Counting TPs, trying to min-max some of the buffing talents, counting how many flurries go off for the capstone and lining it up with Skyreach, which are all terrible ideas, don’t really affect our rotation. It’s just more stuff we have to keep an eye on/have a WA to keep an eye on.
Rotational interactions dont modify the rotation? ok then
What interaction?
I don’t see us attempting to spam or double use BoKs for the buff to Flurry. I don’t see us being able to reliably blast several flurries at a time to proc more of the agi outside of burst. So where is the interaction? As it is, we do 8 TPs or 7 TPs and some change of expel harm and we get what is essentially the MoP Xuen Leggo cloak as a proc that is somewhat modified by what we do and we get a random buff out of 4 every 10 flurries.
It feels like we’re just gonna be doing our normal rotation with extra monitoring on buffs with what we have on the Shado-Pan tree.
I dont think you understand the magnitude of the buff or what youre talking about. It is mostly definitely a rotational change
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What will we be changing up?
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Many valid concerns have already been expressed on this thread w.r.t scaling behaviour and expected feel of this hero tree. The most notable points I concur with are the following:
- Incredible potential for power to snowball in aoe
- Either feeling “uncontrolled” or require very careful planning, unless somehow we luck into scenarios where alignment of Flurry Charge consumption with CDs is automatic.
- Lack of clarity on whether or not Wisdom of the Wall grants a single effect or all 5 at once.
My biggest additional concern is the number of rather opaque effects that this talent tree introduces. BrM (and by my understanding WW) has quite a lot of unintuitive or relatively unclear tooltips. A very significant amount of the communication I do related to the spec and class is clearing up misunderstandings created either directly via existing tooltips or incomplete readings of tooltips. Digging for information and completing models for effects in game may be fun for a very small portion of the playerbase, I’d bet that many players do not appreciate obscure or convoluted mechanics that don’t need to be that complicated.
No one has mentioned that Gift of the Ox (at least as of some point in Legion) used an alternative estimation for maximum HP instead of the actual current value. Instead of actual maximum HP, this value could instead be used for the Flurry Charge threshold. This improves consistency and doesn’t punish players for stamina buffs and trinkets, but comes at the cost of obscuring the actual behaviour behind the mechanic. From my recollection of what the expression is expected to be, it also may need tweaking to be “fair” for WW monks as well.
Damage accumulation and whether or not it is whitelisted [to spec/class abilities] is also going to be a significant sticking point in its tuning and going to disproportionately punish BrM over WW along with the lower expected damage output along with greater maximum hp if it ends out being whitelisted.
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Having had some more time to digest this tree, wanted to post some updated thoughts.
On the Overwhelming Flurry - I think people have (correctly) identified the many scaling issues from fort / rallying cry being potential dps losses to stamina scaling at a different rate than power over the course of the expansion.
I would like to add that it feels uniquely monk in that it feels overly complicated and prone to bugs / issues when something simpler may be just as functional. It reminds me of things like SEF, Stagger, Gift of the Ox, and some historical versions of Mark of the Crane, where I can just see ways to abuse it or how it can bug out. What if a fight reduces your max health or dramatically increases it? How does it interact with damage amp phases? Are Tauren monks just going to be numerically inferior to other monks? How do trinkets interact with Overwhelming Flurry? Will SEF work with Overwhelming Flurry, or will it be bugged and only 45% of your damage contribute?
The last note is that having it trigger on 400 energy spend feels like there’s a chance that I’ll need to get some weak aura to track how much I’ve spent and just sit there and afk if I have cooldowns becoming available soon.
On Wisdom of the Wall - I may be reading into this too much, but it feels like a way to address WW (and to a lesser extent BrM)'s terrible scaling by making non-haste stats much better. However, addressing this in a hero talent tree seems like a mistake. Is the intent that when we get to the final seasons of TWW we are going to get locked into Shado-Pan because it is the only one that scales our stats comparable to other classes? Wouldn’t it be better for these problems to be addressed at the baseline? And if we are getting better stat scaling in TWW, doesn’t Wisdom of the Wall cause us to scale even better and force us into the same problem? Or is this meant to somehow offset the potential negative scaling of Overwhelming Flurry?
On The Theme - I keep coming back to this, but I just don’t know what the theme is here. What does it mean to be Shado-Pan? You see Rider of the Apocalypse and you can already imagine what the theme is going to be, and it’s pretty obvious that you nailed that there, but Shado-Pan is a bit more nebulous of a concept. There are non-monk members of the Shado-Pan, including archers (hunters), rogues, and various spellcasters.
