Feedback: Fists of Fury as an outsider

Classes Monk
1

let me start by saying i am not a windwalker main. not even close. what i am is a dabbler. i’ve now leveled 2 monks to 80 and gotten up past heroics on both.

i GREATLY enjoy windwalker. there is so much going on here thats cool. the various shadow pan and flurry of xuen procs, a fully charged blackout kick swinging like 5 times at once, rising sun kick with that thick thwack sound getting the proc for the extra swing, whirling dragon punches fantastic sound effect and animation. the mobility, the rhythm, the impact, what a spec.

but then you get to fists of fury.

you were having fun? prepare to stop your rotation dead in its tracks as you channel the most boring looking spell, with the most monotonous robotic sound effect in the game for almost a full 4 seconds straight, during which you cannot do anything else like spearhand strike interrupts or pop a defensive or heal without interrupting it and cratering your damage. and damage? frankly it feels like such a wet noodle for how long you have to channel it and how many talents seem to play into it. i’ll admit, i dont have a crazy high haste stat and maybe that makes the difference, but compared to a rising sun kick or a strike of the wind lord? what a wet fart fists of fury is. you see one unimpressive damage number float up lazily every half a second or so and all you are thinking is “do i really have to do this? i could be kicking right now”

i dont know. maybe when you get high gear and the right stats something changes, but having played every spec in the game now up to 80 in at least heroics, this is probably the most boring, rotation stalling flat tire of an ability i have used. and again, i admit, i am not a windfury main, im not even a monk main, so maybe there is some nuance i am missing here, but it just kills the whole rotation for me.

i think a good comparison would be to look at demon hunters eye beam. these two abilities, fists of fury and eye beam feel like they fill a somewhat similar role. medium length 30 second-ish cooldown, supposed to be a big damage button, with a channel that deals damage to all targets in front of you. but man what a difference. for starters eye beam resolves in half the time, about 2 seconds. the sound effect is much more urgent and impactful, less of a robotic slapping and more of a frenzied laser scream, and the damage numbers instead of being 1 tepid number every half a second is a blistering wall of big yellow crits waterfalling over the enemies so fast its hard to count them. eye beam then sends you into a frantic short buff window to crank out some big hits ASAP, while fists of fury seems to just plunk you back into your rotation, possibly lining up with a whirling dragon punch for a bit of punctuation. it gives you an auto attack speed buff after the fact but that is completely non interactive with actual gameplay. i know demon hunter and windwalker are a bit apples and oranges but the two feel similar enough that i can make the comparison. on my havoc DH i am always excited to use eye beam, i cant wait for it in my rotation, but on windwalker fists of fury feel like it just grinds the gameplay to a halt with no payoff and bad aesthetics and audio.

feel free to disagree and try to sell me on fists of fury, but as it is i think its a flat tire on a hotrod of a spec. and to clarify, i am not talking about details overall dps throughput, im sure its actual numbers are just fine, im talking play feel and excitement.

3 Likes
2

It needs to sound both chunkier and like there are more quicker hits.

3

I completely agree. I have been leveling a WW monk the past few days and I’m having a ton of fun with the rotation, but clicking Fists of Fury just feels like dead space. It feels like a button I have to press, and not one I want to press.

Genuinely, if they so much as spread the damage out across multiple hits so that they better line up with the punching sound effect, that would make it feel better. As it is right now, there is a huge disconnect from this flurry of fists animation to this steady, relatively slow chunk sound when the damage goes out.

Additionally, it would feel much better if—like Eye Beam—had a shorter channel that felt much more impactful.

1 Like
4

I’d argue that eyebeam although thematically cool is also a wet noodle. It’s primarily there to setup a small burst window. Same as FoF for WDP.

They share the same dev. I wish the dev would anchor the damage around both EB and FoF. Give us the flurry shadow pan animation and reduce the channel time.

5

The only thing I currently want for ww monk is to remove acclamation, buff rising sun kick and replace acclamation with splash damage for rising sun kick. And bring back casting abilities during spinning channel.

That’s pretty much it for me

6

Something in my Monk brain goes crazy when Flurry of Xuen, FoF and Flurry Strikes all go off at nearly the same time.
That being said I hope they do replace FoF with Flurry Strikes.

1 Like
7

I 100% agree the sounds effects of Fists of fury are boring and it should get updated to have a more ramping and punchy feel to it. Most of the other problems with the spell do get better with haste. The channel is hasted and most cast at ~30% hast come to under 2s and with lust or pi or both can get to a point were its done channeling in a single gcd. Momentum boost, The talent the lets haste directly buff it and have it ramp damage, does make it deal a good amount of damage. It certainly doesnt feel like a wet noodle but it doesnt give you that hit of seeing the big numbers as often. the last two ticks can get up there to crit in the 1.4m range.

8

i think its probably flurry of xuen and flurry strikes doing a lot of the heavy lifting there, those sfx and animations are pretty good. if anything they make FoF feel more dated by contrast

maybe this is a naive take on my part, but im a firm believer that a spell or rotation shouldn’t require 20-30% of a specific secondary before it feels good (prot pal has this same problem with haste and SotR uptime and it drives me up a wall). maybe this is just a fundamental “agree to disagree” point i have with the designers or community, but i think a spell should generally feel good to press and function correctly and comfortably out of the box, so to speak, and secondary stats should be icing on the cake.

9

They’re really not.

Hyper mobile, leather, dual wielding dps.

They’re basically the same

10

Considering flurry is just as old is funny