It’s comical that you think there is a dev who does nothing else but work on monk and only that. That’s not how the real world works.
Well that’s a fair criticism but no need to be toxic either; just as we shouldn’t be toxic to devs, we also shouldn’t be toxic to the community. Some people are quite passionate about their specs (like me for Arcane)
1 Like
I think we should address the theme first. While theme doesn’t address gameplay directly, if done correctly it can (I’ll give an example)
Here’s a description from an in game character of what a Shado-Pan is:
“Nobody put up a battle 'til those dark ones came along - the “Shado-Pan.” They don’t stand up and fight. They come at us from the trees. Sometimes I swear they walk through walls. Always behind us, always out of the corner of our eyes - never fighting from the front.”
Shadow-pan should work around “Roll”. The base ability should replace roll into a “blink”. This creates the effect of making them appear out of nowhere without changing how the movement ability works too much. I’d make it so that it damages nearby enemy (if triggered close to target) or upon arriving in close range (if close enough to target when landing) (so it creates an “hit and run” or a “sneak & stab” kinda)
This ability could create our flurry charges or whatever we want to call them. The tree could improve on “hit and run” in a branch or “sneak & stab” in another. Other options are to have interactions with our charges with other skills ofc.
You have some sort of control over when you buildup charges, and while it’s dependent on moving, we’re usually rolling a lot anyways
Not saying this idea is very good, but it sounds a lot more fun to play around or improve upon 
Edit: I figure for tanking a boss in place for a while it might not be perfect, but hey, I’m sure something can be figured out if it’s just that 
2 Likes
That’s actually how that works. There are specific design teams for each class.
Hello everyone, I’m a monk enthusiast and I have played WW monk for a few expansions now and to me the class has the best flow when it comes to our rotation. I know WW has been struggling in DF with our rotation since we have buttons that just feel terrible to press (yes I am talking about jadefire stomp), but I think this will only be fixed with a class talent rework (me specifically would like to see weapons of order coming back to WW). I was hoping to get some cool new interactions with these new hero trees, I was particularly looking forward to the shado-pan one. And with the release of the tree I was confused about a few of these new talents so I decided to write this post. I will be splitting my discussion into 3 topics: energy usage and flurry strikes, confusing talents and suggestions.
Energy usage and flurry strikes:
In this whole thread a lot of people have been talking about how weird it is for flurry strikes to be dependent on your current health, which has some negative interactions with buffs, which I totally agree with, but I have other concerns and it is the energy usage requirements that we have in this tree. In my opinion designing talents around energy for WW it’s kind weird, cause when I think about a WW resource I always think about chi and not energy. I’m not sure if this is because of how WW operates in DF, since it’s quite hard for us to energy starve, but I always end up thinking about chi because our biggest damaging buttons use chi. So I think the focus on WW trees should be more on chi than energy because it would feel more natural. And one thing they need to fix for sure is the fact that we don’t use either energy or chi during Serenity, which would make this whole talent tree feel awkward during our biggest damage amp phase.
Confusing talents:
In this topic I’m going to highlight some text parts that got me confused.
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Overwhelming Flurry
In the talent it says “unleash Flurry Charges as Flurry Strikes” so i’m guessing if i have 10 Flurry charges once i spend 400 energy i will do a set of 10 Flurry Strikes. And if that’s the case, it would feel so bad to get 9 charges right when you spend 400 energy because you need to spend 400 energy just to get the 1 charge needed for the Wisdom of the Wall buff. -
Veteran’s eye
In the talent there is no duration to the haste buff, does that mean we are going to have 20% haste during the whole pull of a raid boss ? Or during the whole M+ ? I’m guessing they just forgot to add the duration to the text.
Suggestions:
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Overwhelming Flurry
I would rather have something like “Once you deal damage equal to your maximum health you unleash a flurry strike”, or change the energy requirement for a chi requirement. But in my opinion the best solution would be to make it work similarly to the old WW mastery where we had to stack our brew charges in order to get a big damaging window. I feel like if we had the power of choosing of when we want to use our charges it would feel so much better since we would have control of both Against All Odds and Wisdom of the Wall, we could have a more interesting interaction with Vigilant Watch and we could have a better control of High Impact inside dungeons, and yes i think if we had this version of the talent we would need a maximum amount of charges. -
Against All Odds
To me it is so weird to have a buff that only lasts 6 seconds, it feels super non impactful, I would rather have this buff stack up to 10 and have a duration of 12 secs. -
Efficient Training
The extra damage from energy spenders is so non impactful, i wish this could’ve been a 5% increase on chi spenders. I think the cd reduction on our big cooldowns is quite cool, I like that part. -
Wisdom of the Wall
To me the best solution to this would be the change I proposed in the Overwhelming Flurry talent, just to have the power of choosing in order to avoid a lot of frustration with this buff. Another way of solving this problem is to make Wisdom of the Wall a button that we can press after the 10 flurry strikes have been used, so instead of letting us choose when to use our flurry strikes we could just choose when to use Wisdom of the Wall.
