I have been playing WW quite a bit in beta and I really don’t like the expel harm change. I understand it was made to balance our resource economy and to make haste a more desirable stat but the result is a rotation that feels clunky and not satisfying. Having a quick button to generate one chi just fit perfectly into the WW rotation.
I love the removal of Bone Dust Brew and Serenity and the changes to Jadefire Stomp. I love most of the new talents. Ordered Elements makes your Storm Earth and Fire window feel amazing and I love the added value given to Whirling Dragon Punch.
The amount of good changes definitely outnumber the ones I don’t like, but the rotation without expel harm just doesn’t scratch that itch.
Chi Burst change doesn’t seem available quite to be tested yet but putting both Chi Burst and Chi Wave to passive is a big W change. Both Chi Wave and Chi Burst in all reality felt fairly out of place in overall rotations for both Brew and MW and at best only filled a niche for WW for certain awkward rotational moments.
While WW may miss some of its buttons to smooth over the awkward moments I couldn’t see how Master of Harmony was going to release with Chi Burst talents and not have this button changed. It fit horribly in the rotational flow for MW and Brew, the rooted cast time was awful for every spec, and in general these felt like such weak buttons that even when they are passable by numbers for a GCD you don’t want to press them because they take the place of the more rigid GCDs that each monk spec wants to follow.
The new monk rework feels amazing! I’ve been playing monk (WW) since it came out in MoP and this is my favorite iteration of the spec. I am mainly a PvP player so I was hoping to give a little feedback coming from that side of the game. I really like the auto casting expel harm and chi wave, it feels really nice in combat but it can feel really bad in a lot of pvp situations.
My issue with chi wave, if I want to stop a healers drink or keep a rogue/feral in combat my only options now are to waddle my way over and melee them, Paralysis, ring of peace, or stand still and cast crackling jade lightning. All of these options feel really bad to waste or feel sluggish, especially if a rogue is sprinting away from you there’s a good chance you wont be able to get the cast off before they range you.
Ive thought of some super easy solutions that could work. My favorite being to make crackling jade lightning cast-able while moving. Most of WW identity is mobility, our name is literally Wind Walker, having a spell force us to stand still for 4 or2 seconds feels really out of place. This would also make the new CJL talent a little more enticing. I dont really see a negative with this option, maybe some PvE’rs can correct me.
My issue with expel harm is that if I’m kiting away from my enemies i used to be able press expel harm for a decent heal along with my instant vivify. I no longer have that heal and now that its gone it feels very empty.
A solution I have for expel harm would be to just remove the “replaces expel harm” from combat wisdom. It would not count towards hit combo or generate chi and use up the buff that activates it for tiger palm on the same CD, it would have no additional benefit when casted manually other than the heal so everyone that wants to keep it off their bars can, it just gives the player a choice.
Jadefire stomp feels very lackluster compared to the other capstones not just numerically but impact as well. whirling dragonpunch is a staple ability with interactivity with our blackout kicks and potentially crane kicks with new talent support, and crackling jade lightning has its own amazing support with a very satisfying capstone as well.
Dancing Hurricane feels like a missed note, very rarely am i feeling the pressure of GCD on tiger palm(especially outside of our cool downs) and those moments are incredibly specific when lined up with external cool downs like lust. what i think this capstone should be focused on is our energy or chi generation outside of our burst windows in some way, especially with the lack of chi wave and expel harm our control of the rotation feels diminished(Even if this remains the best iteration of the spec don’t misunderstand)
Shado-Pan feels disjointed and uncertain of what it wants to be. it has no impact on our rotation or playstyle, and is riddled with mechanical issues with the flurry strikes often over capping, where as conduit has satisfying moments where fist of fury is nearly instant cast( a long time request from me specifically) perhaps making flurry strikes its own separate cooldown or similar to the wonderfully designed Templar on retribution/protection it temporarily replaces fist of fury with flurry strikes as an instant attack, minimizing button bloat and increasing the impact the choice of this spec has on windwalker as a whole.EDIT* even having flurry strikes be a simple haste buff to fist of fury cast time and or discharging all the flury strikes when we cast fist of fury would solve at least the mechanical issues of over capping charges.
