I used to love WW because it was buttery smooth but I am constantly out of chi after the massive “you have too much fun energy/rage/focus” TWW nerf.
Stacking haste doesn’t reverse the chi part of the nerf.
The reply to this is usually “You’re using Blackout Kick too much” but ok, than how the hell do I maintain Combo Strikes? There aren’t enough abilities up to avoid repeating unless you expect me to *throws up in mouth a little* auto-attack
Rotation is supposedly:
Cast Invoke Xuen, the White Tiger
Cast Strike of the Windlord
Cast Touch of Death
Cast Tiger Palm if <5 Chi AND about to cap energy
Cast Jadefire Stomp with Jadefire Harmony talented
Cast Whirling Dragon Punch
Cast Celestial Conduit (if talented into Conduit of the Celestials)
Cast Rising Sun Kick
Cast Fists of Fury
Cast Blackout Kick to not overcap Teachings of the Monastery
Cast Jadefire Stomp with Singularly Focused Jade talented
Cast Spinning Crane Kick with Dance of Chi-Ji buff
Cast Chi Burst
Cast Crackling Jade Lightning try not to overcap Last Emperor's Capacitor stacks
Cast Blackout Kick
Cast Jadefire Stomp
I am not a Monk main by any means, but I learned recently that Crackling Jade Lightning maintains the Combo Strikes buff if you have the energy to spare to cast it.
Don’t do this unless you’re away from the boss for an extended period of time, the damage per energy is atrocious. Hit Combo has a 30 second duration now, so unless you know you’re going to cap energy anyway and will cap back the tick of energy you spend on CJL, don’t use CJL for maintaining HC.
I’m not sure what nerf you’re referring to but Windwalker has more energy, and thus more Chi, than anytime in the years since it was created. Stacking haste absolutely leads to more Chi since it creates more Energy and things like Glory of the Dawn’s chance to refund a chi.
You pasted a recommended opener sequence, not a rotation or a priority, so if you’re setting to follow that outside of the first few seconds of a fight then that will lead to problems.
There will always be brief moments of waiting for energy, chi, or cooldowns, as that’s how most energy classes play. If you want to always have a button to press with no downtime then a non-energy class is your best bet. Windwalker has very few, if any, actual pauses of waiting if you’re performing correctly, but sometimes you go a little bit without a proc or haste buff and you end up having to wait, that’s just the nature of energy specs.
In what content are you starved for resources just to be certain? Based on your opener, I’m gonna guess raid.
I don’t know how you run your rotation/priority outside of CDs, but I’m gonna guess you’re running into Chi problems just before your CDs are back up. What abilities do you find yourself close to doubling up on from not being able to maintain combo strikes?
While I agree that the resource change was really dumb, a chi shortage is kinda rare for us even in ST. Stacking haste isn’t a perfect solution as we still get moments of waiting a global or two, but it holds up most of the time. It sucks but we kinda just have to sit through those globals sometimes.
Also post on your monk so we can see what you’re running. Rotation can feel like night and day depending on the build you run. Shado-Pan (imo) feels significantly smoother than Conduit. Especially since I had to drop like 5% flat haste for the Circe ring.
Ok, apparently that was an opener. Grabbed a rotation off methodDOTgg
Cast Invoke Xuen, the White Tiger (cd)
Cast Strike of the Windlord
Cast Touch of Death
Cast Tiger Palm if <5 Chi AND about to cap energy
Cast Jadefire Stomp with Jadefire Harmony talented
Cast Whirling Dragon Punch
Cast Celestial Conduit (if talented into Conduit of the Celestials)
Cast Rising Sun Kick
Cast Fists of Fury
Cast Blackout Kick to not overcap Teachings of the Monastery
Cast Jadefire Stomp with Singularly Focused Jade talented
Cast Spinning Crane Kick with Dance of Chi-Ji buff
Cast Chi Burst
Cast Crackling Jade Lightning try not to overcap Last Emperor's Capacitor stacks
Cast Blackout Kick
Cast Jadefire Stomp
Same deal, hell that’s worse. Next move is still on cd or you didn’t get a proc? Tough luck, trying to fill that cap will starve you.
wat.
Not how Monks did before TWW increased costs and removed a couple builders.
I think that reference might be relating to the loss of Expel Harm (being baked into power strikes) and the increase in TP energy cost.
How you talent changes how much forgiveness your rotation has. If you are taking the path that sets your WDP up to give you a free SCK and subsequently a free BOK, then you will likely feel like you have too much energy and Chi and should have no problem dumping it on abilities that maintain your mastery.
If you are struggling to make it feel smooth, try pathing to the talents that make it easier, specifically:
Revolving Whirl - Force proc Chi-Ji (Free SCK)
Sequenced Strikes - Force proc BOK (Free BOK)
Energy Burst - Generate 1 Chi on BOK proc
Dance of Chi-Ji - Random free SCK
Xuen’s Battlegear - CD reduction on FoF
Ordered Elements - RSK reset + generates 2 Chi
Also keep in mind that SEF counts towards our mastery so using it combined with Ordered Elements (resets RSK and generates 2 Chi) to use 2xRSK almost back to back helps stack the damage buff and if you have Xuen’s Battlegear and you have do this right after FoF your RSK crits could reduce the CD of FoF substantially.
