Feedback: Monk Updates

[Kaivax]

In this thread, we’ll be testing and talking about Monks in The War Within. Look here for posts from the development team as adjustments and bugfixes are made throughout the testing period.

Please note that off-topic or inappropriate posts will be strictly removed.

Thank You

Before we continue testing The War Within, we’d like to take a moment to thank everyone who read and responded to the Hero Talent previews we posted over the last few months.

Looking to the Alpha

In this first Alpha build, every single class has at least one new Hero Talent tree available for testing, with the rest coming in the following weeks. We’re asking testers to initially keep several things in mind:

• There are UI elements on the talent panel that are placeholder, including things like talent icons, text, or final UI art.
• Some talents may not be functioning yet, or may be marked as not yet implemented (NYI)
• New spell visuals and audio for several new Hero Talent trees are still a work in progress. Many trees are using placeholder assets for now that will be updated over the course of Alpha.
• There are some talents that are not fully tuned yet. This is expected, and we will implement tuning adjustments throughout testing.

The combat design team has two big areas of focus right now that we are prioritizing over other concerns such as tuning or generic class updates/maintenance:

• Finish building the remainder of the Hero Talent trees that are not yet available.
• Fix bugs that are blocking testing of new talents.

With the Alpha build being playable and all of the discussion that will occur around the flood of data, we wanted to reiterate that the responses to our blog previews were highly valuable. The feedback we received allowed us to make some early improvements or revisions while we didn’t yet have a public test environment. It allowed us to take some big early swings on certain trees, and then react to early feedback quickly.

Going forward, we aren’t planning to publish any additional Hero Talent previews in blog form, since we’ll add the remaining classes to the Alpha as soon as they reach their ready-to-test state.

Working from Feedback

Several Hero Talent trees have received changes after reading feedback to the blog posts. Some of these were tuning changes to ensure that the Hero Talent tree felt competitive, while others were significant design changes. The feedback thus far has been of great benefit to us.

Going into Alpha, we feel good about the shape of the Hero Talent tree designs. Keeping a consistent number of utility and defensives nodes across all trees, having parity between number of choice nodes, and the overall structure of the trees are things we’re confident in.

We’re also working on tweaking some core class designs as well. In some cases, it was necessary to make adjustments to the class or specialization talent trees before significant work was done on a Hero Talent tree. In other cases, we did work seeking to improve base class talent tree designs.

Alpha Feedback

Now that we’re in Alpha, we’re looking for feedback on how it feels to playtest these trees. We’re specifically curious about:

• Hero Talents that you feel are “required” for your spec in a type of content, such as raiding or Mythic+, or that push you towards picking a specific tree.
• Hero Talents that create frustrating or unsatisfying gameplay or rotations for your spec.
• Hero Talents whose functionality is confusing, unclear, or difficult to track during gameplay.

Throughput comparisons of Hero Talent trees are helpful, but we’re more interested in gameplay, feel, and choice feedback at this stage. Also, when possible, we appreciate it when you focus posts or articles on a single spec and Hero Talent tree, rather than combining feedback about multiple issues.

Again, Thank You

We greatly appreciate all your feedback on Hero Talent trees and are very excited for you to see everything else we’re working on. Thank you!

– The World of Warcraft Combat Design Team

[Kaivax]

Monk Class Tree

Our main goals for the Monk Class tree are to introduce more optionality, refresh the cappers, and add a few new pieces of utility (such as an Enrage dispel), while still cutting down on overall keybind requirements. To accomplish this, we’ve added choice nodes to most active options that offer a passive option or changed pathing to allow more skipping of these spells.

We’ve also cut down on the total amount of throughput being offered within the core tree. Using Mistweaver as an example, they often found themselves feeling required to pick up both the healing and damage nodes offered throughout the tree and were therefore left with only a few points to customize their utility loadout. The reduced number of throughput nodes and the decreased amount of 2-point nodes throughout the tree is intended to help remedy this situation.

[Kaivax]

Windwalker Monk

Our updates for Windwalker in The War Within are intended to address a few issues the specialization struggled with throughout Dragonflight. These points of focus for us were the power levels of the Haste and Mastery stats falling behind other options, Jadefire Stomp’s usability, and the Touch of Death gameplay focus. Other areas that we are also looking at are resource bloat, evening out their rate of auto-attacks, and adding more pronounced thematics through both gameplay and visuals.