Chi Burst rework feels surprisingly good all things considered, it would feel a lot better if this new iteration had its chi generation restored(capped out at 1 most likely) and perhaps slightly higher proc chance. as i stated before there is a very odd valley outside the cool down window that did not exist in the dragonflight windwalker.
Xuens bond this one i haven’t tested as thoroughly as the previous ones, but it doesn’t quite feel like its keeping the cool-downs lined up if that’s the intended goal.
Tiger Palm, i like the idea of pushing tiger palm as a more satisfying button to press than just filler/generator but making it deal more damage isn’t the way to go i feel, having things like free blackout kicks tied to it and many of our other procs however does, but it also leads to moments where our energy regeneration FEELS slow even if it might not be.
I’m thoroughly enjoying the attention windwalker and monks as a whole have been getting. I have too many thoughts to articulate and include in this post for now, but my largest grievance is that expel harm has been transitioned into a passive. As a windwalker, I feel expel harm is such a classic single chi generator; as an active, it added agency to the rotation and worked exceptionally well with maintaining our mastery. A lot of the other abilities made passive were rather nice (chi wave etc) but not expel harm pls. I pray that y’all would consider reclassifying it as an active ability. It would round off what has evidently been a great ‘mini-rework’ for the spec. pls blizz pls
Also regarding hero talents: within Conduit of the Celestials, I feel quite forced to run August Dynasty no matter what over inner compass.
Overall extremely happy w/ the class tree and all 3 specs.
Vivacious Vivification being buffed this much has been so damn good tbh
Peace and Prosperity could be more cdr
Touch of Death being able to be a unique execute is pretty cool
Make Bounce Back function like Will of the Necropolis as in the hit that triggers if will be reduced then apply the damage reduction and not only proc on very specific AoE effects/dmg events like Smolderon lava fire patch(Smoldering Ground), Fyrakk Wildfire raid wide hit(not to be confused w/ the swirly that you can dodge) and Tindral Typhoon(when he goes into bird form and does the constant pushback). Then it can be tuned accordingly and be useful on all 3 specs.
Can we have Chi Burst be an instant cast spell? Chi Burst being instant cast would remove the very bad feeling it invokes from having to cast the spell imo and would make the spell feel a lot better to use. Also love that it finally got a massive buff on the latest beta build (06/18/2024) and actually does good damage and healing for once.
Also very confused on the intent on the “passive” Chi Burst that you have to proc to even cast, in the current form of windwalker on the beta it was a button that I was going to use to mitigate the unlucky situations of somehow my tiger palm missed/got parried and I either don’t have enough chi to cast what I want so I’m feeling like I’m having to make the bad decision of breaking my Hit Combo(talent)/Mastery and that just feels bad. I think making it a passive you need-to-proc-to-use is just very strange and prefer the 30s version. If we’re going to stick w/ this version can we get some QoL of the buff being able to stack to two and not having a 20s duration? If all 3 of the QoL(instant cast, stacks to 2, no duration on buff) I asked for happens I think this new version of Chi Burst will feel actually much better than current Chi Burst.
For this new passive need-to-proc-to-use Chi Burst for mistweaver/brewmaster, it might creates this weird conflict b/n hero talent Path of Resurgence w/o it being a reliable button or w/o the QoL I asked for above.
edit: I think generating a Chi Burst charge on combat start would solve my concerns of not having Chi Burst on pull for weird situations or Chi Burst becoming a 2 charge 30s ability as well if the combat start is too complicated
Mistweaver:
I’m ecstatic to see that Essence Font+Clouded Focus are finally in the grave and that Soothing Mist is optional. This version of Mistweaver will feel amazing to play and I am so excited to experience it in TWW. If I had my way I’d also remove Soothing Mist since it’s not possible to make the spell feel good, think it’s just a relic of it’s time and creates confusion on how the spec should be played.
The icon for Chi Harmony needs to be noticeably very different to be visually readable. I don’t think entirely agree w/ needing to remove the Chi Harmony buff since there are other specs that also have this same “issue” of too many buffs to track and removing Renewing Mist bouncing while it’s Chi Harmony is a downside for keeping ReM’s on as many injured players as possible. I just don’t think having one additional buff to track really matters.
