Yeah I think this one has a ton of potential. It reminds me of the trinkets with random things that pop up and I have always liked them for some reason.
Mistweaver feedback for conduit of the celestials.
Celestial Conduit
Reasonably unimpressive ability, the visuals and sounds are going to have to carry it because after channelling essence font for the last 7 years if anything I gained is long channels need to feel impactful, and both essence font and fists of fury really, really donât.
Temple Training/Xuenâs Guidance
affecting both of our main heals now essence font has been removed is a pretty good way to make a safe talent work for the bulk of our healing.
also has a fun little choice if you wanted to play more aggressive, or for more damage.
Heart of the Jade Serpent
Holy moly does this sound fun to play around, cocoon feels like overkill, but playing around this really does sound fun, however it also means sheilunâs gift is more likely to overheal because youâd use it earlier in ramps.
Niuzaoâs Protection/Jade Sanctuary
Theyâre okay, but with monks being as tanky as we are you could have forgone having defense talents.
Courage of the White Tiger
Gives us an additional (mostly baseline) reason to return to filling empty moments with dpsing, while giving us damage during ramps, its a very safe talent that gives us double benefit, very nice 
Strength of the Black OX
Having a little combo with dpsing and giving us a mini chi-ji proc is actually very nice for giving us on the fly envelopes and it will be super noticeable, no real downside.
Chi-jiâs Swiftness
Honestly its fun and having access to more consistent movement feels very onbrand for monk.
Restore Balance/ Yuâlonâs Knowledge
Adding our first talent that gives something to rjw, at worst its more healing during our main healing cooldown, at best it helps funnel rjw into a strong 30 second cd, a pseudo replacement for tft upwelling which weâve used during dragonflight.
Flight of the red crane
Honestly one of the only real disappointments and thatâs because of how little it will be applied, based on the above this either will proc an incredible amount during rjw, or you will barely see it out of keys.
Inner Compass/ August Dynasty
Honestly its a cute way to mention stances of old and add a little more to the theme of us being constantly empowered by them.
Giving Jadestomp the ability to choose which weâd buff is cool, much like the Niuzao giving us the option to have some thing in the back pocket if we want it is very nice and will be fun to play around, along with the side benefit of giving us much needed ST damage in keys with how much of it is from our aoe.
Unity Within
Tricky because I could see this meaning 2 things, and while one is very much more likely, the other sounds much more fun
the first and likely being its an extra cast double double power, and the second being it procs all of your celestial procs.
The first is more likely and safer, but realistically everyone will just recast immediately because not doing anything for that long means we start stocking up our maintenance effects and produce this weird rush right after finishing, and the second feels like a massive missed opportunity to hugely double down on the entire trees theme, so I pray you consider it as it would do wonders for how it feels to use.
Essence Font
Sneaky quick little removal of the biggest painpoint in recent years, which Iâm sure was very hard to do knowing a lot of people have now grown attached to it the way others have with soothing mist, but Iâm personally glad to see its removal.
With this itâs worth noting just how many talents have been affected by this change, and I pray you choose to remove the activators on ancient teachings, without the current tierset the two options of ancient teachings and clouded focus are a lot closer if we werenât paying the price of the activator.
Sheilunâs Gift I feel this talent needs to be shifted further up the tree, maybe even replacing Essence Font.
This talent has been a raging success since its readdition, and it feels criminal to be spending a final gate point on something that feels so integral to our play, especially with this talent treeâs addition to the spec.
2 Likes
Iâm really disappointed in several of the talents for Windwalkers.
Courage of the White Tiger. I think that for WW making the proc increase the damage the target takes from all our abilities by 5% for 10 seconds or something along those lines would be much more interesting as opposed to our main generator having a low chance to deal some bonus damage and heal someone.
For Chi-Jiâs Swiftness I think itâd be cool to give us like a haste buff for a few seconds after celestial conduit making it something we can use to give us a bit of a burst.
Xeunâs guidance also seems kinda useless and would promote us spending more chi on Blackout Kick which is just gonna feel bad
I just feel like they should have some alternatives for some of these buttons that make more sense for dealing damage and are like actually relevant talents.
