Feedback: Monks

In Development The War Within Beta Test
192

…and here we go. Devs where looking like they understood Brew/WW finally and then they go bad to showing they really don’t.

WW and Brewmaster cannot spend the flurry charges in the way the tree itself clearly says it should be. There are three different buffs in the Shadowpan tree that CANNOT be used properly the way flurry works right now.

Please read what every single monk on this thread, every discord, reddit post and anything else wow monk related has said.

THE ENGERY COST DOESN’T WORK

A stacking AGI buff with flurry doesn’t matter because WE CAN’T STACK IT

Blackout kick buffing Flurry? nice. Too bad we get many more Blackout kicks than flurry… many… many more.

Wisdom of the wall can buff flurry… too bad the buff to flurry often wont do anything at all since we can’t actually proc flurry again.

3 Likes
193

the issue is still the amount of time it takes to spend stacks and the damage the stacks deal. 400 energy is too long and makes the other talents in the tree that require flurry strike spending to be very weak and low uptime

8 Likes
194

Quoting because he is nicer than I am…

Also I forgot to add in my little rant that there are talents in the WW tree that reduce/refund chi costs so that is the opposite of what the Shadopan tree wants.

195

So based on the actual beta tuning, this change actually does nothing to gameplay. It went from 350% AP to 425% AP plus Vers. After testing, a single FoF still gives 7 stacks.

The note here about the change is just weird and completely misses the mark on the issues with Flurry Strikes. Flurry strikes just doesn’t make sense in pair with the other Shado Pan talents. Like look at Against All Odds. It stacks off of Flurry hits, but it stacks up to 20 stacks. Like how does it make sense to have this talent but then cap Flurry Strikes to 10 stacks.

I think if Blizz wants to make Flurry feel good, make the charges go out more frequently, and then do tuning based on that. Like for WW, just make charges be used every 10 or so combo strikes. Let the output be consistent. Let Wisdom of the Wall be able to overlap multiple buffs at times. But in my opinion, as long as this cap remains and charges take nearly 30-40 seconds to use, Shado-Pan will just be a confusing mess of design.

3 Likes
196

Shado pan sucks if you only have 9 stacks, so any “differentiation” just makes the talent not worth playing if you cant hit 10 stacks

if you want differentiation then uncap stack generation? seems pretty simple

overall its still just a stupid hero talent tree but w/e

197

I think this change was necessary, however I am still concerned for the Shado-Pan tree as a whole. Even with this change in place, Fists of Fury almost caps out Flurry Strike charges on a single target, which are still capped at 10. I feel that this still does not address the main concerns plaguing the way Shado-Pan plays in practice from a Windwalker’s perspective.

Let’s start with how Flurry Charges are spent. Flurry Charges are only unleashed by spending 400 Energy, which is about every 7 Tiger Palms. This is not simply every 14 seconds, not only due to our Energy generated per second even with high amounts of Haste, but due to the way we spend Chi, especially during Storm, Earth, and Fire. Tiger Palm isn’t always casted every other global cooldown.

The reason this is such a big issue is that unless it takes millions of damage to generate a Flurry Charge, we will nearly always reach and sit at 10 stacks for an extended period of time before we unleash all Flurry Charges.

Furthermore, one of the main Wisdom of the Wall effects causes Flurry Strikes to deal an additional amount of Shadow damage to uncontrolled enemies within 6 yards of the target struck by the Flurry Strike. The reason this is an issue is because as long as unleashing Flurry Strikes requires 400 Energy to be spent, you are left with 2 options:

  • Manage to spend only 9 Flurry Charges the first time you unleash them. This causes the Wisdom of the Wall buff to apply on the first Flurry Strike the next time you unleash them (assuming you unleash 10), making the following 9 charges of Flurry Strike deal the Shadow damage IF you get the associated effect.
  • Try to spend an additional 400 Energy to unleash Flurry Charges again in the 20 second Wisdom of the Wall buff window.

Going in order, I feel that having to attempt to intentionally go out of your way to unleash your Flurry Charges at an otherwise inopportune time just to try to get a benefit out of a semi-random Wisdom of the Wall buff seems like more of an oversight than anything. Similarly, having to intentionally change the way you do damage to a sub-optimal way of spending Energy to try to benefit from it also seems like a poor goal. This leaves me with more questions than answers.

Are Flurry Charges designed based on only having one target to attack? How many are we supposed to generate on one target by the time we unleash them? What about 2, 3, or 5+ targets? How often are we supposed to be able to unleash them? How impactful are the Wisdom of the Wall effects supposed to be? These are probably questions that are going to be left unanswered, but I feel they are all issues that need to be addressed.

As it stands now, 3 of the 4 Wisdom of the Wall effects are very difficult to get much benefit at all from (2, 3, and 4 on the tooltip). The Flurry Strikes themselves don’t contribute much to your damage at all, and most of the benefit of the tree comes from the passive Haste from Veteran’s Eye.