Overflowing mists needs to state that auto attacks proc the heal so new players stop getting baited by the description.
Resplendent Mist needs to go or get reworked to be consistent, it being a chance to proc is abysmally bad for a capstone talent.
Swap Healing Elixir and Invigorating Mists w/ each other, think it’s healthier for the spec if Healing Elixir is something you have to choose to take since mw is pretty tanky w/o Healing Elixir and I think it makes more sense that Invigorating Mist something that you can’t skip taking since Vivify is balanced around the Invigorating Mists.
Invoke Chi’ji feels clunky compared to Invoke Yulon, not sure what can be done to make it a bit more smooth w/o overpowering Yu’lon. I think Chi’ji giving a buff where your Tiger Palm strikes twice during the duration would maybe solve the clunkiness b/c the issue is having to tiger palm twice to get the instant cast Enveloping mist. Chances are that Xuen’s Guidance in Conduit of the Celestials fixes that issue, but I think ideally that talent shouldn’t be the solution.
Mastery is just woefully underutilized in the kits overall and it could be made better if it just had more hooks into the kit. For example early version of Shielun’s Gift in Dragon Flight used to proc mastery on every hit of the spell and used to be something that could be an interesting choice if you decided to grab some mastery to be able to use Sheilun’s at lower stacks since you had mastery to beef up the heal since it used to work on each hit. I think allowing it to proc on every cleave of vivify would let it be stronger and more enticing of a stat.
Conduit of the Celestial: feels super good for all builds
Master of Harmony: feels underwhelming, doesn’t really alter your rotation enough to be interesting outside of gaining a 2nd Thunder Focus Tea charge. I don’t think there’s anything really wrong w/ a more passive tree since some players would prefer that.
Windwalker:
Glad that Mark of the Crane management is back for windwalker.
Would love for the ability to Spear Hand Strike during Fists of Fury.
Swap Acclamation and Ascension w/ each other, I would prefer to be able to take Ascension w/o having to take Acclmation
Buff Touch of the Tiger, Replace TotT w/ Inner Peace or maybe incorporate Eye of the Tiger w/ TotT?
Combat Wisdom: Would love a choice node on whether we can get passive vs active Expel Harm w/ or w/o the chi generation. It doesn’t feel good that I have no agency on when I can choose to get the EH heal at least b/c at times it was a clutch heal w/ Strength of Sprit talent every now and then. If I had to choose between Power Strikes and Expel Harm to keep I’d personally want to keep Expel Harm b/c it allows the continuation for Hit Combo(talent)/mastery and I think it flowed well in the spec’s kit b/c you chose when you wanted to use it for the various reasons I mentioned. I think at the very least if we can’t have the chi gen version back that there needs to be a choice node. My other wish is that it also feels more chunky like mistweaver’s EH. I will miss Power Strikes, Chi Burst generating Chi and Expel harm as chi generation to be honest, but I’ve been playing around on the beta and have grown to enjoy the current chi generation the more I play.
Increase the window to use Whirling Dragon Punch in some manner.
Would love for Last Emperor’s Capacitor to also let you cast Crackling Jade Lightning on the move, really happy that the talent is viable now. Also POWUH OF DA THUNDA KING is my new favorite talent.
Dance of Chi-Ji being a hard requirement to take Martial Mixture feels off to me.
Jadefire Stomp is just a unenjoyable button even w/ the massive QoL it got w/ this alpha/beta. It needs to enhance the windwalker kit in some manner like it did for Mistweaver to feel good. The only hero talent that interacts w/ Jadefire Stomp is August Dynasty on the Conduit tree and has a strange 8s icd while the choice node talent w/ Jadefire Stomp is Jadefire Fist which only actives every 25s not factoring in FoF cd usage. I just don’t think it’s worth the dev time to salvage it, but maybe there’s a way.
Hit Combo should get some kind of rework or massive QoL if we’re going to stick w/ the current flow of windwalker. I’m pretty happy we got a Flurry of Xuen to take in place of it so there’s an option to not take Hit Combo instead.
Darting Hurricane and Memory of the Monastery feeling a bit underwhelming to me for being capstones and probably need a bit more cooking. I like the ideas, just don’t know if there’s a way to make them feeling more impactful for being on the bottom of the tree.