1 Like
I once again wanted to spend some time to really digging into these trees, rather than just going off of my initial reactions. I tried to find some hard evidence to support my claims, but because this spec is so vastly different than what we currently have, Iâll not be able to show my work as well as I did when analyzing the shadow-pan monk. Once again Iâll be rating things based off of their thematic nature first and then their mechanical playstyle.
Celestial Conduit
This is an interesting fantasy for the monk to engage with. We know that the monks have a deep and spiritual connection to Pandaria, even new monks on Exileâs Reach meditate and get training and guidance from the late Grandmaster Hight. We also know that the August Celestials are a core part of the monk fantasy, despite the fact that other monks have existed in the game for around as long as itâs existed. Iâm okay with this direction, but would love an option or glyph to make this appear more holy, especially with some of the themes coming in The War Within.
Mechanically Iâm really not a fan of this. From a Windwalking standpoint the last thing the class actually wants is a long duration channel where weâre unable to spend resources. Thereâs already enough of an incentive to overcap energy because of how little damage Tiger Palm does, and two of our major cooldowns currently simply exacerbate this issue. The ability being a cooldown also has innate anti-synergy with our other offensive CDâs because it prevents us from using chi spenders in Serenity, likely wonât be replicated by Storm Earth and Fire, and while it might do enough damage to be worth pairing with Xuen, it is unlikely to do more damage than the other two cdâs replicated through Xuen. This leaves it in an odd space where the optimal rotation might simply be to pop Xuen and Serenity, burn through them until theyâre done, burn through whatever chi we have, then dump energy before instantly starting to channel this, which feels like it will be very antithetical to the fluid and combo-based spec.
For Mistweaver this falls into a similar issue. I know that Essence Font is going the way of the dodo, but I also know that part of the reason itâs so maligned is that standing around waving your arms as healing goes out is not fun or engaging, and doesnât lean into the fantasy that Mistweavers overwhelmingly seem to want to engage with; fistweaving. Much of the fun of Mistweaver comes from the very active, moment to moment choices being made by the spec, and the various combos that turn your vast toolkit of small heals into something truly greater than the sum of its parts. This spell not only doesnât embrace that fantasy, it goes against it. I am really hoping that the split between Conduit of the Celestials and Master of Harmony isnât the split between the Mistweaving and Fistweaving specs, because if thatâs the case this will likely never see play, regardless of its power level.
Courage of the White Tiger
The concept of this deep and spiritual connection to the celestials is excellent. Imagining this being shot with an action camera my mind instantly goes to a scene in Avatar: The Last Airbender where Zuko and Aang have learned to do the Dancing Dragon technique, and with each of their moves the dragons behind them emulate them. I can see in my mindâs eye slamming with a Tiger Palm and Xuen appearing for just an instant and slashing at the target, and man does that just feel so cool to me.
Mechanically this is a very passive talent, but itâs one that supports a playstyle of Mistweaver that the community likes, while also being useful for when you need to spot heal someone. It proccing off of Tiger Palm means itâs not overly intrusive, but I worry that with a medium high proc chance like it has if the ICD will be low enough that Windwalkers will want to track the ICD and spam Tiger Palms when itâs over. The big issue I have is the higher change while Xuen is active. The last spell you want to cast while Xuen is around is Tiger Palm, as it does minimal damage (less than an auto attack in some cases,) so we want to avoid itâs damage being replicated. This is further exacerbated by the fact that we often pair Xuen with Serenity for large burst, and that would have about as much anti-synergy as can be with this feature.
Strength of the Black Ox
This once again leans into the fantasy I described above, but now leads me to think of the champion Udyr from League of Legends, quickly weaving between different martial styles as he invokes the elemental spirits of that setting. Assuming the ICD on Courage of the White Tiger is fairly low, this one-two combo of spirits will happen quite often, and to me that just sounds so freaking cool.
As a talent this node is entirely passive, and just another buff to the talent above it, which is itself very passive. All the anti-synergy that the above had will apply here, but even worse doubles down on it, which has me very disappointed. I think that from a healing standpoint the fact that itâs randomly proccing healing and shielding isnât exactly the best thing in the world, but being able to hold onto that proceed Enveloping Mist with no duration (as it doesnât seem to have one), would lead to it becoming a pseudo cooldown, which I sort of dig.