If I had to go really distill down what Shado-Pan means to me is the idea of some sort of ninja army that mans the serpent’s wall, and I don’t really think this tree captures that. It is a bit of a stretch but I can kinda see how you can come up with Overwhelming Flurry as some kind of a patient fighter waiting for the perfect moment to strike - but triggering the proc after you hit 400 energy doesn’t feel like I’m exploiting some weakness, I’m just delaying damage for now reason. Why not have Keg Smash and Fists of Fury trigger Flurry strikes? Or how about when you use a cooldown?
Finally, where are the stealth elements of Shado-Pan in this tree? Several questlines in Townlong Steppes featured you working with Shado-Pan to stealth around disabling Mantid operations. None of that flavor is here.
I’ve already mentioned that it doesn’t seem like a visually striking hero tree, certainly not comparable to something like Templar.
Some closing thoughts -
- It is weird to me that Veteran’s Eye gives you haste which is the only stat not buffed by Wisdom of the Wall.
- Lead from the Front is incredibly disappointing because the listed abilities basically do no damage and feel like bloat on the class.
- Efficient Training buffing tiger palm damage is… something but boy does it feel bad. I understand most of the power is in the CDR for that node, but it seems like a weird tack-on.
- Without a way for Windwalker to buff their parry or dodge rating, the choice node of Whirling Steel and Predictive Training feels like a non-choice for WW and a “sim it and pick the best” choice for Brewmaster
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Heyo! Repping the old Monk cuz eh, why not… used to love Windwalker, haven’t had the energy to summon to level it up with everything I see about Touch of Death windows being the absolute worst (and my personal, unending distaste for the new Statue abilities summarizing our button bloat problem)
Few thoughts, partially rehashing more qualified people in this thread, etc… I’ll try to factor BrM into my thoughts but I really am just a WW guy, so… apologies…
- Rework Flurry Strikes:
- Make it an active ability.
- Generate Flurry Strike Charges up to 10 per X Chi spent (Serenity spenders still count), using Flurry Strikes consumes 5 charges. Max HP and energy spending triggers is just janky. Yes, this is just Tigereye Brew Mechanics. I loved Tigereye Brew. Sue me. Give it the Legendary Cloak Fury of Xuen animation while you’re at it.
- Flurry Strike replaces Touch of Death. Kill Fatal Flying Guillotine and Forbidden Technique or make their effects less janky if Shado-Pan. (I.E. FFG could increase the cleave damage of Flurry Strikes or FT could forego the double-tap in favor of buffing the damage output of a 5-stack Flurry Strike)
- EDIT: Activating SEF/WoO/Serenity gives a 5 stack. Boom. There’s on the pull burst coordination solved.
- Efficient Training:
- Granular Cooldown reduction is already a thing on the WW side by way of Spiritual Focus. Is providing more active cooldown reduction engaging or is it practically just providing more ways for burst windows to get slightly misaligned? Personally, I think going back to the base class and making a fixed ~1 min CD/45 sec Recharge on Serenity/SEF might be more appropriate if the intention is for monks to use their CDs faster than their CD indicates but… eh.
- Controlled Instincts:
- Not a fan of more stack juggling mechanics. I think this might be a good spot to lessen Monks channeling woes to keep the theme of the name (Remove Zen Meditations’ Channel requirements, ditto for Fists of Fury or make it channel 100% faster etc.)
- Wisdom of the Wall
- Rewarding firing off Flurry Strike bursts good, randomized buffs bad. Keep it simple and consistent. I’m less concerned with what that buff is than it’s not randomized, but a couple ideas…
- WW: Add damage % = X% of haste for Y seconds? Lord knows that stat should do something for us…
- BRM: Popping into my head-- Attacks clear X% of staggered damage and inflict that damage to your target (or heal you?) for Y seconds.
- Lead from the Front
- Bonus round. Why is this here? These abilities do not do enough damage to qualify for a leech mechanic. If this is your way of announcing Monks can finally throw a proper Hadouken with damage to match, though…
Finally, where are the stealth elements of Shado-Pan in this tree? Several questlines in Townlong Steppes featured you working with Shado-Pan to stealth around disabling Mantid operations. None of that flavor is here.
Also yeah, didn’t even touch on the flavour thing. I think it’s reasonable that they shouldn’t try to shove every class in the Shado-Pan ranks into a Monk Hero tree, but I agree there needs to be some stealth at bear (hah) minimum.
