secs.

-OR-

(New, replacing Whirling Steel) Emergency Brew: When your health drops below 35%, you chug a Fortifying Brew which lasts 15 sec. This effect can not occur more than once every 120 sec.

These new options effectively keep the same spirit of the nodes they are replacing but are far more useful. With Predictive Training’s current iteration it’s way too good for Brewmaster and practically useless for Windwalker. This newer version would incorporate the Hero Talent theme of Flurry Strikes and equalize this value between the specs.

As for Whirling Steel, it’s never been that useful as a pseudo cheat death as gaining Avoidance and Parry after taking a big hit is largely irrelevant. But, gaining Fortifying Brew (which increases your current and maximum health) would almost act as a security blanket to prevent one shots which is largely Windwalker’s defensive gap in harder content.

This would also synergize with other Fortifying Brew talents on the class tree.

There’s a bunch more to be considered in this aspect of the class such as Vivify feeling lackluster, needing to channel Soothing Mists (yuck) for the 6% DR to survive in some cases, and generally lacking a unique defensive toolkit that can tackle some problems well, but this above proposed fix would be noticeable and doesn’t seem like it would be that hard to implement.

A more outlandish and frankly overpowered idea that I had was because Fortifying Brew’s wording says your skin turns to stone - why doesn’t it make you immune to bleeds and such like stoneform does? or at least remove them.

Anyways more help here would be great as I’ve never felt more scared for my life during higher keystone dungeons (20-21) or in harder raid fights.

Hero Talent Balance

Hero Talent Balance

While Hero Talents aren’t the flagship feature of this expansion I’m kind of surprised there hasn’t been more done to balance Conduit this expansion after it received a significant redesign at the start of it.

The tuning of Conduit seems to indicate that the developers don’t want it to do burst damage but it’s entire identity as a hero talent revolves around the idea that it is the burstier of the two hero talent options.

With the current tuning, Conduit runs the risk of always prematurely cancelling the channel of Celestial Conduit in order to proc Unity Within as the damage that Celestial Conduit itself does is not worth the time spent anymore.

In fact, the brunt of Conduit of the Celestial’s power is basically just Heart of the Jade Serpent and the newly buffed Temple Training node. Xuen doesn’t impact your play at all and is the most lackluster and forgettable he’s ever felt. Something needs to be done with this hero talent option and I would say you can’t be afraid to give it burst damage and make it matter again.

There also has not been an effort made to incorporate Conduit of the Celestials better with the Apex talent. Currently if you run Restore Balance and 2 minute Conduit build, you tend to overcap your Tigereye Brew stacks which feels absolutely terrible. Additionally, there are no synergys whatsoever with Zenith Stomp and Celestial Conduits. In fact, it makes your already frantic rotation during your cooldowns feel even worse because you don’t have enough globals to fit all your spells in. It has been recently discovered that you can cast Zenith Stomp while channeling Celestial Conduit which seems like an oversight more than an intended feature as you cannot cast any other damage spells while channeling it but at least that is some level of interaction between the two spells.

I’d personally like to see a Xuen redesign to make his impact felt more in my rotation and more power pushed back into the Celestial Conduit ability itself as what’s the point of having this cool looking spell if it doesn’t do any damage.

Apex Talent Design

Apex Talent Design

I went into the 12.0.5 redesign of the Apex Talent with an open mind and really tried to like it. I do think that it fills a niche within our rotation by giving us more much needed burst AoE but I think my opinion has soured over time.

Zenith Stomp largely doesn’t thematically fit with Windwalker as a wind-based martial artist and frankly I’m growing sick of seeing stomps shoved into the toolkit.

It also doesn’t fit within the Apex Talent design thematically with the first rank being this extra crit cooldown thing, the 2nd rank involving crit and then out of left field is a charge based aoe stomp thing.

I also don’t really like what it does to our damage profile by making it more paddy even if you aren’t trying to pad because of how much passive cleave you have. Rotationally, it’s kind of annoying because you have to fit it inside Zenith or risk losing a charge so you somewhat often overcap the Chi that it provides to do so.

There’s also a newly introduced (mostly tuning) related problem where both Shado-Pan and Conduit of the Celestials is dropping the 4th rank of the Apex in Single Target situations. This comes as a result of the changes given at the start of the patch but also Windwalker just doesn’t really have the globals to fit inside Zenith this patch it seems.

Tier Set Feedback

Tier Set Feedback

Initially I would set I was hesitant on the design of this tier set when I first saw it. After all, we’ve seen Tier Sets like this for Windwalker nearly a half a dozen times at this point. But after playing with it, I do think it provides a band-aid fix to a problem that Windwalker has which is that Spinning Crane Kick is largely not pressed in AoE.

This tier set sort of solves that by making it so you ideally want to press Spinning Crane Kick on 2+ targets with the 4pc buff. However, after doing some M+ PTR dungeons it does highlight some issues with not necessarily the tier set but with Spinning Crane Kick.