I think it’d be kinda neat to have a talent choice that’s an AoE cone Rising Sun Kick where you have to build it up in some manner so it’s not just mindless press RSK on cd to allow the rest of the kit to still be used. I think the animation could be an overhead leg swap to slam the leg down onto the ground or just a big cone kick would be.
Conduit of the Celestials: Tree feels great, Heart of the Jade Serpent can feel kind of hectic at time, but I’m sure that’ll be ironed out over time and practice. Heart of the Jade Serpent still feels much better than it’s initial version.
SP: Needs more cooking in general and in terms of how you active it now, the attack power bar per flurry strike charge gen is a great change. To me Wisdom of the Wall comes off as buffs that you keep cycling through as you do your rotation and have 1-2 up at all times, ideally 2 once you get your flow set up. I like the ideas behind it for sure. Maybe there’s a button that let you choose when to send flurry strikes once maxed? Don’t think SP getting a button would cause “button bloat” since for example I would be be putting that theoretical Shando-Pan button wherever I end up putting Conduit of the Celestials. Definitely needs some more frequent stack dumps to feel good.
Brewmaster:
Make Rushing Jade Wind duration+cooldown not hasted anymore, but haste still adds ticks to keep the button comfortable rotation wise, esp during lust. Rushing Jade Wind gets very uncomfortable during lust/high haste periods b/c the cd and duration get shorter w/ more haste.
Invoke Niuzao need to feel more impactful as a button in some manner and have Walk With The Ox talent be a 1pt instead of 2pt to not feel so expensive to take. The new improved celestial talent is a massive improvement over the degenerate shadowlands version. Maybe swap WotW and Improved Niuzao w/ each other or baseline Improved Niuzao to make Niuzao more enticing to take in general? Maybe make pressing Niuzao give like a shield or do big dmg on summon to make the global feel less bad to press?
Zen mediation needs to have just something more to more enticing to take, maybe make it continue giving the 8s damage reduction buff after the channel is broken from a melee?
Remove Spinning Crane Kick sucking in orbs or make them stop short of your character so you can choose when to step on them for the healing. Maybe even increase or uncap how many you can have you like you could in MoP/WoD so there’s a gameplay loop around choosing how to utilize your orbs for healing if you choose to.
Both hero talents feel surprisingly good.
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Aside from all my minor complaints, thank you dev(s) for making monk feel amazing to play and I am super hype to play it in TWW. I think this will be the most excited I have ever been to play monk since I started in Legion and I look forward to see what else will be cooked up!
Current S4 WW, I really wish the changes had been more surgical, there were some great ideas in the rework, some 2 point nodes to 1, add some fun talent points, tie in stat scaling to FoF, make chi wave passive, delete serenity, fix the statues and voila all done.
Instead we got this car with square wheels, it went from a symphony of flowing martial arts to w/e this is.
But hey at least we can kinda double jump and dash but not really unless you use roll and want a longer recharge, or the roll into an enemy??? what? why?
Idk but to me it’s just a glorified roll extension talent but for extra gcds and roll is a great length charges are all that was wanted.
I agree with pretty much everything from Jarrods post. Most talents are actually fun or I see potential in… playstyle, balance, content, tier sets, etc will all play into it but I like it overall.
As for JFS… what if Jadefire Stomp for WW was utility instead of annoying damage/buff/just bad? What if it was a small group/raid defensive sort of like Darkness? Personally I think a movement speed buff within a certain range of the stomp perfectly fits in with WW theme. We lost windwalking maybe give a us buffed version on a cooldown and call it Jadefire Stomp?
Would be easy enough to make this change, just drop the other talents in the tree that buff it and I am guessing 99% of WWs would be thrilled. Would need some kind of adjustment in the Conduit tree since there is a talent there for it as well but its worth it imo.
6/19 I’d like to go back to this post and touch upon it a little bit due to the changes of this weeks Beta Build for PvP.
Really happy about new honor talent additions, the removal of alpha tiger is acceptable and mighty ox kick was semi replaced with the new honor talents, so I can see why it would be obnoxious to play against ox kick if it sticked around on top of the new additions.
