Monk Class Talent Tree Analysis

Classes Monk
1

Stat Boosters

Talents which increase a baseline state by a very small amount (+2% to all damage). The presence of these stats mean that developers have to balance around the assumption that they’re going to be picked. They’re effectively canceled out by the hidden spec passive which tweaks numbers up an down. They shouldn’t exist in any talent tree. They’re lazy and tax player agency away from more interesting options. As an example:

Monk Class TalentsHidden Windwalker Modifiers
  • Grace of the Crane: +4% healing taken
  • Calming Presence: -3% damage taken
  • Ferocity of Xuen: +2% damage
  • Chi Proficiency: +2/4% healing and magical damage done
  • Martial Instincts: +2/4% Physical damage and Avoidance
  • Chi Burst: -20% damage/healing
  • Crackling Jade Lightning: -2% damage
  • Faeline Stomp: -2% damage/healing
  • Fists of Fury: -2% damage
  • Sunrise Technique: -2% damage
  • Fist of the White Tiger: +24% damage/healing
  • Strike of the Windlord: +27% damage
  • Blackout Kick: +40%
  • Rising Sun Kick: 61%
  • Rushing Jade Wind: +90%
  • Vivify: +150%
  • Tiger Palm: +223%
  • Expel Harm: +250%

If there should be any sort of “throughput” talents placed into a class talent tree, they can be done in far more interesting ways. The following examples are focused around fun more-so than balance (numbers are easy to tweak later):

  • Ferocity of Xuen Choice Node:
    1. Twin Tiger Palm: Tiger Palm strikes an additional time, gaining all bonuses and modifiers associated with the first strike. However, this additional strike does not grant Chi, stacks of Teachings of the Monastery, or reduce the cooldown of your brews.
    2. Grand Tiger Palm: Tiger Palm’s damage extends to nearby enemies within a small radius.
  • Calming Presence Choice Node:
    1. Karmic Trance: Expel Harm now produces a shield that absorbs both damage and healing for 3 seconds instead of immediately healing you. Once the shield breaks or expires, all damage and healing absorbed is returned onto their original sources. Any remaining absorption after Karmic Trance expires instead heals you.
    2. Energy Meridians: Successfully Incapacitating a target with Paralysis resets the cooldown of Expel Harm or automatically triggers the effects of Expel Harm without triggering its cooldown.
  • Grace of the Crane Choice Node:
    1. Swift Karma: Expel Harm is no longer affected by the global cooldown and its cooldown is reduced by 3 seconds, but it now costs 5 more Energy.
    2. Patient Karma: Expel Harm gains an additional charge but heals for 20% less. Every second that any charge of Expel Harm is off cooldown, Patient Karma increases the healing of your next Expel Harm by 5%, stacking up to 20 times.
  • Chi Proficiency Choice Node:
    1. Chi Proficiency: The cooldown of Chi Wave is reduced by 5 seconds and it releases 2 additional waves. Chi Burst becomes an empowerment spell that can be charged up to 3 times, increasing its projectile radius up to 12 yards.
    2. Touch of Jade: Crackling Jade Lightning becomes instant and deals its full damage instantly based on the amount of Energy consumed, up to 100 Energy. This damage will automatically trigger Touch of Death if it is off cooldown and can be used on the target. Slain enemies turn into a jade statue.
  • Martial Instincts Choice Node
    1. Expanded Teachings: [Mistweavers/Windwalkers] Teachings of the Monastery can stack 2 additional times. [Brewmasters] Your other abilities reduce the cooldown of Blackout Kick by 1 second.
    2. Black Sun Kick: Rising Sun Kick has a chance to cause your next Blackout Kick to benefit from all effects which benefit from or are triggered by Rising Sun Kick.