Flavor fluff:
- Toggle weapon use over unarmed somehow or other… jab, blackout strike, an active toggle, whatever… (Warrior aspects)
- Tiger’s Lust gets a smokebomb and makes you untargettable or something like that. Idk.
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Hey guys! I know that Max and some of my other friends who play WW were disappointed with some of their trees on Friday. I made this one, based around a big finisher called Overwhelming Flurry (obviously inspired from Rock Lee’s Hidden Lotus from Naruto). I’ve never played either Brewmaster or WW so I tried to make my own thing based around this ability.
I also tried to integrate some things that make Haste and Mastery better for Windwalker (since those stats don’t seem to be good for WW). For Haste: it increases the number of strikes during Overwhelming Flurry. For Mastery: it will increase the damage of Overwhelming Flurry per stack of Flurry Charge. Let me know what you think!
Here’s the tree: https://imgur.com/gallery/UuC8gJg
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I am surprised Shado-Pan has no “ninja” elements but perhaps they didn’t want to infringe on Rogues.
There should still be some overlap though.
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Looks very OP just judging by the numbers but that does not really matter. Tbh it’s way better than the talents we just got imo.
Good passives like a damage stagger for WW that is prone to getting blown up unless you preemptively use defensives.
Simple stacking to track at a glance, even with a base UI.
A passive haste effect is maybe not the most desirable for WW but with adding more strikes to the big hit at the end there is good synergy there. The idea of a “Seven Sided Strike” type of ability has been thrown around by players before and this is like a cooler version of that.
It’s also not another CD to just stack together with Serenity/Tiger to amp up the damage of other abilities, really well done.
I would be very happy if this was the tree we got, with some adjusted numbers ofc. 
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Completely agree about the numbers; I have a tendency to make the numbers big on first tree so people get the idea that this is your “big button”. I did the same thing with Spellslinger (I made an Arcane Laser thing).
Yeah easier to get the general idea across for sure.
Hope the devs really are looking at these threads and are prepared to make changes this time around and steal some of your ideas, or the whole damn thing for that matter.
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Yeah, to be fair to the devs the Shado-Pan dailies made it pretty clear the organization was made of more than just monks… it just implied everyone had some monk training, so it gets awkward. TBH if the hero class got renamed “Shado-Pan Blackguard” I think it would clear up stuff if they didn’t add Rogue/Hunter stuff to it.
I don’t mind the talents overall.
I do take issue with the Whirling Steel and Predictive Training Talents, they are the random 6 second defensive procs which will assumedly come with something like a 30 second internal cd.
Random DPS procs are ok as we can play around them, random damage reduction only procs are just bad. We can’t restructure boss and mobs damage profiles around these procs. We already have one similar talent in class tree Bounce Back which is universally disliked and should also be looked at.
If we are going to have damage reduction it should function in one of the following ways…
- We have direct control (new ability or tied to existing ability or condition).
- We work to maximize uptime via general rotation.
- Its tied to a specific circumstance or event (dropping below 35%, number of mobs in proximity, etc).
- The bonus is smaller but permanent.
Brewmaster damage intake is already spikey in dungeons, we need stability not more RNG!
Some basic feedback here-
“Overwhelming Flurry”-
On paper doesn’t look bad, but the stronger we get (more health) the less it is going to do. Gaining health vs us doing dmg has never followed the same linear path and why would we expect this to change.
This directly counters any Serenity builds basically saying if you want to play Serenity and not summon things go play the other tree that summons things. Unless Serenity abilities still count as spending even though our energy doesn’t go down. Need more clarity on this.
“Efficient Training”-
This is mostly good but pigeonholes us into playing Weapons of Order as Brew, if you don’t play WoO this is a dead talent. So this build counters the Press the Advantage builds which was implemented to alleviate button bloat.
“Wisdom of the Wall”-
Is this all of them or one? All of them does sound too strong, but on the other hand one of them sounds like we are just playing slot machine that we have no impact on, and this would need a big visual queue for players who don’t use a bunch of Weak Auras to track stuff.
“Protect and Serve” and “Lead from the Front”-
Honestly, this is a pretty lame choice node. BrM and WW already have a ton of buttons that I find myself next to never using these buttons (outside Expel Harm, and Vivify outside of combat). This isn’t the tree’s fault but more so the core abilities fault, would love to see Chi Burst and/or Chi Wave reworked into passives that happen on different abilities (think Rising Sun Kick sending out a Chi Burst, and Fist of Fury/Keg Smash sending out a Chi Wave type of thing).
