TL;DR: Windwalker has been in a pretty critical state along with Spriest for arguably longer, but we don’t currently have enough voices to spread it. Nothing will change until after Shadowlands though, so all I ask is for our 3 year old bugs to be fixed. WW remains the only spec in the game that has no bluepost for shadowlands.
I was happy when I read the changes for Spriest, they deserve they attention they just got, but I can’t help but feel like Windwalker was turned a blind eye on because it’s not as represented.
Ever since Legion hit, Windwalker has been consistently unimpressive, on top of having the same rotation and talents rebaked into one another. We have effectively gotten NOTHING new since MoP aside from borrowed power.
Demon Hunters were unfortunately a direct nerf to WW, since it can do more consistent damage in any content on top of having more utilities. The addition of Demon Hunters as a fantasy was really cool, but the game did NOT need another melee dps, least of all a leather wearing one.
With that out of the way let’s talk problems:
1- SEF (Storm, earth and fire) is not reliable, the AI isn’t even smart AI, they start attacking completely random targets and leap far away, forcing you to constantly repress the ability. However repressing isn’t even a garantee that they will connect with enemy in time to replicate your abilities. It’s a cool ability, but it is attached with countless bugs and inconsistencies.
2- Hit combo (the talent) nulifies a row completely, putting flat increase damage as a talent is not only lazy, but will always be the picked option, don’t let the addition of dance of chi-ji hype you up, as it will never be the viable option if paired with hit combo, I’m tired of seeing cool fun talents made unviable because of hit combo, REMOVE HIT COMBO OR REDESIGN IT.
3- Our damage scales with nothing other than versatility by design, which leaves us with some awful scaling during the start of an expac. Once we have enough versatility to become viable (Finally) it still feels boring since now the gameplay is THE EXACT SAME, but now you do more damage, there’s so much in terms of class design that could remedy this, but now we’re stuck with stacking versatility until something changes.
4- We lost to much of our baseline from MoP, readding fortifying brew and expel harm as baseline is a good thing, but it’s really just a bandaid fix to our core issues.
5- Touch of death returning to it’s initial design is fun, but now we are left with no burst window, and I don’t see anything happening there either.
6- Xuen returns as a baseline ability, however Xuen has historically scaled VERY POORLY with stats, still I’m happy to see it back, however it will drop in effectiveness really quickly as I gear up.
7- Tigerseye brew and chi explosion from WoD were where the design started to get interresting, you have to manage chi and tigerseye stacks in a smart way for different benefits, (Flat damage, AOE, faster tierseye stacks) Everytime you used chi explosion, it was a calculated decision on how much chi you should spend on it in that moment. THAT WAS GOOD DESIGN, THAT WAS FUN, THEN YOU REMOVED BOTH OF THESE THINGS, WHYYYYYYYY
8- Our raid viability is consistently F tier as compared to our leather counterparts.
9- WDP (Whirling dragon punch) has always been the only viable choice in it’s talent row, and has been bugged for over 3 years, making you unable to use it often even when the criterias are met. This destroys a dps rotation.
10- Chi wave has been a dead talent ever since WoD, it’s REALLY bad healing and REALLY bad damage, chi burst is also quite bad but can sometimes be picked for big AOEs.
11- Eye of the tiger is a yet another lazy talent that doesn’t change your rotation at all other than putting a lame dot on your main target, it’s consistently better than it’s other options though so it’l remain a dead talent row.
To conclude, I don’t expect any of this to change as people avoid Windwalker as a spec more and more. With the addition of DH, I doubt anyone would be willing to try Windwalker out since it’s just flat out worse. Shadowlands doesn’t look promising for us so far, but I have too much history with this spec to simply quit.
I feel like I have some grounds in which to review the spec on, I have mained this since Mists of Pandaria, and have decent experience with raiding, M+ and arenas.