Listen, a lot of people usually shaft their pants when they hear stuff like “buff WW” or stuff like that, WW has also quite a minor community and the people playing the specc as a main you can count them on maybe 20 fingers so backlash is to be expected like always. I also dislike doing threads like these because usually when I see reasonable skill issues i will never be the one to complain about anything if theres stuff to do better I will always be the first to look at myself. Sincerely so did I, I streamed multiple times in the past weeks tried to push shuffle/3s and I even rewatched my vods even though it was absolutely boring to do, just to understand if there are really just moments where I can say “well i just suck and its a me issue” however after watching multiple lobbies I started to understand why games feel so hard and why WW just inherently sucks in what it is doing.
- You feel like you let your team down the entire game.
Windwalker has absolutely no team utility or moments where you can help your casters breath, windwalker is a full egoistic class in a game where teamplay is A and O. Yes you have self utility spells or spells which “could” make a difference in moments where you never think it could, but to pull those moments off all the time and risking of guaranteed value is almost never the play. Ring of Peace is most of the time easily ignored by your team mates to make value out of it, it also has ever since the addition of the WDP Knockup lost a lot of value of just functioning. Clash is mostly used as a mobility spell to make up for the loss of Skyreach and it has tons of buggy interactions aswell “negatively of course”.
Movement speed buffs and whatever your honor talents offer have no value in pvp since every slow is automatically applied and almost permanent. Paralysis has been downgraded to a global-blocker. Disarm is the only thing which WW uniquely offers compared to other classes just because of its 20y range and that’s all what windwalker brings to the table for a team.
Windwalker very weirdly also has no useful stun besides legsweep on a 50s CD as a supposed “leader melee” who takes his team to victory who shares a rivalry with classes like dh/rogue/feral/warrior for a spot in most team compositions this is an insult and cannot be described better than just lackluster
So if you think about that that doesn’t really sound great all around and is a major reason why it feels like you let down your team mates permanently. To find success somehow you need a class who is fully self reliant as well and doesn’t need anything what windwalker offers to a team which in other terms means it has to be a class being absurdly overpowered, e.g outlaw rogues in DF, or Mages in shadowlands.
- The damage distrubution of windwalker is completely wrong and should never have touched the light of the game as it is right now.
Rising Sun Kick, Fists of Fury and even Strike of the Windlord are spells which are historically knows as hard hitters, spells which could easily delete 50% of your HP in a single press in good followage of events have been rebranded to spells similar if you were throwing toothpicks at people.
Tigerpalm, Blackout Kick and Spinning Crane kick are the spells which do the most damage in the current iteration of windwalker, spells which used to be your generator , downtime filler , and AoE are now your highest single target damage spells and these come not with high numbers its still small numbers all just adding up to the useless pad damage windwalker is creating with that gameplay.
This brings windwalker also to a point where it directly is competing with every other mortal strike class in that game because the only saving identity windwalkers had in Dragonflight was that they were that “bursty kind of bruiser who if he has uptime he gets to kill you quickly”. now all you do is literally copy paste of a fury warrior, bm hunter, dh and so on, just in worse because all your damage is, like I mentioned just small hits over time which is very easy to deal with for any healer. And again to WW also has no hard CC besides a 3sec global breaker incap. for that reason alone it will be super hard for windwalker to ever be a viable choice if EVER again in this game unless tuning decides to literally nerf every other melee simultaneously to a bad spot or windwalker to an absurd broken spot.
How to make a realistic approach?
Well blizzard has the choice to go 2 ways with windwalkers which i’ve said in the past multiple times already as well.
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way: Buff Fists of Fury, Rising Sun kick and remove the PvP modifier from Strike of the windlord (baseline -30-33%), Fists of Fury by around 50-70%, Rising Sun kick by around 40-50%, reduce damage from Tigerpalm, Blackout Kick and Spinning Crane Kick by 30-40%. (these are just imaginative numbers which I just feel like could be correct) however Blackout Kick might be a bit careful to tune around because it can easily feel like a useless spell if it does no damage (like current FoF) and Blackout Kick is still a part of the single target rotation a global which you press constantly to spend Chi, I’d rather take a way of reducing the extra blackout kicks of Teaching of Monastery by half and keep the blackout kick damage as a baseline high on primary targets as priority damage and reduce blackout kick’s damage by a smaller amount 10-15%.
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way: Same Way as the first way but instead of catapulting FoF to be your damage source it will stay as it is right now with no buffs to the FoF damage, and will have a stun attached to it instead, which is baked into Turbo Fists on a flat cooldown (think of jadefire stomp passive choice-node talent) to prevent endless resetting of FoF and cheesing stuns on everyone. All the other damage changes should stay relatively the same with the exception of the nerf to Spinning Crane Kick, Tiger Palm and Blackout Kick maybe being lessened.
Last thing i’d like to mention which plays a very important part to make windwalker not absolutely obnoxious to play against and improves the lack of team utility are urgent needed honor talent reworks,
all honor talents besides Grapple Weapon, Turbo Fists, and Rising Dragon Sweep are useless, that means you have 9 out of 12 honor talents being just utterly insignificant on the edge of absolute uselessness, i’d like to see a very major rework on that in the future to give windwalker more possibilites to help your team i’ve already proposed a few ideas in the past which could fit the more preemptive thematics of a windwalker monk and we don’t have to look far it is in the other specc tree (brewmaster).
Remove Rising Dragon Sweep instead:
- Zen Meditation, reduces all magic damage taken by 30% and redirects to you up to 5 harmful spells cast against party and raid members within 30 yards. Being a victim of a melee attack will break your meditation, cancelling the effect. Lasts 8 sec. 1.30 min cooldown.
- Nimble Brew, Douse allies in the targeted area with Nimble Brew, preventing the next full loss of control effect within 8 sec. 1.30 Min cooldown.
stuff like this could be ideas to go forward with, and proper damage choices like Alpha Tiger used to be in the past could also be a nice touch of change in your honor talents, maybe as example:
- Rushing Wind Kick, after casting Fists of Fury or Jadefire Stomp your next Rising Sun Kick becomes a Rushing Wind Kick, dealing heavy Nature Damage, grants 6 seconds of Rushing Winds which temporarily lets you bypass 20% of the enemies Armor. 20yards range.
- Tigereye Brew reworked, now increases all damage done by 15%. 1.5% damage increase for each charge can only consume up to 10, and hold up to 20 at the same time. all other functionalities unchanged.
I am writing all of this because I don’t think i have ever seen a more undertuned version of windwalker ever since the Dread Season in BFA and i genuinely want to play my windwalker and not reroll to every other class in the game to find fun. I leveld my Fury Warrior which I never played before in my Life seriously and have reached higher CR and impact than my windwalker in no time and with complete ease its absurd, and I main WW for over 10 years so the chance of me being a complete prodigy on Fury Warrior is quite low.
please blizzard its time for changes bring back windwalker, We dont want to have to wait for MoP to play a viable version of our class.