While not sure exactly how well using a blink-roll to build charges would work, I enjoy the concept of a WW sub-spec having stealth-like mechanics.
Perhaps the blink-roll is called Dash, like the Monk recharge ability in D3. This coincides with Seven-Sided Strike, also from D3, which I would love to have in the spec tree, perhaps as a replacement for WDP. SSS functions like a combination of Killing Spree and Dash, but with a series of kicks, punches and palm strikes, and its tooltip reads:
“Dash rapidly between nearby enemies, dealing Physical damage over 7 strikes.”
Since this is getting into Rogue/DH territory, its design would need to be unique and function off existing WW mechanics, such as the CDR that both RSK and FoF get from BoK, but also damage amps from MotC, etc.
This would also be a great opportunity to incorporate “techniques” or “combo” mechanics, where you have to execute your rotation a certain way to increase the number of strikes or damage it deals, reduce or reset its cooldown, etc.
But I digress, since much of this is more of a spec-level concern rather than a Hero tree concern (though I understand they are ultimately intertwined). Hopefully we see some WW news going into Alpha.
6 Likes
As a Windwalker, nothing about this tree feels exciting, and instead adds a lot of heachaches and negative stat scaling with Stamina (presumably as punishment for our positive scaling through Touch of Karma and Touch of Death).
Flurry Strikes feels like it is going to cause so much degenerate gameplay that truly only Windwalker players will be prepared to play with them. We are used to popping Fort Brew and Stamina Flasks to enhance our damage for Touch of Karma and Touch of Death in past expansions, but at least our DPS increases have come from increasing our stamina, rather than decreasing it.
The damage threshold of Flurry Strikes being based on max health will cause fluctuations both throughout the duration of a fight, and throughout the expansion (as damage done scales much faster than player maximum hp). Our gearing choices will be extremely unique, having negative dps scaling on stamina.
If the threshold is updated dynamically, mid-fight, we can expect to be removing our Fortitude buffs, /cancelaura Rallying Cry. Maybe we just need to not group with a Resto Shaman in case their healing buffs grant us additional max HP.
If the threshold is not dynamically updated, then I’m sure we’ll end up doing shenanigans such as starting the fight with our weapons un-equipped in order to snap-shot a lower maximum health pool.
Having a potentially large damage in Flurry Strikes event trigger off of Tiger Palm can likely cause issues with Skyreach - if we have several stacks, and our next tiger palm will trigger Flurry Strikes, and Skyreach will be off cooldown soon, it is likely that the best move of ours will be to sit and do absolutely nothing, wasting energy, while we wait for Skyreach to become available in order to amplify the Flurry Strikes by the massive critical strike bonus of Skyreach.
Also, since Tiger Palm and Vivify are the only energy spenders for WW… what happens if we cross the 400 energy threshold with Vivify? Is the proc wasted? Does it target a random enemy in range, if there is one? Does the buff sit at 410/400 until we tiger palm again? Does it actually trigger off of your next auto-attack after hitting the energy threshold?
While we do not spend Energy during Serenity, we will still build stacks of Flurry Strikes during it. That does mean that we will probably need to do some set-up, ensuring we enter Serenity with 350/400 energy so that we can use the final global of Serenity to cast Tiger Palm to trigger Flurry Strikes within the damage buff of Serenity, which doesn’t sound particularly fun since we want to be pressing free chi-spenders during that buff. (side note, please delete Serenity or replace it with the much more fun Weapons of Order from Shadowlands).
Veteran’s Eye seems nearly impossible to proc, short of Teachings of the Monastery procs. However if each damage event of Spinning Crane Kick and Fists of Fury count, then perhaps it will only reliably proc during AoE, which is actually when haste is at its most valuable. So this might actually end up being a pretty cool node. (Or does Flurry Strikes deal damage separately for each stack consumed, thus interacting with this node?)