Fists of Fury’s damage and Glory of the Dawn now scale with your Haste value to help the stat be more impactful for Windwalker Monks. These will help us have the tuning knobs to increase its value more dynamically. We’ve also increased the cost of Tiger Palm to 60 Energy to help decrease resource overload while encouraging Haste to help with energy regeneration. For Mastery, we feel we can get to a point where it becomes a more competitive stat through tuning.

Jadefire Stomp’s reset mechanic is being removed in favor of a static cooldown. We feel this will be a lot more forgiving and lower the barrier of entry to playing Windwalker. Additionally, we’re adding talent support to increase the individual value of the Jadefire Stomp global in single target situations.

Most of Touch of Death’s gameplay is being replaced with a more execute-focused version through the Core Tree capper instead of the AoE and repeat cast components. This opens up more of the AoE tuning budget to be within Windwalker Monk’s base spells.

Serenity is being removed from the talent tree in The War Within to be able to focus Windwalker Monk’s cooldown window around a more consistent window and create opportunities for some gameplay options we’re excited about while reducing resource overload.

[Kaivax]

Mistweaver Monk

Mistweaver is seeing a few updates including their class 2-set Chi Harmony bonus and the removal of Essence Font. We’re also adding a talent to help Mistweavers who are focused on melee to gain more value out of their Mastery stat. Essence Font’s removal will have a few outcomes, the most important of which to address will be melee Mistweavers in raid healing scenarios.

We’re hoping the removal of Clouded Focus and consequent tuning of Vivify and Enveloping Mist will help Soothing Mist fill the gaps for them, but there are some realities around planting and casting that may feel worse than Essence Font did. Our goal here is to make the risk/reward feel worth it here through tuning, but we’re going to continue looking at this as we iterate in The War Within.

[Kaivax]

This week’s Alpha build brings more updates to Windwalker and we’d like to go over the underlying philosophy and reasoning for these changes. The main changes we’ll be discussing are to Tiger Palm and its damage distribution, making Combo Strikes more consistent and intuitive, and some incoming shifts to their spec tree talent layout.

Tiger Palm
Tiger Palm is the most commonly used button for Windwalker, but historically it has represented very little overall damage itself. We want Tiger Palm to remain mostly about generating Chi, but also represent a more meaningful percentage of Windwalker’s damage breakdown. Our goal is not to change rotational priorities, but to make every button press feel directly meaningful to your overall damage.

This also helps us tackle some interesting damage profiles by increasing their priority target damage, even in AoE scenarios. We’re excited about talents like Martial Mixture for this reason, which could offer some additional support to this profile.

Combo Strikes
We’ve removed Chi Wave and Expel Harm from the list of spells that trigger Combo Strikes for Windwalker Monks in The War Within. Since these are now automatically triggered, we didn’t think it was intuitive for these to trigger Mastery. Our intent for Combo Strikes is that the main focus should be directly on the action bar and relying on direct spell casts rather than auras to determine your next spell to cast.

Alongside this, we’re making a couple adjustments to Combat Wisdom and Storm, Earth, and Fire to support these changes.

Combat Wisdom will now rebalance Chi to 2 while out of combat instead of the default depletion. We think this will help both Windwalker’s opener feel more intuitive (only one required Tiger Palm before entering cooldowns with max Chi when playing with Ordered Elements) and also improve the experience of traveling between packs in Mythic Plus or the open world.

Storm, Earth, and Fire is being added to the list of spells that triggers Combo Strikes. Our goal here is to make the transition to bursting feel as smooth as possible – both when maximizing Rising Sun Kicks with Ordered Elements and in the cases a Windwalker may choose to Storm, Earth, and Fire immediately before using other globals to set up Combo Strikes.

Windwalker Tree Talent Layout Adjustments
In next week’s Alpha build, we’re repositioning some nodes in the Windwalker tree to free up some builds we’re excited about. The main change is moving Teachings of the Monastery to Flying Serpent Kick’s location and moving Flying Serpent Kick baseline. Teachings of the Monastery is a talent we’re now considering core to the spec’s design in all scenarios, and moving it to a more centralized location frees up a talent point to increase optionality elsewhere.