“General/TLDR”-
It’s a basic tree, I like the concept though.
Being pigeonholed into playing or not playing certain talents doesn’t feel good for the health of the game. Are these trees only an expansion feature or is it evergreen and if I choose to play with a certain talent (or not a certain talent) then I am barred from playing this tree and forced to the other tree where I suffer from the same fate.
You know what would be great is a Dev reading through the posts and responding to the players. So that your player base knows you intend to review your product to make adjustments that the reason for feedback but not once in 3 days has there been a response from a Dev or anyone involved with the dev team in this thread.
Please blizz review all the posts here. There is a lot of good feedback to be helpful to us monks.
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While I agree with that in principle, the problem is that a lot of players are incredibly toxic, and sometimes over the wrong thing/completely irrelevant issues. The perfect example is that there are players right now in the mage forum that are complaining about spellslinger being bad even though it might be the very best tree released so far (I say this as an Arcane mage main). We unfortunately brought this upon ourselves.
The other reason I suspect is actually one of company face. I firmly believe that the devs want to make the coolest product but cannot due to either time or engine constraints or coding constraints or what have you, but aren’t always able to tell their player base this because the legal team or sales team said this would be bad for the company’s image.
In short, I agree with you but I also understand why a lot of devs don’t reply.
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Well, I think there are a ton of issues with the main ability of these Hero Talents, to the point that I think you should consider reworking it from scratch:
How does this deal damage?
Is it on your current target, is an AoE attack against every enemy near you? What happens if it procs when you’re not in melee range of an enemy, like throwing a Keg Smash at range? Will it proc and deal no damage?
Energy Spent
Then, the way it works is really annoying, and probably a balance nightmare. You depend on damage dealt and energy spent. The energy part is fine for BrM, but WW doesn’t spend energy during their Serenity, which makes it incompatible with these Hero Talents.
Single Target vs AoE nightmare
Then, the damage done per max HP is really annoying is really unbalanced on singlet target vs. AoE. You’ll gain way many more procs on AoE situations than on single target fights, meaning that balancing the Flurry Strikes will be difficult: it will be decent on single target and extremely OP and busted on AoE, or decent on AoE and completely useless on single target.
Brewmaster will barely gain stacks
The way you gain charges doesn’t make sense for Brewmasters: you deal way less damage while expending more energy than WW, and you also have to consider they have more HP. In fact, it’s very possible that in single target situations, Brewmasters will sometimes trigger Flurry Strikes while having 0 Flurry Charges.
You’ll have to remove your HP buffs
Finally, the fact that the charges are generated depending on your maximum HP, means that buffs like Fortitude, Ancestral Vigor, Aspect’s Favor, or Rallying Cry, reduce the overall DPS of the core talent of this Hero Spec. There will be an incentive for Shado-Pan players to have a macro with /cancelaura these buffs.
The capstone shouldn’t be based around a proc
The Wisdom of the Wall effects are great, but again, they happen every tenth time you get a proc. You might get them when a pack of trash just died, or when the boss transitions to a damage inmune phase, or when you get a mechanic that makes you ran away from the boss. I think there should be a more deterministic way of gaining Wisdom of the Wall, like “Every 10 Flurry Strike, the next time you summon your Celestial you gain Wisdom of the Wall”, so you can control it. Also, procing Flurry Strikes with multiple charges counts as one Flurry Strike or multiple?
Then, some specific issues or doubts with some of the talents:
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High Impact: hitting enemies with a proc that happens based on energy spent is gonna be really annoying to track. The 5 seconds window is too small for something that is a proc.
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Protect and Serve: completely useless for both specs. We don’t cast Vivify outside of very niche scenarios.
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Lead from the Front: the damage and healing from these abilities is so minuscule, that this talent is almost non existent. Why not make it just an extra leech gain? Even if boring, it would be more impactful.
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Against All Odds: is this per Flurry stack? Per proc?
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Veteran’s Eye: I hope that any instance of damage from the player works for this talent, like Breath of Fire dots and Bonedust Brew procs. Because if not, I don’t see how can a Brewmaster proc this.
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Efficient Training: what if Brewmasters pick the Press the Advantage talent? Then the second part of this is useless.
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Whirling Steel: What exactly “become injured” means? Just receiving damage? Because Brewmaster have stagger, they’re receiving damage 100% of the fight. Does it mean getting below X percentage of HP?
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