Budget DH with a static talent profile and the majority of its abilities bugged or reliant on bugs to do damage is not the best design out there…
14 Likes
I agree about bringing less to the table than rogue or DH. What I’m curious about is this: what kind of change would help bring our baseline utility up to par with other classes of our level? More survivability to make us like DH? If so what kind maybe bigger heals from orbs? If it’s more utility like Rogue what would be a good answer there? for me some z axis movement would be really neat really play with the wind element in our class name, maybe a knock back or daze, something windy is on my mind.
I don’t know the answer to these questions. I know that it feels like our spec just doesn’t cut the mustard when stacked up against others in our bracket. Flat-out at a baseline comparison they do things that we can’t or do it much better. As long as A monk (mw or bm) is a long for the ride then we become even less relevant. I want so badly to play this spec and live my avatar Ang best life, but the spec feels a little lack-luster imo.
I think that rotationally and mechanically WW is a much more fun spec to play than some of the other melee dps. The chi/energy system, combo strikes, and blackout kicks CD reduction interaction with RsK and FoF keeps things interesting enough for me.
I agree though that there needs to be some diversity in the talent choices and I wish there was something better than SEF. Knowing that one of the only ways you can squeeze extra dps by exploiting a bug with SEFs expiration is kinda lame.
Our utility is decent in my opinion. We have poison/disease removal, ring of peace, and 5% physical dmg buff. The problem is that our Tank and Heal specs also bring this to the table, so from a dps standpoint we don’t bring anything unique as WWs. I’d love to see us get our conflict and strife spell baseline for Shadowlands (not the watered down version they’re giving us currently) and maybe one more thing to make us stand out in raid/m+
4 Likes
I thought the SEF expiration bug was patched long ago. Unless there is a new way to trigger it?
The thing that was fixed was the cancelaura macro you could trigger it, you can naturally do it still right as it runs out.
I feel like people’s reactions to OP’s complaint are heavily weighted by how much trust they have in the current crop of WoW systems designers.
If you think they’re good and trustworthy of adding fun and balance, “more changes” is fantastic and they need to get to working on Monk immediately.
If you think they’ve been gutting classes, poorly balancing, and selling baseline items back to you on the talent trees for a while now , “less changes” is great. Please devs, go sit over here on this comfy, colorful playmat and mangle this here spriest spec a bit more, while we adults enjoy the game in the other room.
Completely unrelated, I’m glad they’re not changing much. 
I’d personally avoid “bringing our survivability up to par” types of changes. Homogenized classes are not the answer to utility and you shouldn’t buff or nerf abilities in an attempt to make another spec fill some role artificially because you never really solve the original problem. Some abilities are definitely mechanically interesting and I’d love to have them across specs but not for the reason of “we need 99% diffuse to compete with cloak”, for example.
The overall state of defensive abilities & talents are actually not even in a terrible state anyway.
The problems mainly happen when things like demonic trample ignore global movement restrictions in bgs, or demonic puts you in meta every 30s with full resources from eyebeam & traits to where damage and survivability from meta dance and leech just never seems to end, or when you try to compare the raid value in netherwalk, cloak, and cheat to run of the mill defensive abilities like ToK.
The average perception of classes being the way they are doesn’t help but a DH in arenas with Soul Rending is very different on the power scale from a DH in raid with netherwalk. Elusiveness and cheat death are in a similar state. These classes don’t just exist in [whatever you consider] their most powerful state offensively and defensively all the time. Bringing other specs up to par, or to a middle ground, is where most specs are already at.
I see this a lot;
But that argument can go both ways. The idea shouldn’t be to exclude specs from raid because somone else can bring mystic touch but instead to allow you to play multiple roles for your dungeon group or bring the debuff to adds, secondary targets, or whatever else. Not every tank or healer wants to be a Brewmaster or a Mistweaver and not every monk wants to play a windwalker. The benefit for a single spec here doesn’t make the loss for the class feel worthwhile.
4 Likes
I agree with you that it would not be helpful to strip the other two specs of something just to make the 3rd stand out more. My thought was more along the lines of adding something extra to the dps spec to make it as attractive as a similar melee dps spec of a different class.
Another thought and approach could be how encounter design could help determine how useful we can be. Paralyze, AoE stun, poison/disease cleanse, offheals in the form of reverse harm, and ring of peace are all useful already. Maybe we dont really need anything more than some encounters that highlight our toolkit every once in a while.
The bugs…yeah need fixed.
I feel havoc is more the outlier issue though. It feels like it was designed by a 10 year old who just grabs the best aspects of multiple classes so theirs can be awesome in so many ways with very limited downsides.
2 Likes
This will always, ALWAYS be the case now that DH is a thing. Everyone compares their spec to the ease and power of DH or the utility of rogue. What shocks me is that it is so prevalent and yet nothing has been done to DH to bring it into line.