Thank you very much for your testing and feedback!

[Jeremoot-garona]

@Kaivax

Tiger Palm
Tiger Palm is the most commonly used button for Windwalker, but historically it has represented very little overall damage itself. We want Tiger Palm to remain mostly about generating Chi, but also represent a more meaningful percentage of Windwalker’s damage breakdown. Our goal is not to change rotational priorities, but to make every button press feel directly meaningful to your overall damage.

With respect to Tiger Palm, because it’s already limited in the frequency that you can cast it via energy resource generation, it would be a welcome change if it always benefited from the Mastery effect Combo Strikes, allowing you to cast it twice in succession if energy levels are high.

[Coropaladin-emerald-dream]

@Kaivax

Jadefire Stomp’s reset mechanic is being removed in favor of a static cooldown. We feel this will be a lot more forgiving and lower the barrier of entry to playing Windwalker. Additionally, we’re adding talent support to increase the individual value of the Jadefire Stomp global in single target situations.

Not stated here, is Jadefire Stomp has had it’s cooldown reduced to 15 seconds, increasing the amount you have to press it. The stand in ground component is certainly annoying, but even without it, it’s a short duration maintenance buff that isn’t fun to press. The spec is in tremendously great shape if this button was removed.

Additionally a couple other small points of feedback from the Alpha. Shado Pan WW feels great, the extra haste makes the rotation very fluid. Flurry Strikes seems to be missing a satisfying audio effect to really punch up the keystone talent.

Conduit of the Celestials doesn’t work well with SEF. Your 2 clones don’t channel the ability, so you’re doing reduced damage and the clones are not doing anything. It might feel good for MW, but for WW it would be much better to change the cast paradigm to not be a channel.

Additionally, I feel pretty energy starved with the Celestial Tree rotation, which may be deliberate but the removal of free mastery buttons like Expel Harm and Chi Wave are going to make that problem feel worse by increasing downtime.

[Jfunk-sargeras]

Initial Windwalker Monk TWW Feedback

Bugs currently affecting WW

For a list of bugs maintained by the WW community we made a spreadsheet, but I’m unable to post links here. If this changes I’ll post it here, but it’s pinned in the class discord.

Hero Talents that create Unsatisfying or Frustrating Gameplay

Shado-Pan

Flurry Strikes - I’m not sure what the intended frequency of generation/spending is supposed to be right now, but it seems kinda wack at the moment. It feels extremely easy to reach the low cap of 10 stacks and extremely difficult to proc the Flurry Strikes.

This is compounded by having talents such as Against All Odds, High Impact, and Wisdom of the Wall which encourages you to proc Flurry Strikes much more often. This is extremely problematic as the core design of this whole tree relies on the Flurry Strikes mechanic working well.

In addition, I still have to question the proc being reliant on maximum HP. This has the potential to have very awkward interactions with increased effects such as Rallying Cry and Power Word: Fortitude.

Protect and Serve/Lead from the Front - While Windwalker is strong defensively, both of these nodes and the other defensive nodes (which we’ll get to later) are pretty weak compared to the vast majority of defensive nodes that other hero talent trees are getting.

In this case, with the WW rework, you can’t control Expel Harm so it’s unlikely to do very much damage. Additionally, it’s entirely possible you just don’t end up taking Chi Wave/Burst making Lead from the Front not very easy to gain value from. However, even if you did take those nodes, it’s difficult to benefit from extra healing. I’d like to see both of these nodes revisited to see if we could find something potentially more useful.

Whirling Steel - Acts a bit strangely currently, it is only a 15% amplifier to current parry/avoidance ratings which makes it pretty useless. In addition, the 180 second cooldown combined with the lackluster effect makes it feel pretty bad as an option. When addressing this, I’d like to give the feedback of making it activate preemptively. E.g. You are 85% HP, A boss AoE happens which damages you below 50%. My hope is that this would activate and reduce the damage done by that AoE.

Predictive Training - This has a potential for degeneracy as WW when combined with Dance of the Wind where you would intentionally taunt a mob to dodge to gain the 10% DR. I’d like to see this addressed as taunting mobs for a gain as a DPS is never enjoyable.