Spinning Crane Kick just needs to basically function as an AoE Rising Sun Kick at this point because it feels really bad and breaks the flow when you use Spinning Crane Kick with a 4pc proc and you just don’t have the Chi to cast a Rising Sun Kick that is off cooldown afterwards where you would if you did it the other way because of Glory of the Dawn procs (and you’d get roughly 3x the amount of Fists of Fury CDR too!)

Misc Problems/Food for Thought

Rotational Gameplay

Rotational Gameplay

One thing that has become very apparent over this patch and heading into the next is that Windwalker is basically almost always doing the same rotation in all situations. This has really started to make the spec feel bland and is not a super uncommon thing across all classes but it really sucks to see this.

From what I can tell the problem mostly sourced from the spec talents not giving Spinning Crane Kick enough power and ability uniqueness to shine. There’s just enough interesting gameplay hooks with AoE spells.

As this relates to 12.1, the buff to Blackout Kick has made Shadowboxing Treads a must pick in any AoE setting and pushes it up the priority list quite a bit which sort of feeds into this problem. Also, Tiger Palm damage being higher than Blackout Kick on single target feels strange.

Lack of Build Variety

Lack of Build Variety

I was really surprised to not see any spec talent tuning for Windwalker as it feels like you play mostly the same talent build in all situations.

Strike of the Windlord/Whirling Dragon Punch could really use some love. Their damage is way too low and there’s not enough identity between them to make them shine in any particular situation (also Whirling Dragon Punch’s ‘first target struck’ damage should be changed to affect your current target if they are within range).

Slicing Winds and it’s supporting nodes have been woefully under tuned this whole expansion and I think most people have forgotten this talent exists.

Jade Ignition needs to scale its damage based off Spinning Crane Kick somehow as it’s fallen behind significantly and looks like it won’t be played despite us using Spinning Crane Kick much more frequently this patch.

There’s a lot of misc nodes such as Flurry of Xuen, Meridian Strikes, Thunderfist, and Knowledge of the Broken Temple that just feels blatantly under tuned and it says a lot that when Windwalker is dropping one of their apex points on Single Target, you pick up Touch of the Tiger instead of one of these nodes much lower on the tree.

Buffing or tweaking the above nodes would help with talent diversity this patch to prevent the spec from feeling quite stale. I do think more drastic redesigns of the spec talent tree are going to be necessary going forward into Midnight as I don’t feel like the iteration of this tree is better overall than what we had before in the last patch of TWW.

Thanks for reading and I look forward to testing more upcoming PTR builds.

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Found another issue with Touch of Death.

The tooltip says it should unlock at 15% health or the enemy going below the maximum health of the monk. Additional testing revealed the game applies the current health of the monk instead of the maximum health for this check.

I discovered this by the ToD button going off again after my monk got a bigger hit from a prey boss.

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Monk is just my alt but it’s usually been my first alt. But this has to be the most disappointing expansion I can remember for Windwalker since I started playing it in Legion. The tuning of spec has certainly not had many wins over the years, and to be honest Shado-Pan was never a hit for me.

But as an alt the gameplay was fun as conduit, and I didn’t need it to be the absolute best.

But for whatever reason in Midnight here the decision was made to essentially delete Conduit as any kind of viable form of gameplay. Zenith stomp is an unfun, weird, and dumb spell imo that makes our cooldown feel bad in general.

Combined with mediocre tuning and one of the worst defensive packages in the game. I’ve never felt more down about my Monk.

Now with the lack of work being done as we head into season 2 we’re reaching the point where conduit is just going to be horrendously bad for most of an expansion?

I know this class has a low play rate, and resources, etc.

But like why would anyone play this class when it is so often ignored, rarely gets tuned toward the top, and at the moment leaves an entire hero tree that almost arguably just flat doesn’t work and certainly isn’t competitive.

I’m ranting I know, but it feels somewhat justified at this point as we head into the 2nd of three seasons of the expansion and so little has been done.

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WW monk still has a ton of bugs including ToD, Zenith Stomp and Conduit balancing.

But Blizzard ignores all bug reports and feedback, instead they name the current PTR state a “release candidate”. It appears the devs don’t play monk and don’t know how the class works.

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So I hadn’t really been paying attention to the tooltip numbers, but WW has received multiple hotfixes that have never made any notes.

The spec seems like it’s doing decent damage but…this is some of the most degenerate ability use I feel like I’ve seen in a while.

Spinning Crane Kick is doing like 60-80% more damage on single target than Rising Sun. Then SCK benefits doubly from the tier bonus to make it even more powerful.

idk man. Whirling Dragon, Strike of the Windlord, Rising Sun, Blackout Kick, Celestial Conduit have all essentially become cosmetic abilities and nothing matters except Fists of Fury and Spinning Crane Kick.

EDIT: Add Xuen and Zenith Stomp to the list of meaningless abilities.

Also some great thoughts over on the class forum: Windwalker Feedback to latest datamining

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More valid feedback over on the class forum