Chi-Jiâs Swiftness
Gaining movement speed after you summon a celestial is cool, and very on theme for monk. Channeling spiritual energy for mobility already exists in Tigerâs Lust and Flying Serpent Kick, so Iâm pretty down for it all.
This does end up being sort of a nothing burger when it comes to the gameplay. Making the 4 second channel into a speed boost is fine, and will have some niche uses, but the randomly proccing move speed is less appealing, and I feel will probably get me killed in an M+ at least once. It gives me Skyreach vibes, and Iâve died to that enough times already.
Unity Within
Calling all of the celestials at once is going to look and sound awesome. I get very big Power Rangerâs vibes with this move, calling in the Zords for a strike on the bad guys. I think this being a means to summon the entire family makes it feel a lot more like an important moment in the fight, and those are always cool.
My concern with this is twofold: Firstly, I really hope this doesnât trigger the ICDâs that these summons will 100% have, because that would make the rest of the rotation feel much more flat and boring otherwise. Secondly, because the celestials assist you at 200% I worry that their normal values are going to be fairly low to prevent this from being an overwhelming portion of your throughput. If either of those are true it will very much malign an already disappointing button that is against what the class wants to do.
Temple Training
This has basically no theme attached to it, itâs cool that weâre referencing that we studied in the temples I suppose? Not bad, just sort of milquetoast.
A throughput increasing talent that doesnât change the playstyle is actually sort of nice to see in this tree, considering how drastic the shakeup is. I actually quite like this.
Xuenâs Guidance
This talent has a cool fantasy behind it, with Xuen teaching you the lessons of power, the literal Teachings of the Monastery, and it gives me vibes of returning to the proving grounds and fighting in his arena.
Mechanically I think this one is a miss. Both Windwalkers and Mistweavers want to avoid overcapping our Teachings stacks, as itâs obviously a throughput penalty if we do. At three stacks of Teaching we have a roughly 39% chance to refund any charges at all, and around a .3% of getting all three. This has some issues because these specs already struggle with overcapping these charges, and it often leads to feel bad moment to moment gameplay decisions. Itâs often âthis is the least bad choice,â rather than âthis is the best choice.â
Heart of the Jade Serpent
The fantasy of invoking Yuâlon to come down and increase our cooldowns is interesting. I donât exactly associate her with rapid progress, and instead with something more cyclical in nature. Even still, her appearing and bathing us in her green fire and making us better will look really cool.
I am going to assume that the way this talent functions is that when you trigger the effect it provides, the specified abilities will complete 16 seconds of their cooldown time over the following 8 seconds, rather than having no cooldown at all. From a Windwalker perspective this talent is a little strange. You spend energy to get chi, you spend chi to get stacks, you spend stacks to get cooldown reduction. Itâs not a closed loop, as energy still limits your charge production, but itâs still a nice positive feedback. The problem comes in when you realize that the overcapping issue from the talent above is already providing CDR to these abilities, and that one of the main DPS cooldowns makes you spend no chi, and finally the keystone talent of this tree prevents you from using any chi or energy during the channel. It ends up being a clunky mess, and one that will need a weak aura to play the class for you to play around. And the worst part of it is that Strike of the Windlord, Fists of Fury and Whirling Dragon Punch all animation lock you, meaning you canât auto attack during them so when youâre using them back to back to back youâre losing out on more auto attack damage than before.
For Mistweaver this is largely forcing you to use Sheilunâs Gift until youâre at just under 8 stacks, tracked via a weakaura, and then choose to not use it at all until you need it to be a healing (or technically also a DPS) cooldown. During that window youâll get a very large amount of healing, but it might as well just be a regular cooldown instead of shoe horning a cooldown into another ability.
Niuzaoâs Protection
Fortifying brew is a talent that Iâm not overly fond of. Itâs generally a weak CD and it takes a lot of investment to make it not so weak. The flavor of Niuzao protecting you when you drink it is fine, but doesnât really scream exciting to me. Not all the nodes can be winners, and this one is just one of those.
A 25% max HP shield is bonkers good, thatâs warlock levels of defensive utility, so Iâm all for making the ability actually worth itâs 11 day cooldown.
Jade Sanctuary
Once again, thereâs not much to say here about the flavor. It would be cool if it had some sort of animation of Yuâlon wrapping around us as we channel, but I feel like that would be an animation bloat issue.