That being said, at this point comparing WW to DH is just silly. I’d rather we compare to other melee specs that are not obviously broken. That’s the real comparison to show here, and in that regard, I think monks are doing OK.
I like the change. Removing ToD from normal rotation means they’ll have to increase our other abilities to make up for it.
It’s also a good change for PvP overall. There are 100000 ways to completely negate the current ToD damage and it annoys me.
3 Likes
Just about every other melee spec except survival is better than WW. The aoe cap makes it worthless.
WW and MW lags behind every other spec I have seen with survivability. Play a rogue, it is so well designed and powerful.
Coming in slands?
Encounter design is very important and will go a long way but in order for it to be consistent we really need to figure out what the niche is supposed to be and stick to it in order to consistently define what windwalker is each expansion and each tier / season, moving forward.
What haven’t we hit so far? After SEF was added we’ve excelled in spread cleave, stacked cleave, AoE, single target, prio target swaps, burst (AoE & Single target), each tier we just seem to be moving down the list of new things to try.
BFA is really the first time we’ve hit such a long span of mediocrity for lack of a better word. There wasn’t anything encounter design was going to do to reward us.
We already see a lot of this gameplay in PvP so in my opinion I think it really adds less to the overall experience than you’d expect.
Happenings like this are always nice but infrequent as well. It just seems like the process behind things when you look at your raid group objectively to clear a progression hurdle like Opulence Gauntlet, which side do you send for Jaina or Carapace, Psychus 1 vs 2, are… how well does the added utility supplement what a healer is already going to do or what the raid is dealing with?
It’s cool to have utility but how does the baseline windwalker utility kit compare to other DPS and at what point does it take you from just being a “well positioned” melee to feeling impactful?
Windwalking has always been downplayed but Mannoroth and Gul’dan were 
, Tiger’s Lust is something you can always benefit from, Ring has fit in really well, but the cleanse can be brought by anyone, same with the cc in most cases along with the added problem of DR for those Sweep/Nova/Cap chains in PvE.
In addition to those situations when they are provided by another class - often times they provide a general utility that is at the very least equal to what we provide, if not better.
When you look at the power behind a Spirit Link + Darkness, or Shout, Divine Shield, CoS, and then look at the comparative value in what your bringing the impact of what you can do becomes really specific unfortunately. In a raid of 20 people that is just going to be hard to overcome.
Especially moving forward with more being added in Shadowlands. My shamans already got Windrush, now I’m getting chain heal, Earthquake is not AoE capped, I’m ranged 
, plus totems.
Not to go off topic - If we’re working towards a goal of feeling more impactful as a specialization then we need a way to highlight what we can do in any situation and not just when the encounter allows for it.
It’s a complex problem to tackle though honestly. We have some issues that have some pretty straight forward solutions but the other ones I think the community is pretty divided on.
3 Likes
They wern’t issues in Legion 
I don’t like how DH is inconsistent with restrictions placed on ferals, rogues, and monks but I don’t see the class too negatively.
I’m all for letting them have fun just when it comes to things like immunity frames, mana rift being a viable win condition, rain from above, Dance/Death Sweep dodge on top of glimpse with no punishment for using mobility randomly, and reverse magic, it’s just like… c’mon…
Now we’re throwing mortal strike debuff at them in Legion.
At what point do you say enough is enough lol.
4 Likes
Exactly lol.
I have a 10 and 8 year old and this is exactly how they would make their own class.
Complete focus on effectiveness in all regards with minimal to no weaknesses. A streamlined toolkit that lets you be great at single target and aoe at the same time.
Immunities when I need one because those help. Gravy they have a taunt too.
A very frequent immunity on blade dance.
An offensive dispel.
Make their interrupt better than others and give resources.
Make them very tanky with high leach.
Extreme instant mobility for point to point movement.
A unique (de)buff
Group defensive cooldown.
Single target long duration CC
Aoe stun.
3 Likes
Yep, all aoe talents and abilities for monks are being nerfed so you can pull max 5-6 mobs, making all old farming content a pain and new content just as horrible for gimped classes like monks now.
Shamman is definitely the class to level in SL and the monk will sit and wait for the next xpac if they don’t fix it quickly.
Having a tool that work in 1 fight for a whole tier is not justification to bring a monk.
The fact we take way more damage then any other melee does not help.
Our gimped aoe is huge.
No offensive dispell, no brez, a buff that really is an extra (not vital or all that important like fort or wisdom or intel),
So much needs to be fix for the monk, all three specs, naming something monkish is not the same as actually fixing it to be valued in a 5 man or raid.
This is happening to everyone
Not for shaman earthquake, that is not being reduced. Shaman is the go to dps class for SL.
You can’t say that as we have had zero numbers tuning.