There is a lot a like about the new iterations of TWW WW Monk but there are also some issues I have with some of these changes, especially those that cause a reduction in choice and control. Additionally there are issues that have been grandfathered in from previous expansions that have remained.
So firstly there are the newly baked in / removed abilities.
Chi wave (baked in)
What it did:
Could be used for ranged pulling
Could be used when HP wasn’t 100% for some bonus health
Could be used in PvP while moving to keep targets in combat
Workaround:
Allow for crackling jade lightning to be cast on the move, this solves all but the healing issue, which was minor.
Expel Harm (baked in)
What it did:
Lets us stack Chi out of combat
Lets us build Chi during fights when we are at range or during a phase change
Lets you double pump Chi (TP into EH) without breaking hit combo or combo strikes
Lets you time your heal for maximum impact and damage (especially with the strength of spirit talent that improves its healing based on missing health)
EH was our only other chi builder / energy spender
EH has a half global compared to all other monk abilities and can build chi faster than TP
We could heal on the move without a target reasonably well between EH and Instant Viv
Workaround:
Really this just needs to come back and be apart of the core class. There is so much play involved in this skills usage and its removal takes away some of the satisfying strategic play of a WW and it definitely fills a gap.
Summon White Tiger Statue (baked in)
What it did:
Fixed location AoE damage
Xuen is often cast when initiating a pull rather than when you are fully planted so that 100% of the time spent in melee range is spent using big damaging abilities and will result in statue being misplaced regularly.
Horrendous ability in the first place
Workaround:
A simpler solution for the statue is to have it summoned when you cast FoF while Invoke Xuen is active. You are likely planted at this point and will allow for more accurate placing of the statue, even though I hate it.
SEF/Serenity (removed)
What it/they did:
Serenity was for many the more desirable DPS CD and SEF was only taken due to throughput reasons
SEF doesn’t change gameplay or impact player experience in any meaningful way
SEF suffers from many issues due to being bot damage
Can be CC’ed making it less than useless
Unlike almost all (I think all) DPS cooldowns its very possible to do less damage during a SEF window if your clones are suffering from the many issues that pets can / do suffer from.
SEF is just a glorified but terribly designed % dmg increase
Serenity caused resource issues but it was never developed so obvious solutions weren’t implemented.
Workaround:
Replace SEF with Serenity and instead implement SEF as a Brewmaster damage mitigation ability (splitting stagger damage across 2 clones, each clone being able to taunt its own targets, etc)
Change Serenity to instead increase the speed in which abilities cooldown by 30%, channel by 40% and decrease the global cooldown by 50% (no damage amp). This would essentially just make everything really fast for 8 seconds with the biggest damage increase coming from a faster FoF and SCK channel.
Remove Serenity from the GCD
Serenity now has a 1minute cooldown, 2 charges and lasts 8 seconds
Shift “Ordered Elements”, “Drinking Horn Cover” and “Spiritual Focus” talents to work with Serenity
The removal of the choice of abilities or of when abilities activate by baking them into our rotational abilities means that we no longer reasonably control any of the above. Now there is some consideration for this with the integration of a 2 chi baseline into the EH talent but ultimately with the loss of Keefers we will no longer feel the need to open with TP except to build Chi which only makes EH more valuable as we could have built to max chi and opened with SotWL or RSK instead.
Old Issues
Invoke Xuen, The White Tiger
What it did:
Xuen does 3 things
Basic attacks your primary target
Passively cleaves 3 targets with lightning
AoEs targets for 8% of the damage you dealt every 4 seconds
He also
Doesn’t change your gameplay
Is subject all the same issues all pets are
Isn’t as intuitive to control
Is easy to CC
Is a pet we don’t need
Workaround:
A complex but way more engaging solution would be (beating the same drum again) if we actually invoked the celestials essence / martial style and it changed our attacks, much like a DH metamorphosis. Think Udyr out of league when he takes on the forms of animal fighting styles and its represented as magical augmentation.
Xuen - Invoke Xuen now becomes “Invoke” Xuen which shrouds you in tiger lightning and amplifies your most iconic abilities. Lasts 14 seconds, 2 min CD.
FoF becomes Fury of Xuen and hits targets for additional tiger lightning damage and has a 40% chance to apply a non diminishing ministun for 0.1 seconds every hit.
RSK becomes Rising Tiger Kick and leaves an after image of the monk that explodes for tiger lightning after 1 second.
BoK becomes White Out Kick and leeches speed (20% slow + 20% move speed inc) for 12 seconds.
SCK becomes Crackling Cyclone and has its AoE size increased and damage changed to tiger lightning/nature.
Roll becomes Lightning Dash and now teleports 15 yards instantly, damaging enemies within 5 yards of where the monk arrives and leaves behind tiger lighting in the path, enemies that pass through it are slowed. Roll when used this way recharges 300% faster.
Flying Serpent Kick, becomes Accelerated Lightning and now travels 50% further, speeds up the further it travels, accumulates damage and widens the radius of the damage + slow the further you travel, releasing it when you recast the ability for 100% of stored damage + radius or instead store it for 3 seconds after Accelerating Lightning has ended and apply it on your next melee attack for 50% of the stored damage + radius. Change animation to lightning and Xuen instead of a dragon/serpent.
Anyways, let me know what you guys think about all the above, especially in regards to Monks kind of being forced into being a pet class more and more with less and less engaging options.
Agree with a lot of what you got here. That said, I do have some differing opinions about what could be done for some of the issues.
