So, disclaimer: I’m a returning player. I quit about 8 years ago and recently started back up. I’ve done some mythic 10s and casual BG.
I’m trying to figure out the reason many people are unhappy with monks. I find it quite fun. Perhaps I haven’t done enough hardcore stuff to see the problems?
I’ve been debating which toon to take into Shadowlands and was leaning towards my monk, but reading the forums I find a lot of discontent. My second choice is my Druid, which I also enjoy, but the monk “vibe” is more appealing.
I almost exclusively heal unless I’m questing as WW.
What are the glaring issues? Are they so bad that I’ll severely be gimping myself?
You won’t be gimping yourself unless you’re playing extremely high level content.
BUT- the problem with monk right now is Brewmaster is such a ridiculously good tank spec in raids and has been since release iirc, while windwalker has a history of being either middle of the pack or bottom barrel, and mistweaver I won’t really comment on because I don’t heal, but as far as I know they just don’t have the powerful externals that other healers do.
Essentially, if you want to play monk and get a mythic raid spot, you better either be an extremely good MW/WW, or a tank.
so the problem with windwalker is that there are other specs (havoc) that are basically you but stronger. its got an incap, st stun, aoe stun, insane leech, amazing cleave and st damage. you don’t bring a lot of utility either, only a 5% melee vulnerability and a 10% movespeed buff. it’s decent in m+ but flounders in raid.
in the end, feel free to play what you want, but, in a pug environment, you might struggle more vs a controlled guild environment. just the other day i got aotc on my windwalker.
But they should be okay in mythic dungeons? How about MW? I see a lot of disappointment in WW but not so much in the others. Am I correct in thinking this?
MW’s are perfectly fine in M+ and quite a lot of fun IMO.
Some players will complain that the Healing Meta for M+ is Resto Druid by a mile followed by HPally and anything else is just trolling.
While this might be true at the high end… how many of us are high end players? (and are being honest about it!)
WW suffers the same problem as other Melee specs… it’s not a DH… or a Rogue.
Ultimately I’d say Monks suffer mostly because of WW and the fact most players are DPS focused. There are also complaints around the class fantasy and lack of animations… which I also think are fair.
DHs and rogues basically give up nothing to sustain themselves in combat. fury does as well, they dont skip a beat to keep in a fight.
windwalkers have touch of karma, but it has a lot of pre-requisites for it to work. you have to be facing your target, you need a target in the first place, it stops working after a particular HP threshold and breaks. otherwise the monk is just a sitting duck.
defensively and if we want to just compare the leather melee for a second. both rogues and druids have instant cast heals and hots on top of stealth to keep themselves going. while also having other defensive CDs on top of that. DHs have the INSANELY strong obscure on blade dance which is up extremely often because of its low CD. they have insane sustain because of very high levels of leech built into them just playing there character. on top of that they have blur AND darkness which is also a raid wide defensive as well.
windwalkers have nothing to compare with any of that from any of those classes. we have crappy karma, and thats it. and lets not get into pvp and what those classes gain compared to what we gain. our mobility is beaten by those classes on top of there natural advantages, and our only heal is utterly pathetic compared to there self sustain ( and we have no way to make our heal stronger, instant cast or better in any way ). and on top of that karma can be removed, negated or ignored by over half of the specs in the game.
this is just the tip of the iceberg and talking about only 1 facet of how weak windwalker is. theres also our utterly complete lack of scaling. our ancient mechanics that havnt been iterated on or changed in years. our disastrous talent tree. all of our persistent bugs. our massive issues with storm earth and fire. our lack of lore representation. player perception and reputation completely diminished because of the lack of care from blizzard. we are the only class in the game that didnt get a visual update. our complete lack of group utility. clunky and useless pet AI on both SEF and xuen.
i wouldnt say we need a gut rebuilt like rets normally get, shamans, warlocks and now shadow priests. but blizz need to put in A LOT of work to the spec to get it working again. theres just too many issues all compounding to make things worse and blizzards lack of attention to the spec.
dont get me wrong. the few of us left love how the spec plays. but numbers tweaks just arnt going to fix the gameplay facets that arnt working. and thats all blizzard do. the raw gameplay of the spec works absolutely fine ( and its mostly fun ). they can just do the same thing with changes that will fix all of our issues under the hood of the spec.
15-20’s are definitely doable as MW… or any healer. From memory, my best timed runs were +17’s (although I’ve done higher keys without timing them) and I don’t really care for M+
Holy Paladins are fun in a crazy OP sort of way at the moment but that’s going away in SL. Unless they see some big changes they’ll be rather clunky at launch so if you’re not a fan of them now…
yeah they do pretty good in there. Only issue is you have to be using your cds a lot and know the routes for the dungeons really well to pull good numbers.
The other issue is self-sustainability, we soak up heals a lot currently. Not sure how it will feel in slands with that.
My bad didn’t see only heal unless questing part.
Probably a good idea because in terms of pvp currently this xpac we are bucking for number 1 melee.
As disclaimer im fairly casual on my MW monk, so this more of feely opinions rather than numbers. Probably will end up taking it to SL as kinda hate all the class designs atm, and hate monk just a little less.
Perhaps I haven’t done enough hardcore stuff to see the problems?
Cant really chime to this as casual
What are the glaring issues? Are they so bad that I’ll severely be gimping myself?
Raid healing is kinda lackluster, I just run around flailing my arms like a monkey doing Essence Font, most other things just seem to make me to oom with little pay off (tend to always be behind other equally geared healers)
Outside of raids they don’t feel awful, and are quite fun. I find I have a lot of throughput on my healing if i need to get someone up quick either from standing in bad or me not paying attention. You also get to kick things in the face or spin2win like the graceful monk you are during healing downtimes.
At the moment its hard to tell how they will turn out in SL as all the new stuff they got or are getting is bugged and not working correct, sad times.
If you just enjoy dodging things and clicking heals (not bashing totally cool) then MW will be perfectly fine. It will only feel bad if you think of it relative to other healers (i.e. anything you can do, other healers can do better) and start looking to push what the spec can do. Sadly the claim to fame for mistweaver is doing MDI pulls with crane, which probably isn’t going to be happening in pugs.
MW feels very point and shoot, so if that’s fun for you then it’s a decent spec. If you like looking for fun interactions and setting up your strengths, MW is gonna feel very flat.
With that said, I think mistweaver is probably better than hpal for pugging 15-20 keys. Pugging in that level is less about using GCDs on utility and damage and more about saving people from things they should have dodged or defensived.