I checked the icy-veins dps tier list earlier today to find windwalker monk in a very sad state. My gameplay experience tells me that WW is decent in cleave and area of effect fights due to fists of fury, whirling dragon punch, spinning crane kick, and now even some splash damage from blackout kick. Unfortunately, due to our single target rotation incorporating many of the same aoe abilities, we’re pretty poor performers in static single target. What I didn’t realize is that we’re currently competing for last couple spots even in the M+ tier list. We’re showing dead last in raid dps.
Hear me out. If our general struggles come from fist of fury and whirling dragon punch in our single target rotations, why not consider a Karthas (from League of Legends) mechanic. For instance, if striking 2 or more targets, Fists of Fury does its normal damage. However, if there is only one target within the fists of fury cone, this target receives 1.5x? 2x? typical damage from the ability. Not only does this help remedy the uncompetitive single target damage, it introduces an opportunity for skill expression. There may be instances where you opt to rotate your Fists of Fury cone away from multiple targets in order to prioritize damage on a high priority target.
Thoughts?
This used to be a mechanic for Fists of Fury and it was kinda cool
Id like to see the channel time bw reduced
…it’s just a tad too long
This is really just a matter of semantics and your suggestion is actually counterproductive to the goal you mention.
Your suggestion is how it used to work, splitting damage among all targets hit, but they changed it to deal more damage to the primary target specifically to promote damage prioritization without needing to do silly things like aiming the small cone away.
With the current way it works, you don’t have to worry about doing something silly to deal more damage to a more important target, just target that target before you press FoF.
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Thanks for the clarification Bab. I honestly didn’t know that it did more damage to your selected target. If this is the case, should just be simple tuning, right?
Maybe the monk balance team can recruit a few people from the shaman team. Those folks look to be REALLY persuasive. All 3 specs are excessively strong in both pve modes…
I’ll keep slogging it out but getting into M+ groups is becoming metric tons of no fun. Need to get guilded crests from some kind of end game content.
There isn’t a “Monk balance team” and a “shaman balance team”, there’s just the class designers.
It is just a matter of tuning, and Fists of Fury could have a little bit more damage, but it’s already our strongest ability, so it really is mostly fine where it is unless other things get buffed and change the internal balance of our abilities.
Personally, I’d like for our active hero talent to not be so significantly behind the passive one…
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Not a doomer or anything, and I still manage to do ok in the content that I spend time working on (albeit quite easy content atm), however its hard not to notice that we end up in this position quite a lot.
Apart from tuning I still think there is room to fix some of our continuity and scaling through redesign, not just to address current, but also future issues, as opposed to waiting for aura buffs to fix bad scaling. Where’s your head at? Do you not mind the ww aura tweaking?
I very much mind the aura tweaking and have written extensively about the scaling trouble. However, it’s very unlikely that the current state of things is because of scaling, especially since our scaling should be much better with all the new Haste interactions for this expansion.
The biggest buff it needs is a new sound and visual. Casting this right after flurry strikes feels is disappointing lol
Completely my speculation but I don’t think having FoF and RSK scale well with haste is enough to move us away from needing aura tweaking every patch. I think it will require more of an effort to integrate all stats into intrinsic upsides for us to not constantly fall behind.
Something that is more broad. Like:
- Critical strikes cause the next attack that consumes 2 or more chi to be increased by 30% of total mastery rating, stacking 3 times.
OR
- After 3 consecutive combo strikes, haste contributes double to your melee attack speed for 6 seconds and every 20 melee attacks reduce the GCD and cast/activation equal to your critical strike chance on your next RSK, SCK, FoF, WDP, SotWL.
These are obviously silly unbalanced ideas but my thinking is that without scaling being baked into the whole spec and while its just those two abilities that get the extra attention we will continue to have scaling issues.
It’s definitely hard to predict exactly how our scaling has changed, and a lot of time we don’t know till well after it happens. It’s certainly likely that although our scaling will be better, it may still be pretty bad.
So far they’re pretty on-top of balance tuning, even if it’s been a mess, at least they’re trying.
It’s true that have been better with managing it, but while it doesn’t automatically increase with the content, we are still much more vulnerable than other classes to getting left behind.
Especially if Blizz have a season where they maybe aren’t as focused on keeping on top of class balance. Just one Monk’s desire for a more permanent solution.
your talking about blackout kick doing cleave dmg but right now its a underperforming talent. But having it as an keystone in monk it would be good compared to now only Touch of death 5% increase dmg for 30sec is like Okay at best compared to warrior roar. overall we just need Better talent its lacking right now some should be tier 2 some should be baseline. some doesnt even matter
Needs to be a whole second to 1.5 seconds faster/shorter
Maybe like Eye Beam
Why not just do the simple thing and remove a layer of AoE restriction from FoF? Instead of what we have now where FoF does extra damage to the primary target then like 40-50% reduced to the next 4 and another reduction past that, why not just let FoF full cleave the first five targets then deal half to everything past that? The same could be done with WDP, and neither change would affect ST.