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!