Wisdom of the Wall - I’d like to hear the intention of this as it seems to be going through constant iterations with each build. Initially, we were getting every buff at the same time. Then, we started getting them one at a time on a deck of cards system. Some clarification of what you’re aiming for would be nice. Currently with the low rate of Flurry Strikes, the Flurry Strikes Wisdom is useless as you are unable to proc Flurry Strikes quick enough when the buff procs.

Conduit of the Celestials

Celestial Conduit - Feels pretty weird on a 90 sec CD and not working with Storm, Earth, and Fire. It’s likely the playstyle ends up being you hold this to combo with your other cooldowns but that type of gameplay just isn’t really that fun.

Courage the White Tiger/Strength of the Black Ox/Flight of the Red Crane - All three of these procs kinda feel uninteractive. I’d like to see minor gameplay elements introduced to these to differentiate them from their MW counterparts (why does White Tiger heal for WW?) but not be too important where you need to play around them necessarily. An example of this would be Strength of the Black Ox also applies Mark of the Crane to targets struck.

I also have a concern when it comes to scaling of these procs. They don’t scale with mastery which is my immediate concern. Perhaps have Strength of the White Tiger always proc when Tiger Palm procs a Blackout Kick! or something.

August Dynasty - I don’t know if this makes sense, but I’d like to see this effect changed to trigger from casting Strike of the Windlord for Windwalker (and buffed as a result of the increased CD) instead as Windwalkers are way more likely to have that talented instead of Jadefire Stomp. With the way it currently is, you could effectively only have 1 choice in this slot as a Windwalker which feels bad.

Rework Spec Tree Feedback

First of all, I’d like to say thank you to the developer responsible for the rework as it is excellent. You guys really cooked well and renewed my faith in the design direction of this spec. With that said, there are a few issues I have with that I want to talk about in order of most important to least important.

Skytouch and the damage window problem

This was somewhat addressed with the most recent Alpha build but I think removing this talent is healthier for the spec in the long term. You (rightfully) have reallocated the movement flavor of this talent into the class tree. As a result, I think this talent does make our target switching better but its activation is still incredibly awkward, even more so now that Tiger Palm is our only reliable Chi generator. We have gained so many more damage windows that I think that Skytouch is unnecessary as a talent and is occupying prime real estate on the tree which could be used for a new talent that is more interesting.

My suggestion would be to bring back Katsuo’s Eclipse from Legion with a little more flavor.

Your Fists of Fury costs 1 less chi and ticks 50% faster during its channel.

This would introduce a resource node towards the latter half of the tree which is missing and would also play off Momentum Boost in a cool way by introducing more ticks of Fists of Fury to proc the stacking 10% more damage.

Jadefire Stomp

This is a personal sore spot for me - I don’t like Jadefire Stomp. I’ve played with the new version and I’ve come to the conclusion that the ability just doesn’t belong in a Windwalker spec tree. It occupies similar design space to that of Strike of the Windlord or Fists of Fury (frontal cone ability) but with none of the class flavor or interactions that make those spells beloved.

It ultimately just feels out of place.

There’s also the secondary issue that the reputational damage has been done with this ability. No matter the attempts to salvage it into a fun to use button, people will always associate it with the 2+ years they had to suffer through using this thing.

With the rest of the rework being so great, keeping this around is a head scratcher.

I’d personally like to see it removed and replaced with Last Emperor’s Capacitor. I think it fits the flavor of Windwalker better and with more noticeable gaps in our rotation compared to Dragonflight, we actually have time to use it. I’d also love to see what you guys come up with for nodes that would enhance it.

This would solve two problems as it is unlikely we would ever pick Last Emperor’s Capacitor currently because it is in No Man’s Land on the tree and has always been lackluster in the past (CJL base damage for WW is too low).

Lackluster Remnants

There are several nodes that were kept from the previous iteration of the tree that stand out as lackluster or lacking in purpose. For me, these are Jade Ignition, Touch of the Tiger, Meridian Strikes, Last Emperor’s Capacitor, Xuen’s Bond, and to a lesser extent, Fury of Xuen.

Jade Ignition - Design wise has always been kinda cool, but always has been undertuned. Also suffers from a bug where the damage is reduced by Storm, Earth, and Fire but the spirits don’t replicate the cast even though they used to at some point in Shadowlands.

Since this links directly off Mark of the Crane now, perhaps you could do something cool with that.