Two-Point Talents

Sinking more than one talent point into “upgrading” an existing talent never feels good. Two-point talent nodes clog up pathing on the tree, limit flexibility, and generally have to be “lazy stat boosters” by design. I already mentioned more interesting alternative ideas in the previous section. Even if the existing two-point talent nodes didn’t change at all for what they provided per talent point but were just reduced to 1-point talents, they would STILL feel significantly better than their current iteration.

The two-point nodes still plaguing the Monk Class Tree are:

  • Ancient Arts
  • Chi Proficiency (especially painful because it blocks “Lighter than Air”)
  • Martial Instincts

Weak Talents

Some talents aren’t picked simply because they’re slightly weaker or more niche than other talents, but the Monk runs out of talent points to use (curse you two-pointers!). Some talents aren’t picked simply because they’re very weak or so incredibly niche that they’re rarely useful.

I won’t reference any of the other talents I’ve already talked about in the previous two sections. Otherwise, the weakest talents (in my opinion) are:

  • Bounding Agility. Decreasing Roll’s cooldown by 3 seconds would be more useful.
  • Quick Footed. Swift Art is more useful, and Quick Footed’s benefits seem redundant.
  • Hasty Provocation. I know there’s niche “high-skill-cap” uses for this. But it still takes up a talent point. If it also allowed taunt to be used on allies (but not yourself) as a speed boost, that would make it more interesting.
  • Song of Chi-Ji. This is absolutely in the correct place. It should be competing with Ring of Peace. The problem is that Ring of Peace is just too powerful compared to Song of Chi-Ji. Something like the following (example) would make it much more enticing:
    • Song of Chi-Ji: Paralysis emanates a hypnotic wave from its affected target while active which causes nearby enemies to fall asleep, Disoriented for 20 sec. Damage may cancel the effect.
    • Peace and Prosperity would increase the radius of Song of Chi-Ji rather than reducing its cast time.
4 Likes
2

I’m all for removing the boring % modifier talents, cooking them in baseline and adding interesting choices like these. Some thoughts from a PvE (mostly M+) Brewmaster main:

Neither of the Expel Harm replacements for Calming Presence seem even remotely useful for Brewmaster. Expel Harm itself does minuscule healing for Brew and almost all of the healing comes from Gift of the Ox orbs. Same for Patient Karma in a way.

I really love Chi Proficiency’s interaction with Chi Wave, although I do not know that I’d enjoy Chi Burst becoming an empowered spell, especially so just to increase the radius. It already hits pretty much everything in a pack. I’d almost rather it just reduce the cooldown or make it instant cast or something.

Touch of Jade seems absolutely busted, especially so in PvP. Even with it being conditional if the spell can be cast, that’s an absolutely disgusting nuke on a class that’s already pretty burst heavy. I don’t really care for PvP myself, but it would get the talent gutted instantly.

Expanded Teachings for Brewmaster sounds awful. Pressing Blackout Kick off CD (or as near it as possible) is a fairly high skill ceiling for Brewmaster players and reducing the CD makes it nearly impossible to properly weave other abilities into it. I’m not sure what an alternative to this would be, but having it simply be “Blackout Kick reduces the cooldown of your brews by 1 second” would be fine with me

Black Sun Kick has quite literally no interaction for Brewmaster. The only things RSK can (conditionally with talents) do for Brewmaster BoK can already do better. The only real gain would be gaining charges of Ox Stance via Black Ox Adept, but that talent is entirely dead and near useless. My suggestion would just have it be reversed for Brewmaster, making BoK have a chance to grant RSK the benefits of BoK. It’d cleave with Shadowboxing Treads, grant stacks of elusive brawler, grant hit scheme, grant shuffle, etc. Mostly things it should already be doing (save for SBT cleave). I suppose it’d also technically grant Blackout Combo unless specifically omitted, which would be kind of strong and awkward to play around.