Also, Celestial Conduit can add an ability for extra smoothing, however the trade off is that you have a window where you will likely have more abilities off CD than resources to use them due to the CD reduction from Heart of the Jade Serpent.
None of the above is a suggestion focused on throughput, more so about smoothing out your experience with maintaining mastery.
It’s absolutely how Monks did it before TWW. Things got real out of hand with random procs in DF, but if you weren’t flush with procs then you were waiting. For much of the history before DF, and even through most of DF, Windwalker was one of the specs with the highest downtime.
As Nexen said, there are talents you can take to fill as many GCDs as possible, but that’s not always what gets you the most damage. If filling every global is your priority then you have those choices.
There are enough abilities in our kit to never need to break hit combo. Flurry of Xuen might be a better choice for you. The two talents are close enough where, if you are breaking Hit combo a lot, Flurry would be more damage overall for you.
Managing resource is the core of WW gameplay. We are not a hekili button masher. The priority list is a general rule set on what you should be pressing to maximize damage every button. It take the player to know when resources support pressing that button. Its very easy to dump your chi with a quick FoF + Rsk and you might not be capped in energy by doing so but you left yourself in a bad spot that could be made better by knowing to throw a TP in there. If you find yourself low on energy you need to think ahead on how to build back up to 3 chi and let the channel of FoF help replenish some energy.
Free procs don’t need to be used immediately. The key to not just ‘auto-attack’ is to learn how to use the resources that get given back and the channel times to maintain a health pool of resources. The order you use abilities matters more in this class than any other I played. It might not be the most mash happy class but it does take more thought than most to play at a high level.
I remember mathing this out, and correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t the downtime calcs that pushed WWs to be one of the lowest include the downtime from FoF?
If true I would be curious if instead of APM we looked at occupied globals + casts/channels to determine “busyness”.
It’s always been difficult to talk about downtime because of stuff like this and whether or not people count stuff like cast times and channeling as “downtime”. It’s one of those terms that has different definitions to different people.
I’ve personally never counted FoF as “downtime” since your character is actively dealing damage when it’s happening, but I know some people look at whether or not they’re pressing a button to determine downtime.
The problem with Windwalker downtime right now is it is heavily dependent on luck with procs and outside cooldown windows. Inside our CD windows there tends to be more resources than we can use, but then the flip side is that you may be waiting for energy to regen or something to come off CD outside of those big haste windows. It’s a complaint I’ve had with the design choices since Shadowlands.
It’s entertaining when the plebs don’t know who they’re quoting… Bab has been and is still the WW guide writer. If you have particular points you want to argue, have at, but you look pretty foolish as it stands.
Dude thinks Windwalkers are historically “one of the specs with the highest downtime.”. (and uh no, I’m not considering FoF “downtime” that’s weird)
I don’t care if he’s the freakin’ lovechild of Chris Metzen and Tseric, that’s ridiculous and posting a guide on peakofserenity doesn’t make it less so.
What’s next? “historically Blizzard has always loved Shamans”?
I guess doubling down on the stupid things you say are one way to go…
You do realize APM has been a metric for each spec for years right? And that it conclusively shows WW as one of the lower APM specs for quite a long time right?
How does that work? Apm is a measure of the amount of decisions or button presses per minute, no? Channeling FoF means fewer button presses per minute. Were you planning on arbitrarily counting FoF as 3 actions? Were you going to calculate how many actions per minute we could perform if FoF was executed in a single gcd? How do you compare that to casters? Does Disintegrate also counts as 2-3 actions, since it’s a channel? Or Chaos Bolt, or Aimed Shot?
Who said anything about apm? Don’t put words in my mouth to prop yourself up.
Downtime, to me, is not doing anything. Just sitting there auto-attacking and waiting for a proc or the next move to come off cooldown.
Even if you do consider FoF downtime, the claim was still silly. 2ish seconds out of what used to be a borderline gcd-locked class.
Might as well say Fury is slow because of Bladestorm.
That doesn’t make your position any less confusing. Waiting may not be exclusive to Windwalker, but we certainly wait more than most specs.
For example: let’s say you have 70 energy and 0 chi. Every chi spender is on cooldown with RSK coming up first in 3 sec. That gives you basically two options, TP > wait 2 sec > RSK,
or TP > BoK > wait ~3 sec > TP > RSK.
Regardless of which is the better option (the first one, but doesn’t matter), waiting a few seconds is the correct answer.
WW is a spec that doesn’t adhere to ABC. Certainly not the only spec, but certainly one of them. If we have nothing to cast, we cast nothing. I fail to see why it would be so absurd that we may have one of the highest counts of downtime, especially if we’re talking historically when we had fewer procs that remove resource costs.
Side note, what’s the difference between waiting for resources and waiting for FoF to finish channeling?
APM is the number of buttons pressed in a minute. It is literally what you’re complaining about, and it definitively proves you have no idea what you’re saying. You can keep doubling down on the stupid statements, they won’t be any more correct.
