These are upgrades to the base ability for sure but it will still suffer the same inconveniences of the base ability. You could have baked these changes into serenity too so these points avoid the main issue of whether Serenity will be missed or not.
The base ability of Serenity was much neater, brings more agency into the player’s movement and choices, is more interactive, avoids pet problems, changes gameplay and I would’ve preferred they develop this ability much more than SEF.
Conversely the base ability of SEF is very problematic (pet pathing, pets targeting, item/trinket scaling, skill activation clipping etc…) and doesn’t change gameplay. It may as well say you do 26% more damage. Having a choice to avoid these issues would’ve been great. The less pets Monks have, the better. Get rid of the celestial summons while you are at it and incorporate the mechanics into a buff of the character instead of summoning an AI bot.
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I’ve always felt we should become avatars for the celestials and be filled with their power, instead of summoning them themselves.
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Well, you don’t summon the celestials themselves as per tooltip, it is an effigy, so it basically a construct of chi or something.
But conduit of the celestials seems to go towarss the route of being empowered by the celestials instead of using your power to imitate them.
Invoking is the term that’s used in the tooltip, which I think is reasonably synonymous with summoning.
What I think is important is to remove pets as much as possible and in both cases (Xuen and SEF) I think it would be a vast improvement to bring those buffs back into the character you control instead of externalised into AI.
Plus, serenity looks way better than SEF and if the monk was covered in white lightning with it splashing out during attacks it would look way better that Xuen.
3 Likes
I dont disagree about reducing summons, i was just being specific about what the tooltip says.
The name of the skill is “invoke xuen, the white tiger” but the tooltip says: summons an effigy of xuen right at the start.
Of course tool tips are irrelevant in terms of gameplay and is just a pet summon thats annoying to use as a main CD.
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If they are removing Serenity I will never touch WW again lol.
Serenity is being partially baked into sef
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Serenity is being baked in partially by “Ordered Elements” (chi reduction) and also by “Heart of the Jade Serpent” (cooldown reduction) in the conduit hero tree. So obviously Blizz recognize that these mechanics were strong and fun enough to adapt them into this new revision. The problem is that they have picked a bad ability to center it around.
If they had put the effort into adapting Serenity we might have a much more interesting and engaging button to press than SEF and hopefully with less issues.
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i think that’s what made it good, dont have to worry about resource management for a few seconds, just spam your hardest hitting abilities while popping a potion
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Personally as one who was heavy ww monk main for several expansions I prefer SEF over serenity. It’s more visually appealing as well as can be used for ST or AoA/ cleave.
Serenity is a hit and forget, doesn’t feel dynamic enough. But it’s true they really REALLY NEED to fix the SEF bugs… Maybe this time?
Yuh I first came to Monk from Warlock playing WW and omg that was my most favourite ability 
Then I swapped to healer as Mistweaver although tbh learning to heal on Mistweaver probably wasn’t the smartest choice x3
In fact would later kinda repeat that learning to tank on Blood DK 
Was fun but not my thing prefer healing