Frankly, I disagree about Song of Chi-Ji being in the proper place. At least in PvE, there’s near no use for it. Even with your suggested uses, RoP can do everything it can do but better. I’d rather they go with the suggestion most people have, which removes Song of Chi-Ji and replaces Peace and Prosperity with a choice node of either having two charges of RoP or replacing RoP with a longer CD version that has the disarm/silence effect the older RoP had. I do respect the suggestions and it does make Song of Chi-Ji more enticing than its current state, but it still frankly just feels useless compared to RoP.

1 Like
3

I’m for auditing the crap out of the talent trees. However, I don’t think adding new interactions is the first thing to do. I think that the class and spec trees need to be looked at and have talents shuffled.

Jade Walk can be deleted and Lighter than Air moved into its place. Fast Feet should be baselined and DoCJ could be ripped from all the spec trees and put in Fast Feet’s place which also gives BrM access to DoCJ. Statue should be deleted/baked into the individual specs, so Invoker’s Delight can be ripped from the spec trees and put in Statue’s place. Preferably un-nerfed. Improved Touch of Death can be baselined and SBT can be ripped from the spec trees and put in ToD’s old place.

Changes like these makes base monk significantly stronger, monk as a whole more of a pain to balance, and frees up points on the spec trees which makes each monk spec stronger.

4

I have to say again that trying to fix these talent trees will not work. It requires far too much effort from Blizzard. There are way too many modifiers to abilities for blizzard to ever balance.

We need to go back to MoP talents and reduce the sheer complexity of every spell.

1 Like
5

What are these uses for this talent?

I see Equinox running this for M+ but I never understood why it’s a good talent. I never found a use for it

6

When I read about it years ago, some PvPers would taunt player pets to come attack them just prior to getting CC’d by something that would break when taking damage. The 50% movement speed haste helped to trigger the auto-attack from the pet before the enemy player could react and stop their pet from breaking the CC.

SUPER NICHE, but that’s why it’s still in the tree as a talent on a choice node. Otherwise, it has virtually zero value considering that it costs a full talent point. Otherwise, I could see it being useful for gathering things more quickly in niche circumstances.

7

oh I see, it’s utility from a PVP standpoint. It really does do that, PVPers still do it. I was wondering if there’s any M+ tech for the speed buff it gives to mobs. That’d be pretty neat

8

Get those ranged mobs into the melee meat grinder faster before they decide to start casting more stuff. Can move bosses out of bad faster.

I finded this

1 Like
9

Hasty Provocation is good for Brewmaster (and extremely nichely for non-Brewmaster) in PvE just to get mobs to move faster. A lot of mobs will drop bad around themselves and need frequently moved, which is where it shines. One example is speed taunting I’pa away from slimes for easier management. Extremely niche non-Brewmaster uses are so niche that I can only describe one, which was the first boss of Siege of Boralus last season. Both myself and the MW I play with would talent it to get the boss closer to bombs faster.

It’s definitely a small bonus, but it’s really nice when it comes up. The only reason it’s a talent and not baked in still is probably because Blizzard doesn’t want to give Brewmaster an “unfair advantage” or something with their taunt over other tanks which is frankly ridiculous.

1 Like
10

Just want to note that Song of Chi-ji has uses in PvP for Mistweaver, and is quite strong in Arena

11

Grand Tiger Palm? I guess you dont play MW MoH hero talent, pretty much does that

12

Pretty terrible for ww too

13

Also, on Swift Karma, 5 less energy? So a big F U to MW??? Wasted talent then.

14

Naturally the talent would be adjusted for mana-based specs vs. energy-based specs, but I didn’t feel it’d be necessary to delineate it to that degree as part of generic feedback.

15

Wizard’s First Rule: People are stupid

1 Like
16

Too bad Terry Goodkind ruined that series with the follow up one

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17

we talking about ildakar or scribbly stabbies

18

I may not be smart enough to know what you’re asking

19

The 2 series that follow after Warheart chronologically. The Nicci Chronicles and Children of D’hara.

20

There is even more? I stopped after the conclusion of finding out what the omen machine actually was.
And when they introduced another side of the gift.

Whatever those were