With Shado-Pan shaping up to be the recommended choice in the majority of high-level content, I just want to highlight some of the tree’s issues that remain in the game that should have fairly straightforward fixes, for a big increase in QoL.
Targeting bug
Ever since patch 11.0.5, Flurry Strikes frequently discharges on a random enemy unit within melee range, rather than the unit targeted by the player. This can be immensely frustrating, since there’s a high likelihood that you move away from the unit mid-discharge (since you can’t realistically see which unit it is, nevermind react to it), or the unit dies before the 10 strikes have landed. This would prevent an application of Wisdom of the Wall, desync any future applications, prevent application of stacks of Against All Odds, and of course lose direct damage. That latter part is especially noticeable when the shadow effect of Wisdom of the Wall is active.
For a short time we thought this bug was actually fixed, but proper testing revealed that to be false. In the following log, I’ve added a pin to only display Tiger Palm and Flurry Strike events. You will quickly notice that, even in trash pulls, less than 50% of Flurry Strikes were hitting the same target as the preceding Tiger Palm.
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports/CZt1x3JmHzbRLG7Y?fight=7&type=damage-done&source=2&view=events&pins=2%24Separate%24%23244F4B%24damage%7Ccasts%24-1%24125893156.0.0.Monk%24125893156.0.0.Monk%24false%240.0.0.Any%24true%24450617%7C450620%7C100780
Please fix this behavior, it is counter-intuitive and immensely annoying.
Outranging
Edit: this was fixed, hurray!
As described in the 11.2 patch notes, there is now a check that determines the distance to the player’s target and whether that target is in range of Flurry Strikes. If not, the accumulated energy and flurry charges are not lost and will stay at 240 and 10 respectively. A decent band-aid, since before this patch you would just lose all the energy and charges for no gain. However, somewhat similar to the initial issues with Slicing Winds, this range check is far too restrictive and doesn’t take larger enemy models into account at all. This is causing issues like not being able to hit larger targets without dipping into their model, which may be impossible depending on the encounter. On the Voidstone Monstrosity in The Rookery for example, discharging Flurry Strikes is simply impossible. This will likely cause issues on Dimensius as well, seeing as how he apparently kills anyone who steps into his model.
Given the high relevance in this raid tier, I again strongly request that this is fixed promptly.
EDIT: The raid is out now, and we’re seeing a lot of reports of this bug in action, specifically on Plexus Sentinel, Loom’ithar, Fractillus, and Dimensius. This is making Shado-Pan either highly ineffectual or entirely unusable on half of the raid. This needs immediate attention.
As a side note, this same band-aid seems to have been applied to the issue of failing to discharge Flurry Strikes when combat is initiated with an ability that should discharge. Before this patch, that action would deplete the accumulated energy and remove Flurry Charges without any benefit. While the band-aid is appreciated, the underlying issue is clearly not addressed. Please don’t consider the issue fixed.
Defensive talents
The two options in the defensive node of the Shado-Pan tree, Whirling Steel and Predictive Training, are absurdly weak. Both talents seem explicitly designed for Brewmaster, and require you to be actively attacked with melee attacks to have any value. A pitiful increase in parry chance and a multiplicative increase to avoidance on a 3 minute cooldown timer, with the additional trigger of having to drop below 50% health? A defensive trait that can only be triggered by dodging or parrying, and then requires further damage to be taken to have any effect? These talents are likely entirely unimpressive for Brewmasters, and for Windwalkers they’re a complete joke.
The other node with Protect and Serve and Lead from the Front is marginally better, with Protect and Serve at least having a slightly noticeable impact on self-healing. However, the phrasing clearly suggests that the player is healed for 30% of a Vivify’s value whenever cast, implying this to be the case when Vivify is cast on friendly targets, but this is not true. Effectively, this is just a 30% increase to Vivify when cast on oneself. Lead from the Front seems to be tuned around the idea that Chi Burst, Chi Wave and Expel Harm deal a significant amount of damage, but these spells contribute between 0.5% and 1% of total damage. Being healed for 20% of that is not noticeable.
I try to be neutral in my feedback as much as possible, but I’d be undermining the emphasis that I’m trying to effect if I didn’t say this: This is an embarrassment of game-design. 3 out of the 4 defensive talents in this tree are worth practically nothing, and the remaining one is barely noticeable. We are now in the third season of the expansion, and these talents have gone completely ignored despite multiple mentions in feedback posts. Frankly it is already absurd that these talents were released to the public in their current state in the first place.
All of these talents need to be revisited and likely redesigned from scratch.
Wisdom of the Wall
Having Wisdom of the Wall trigger from a designated amount of Flurry Strikes was a misguided idea, and one suspects that it’s a vestigial element of an iteration of Shado-Pan that had no overly restrictive cap on the amount of Flurry Charges we can hold. Given that one of the effects explicitly triggers from Flurry Strikes, it is anti-synergistic to apply this buff after all Flurry Strikes have been discharged. While we’ve found a way to work around this issue as best we can with intentional desyncs of the Flurry Strikes and the Wisdom application, this is highly unintuitive and not a satisfying solution to player and developer alike. A much better solution would be to process the amount of Flurry Charges on the start of the Flurry, and immediately trigger the Wisdom of the Wall effect. Even tying this to 10 Flurry Charges specifically seems superfluous, simply tying it to any Flurry Strikes discharge should be sufficient.
This would immediately resolve any annoyance with discharge bugs, setup requirements, and the unintuitive interaction between the shadow effect and Flurry Strikes.