I really hope that Shado-Pan continues to get more attention as the Beta continues!

5 Likes
198

MW:one hero talent working
WW:one hero talent working
BM:one hero talent working

3 Likes
199

Haven’t tested MW so wont talk about that but its really sad that WW and BrM both have really interesting options with one hero talent tree and the other is not only mostly useless but it provides no flavor of any kind at all… You can’t really see a difference between a retail level 70 monk and level 80 Shadowpan monk.

Its had to believe how bad that design is honestly and I don’t understand how it keeps getting ignored since the big flaws where pointed out the day the Shadowpan tree was first revealed. Monks didn’t even need to test it to know it didn’t work.

200

I like the concept of shado-pan. It just feels like the impact of flurry strikes isn’t there in the limited testing I’ve done.

1 Like
201

lol like what does this even mean. The skill of near instant capping stacks? the skill of spending 400 energy?

We get it, the energy requirements are there to stop it being op in AOE but it makes most of the talent tree pointless and is not engaging at all.

I wish they would remove the energy spend component, beef up the damage requirements, have damage beyond one target contribute less, and have them auto execute at 10 stacks. All those talents amplifying damage input in to the equation are useless when the skill is ultimately gated by energy gains.

1 Like
202

Shado Pan Flurry strikes still bugged. At least on Brew specs and needs revamped least for brew or least modifers for brew so it works bit differently thatn WW.

On brew still takes me less than 10 seconds to get 10 stacks… And compared to Mastery of Harmony my damage is like 1-2% of my overall damage. Nobody in their right mind would pick this hero talent over the other.

Its either not working as intended still or spending 400 energy on brew is just too much energy to spend. Your spenders on brew for energy are Keg Smash and Tiger palm and spinning crane kick

You might as well make it proc at 100 energy with the damage it does to even compete with Master of Harmony let alone any other specs Hero talent.

1 Like
203

Does the passive chi wave still trigger mystic touch? I use with zen pulse on live right now to apply mystic touch when mistweaving at range.

204

Shado-pan in it’s entirety does not in any way deal 1-2% of your overall damage. Flurry Charges/Strikes themself do an incredibly small amount of damage, but you’re either completely misrepresenting the talent tree or forgetting that you’re gaining the following from the perspective of BrM.

  • Permanent 10% haste (bugged, not the best stat, but it’s a lot of stat)
  • 10% armour pen
  • 15% increased damage for KS, TP, SCK
  • 30% increased damage for KS
  • Ramping agi (up to 10%) for 7s every 30-40s
  • 20% increased critical damage from BOK
  • 10% permanent DR

To say that all of those effects are exceptionally potent is an EXTREME understatement.

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In general though, I do agree with many of the complaints that people have w.r.t Flurry Charge stacking being too fast and the direct power of Flurry Charges feeling exceptionally weak. I am also concerned that if we ever hit the energy trigger threshold before we hit the Charge cap reliably on lower or even moderate target counts, we may experience some pretty nasty super-linear scaling, which is definitely something that I’d prefer not having to be concerned about.

5 Likes
205

This seems to be the case with some other classes as well. My rough theory that has no real basis is that they originally tailored certain hero talent trees to clearly be better for certain specs and now they have the task of making the ‘secondary’ hero talent tree be a viable alternative to the one they designed the spec around

206

For Shado-pan until the flurry strike “activation” is looked at the tree can’t really ever reach its full potential. I completely agree with the change to make flurry strikes harder to accumulate because sitting at max stacks constantly feels like you are wasting resources and that’s a bad feeling.

However, it has to be harder to gain flurry strikes but also easier to spend them. Having to do 7-8 Tiger Palms doesn’t really make sense since it’s an ability we aernt often hitting, especially in our cooldown windows. The way the tree is set up it makes me think that it’s being designed in a world where we hit Tiger Palm way more often than we do now.

The way Flurry Strikes are accumulated and especially dunked is the biggest problem with the loop. Not only does it feel like it takes ages to hit the energy threshold to dunk them, but it also feels like I’m just “waiting” to dump them and without addons it’s something impossible to track, so you probably just wouldn’t ever. Thats not a great feeling as if it felt like dumping Flurry Strikes actually did something, it’s something that you could plan around and dump into specific mobs to show off player skill this way. In its current form it’s random passive damage you’ll never think about. Great if you enjoy the base Windwalker experience I guess but Conduit offers more meaningful gameplay changes.

2 Likes
207

simple way to fix flurry strikes => change 400 energy into “spend 20 chis”, makes more sense since we have way more abilities that uses chi instead energy.

208

The 4pc tiger palm cleave is literally worthless! Does like 0.1% of damage! 4pc overall is practically worthless!

2 Likes
209

Still doesn’t solve 2 problems. At least on Brew as I havent messed with WW. You can generate 10 stacks literally in like 5 seconds then having to wait 20-30 seconds to spend 400. Secondly, Against all Odds talent says it can stack to 20 based on flurry strikes but you only proc 10 so youll never get to 20 stacks.