From a power standpoint, this takes an offensive cooldown and gives it some defensive tech, which is always nice to see. It will likely be a set and forget unless you specifically need the on demand defense of the other choice in this node.
Restore Balance
Iâm not entirely sure what the Jade Wind abilities have to do with balance at all, and those abilities happening when you summon your celestial cooldown just seems kind of strange. I donât exactly know where this fantasy is supposed to be going.
From a mechanic standpoint, more throughput on your throughput is usually nice, but the Jade Wind talents are largely seen as unfun gameplay wise, and so encouraging people to take them isnât exactly my cup of tea. Even if this happens passively without talenting into those talents, Iâd still be a little opposed to them and would rather just see those nodes removed entirely and replaced with something new.
Yuâlonâs Knowledge
This is another one that Iâm a little lost on the flavor of. I imagine the reason the Jade Wind talents are bound into this tree is the general theming of âgreen magicâ being and overarching fantasy. Why Yuâlon makes these abilities different I canât say, but Iâm glad sheâs trying to improve them.
Sadly I donât feel like the changes here are actually what anyone is really hoping for. Itâs nice for Mistweaver in that they need to press this maintenance button less often, but for Windwalker itâs actually making them press it more often, which is not something the community seems enthused about.
Flight of the Red Crane
Oh how Iâve missed you crack-bird. Chi-Ji running around is always great fun, and Iâm so happy to see it return. It was one of my favorite things in the class, and I was sad to see it go in favor of a much more calm crack-bird.
Now mechanically I very much dislike this node. It makes the talent choice above this one a non-choice. Being able to have a higher uptime on the Jade Wind talents will make this talent more powerful. The summon based ones donât increase your Jadw Wind duration by anywhere near the same amount. So unless this talent has a painfully long internal cooldown weâre unlikely to actually get to choose to not take the increased uptime talents. This is doubly painful for Windwalker because of the chi cost of the ability, and theirs overlapping so you lose out on damage to not keep as many stacks up as possible. It also forces you into taking the Jade Wind talents, and I generally dislike talents in these spaces that require specific class talents to function.
Inner Compass
This is such a cool idea. I love the concept of the celestials leaving behind a little bit of their magic to support you on your journey. It feels like something that is very classic wuxia to me, and itâs something Iâd wish this entire talent tree did more of.
The problem I have with it, however, is that the buffs are not really balanced at all. 3% more versatility is just much more stat budget than the other three. Even if a class doesnât stack versatility, itâs still just more raw stats. The other problem is that these buffs are entirely proc based. The only one you can actively control is Yuâlon, whoâs buff is currently the worst for Windwalkers, and despite being strong for Mistweavers itâs entirely possible that youâll trigger your Yuâlon effect and then the next tiger palm you use will call Xuen and youâre right back into critical strike. And as a Windwalker you couldnât even hold the critical strike if you wanted to, because it will instantly change back to versatility the second you blackout kick. The fact that it is entirely possible to rotate through 3 of these buffs in as many global cooldowns tells me that its design needs some work. Also, how will this work with the capstone talent summoning all four? Do you cycle through them all in an instant and end up back where you were?
August Dynasty
I once again donât exactly know what the fantasy here is supposed to be, but Iâm guessing itâs just drawing power from the Jadefire lines in some way. The ability has a beautiful animation, and I enjoy having it as part of the healing toolkit, so for Mistweaver at least this fantasy gets a pass.
Now the actual mechanics of this Iâm not a huge fan of. We currently only really want to press Jadefire Stomp every 10 seconds or so, because it just doesnât do great damage and weâre just using it to maintain the damage debuff. This talent will make us want to use it just before every Rising Sun Kick, because 30% more damage is more than worth the global cooldown to use it, but we canât always have it up for all of them, as it might not be reset every 6 seconds or so, which is what the cooldown of Rising Sun Kick generally ends up being. Because the cooldown resetting on Jadefire Stomp is purely random, youâre going to drop into a lot of feels bad situations.
Consider the following: You are fighting. You JFS, then RSK, TP, BoK with Teaching Stacks, and now suddenly RSK if off cooldown again. You have to make a choice in this moment. Do you RSK to not delay it? Do you hold it for one more global to see if that procs the Jadefire Stomp? Letâs say you donât hold it, and then that RSK resets the Stomp, wouldnât that just feel awful? The Windwalker rotation is already made up of enough split second decisions, and so adding one more in just increases the overall cognitive load.