Some of the current existing honor talents are still rather way too weak and some of them are incredibly useless. I’d like to see a little detail towards that for the next builds to make honor talents like Predistination, Reverse Harm and Pereptual Paralysis more attractive to pick up.
Tigereye Brew would be the biggest winner of TWW if there werent the bugs and how weak it functions. Tigereye Brew has a very long gcd when you press it which makes pressing it feel so annoying. Tigereye Brew also treats spinning crane kick as 3 Chi when used in combination with Dance of Chi-Ji.
In general I’d like to see Tigereye brew changed a bit by generating 1 stack per 2 chi rather than 1 stack per 3. The resources WW used to have are not the same anymore in TWW, which makes this very hard to stack up now.
I would also love to see just a slight numeric buff to tigereye brew because the damage reduction it provides feels rather way too harsh, where it almost just equals out your damage vs high armor targets and reduces your damage against lower ones.
A bit of general Feedback.
PvP feels insanely slow atm which i think the main offender for is Stamina which just outscales the primary stat on gear by a huge margin. I think there was a clear pattern in Dragonflight where Stamina would get more and more absurd as the seasons progressed and players got better gear with the stamina peaking in DF S4, which slowed down the game quite a bit.
Id like to see more action for the first season of TWW rather than a boring slagfest of no one ever dying and 80% dampening games, I feel like especially for the first season there needs to be damage in the game so everything feels crazy, when people come back and they see each arena game is 10 mins, then most likely if not they’re going to leave again.
And lastly for WW Monk again:
The changes aka the hidden nerfs to pvp multipliers this week are super weird, Windwalker already does no damage in pvp if it wasn’t for blackout kick. So double dipping on nerfing blackout kick and TotM theoretically makes sense only IF damage was shifted around to noodle hitters like RSK and FoF. Im also absolutely not a fan of nerfing Xuen’s Treasure by 50% this was completely uncalled for and might hurt WW later in the expansion.
Still no return of Skyreacher dash, even not with honor talent, but some useless crap like 5 yards air knocks you don’t even realize if you don’t focus exactly onto it to see what happens. On top of that some PvP modifier nerfs without any understandable reason.
Thanks to remind me on my promise to drop WW as my favorite spec with TWW! I was unsure for a moment if I still might play it a bit until today changes …
It feels like you’re doing everything possible to avoid fixing Chi Burst’s actual issue. Buffing its damage is good, but the ability still doesn’t feel good to press as a cast. It just needs to be an instant cast button. Making it a rotational proc has only created another problem. You’ve severely limited our ability to use the ability in any scenario, from any distance.
Main issue still is with Shado Pan. Flurry Strikes needs its energy threshold reduced to be a viable option or to feel good in any way, until that is fixed it’s going to be very unpopular.
Second biggest issue is Celestial Brew being VERY weak, like I said in previous posts the max Celestial Brew is barely over 30% of our hp compared to 70% on live this feels exceptionally bad on boss fights with 1 shot mechanics where Celestial Brew is our main short cd defensive and in keys like Stone Vault where the tank busters are constantly coming out then it needs to be looked at.
Balanced Stratagem still does not build stacks properly, keg is only building 2 and every other ability is only building one stack. Really need this to be fixed asap.
Ox Stance being buffed to 40% was a fantastic change, good job on that. Chi Burst buff was pretty big, like others said it being a cast feels very awkward and it would be better as an instant.
I don’t know if details isn’t capturing it appropriately or if it really does just stink, but the Elemental Harmony or whatever it’s called (the hero tree where you story “vitality” and release it to do healing for 10 secs after using TFT) seems to do so little that its pointless. The other tree seems to work better.
Disregarding the bug with its 20% buff that hasn’t actually increased the healing it does (only the rating → percent conversion in the character panel has been changed), this stat just…doesn’t feel good to gain more rating in. Outside of cooldowns, it has no scaling in group-healing situations, with all of its triggers relegated to the single-target component of spells. And even with those cooldowns active the healing is…disappointing. With Chi-Ji active, it just doesn’t feel satisfying to use anymore. Even when using everything in its favor (Jade Bond, multiple enemies, fully stacked Teachings of the Monastery with Ancient Concordance), all of those Mastery events just…do nothing to players’ health bars. For a cooldown that had felt phenomenal to use during Dragonflight and Shadowlands, I feel as if I’d be better off using neither Celestial, and just cast more Vivifies.