1 Like
210

6/28 WW Monk Feedback

There are several bugs that still remain from the previous time I posted feedback on 6/14 as well as several new bugs that have been discovered. These include:

  • Chi resets to 1 at the start of a raid encounter with Combat Wisdom.
  • Celestial Conduit’s Flight of the Red Crane hero talent can pull mobs up to 40 yards away that are not in combat with you.
    • I’ve been told Courage of the White Tiger can also ninja pull mobs as well. Here is a clip demonstrating this behavior in action: https:// clips. twitch .tv/TriangularBoredHumanHassanChop-OvmcqKJ8JX7O_hN9
  • Shado-Pan’s Flurry Strikes reset on pull of dungeon boss encounters.
  • Pet damage is not contributing towards generating Shado-Pan’s Flurry Strikes.
  • Chi Burst does not heal at all.
  • If Chi Burst hits any enemy or ally while you are channeling a spell, the channel is canceled.
  • Rushing Jade Wind breaks Combo Strikes several times in its application since Rushing Jade Wind still procs mastery (this would have to be fixed with some tuning adjustments).
  • When talented into “Pressure Points” Paralysis will pull the mob when used.
    • This behavior severely limits the usefulness of this talent as Paralysis is often used in M+ for skips in combination with Ring of Peace. Please consider changing the soothe effect of Pressure Points to not aggro mobs when used.

Functionality Changes

In addition, there are several talents and spells that could use quality of life changes and adjustments to make them more viable.

  • Chi Burst procs should stack to 2.
    • Because Chi Burst falls low on the priority list, it feels really bad to not have this available when you need it.
  • Celestial Conduit should reset on boss kill/wipe.
    • I understand this is working as intended, but I believe the policy on 90 second cooldowns not resetting with bosses should be changed this expansion and this cooldown is a primary reason why.
  • Memory of the Monastery shouldn’t completely override older stacks when a lower count stack is used.
    • What I mean by this is if you have an 8 stack of this buff and then you use a 1 stack of Teachings of the Monastery, it’ll completely override the 8 stack. I believe this is working as intended but makes this talent less satisfying as a result.

Shado-Pan

I agree with the many others in the thread that have mentioned something needs to be done about the Flurry Strikes mechanic and spending.

However, I think that something also needs to be done about the defensive nodes present in the Shado-Pan tree. All of these are virtually useless for Windwalker Monks in PvE.

Hopefully you guys can figure out how to make Flurry Strikes work well as it feels really bad to effectively have 1 Hero Talent option this close to expansion launch.

Energy Economy

Another thing that has been a common complaint I’ve noticed is that people really don’t like how ‘energy starved’ they feel. Part of this is due to whiplash from the resource flood we had in Dragonflight, but there are some legitimate points about utility spells such as Paralysis or Detox costing energy. When it comes to Detox in particular, there is an outlandish possibility that as a Shado-Pan monk you’d spam Detox between pulls in order to get CDR from Efficient Training. It also just feels bad to be ‘punished’ rotationally for using your utility spells to help your team succeed.

I think a major part of this is there is no direct resource node at the bottom of the tree whatsoever. There are many nodes that act as pseudo-resource nodes like Emperor’s Capacitor and the various nodes that give haste, but it isn’t the same. I do think we’re too late in the game to be changing these talents up but perhaps a minor rebalance that gives a little bit more energy to play with would be welcome such as buffs to Inner Peace or Ascension.

Bottom Right of the Tree Needs BIG Help

This is a consistent point I’ve harped on ad nauseum in my feedback posts during the Alpha and Beta. Currently, Jadefire Stomp and all of its nodes as well as I’d say Communion with Wind and Darting Hurricane are all extremely lackluster compared to other capstone options. So much so that you would never consider picking these at any point in time.

  • Communion with Wind is lackluster because the damage contribution of Strike of the Windlord itself is low.

    • I’d imagine this is due to the fact that there are 3 other potential effects added to it that increase its damage contribution. However, since Communion with Wind directly buffs the damage of Strike of the Windlord itself, it is not useful.

  • Darting Hurricane feels like a half-baked idea.

    • It sounds cool in theory, but it doesn’t have great synergy with the node that precedes it and doesn’t increase your damage at all with the design of it. This is especially worrying as there aren’t any tuning knobs that could make this useful.

  • Jadefire Stomp needs a major facelift.

    • While the initial rework of Jadefire Stomp in the Alpha was semi-promising, there hasn’t been any work done since to make this talent work in this new reworked WW kit. As a result, it feels entirely out of place and won’t see play with its current (abysmal) tuning.

As always, thank you for reading and I hope we get to see some much needed big changes soon.

9 Likes
211

9-10 minutes, that’s how long it takes for Renewing Mist to heal a tank from 0-100% Health…….it’s only use is for Vivify cleave. Buff or delete it.

1 Like