Both of our utility/defensive choice nodes contribute next to nothing for Windwalker in any PVE content that is not outdoor exploration content.
Efficient Training could be interesting, increasing the value of energy and therefore Haste, however the tuning seems too poor to get any value if we cannot get enough cooldown reduction to effectively sync 2 uses of SEF / Serenity with Invoke Xuen.
Wisdom of the Wall does some interesting things, but it seems like it’s trying to do too much in a weird way. I assume you only get one of the buffs at a time… otherwise this would be an absolutely insane proc to get. And if you do get one buff at a time, is it random which one you get? Does it go in a cycle? These buffs all amount to just “do more damage”, but play against your current stats in very different ways for each one, so I’m left wondering “what is the point?”. If I don’t play any differently depending on what buff I get, is there a reason for this spell to behave this way other than to upset me when I get the “bad one” at the wrong time - in this case the “bad one” being whatever one sims on my character the worst depending on my current stat distribution.
If Blizzard is able to somehow account for all the stamina scaling issues with Flurry Strikes, the tree boils down to “every 8th Tiger Palm does extra damage, and sometimes gives you a 20s buff that gives you extra damage”. The rest of the tree feels like filler, extra damage padding here and there with a couple of very bad defensive nodes. Efficient Training is the only node that excites me, with potential to finally sync up our 2 offensive cooldowns. There is potential as well in Wisdom of the Wall as a way to give some better stat scaling to us, but I think the buff should be either consistent (i.e. only the Crit effect, or maybe a different effect depending on what stat of yours is the highest), or if the buff did something that would cause you to play a little differently (i.e. tiger palm generates 2 stacks of TotM).
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The mechanical pattern seems cool, but the theme feels pretty off. Since the gameplay can be worked into shape, I’d chalk up theme as a lost cause.
Wisdom of the Wall having a buff that increases the value of versatility seems counter to the long standing balance issue of WW not valuing other stats. I’d rework that one specific Wisdom buff.
Otherwise, as others have mentioned, finding a fix for degenerate stamina gameplay seems important.
Biggest take away if devs are reading this is to not make it health based/stamina gameplay
5 Likes
I agree that we should build up the stacks another way or it could be the old Mists of Pandera legendary cap. Just proc a bunch of strikes without stacks or spending energy. One more option would be you have a chance based off your haste per attack you do to do a Flurry strike. Gives a reason to have haste, but could be anything. I like the control of times it goes off is based off what we can build around or do not just 2 times a minute. If left like this we will be doing more damage in aoe and not as much in single target. If they could switch that or even it but keep it a actual flurry of strikes for both single target and aoe would be great.
Two changes I think would help a lot with the community reaction to this tree.
First, get rid of the max health and make the proc on chi spenders that hits the number you’re aiming for. Even if it’s the same exact number of flurry strikes per minute, no class’s hero talents should make them feel numerically weaker than they were before, and feeling like you have to give up health/stam boosts to get a benefit feels terrible. Just normalize the chance of the proc and let it be that. This discouraged degenerate behavior and has no ill impact.
Second, change one of the nods to read. “Invoking a Celestial automatically unleashes a barrage of 10 Flurry Strikes.” This would allow us to guarantee Wisdom of the Wall during cool downs and limit variance in the rotation.
I think those would be two welcome and positive changes for the shado-pan tree.
No need to involve celestials in this tree when there is a whole other Hero spec designed around that concept. Keep it free of summons and summon interactions.
5 Likes
Look, Monk is a pandaren-based class. Everything about it is pandaren. It is the cornerstone of pandaren culture. Your character learned to be a monk from a pandaren. There is no other influence on the class. It is only pandaren. There is no other influence.
5 Likes
The shado-pan aren’t a monk based organization. They have members from every class that was out at the time, and you quest alongside all of them. So if we’re so up on the lore that it’s okay for every monk to be inspired by the pandaren, we should keep to the lore of the shado-pan and let the monk take abilities from every class.
Oh and there are non-pandaren monks out and about, including some from all the way back in WotLK.
4 Likes
And?
now that i think about it, next xpac might be worth running no rings and necks lol, which sounds awfull lol
But clearly, we are taking from the Shado-Pan monks, right? Now, having something that summons a Shado-Pan ally would be sweet. Heck, I would not be against an iconic Shado-Pan character’s ability, long as it didn’t take away from another class.
