a new expansion with new “hero” specs should offer more than just passives imo. flurry strikes could legit be our tier set for next season or something, it doesn’t really change up anything for our specs
2 Likes
Please don’t add any summons in this tree. Can we have at least one choice of no summons for people that don’t want to have a bunch of NPCs running around on their behalf?
Imo the tree is not beyond saving, having so many passive effects to track though that are hard to track without weak auras is a bummer. Really hope we get some simplification there.
Generating flurry charges based on doing your max HP in damage also seems like trolling. Why is this tied to HP? Are we supposed to feel bad about getting higher ilvls and getting more stamina?
12 Likes
Can we have a talent that makes WW monk auto attach when channeling fist of fury?
3 Likes
Switching to the Windwalker Monk because, why not.
A big problem with revealing these hero trees now is that there is absolutely no indication of changes to the class or spec tree. Windwalker has been dealing with the same progressive issues for several expansions.
- Our core abilities have grown stale and work exactly the same way as they did when they were first introduced to the game.
- We lack mechanics that allow us to scale well with secondary stats.
- Half of our talent tree is % damage increases to abilities, which is supremely unexciting.
- Several other talents in our tree are either severely undertuned or add so much bloat that we never take them.
- Resource management and buff maintenance are a mess.
There are just too many issues for Windwalker to see any good in these trees. Address the major issues first, then design a cool hero tree around what we can only hope will be a positively reimagined spec.
The Monk discord has an “improving-windwalker” chat room with several threads of dicussions on how the spec can be improved. Definitely worth taking a look at for inspiration.
14 Likes
Sorry, but this would be an absolute waste of a talent point. This should be how it functions baseline.
You could take it a step further and make each FoF hit also count as an auto attack on the main target.
3 Likes
Yea but we all know blizzard won’t change fist of furry… still can’t believe can’t/haven’t fix this for WW Monk.
2 Likes
What is the point of the Protect and Serve/Lead from the Front node for Brew? Out of all those abilities the only one I actually use is Expel Harm and it is plenty good as it is.
Are you taking things out of the rotation so that we will actually be able to cast Chi Burst/Wave?
Are you redoing the class tree so that we can actually get Vivacious Vivification, which gets us an instant Vivify and would actually make that node theoretically useful?
Are you nerfing tank self-sustain across the board so that we will need to actually use Vivify?
That entire node is a head scratcher for me.
1 Like
Maybe I am misunderstanding Overwhelming Flurry but the way I am reading it that the stored charge is how much your max health was so that wouldn’t necessarily encourage clicking off health buffs if anything you might want to try gaming more health in order to increase the damage of Overwhelming Flurry. Not sure I like that gameplay either though.
How do you think we’re going to be able to do all our damage tied to our health pool to trigger Overwhelming Flurry? Touch of death without mentioning touch of death.
My guildmate already mentioned trolling Shado-pan users by using rallying cry during bloodlust.
2 Likes
I was comparing some damage numbers for this and on aoe it’s going to be very very easy to hit the 10 stacks for the capstone on every 400 energy. Single target itll take 800 energy atm to hit that which isnt the best but itll line up with weapons of order since weapons of order will be about very 1:20 on ST with the CDR talent.
Only part of the tree I do not like right now as a Brewmaster is Protect and Serve + Lead From the Font (unless chi wave and chi burst gain MASSIVE damage buffs like 500% of what they do now this is just a dead node) and controlled instincts, haste is very not great on brew and its decent on windwalker. I think changing this to mastery would make a lot more sense
2 Likes
Overall impressions
- Probably harder to properly utilize as BrM vs WW because of Flurry Charges building off of maximum health. Brewmaster has lower DPS and more health than WW, so it’ll inherently build stacks slower, which means less Flurry Strikes and Wisdom of the Wall uptime.
- Example: Assuming WW is doing 200k dps and has 800k health, BrM is doing 100k dps and has 1.00m health, and both generally spend 400 energy every 20s: BrM will proc 6 Flurry Strikes a minute while WW will proc 15.
- This also means that the capstone has more uptime for WW vs BrM. If this is intentional, then that’s fine, but I would expect the hero tree to be roughly the same power for the specs they’re supporting.
- Seems thematically on point, though. Shado-Pan are the martial artists of the monk world, so stands to reason that the tree involves a lot of punching and kicking and striking.
