:rolleyes:
Top tier WW monk players discussing WW going forward.
TL:DR; WW Monk is bad. It’s not bottom tier bad, but it’s bad. The badness is doubled down by community perception over a long period of time, so it’s not as bad as its reputation, but it’s still bad.
The root of its position is that its utility is not good enough to bring it, so whether or not people want windwalkers is entirely driven by number balance. As a result, windwalkers have had periods of time where they were good, but even then they were barely played because people don’t want to commit to the spec when it will be snapped back to bottom tier again next patch.
As is the case with many specs, the utility (or lack thereof) is the base issue with the spec, whereby the utility offered by WW is either not noticeable enough to be impactful, or shared by Brewmaster and Mistweaver, or both.
Love it or hate it, the rotational style of WW feels pretty unique and its pretty dissimilar to other classes, so I’m not a proponent of a full-on rework, but I think that utility is a game-wide issue that needs a gross overhaul that it’s never likely to get. Too much extremely good or mandatory utility gets concentrated in too few classes or specs, which will always leave those lacking out in the cold.
You have x number of spots for melee. One of them is a rogue because rogues have ridiculous utility and an immunity. One of them is demon hunter because they have magic damage amp, darkness, and an immunity. One of them is potentially ret paladin, because they have extremely strong utility and, you guessed it, an immunity.
Now you have warrior with attack power buff, dks that now have anti magic zone, which is an incredibly impactful group-wide cooldowns.
Why are you going to bring a WW monk, or a feral druid, or an enhance shaman, or a survival hunter, unless they have S-Tier damage? They do not have irreplaceable utility, and their other specs are performing better than they are numbers wise. Monk has physical debuff, but the only way that is important enough to get a WW into the group is if MW and BrM are performing worse relative to their contemporaries than they are, which has almost never happened in the history of monks.