There’s a clear difference between human, western-based monks and the pandaren class that we actually play. Pandaren monks go way beyond “guy who just punches things.”
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Its possible they went for just Shado-Pan to make it simple. But Blackguard would be the name for monks within the Order. I do like the idea of taking from a specific Shado-Pan character, which would in this case be Master Snowdrift. Who is in charge of the Blackguard of the Shado-Pan. He has a more fiery version of Fists of Fury, when he punches he releases his chi, and I think has a slam ability as well.
Of those three, I think they could use the the idea of his chi based punches. It could even be a more visual thing. Make it clear you are using chi infused attacks instead of just making it look physical. They could already be planning this, but maybe they should consider giving the animations for Flurry Strikes a jade color.
3 Likes
I would be over the moon if they gave us his spinning piledriver move.
4 Likes
I really like the basic Idea behind these talents. Contrary to the opinions of many I think it is rather well done as a first draft. I mainly play BRM (9/9M around 3.5k Rio) and no PVP, which means my View can be a bit biased. Just a few points I would like to add:
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Obviously we don’t know the exact numbers, but this gives monks a very good dmg profile in the form of funneldmg, which is very valuable and something WW could really profit from in dungeon gameplay. I assume that Flurry strikes are Singletarget dmg.
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While I see that BRM has a harder time stacking charges, it doesn’t automatically mean, that it does less dmg. The dmg per flurry strike can be higher for BRM to account for it.
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The charge generation should be based on our “assumed max hp”. The same max hp that is calculated for Gift of the Ox spheres for BRM, which doesn’t penalize HP buffs or stamina trinkets etc. This alone gets rid of 60% of the complaints in this Forum and are tools already at your disposal.
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This leaves the Energy Issue as the other 40% of the complaints. While this is problematic for Serenity users I think a complete passive option has some value. One solution would be to make this a choice node. One with an active trigger (own button, OFF GCD!; 20 seconds CD in order to not abuse WotW buff stacking) for min-max gameplay and one with a passive trigger for the more casual playstyle. This way we need a cap though. Make it so, that once you reach the max stacks, you trigger one flurry strike once you would reach another stack (like icicles from frostmages). This way the passive playstyle would not be hindered. Although the automatic overcapped flurry strikes should not benefit from vigilant watch and should no count towards Wisdom of the Wall. Against all Odds should overlap (like Ironfur) and not refresh. (So that it should be a loss playing the active playstyle and just macro it with CDs, the passive talent option should proc it without people caring about this, just like it is now).
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The one thing from Wisdom of the Wall that you should delete is: “Flurry Strikes now deal additional Shadow damage to all uncontrolled enemies within 6 yards”. This works against the funneldmg profile and it feels bad if you have 7 flurry strikes and it procs for on the 6th strike. In such a case only the 7th strike profits from the AOE dmg and since we get the wisdom of the Wall buff for 20 seconds, but we can’t spend 400 Energy in 20 seconds, we will never have an additional benefit from that WotW buff. This would feel awful wasting our proc like that.
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Protect and serve and Lead from the Front have their own issue. As it currently is, both would be rather useless. Both increase our self-healing so in order to preserve this I would suggest something like this:
a) A % of dmg done accumulates for your next Expel Harm/ Vivify (up to a maximum).
b) Overhealing caused by Expel Harm transfers into a HoT.
For BRM EH can do a fair bit of Overhealing (counting orbs) and this would help in that regard. Additional healing as it is now (in the form of Leech), would just result in more overhealing. Option a) would increase the self-healing for WW, but it would be with an “on demand leech” effect. -
As a Brew I love predictive Training. What I especially like is the duration. As a brew I feel we could need some DR for trash pulls but it is not really necessary for bosses and this talent delivers exactly that. It would have 100% uptime on trash, but for bosses and their tank busters it could be not up, which means we have to play bosses like we do now (didn’t dodge last melee and 3 seconds cast time for the tank buster etc.). Very good!
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I also like the haste from controlled instincts. While it is true, that haste is generally the worst stat for us, 20% of it is a bunch. Assuming we can have 20% for most of the fight this would make those energy starved droughts less or even disappear, which is a plus for gameplay for me.
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I have seen some people suggest giving us abilities like a hook, stealth, smoke bombs, blinks etc. I very much think that such abilities should not be in the hero talents, because they are one of a kind utility which alone can be the deciding factor for choosing a hero tree.
4 Likes