Talent impressions
- High Impact seems pretty RNG-heavy (relies on your Flurry Strikes proccing shortly before something dies) and really useless in raid unless it’s an add fight. Probably better if High Impact were changed to something like “Targets with your Mystic Touch applied to them have a low chance to proc a Flurry Strike when you land a hit”.
- Controlled Instincts is garbage as written since WW does not scale well at all with haste. You actually run into energy issues because the rate at which you passively regen energy does not scale the same as your FoF channel time being reduced. This needs to be reworked to something else.
- BrM doesn’t quite have this issue, but nothing else synergizes with haste.
- I do like that Protect and Serve/Lead From the Front choice node. Would make taking the instant Vivify talent more agreeable for both specs.
- Predictive Training (and to a lesser extent, Whirling Steel) are useless in group PvE content for WW. The extra non-DRed avoidance is nice, but parry and dodge are not good at all.
- Predictive Training for BrM, on the contrary, could probably see 100% uptime if you stack enough mastery, especially when the capstone is up.
- What does “becomes injured” mean? Does this mean “go from 100% health to less than 100% health” or does this mean “when you take a hit”?
- Probably want to watch Effective Training to see how it performs with Serenity. The other two seem alright since you can pool charges with SEF and you can usually send WoW whenever.
5 Likes
Other people who are more mechanically gifted can go more in depth of why it is weak in that respect. But for me, this was the number one spec I was excited to see. Like, 10x more than any other. MoP is my favorite expac, 90% of my characters are Pandaren. This was heartbreaking to see how little effort went into actually representing the ‘Shado-pan’ in any way. There is absolutely 0 flavor in this. From a thematic point of view it is a total flop.
And then gameplay wise, its just boring. As everyone else has already said “Your things do more random things” isn’t fun.
Not particularly looking forward to the last spec. And may I just say, please rename it and change the flavor. Brewmaster and Mistweaver actually have something in common: they both brew. Brewmasters make beer, mistweavers make tea. I don’t know how you could possibly miss that connection. The third spec should be about brewing. Maybe Kombucha, thats basically halfway between tea and beer.
15 Likes
Please stop giving Monks more abilities that require a WA to keep track of.
At the very least let us CHOOSE when to unleash Flurry instead of just having it go off every 400 energy. Let us store it up to like 20 and then use it 10 stacks at a time like old Tiger’s Eye Brew.
9 Likes
Some fine passives but a lot of underwhelmed passives as well. Would be pretty neat if some of the nodes offered replacement/empowerments for our more lackluster abilities. A big part of the shado pan is being masters of certain crafts, so there would be a chance to have the branches like blackguard, Wu Kao, or Omnia reflected here. Example: that chi wave/burst one could have turned those two into an evoker-like “hold to empower” abilities to reflect Omnia’s mastery of mystical powers. Hell, maybe a light stealth or dodge on rolling to reflect the Wu kao.
Also a bit worried about the new flurry ability and its strange stacking mechanics. Feels like it might not work well with serenity and have an all around bad synergy with our kit.
Edit: Cope is dead.
There is 100% Jadefire Stomp in the Celestial tree in the talent “August Dynasty - Casting Jadefire Stomp increases the damage of your next RSK by 30% (assuming for both WW and MW) and vivify by 50% (MW Only)”
The spec looks great for adding some some scaling pathways to Monk finally.
Some thoughts:
Presumably SEF clone damage will count for flurry generation, will each clone perform its own flurry strike when it goes off? If clones do flurry strike will they each apply a High Impact debuff of their own? Will flurry strike feed flurry charge generation?
Are energy gen talents being changed at all?
Will Wisdom of the Wall cycle through the buffs or is it random?
Any alterations to Jadefire Stomp? I personally like the ability but feel like the main issue others have with it could be addressed through dropping its cd to 20 sec like for MW and/or increasing its reset rate. Alternatively making it just cost energy and have no CD would also do wonder and play into the Shadowpan energy usage theme.
Off gameplay, could the name for Shadowpan please be changed or some lore rationale added for non Pandas? It feels so weird that a hero spec refers to a specific race in its name and when the organization itself is a Pandaren one.
1 Like
My day was better before I read this
4 Likes
I would love to see both SL covenant abilities go out the window, never felt good to press either of them. Would rather see more interaction with Strike of the Windlord to be able to press that more often. Specifically having a 10sec maintenance buff/rune of power in the form of Jadefire stomp being mandatory just feels really bad. A lower cd on Jadefire does not make it feel better to press imo.
7 Likes