Touch of the Tiger - I think because of all of the Blackout Kick synergy in the tree this node will fall by the wayside. I think adding a secondary effect which increases the chance that Tiger Palm makes your Blackout Kick free would be interesting. It would have to be a small amount because there is a risk that this node could become a better Blackout Kick damage node than Hardened Soles with this effect but I think a small amount (~2%) could be interesting.

Meridian Strikes - With the changes to ToD being more focused on execute (which is awesome) this node seems somewhat out of place. I think it’s possible to fix this node with some aggressive tuning so that you’re able to upkeep the buff from Fatal Touch in an execute window would be interesting, but currently I don’t see us ever choosing this talent outside of Execute focused encounters like Taloc.

Last Emperor’s Capacitor - As I mentioned in the Jadefire Stomp section, I think this node is just in No Man’s Land on the new tree. I think this effect is super cool and has a place in the new WW you are presenting to us but it’s so difficult to get to it where it is and just doesn’t make sense where it is. Having to invest heavily in Dance of Chi-Ji synergy in order to get a CJL talent is super weird.

I’d really love for this to take the place of Jadefire Stomp in the tree as historically there have been some really great ideas for improving the gameplay of this talent and I think with what you’ve done so far, I’d love to see what you would be able to do with this.

Xuen’s Bond - The cooldown reduction of this has just been way too low. If you are going to put CDR on a node, it needs to meaningfully reduce it in a way that changes how we’re playing.

At 0.1 seconds in DF, it was at max a 8-10 sec reduction which was almost never useful. Even at 0.2 seconds, it would be a 16-20 reduction. This still doesn’t align it with Storm, Earth, and Fire and thus makes it useless.

I think at 0.4 seconds it would be a 32-40 second reduction with full uptime. I think this is more than fair and would allow us to align it with Storm, Earth, and Fire every time and effectively be able to transform into a 90 second CD class on encounters where that is useful.

If the CDR isn’t increased meaningfully, I don’t see this talent seeing much play at all.

Fury of Xuen - I think the added synergy of the recent addition of Flurry of Xuen which procs this, as well as the Restore Balance node from the Conduit of the Celestials tree adds a lot more value to this which is cool to see. However, with this node being at the very bottom of the tree now, I’d like to see the numbers juiced up a little bit in some way.

Strange Gameplay Feeling/Accessibility Nodes

Lastly, I’d like to touch on a few nodes that as a longtime Windwalker player, feel a little bit strange.

Combat Wisdom - This seems like a work-in-progress still but the feeling of not being able to use Expel Harm at all is going to be hard to get used to. It also makes any healing nodes from the class tree a lot less exciting as we cannot control when Expel Harm actually heals us. I think I’ll get used to it, but I’d like to see a choice node here potentially that allows us to manually cast Expel Harm again (maybe during channels) if possible.

Ordered Elements - I’m really excited to see the Weapons of Order effect return. However, I recognize that even in Shadowlands, this was not everyone’s cup of tea. The unfortunate truth right now is that you will need to play this on Single Target to remain competitive. I’d like to see a more passive talent option introduced as a choice node with this for players who do not enjoy the WoO playstyle.

My suggestion would be a node that plays on the elemental side of Storm, Earth, and Fire. Historically with effects such as this, each spirit’s elemental side is present (Fire Spirit has an immolation aura, Storm has increased range, etc…) and I think that the rework is an excellent opportunity to introduce this type of effect as a choice for players who do not want to interact with Ordered Elements.

Drinking Horn Cover + Ordered Elements - There is currently a negative synergy with these two talents since OE reduces the Chi Cost of all your spells in the window and DHC is based on Chi spent. DHC should probably be changed to Chi Spenders cast in the future to mitigate this issue.

Conclusion

I’m really hopeful for the future which is a strange feeling as a Windwalker player as the past couple expansions have felt pretty doom and gloom. I look forward to continued updates in this Alpha/Beta cycle as well as giving feedback on those as well.

[Delrithae-hyjal]

@Jfunk-sargeras

For a list of bugs maintained by the WW community we made a spreadsheet, but I’m unable to post links here. If this changes I’ll post it here, but it’s pinned in the class discord.

Here is the link to the spreadsheet:

Windwalker Interactions / Bugs - The War Within