From a Mistweaver standpoint, this talent suffers in the same way. Once again getting resets on your Rising Sun Kick without getting the Jadefire feels bad. Granted they have an additional way to spend the proc, so itâs less bad, but youâll likely never want to use it on Vivify because Rising Sun Kick does very strong damage and very strong healing.
Now imagine all of that additional load in a hero spec that actually adds another offensive channeled cooldown to your already bloated rotation.
Obviously Iâve been a little critical of this spec, as well as Shado-pan, but I really love the fantasy thatâs trying to be captured here. Thereâs so much potential for amazing animations and really fun combos, but theyâre just buried under the weight of the specs that feed into Conduit of the Celestials.
And I think that is the crystallization of my headspace around these two hero specs. We need to see the reworks that the monk class sorely needs before we can really judge these on their own merits.
Thank you for taking the time to read all of this, I hope it is helpful in making monks a class we can all be proud to roll for The War Within.
3 Likes
How about Celestial Conduit being one burst of energy, no channel, 30-45 second cooldown, and the damage/healing is done over 4 seconds. This would not lock you to a 4 second channel but do basically the same thing. You could still have a cool visual of a green blast of energy. The shorter cooldown is to make it more rotational of an ability. Would love if it replaced fists of fury or rising sun kick for the button bloat and have it more apart of our rotation.
On another note have Rushing Jade Wind replace Spinning Crane Kick. Have it do damage and healing and make it the same duration for all three specs. Then you can move to the spec tree to replace Chi Burst and Chi Wave.
7 Likes
Chi Burst stays. Itâs used to reset the cooldown on Faeline Stomp. Taking it away makes Fistweaving too punishing for a single mistake in placement, especially in Raids.
1 Like
Iâd love to see it get removed from the class tree and moved into MW only. The fact that BrM and WW are required to take it for pathing is just bad class design.
Good idea - replace the celestial channel with a DPS cooldown. Having another channel (we already have fists of fury) on a high mobility melee DPS class is a DONâT DO anti-pattern, this should be really reworked.
Please also consider the ideas from Babylonius, which can be found here: https://www.wowhead.com/news/windwalker-monk-review-of-conduit-of-the-celestials-hero-talents-avatar-of-338538
Ok fair, but how about making it instant cast, 40 yards, and heals/damages everyone in 10 yards. Make it more of a burst of chi energy. Other classes have similar spells that we do, just better.
Chi Burst is like Divine Star, but Divine Star is instant cast and returns causing everything a second time.
They could make RJW the capstone to replace one of the statues, just make it damage and heals and take the place of Spinning Crane Kick.
This would still effectively be crippling it for Fistweavers. Itâs good because it travels very far in front of you and hits everyone, with each hit having a chance to reset FLS.
Also, thatâs too similar to Zen Pulse.
Would be better if it just put Renewing Mist on up to 5 targets, or put an Essence Font bolt on everyone in the line. Would make for interesting decisions on output vs comfort moment-to-moment.
I mean you can functionally replace chi burst with a second charge and everyone would prefer it
2 Likes
As much as even I would, it would be absurdly strong in PvE and PvP.
I would like to point out that it has now been an entire month since the last time a blue said anything in this post.
I would expect thatâs the case for most of these threads for most classes. Theyâre âfeedbackâ threads not âconversationâ threads, or at least thatâs probably the corporate way of viewing it.
1 Like
I love the idea of Chi Burst (Hadouken is hype) but it just feels so wonky with an unnecessary cast time attached to it. Should be instant cast.
2 Likes
PLEASE donât remove Essence Font. Itâs one of the most fun buttons in the game. Fix the mechanical issues without removing the fun.
2 Likes
And even more monks that have quit playing agree with him and not you.
You want to be a summoner go play warlock.
1 Like
Oh! So now weâre throwing random statistics of player preferences to match what we think is popular.
Olâ up guys, Iâm going to go and find my dnd dices!
2 Likes
Or just using this great thing called memory. The WW community was never truly big to begin with, so not hard to recall who use to play and no longer does and recall the forums at the times of the changes.
2 Likes
for sure, because a huge majority of the community comes to the forum in the first place
1 Like