Regarding the Tiger Statue, I feel like the easiest workaround would be to just bake the statue damage into each of the Celestials rather than have it be a standalone talent.
Regarding SEF/Serenity, I feel like the simple approach would be to just not have Serenity deleted. That said, I like the thought of two charge Serenity and decreasing the GCD while Serenity is up.
I mainly play Brew now but played WW in the past. Here are some things I see in your post.
CLJ has a Energy cost. Making it cast while moving would feel awful, cause you would have to press ESC in order to cancel it and not eat through your whole Energy. I agree with a pulling tool though, which I said in different posts.
That is not really good usage. You want to press your CDs when everything is gathered and help grouping before that (kick casters in, RoP them in etc.). Once the stand in melee you would use CDs, not before. Using Xuen before was a dmg loss.
SEF was the more iconic spell and probably many more players prefered it over Serenity. But that is an assumption, just like yours.
Making SEF a def CD for brew and individual taunts? so now frontals go in every direction? skip raid taunt mechanics? this would be desastrous at best.
I agree with the bugs etc. though. As the staple WW ability they should just fix SEFs strange behaviours rather than delete the most iconic monk spell (SEF is Chens ultimate since WC3 days).
This is something Brews wish as well. At least Brew now has the ability to completly skip their celestial.
Thanks for the response. There is a few things that are worth clearing up.
Simple problem to solve, button press to activate and cancel. Simple.
Not true, obviously you have to use your imagination for the situation but regularly waiting that long can mean you don’t get full usage of Xuen or your other skills. ie. during M+ you will regularly finish fights with Xuen still up which is also a loss so popping early so that all your burst / dmg is condensed is the right play. Using your utility to help gather mobs is something you can still do with Xuen out. However, on prolonged boss or extremely high M+ where even mob pulls last longer than 20 seconds then your comments are dead on.
It’s beyond an assumption at this stage with the commanding responses coming from the community with the loss of Serenity, however neither of us will know with certainty without stats. What I can say is that no WW who PvPs liked SEF and if they did they were insane for the obvious reasons.
Maybe the taunting element wouldn’t work but the damage mitigation would certainly work and would be more true of the original monk lore / theme which was all about brewmasters.
I couldn’t agree more but its been like 6 years and they haven’t done squat. It wouldn’t fix some of the issues around CC but at least the jankiness would be gone.
I made a wishlist for Brew 2 weeks ago and this was a response to that problem, which I like.
[…] change to CJL be it baked in or a talent; give CJL two or three charges that refill on something like a 15~20 sec timer, each charge deals full free instant cast damage but with out the knock back. Once we’re out of charges CJL reverts to it’s current form.
Yeah, I had keys in mind. If the pull lasts less than 20/30 seconds, then it is such easy content that it isn’t worth talking about it.
actually they have done a lot of fixing. It is not perfect yet, but there were plenty of fixes.
I mean, I also would prefer this because I hate statues, I just don’t think its likely so I was offering a minor adjustment.
The problem is that SEF has been functionally more damage for a long time in almost all applications and has been more versatile due to the charges, cooldown and duration. Back in Legion Serenity was the go to but that was back when it was strong. Since then serenity has been nerfed and hasn’t been developed. If serenity was developed a bit more I am almost certain it would be the preference.
In fact with the changes I suggested would make the drinking horn cover talent something very impactful and satisfying to perfect.
I mean FSK already does damage, just not enough for you to prefer it over other abilities when aiming for max output. So long as you maintained this for both roll and FSK (kept the damage low) then they wouldn’t become rotational and would instead just add utility (faster movement, faster ability CD and AoE slows).
I’m talking about having roll be modified ONLY during the buff window.
Why not have roll behave differently for 14 seconds every 2 minutes during a “meta” like buff?
It’s only during the buff window so it leaves everything the same outside the window while adding something interesting.
Also, I’m not really married to the damage element but having it behave differently during the meta makes sense and makes the abilities you choose during that limited window interesting ie, roll: teleports, cools down faster and slows in AoE (which there is now a soft version of this in the TWW class tree)
Umm, I think you haven’t read my suggestions properly and are reacting without really understanding.
We need to define “rotational” because if you have a 14 second buff every 2 minutes (as I stated) that impacts the function of 6 abilities (as stated) I wouldn’t call that rotational. Furthermore, most of the seconds you have this meta like buff up you will want to be pumping your real damaging abilities like FoF, RSK, BoK and SCK, all I’m saying is having roll have some increased functionality + lightning visuals during this window seems fun / flavourful and hardly is a momentum copy… also, these “if you like this you should play this” kind of comments are unhelpful.
I didn’t realize how bad WW in the remix until I started working on my alt army. Hunters MM OP. Priest seriously how did that go live OP. Even running warrior is smooth.
On WW for some reason I get random one shoted by mobs and I have to beat things down. On most other classes I just run around one shotting mobs or aoe pulling on a priest in healer mode and killing everything in the zone.
DH you can be a unkillable god with leech gems or a aoe murder machine with dps solo carrying raids.
Thought I would just add to the list. Try some of the other class. For a fun distraction event WW just hasn’t been fun.
I 100% agree we just need serenity back as an option…especially for pvp. There are aoe stuns and aoe fears, so unless you allow tigers lust to free the clones from all movement and impairing effects…it just doesnt work. Also having to use tigers lust in order for the monk to utilize its main offensive cd is not ok. Do pally’s have to use freedom in order for avenging wrath to be live?..no because its not ok.