With how low its Spell power coefficient begins relative to both the strength of the spells that do trigger it as well as the size of players’ health pools, other secondary stats scale just as well as Mastery does in single-target situations, but those stats continue to effect more of our kit beyond healing a lone target. Mastery needs a way to feel good to have, because at the moment, I’m dreading getting any Mastery on gear, when it could be a useful stat.
With the removal of the Essence Font effect that doubled Gust of Mists events on affected targets, I was hopeful Mastery could become something more than what it had been for the past few years, hopeful that it could come into its own, but having another expansion on the horizon with one of our stats being essentially dead weight in most content isn’t fun or exciting.
Forcing tiger palm to be a main source of damage being a generator in a rotation with so many damage sources already should not be a big part of your damage profile! it is unnecessary and feels weird to the flow of the spec and causes weird decision making issues when building towards your damage + doing damage. Ontop of all of that tiger palm is probably your least cool button to press and has the least amount of synergies in the tree so it is extremely odd to design around it so heavily, just put more synergies into the other spells and the class is 1000x better off when the tier set is gone
Furthermore Hit Combo also feels super weird in a rotation that wants TP to do damage and build bc sometimes you’re forced to break it in m+ scenarios and it feels super weird
This is pretty much how I feel about it also. I can see times where we are in a position to TP at least twice to build chi for one spender or another. I’d really like to see Expel Harm go back to an active ability that generates chi. It would help in those times and allow us not to break our combo strikes.
Currently it almost feels like a trap to talent into Hit Combo because there is going to be times that you’ll need to TP again and drop the buff. Taking Flurry in that choice node mentally feels better to me whether or not it is as good overall.
Brewmaster Shado Pan needs some attention. Compared to Master of Harmony you would never really want to take this as damage break down your aspects of the harmony do way way more damage than flurry strikes. This is supposed to be your Hero talents and it feels paltry to take.
I could see how it fits more in line possibly with WW but when on Brew you generate your 10 stacks and it maxes out at 10 stacks fairly quickly. Then you just sit there for awhile till you can spend 400 energy. Then the damage that comes out pales in comparison to Aspects in Harmony. If this is intended fine. But perhaps a modifier for Brew to buff the damage by a lot make it more competitive.
Also against all odds says it will stack to 20, but it is based on your flurry strikes. So could only get 10 stacks. So either Flurry Strikes either Maxes out at 10 stacks which also could be why its damage so low. Perhaps it should stack on brew to 40,50,99 stacks or something perhaps the damage then as well might be more in line with Master of Harmony Damage. There could be Modifiers for Brewmaster only on this as could undoubtedly effect WW as well
Another suggestion. Master of Harmony gets 2 Celestial Brew charges. Shado Pan should buff the Celestial Brew charge by a significant amount since you get only 1 charge. CB in general feels weak compared to live. Live feels like you could get almost a full healthbar CB whereas in beta CB you might get maybe 1-2M on a 7M healthbar.
Feel like this should be doubled at least or least on Shado Pan
Ive been playing this spec from the beginning throughout all its iterations and between the tier set, talents, and Shado-Pan, it feels like there’s a disconnect with how often the spec design thinks we should be pressing TP versus how many times I actually push TP. Its easy to feel like I never have enough chi fo FoF when that wasn’t too much of an issue in DF (especially with expel harm) and so many talents put power into TP. Shado-Pan generates full stacks of Flurry Strikes with one full channel of FoF and then I need to press 8 TP’s in order to dump them, often sitting at max stacks. One of the Wisdom of the Wall buffs, a 2o second Buff, buff my flurry strikes, but unless I back to back slam 8 Tiger palms, I probably wont get any use out of this.
Not sure there’s any real feedback here other than just this weird disconnect in how Tiger Plam is used,especially with how this spec is supposed to be played by always sequencing your abilities since the Legion revamp.
To me it feels like Tiger Palm needs to generate 3 Chi instead of 2, and energy regen needs to be increased by a small amount and the whole spec will play more smoothly.