I was pretty disappointed to see no Windwalker entry in the tuning post again. The changes that were made on Jan 16th were generally well received and it felt like our feedback was heard. Please don’t forget about us when there’s still so much to adjust.
Most Impactful Bugs
- Storm, Earth, and Fire spirits still don’t benefit from talent damage amps including, but not limited to, Acclamation and Martial Instincts. Acclamation is a pretty significant single-target damage increase, and this bug really hurts our damage during cooldowns.
- Flurry Strikes targeting. I explained this bug in this EU forum post, and it is causing many missed flurry strikes and by extension lower Wisdom of the Wall and Against All Odds uptime.
- Empowered Tiger Lightning. We have two sources of this effect, the xuen effigy from Invoke Xuen, and the one from Fury of Xuen. Several damage sources feed into both ETLs, just one, or even neither. There is no apparent logic behind this inconsistency, but it does hurt our overall performance and makes maintenance of sim profiles quite annoying at times.
Most Requested Tuning
- Strike of the Windlord should sqrt scale after 5 targets. It currently has far too little an impact in aoe situations. More details here, near the bottom of the post.
- Celestial Conduit similarly should scale with targets better. The value increase per target is even worse than for Strike of the Windlord, which is frankly a shocking achievement. Even if sqrt scaling seems like a stretch (which it shouldn’t). at least increase the damage amp per target to like 20-30%.
- Both Storm, Earth, and Fire and Invoke Xuen, the White Tiger are fairly unimpactful in aoe situations. Both essentially act as a flat 20% and 8% damage buff respectively, with Xuen adding some unimpressive 3t cleave on top. I’ve talked about their low impact in terms of gameplay more here, but for this post, suffice to say that they ought to be numerically buffed.
- Memory of the Monastery is with quite a margin the worst t3 talent we have. The haste per stack can easily be increased, and it’s currently not correctly granting as much haste per stack as it should in certain (common) situations.
- Shado Pan: High Impact is still just hilariously underpowered. Even in high aoe situations, the damage contribution of this talent is normally in the ballpark of 0.01%. Even the extremely annoying and unintuitive workaround of spamming tab during a flurry strikes discharge, which only increased the damage to 3-4% of overall, doesn’t work anymore because of the aforementioned bug with flurry strikes targeting.
- Shado Pan’s defensive node, Whirling Steel/Predictive Training are awful. They regularly contribute absolutely nothing to the survivability of Windwalkers, and I say that entirely without hyperbole.
- Conduit of the Celestials: Flight of the Red Crane is quite underpowered, only contributing 2-3% (generously speaking) in aoe situations.
- Conduit of the Celestials: Courage of the White Tiger is currently ST-only, but it could easily be given aoe damage without going out of control.
Most Desired Misc Changes
- Builds that prominently feature Crackling Jade Lightning would be much more appreciated if the ability could be channeled while moving. I’m sure the Mistweavers would greatly appreciate this as well. There seems to be some interest from Blizzard’s side to make Emperor’s Capacitor a viable talent, seeing as how it’s been buffed to double its previous amount twice, but some people will never like it if they have to plant their feet, or risk losing 40 seconds of stacking value because of an unlucky mechanic.
- I’m personally interested in playing Slicing Winds, but it certainly seems to be a controversial ability. However, one thing is certain, its position all the way at the end of the Strike of the Windlord “subtree” is very much not favorable. It might be better off taking Communion With Wind’s place, baking the latter’s effect into Strike of the Windlord baseline. That would be a minor improvement, but it’s something.
- Dual Threat’s value is directly affected by the amount of trigger events. In this case, autoattacks. That means it necessarily works (much) better with dualwielding than with 2h weapons. A slight rework to normalize this talent’s effect would help keeping it relevant as 2h weapons start scaling better.
- Jadefire Stomp and all of its follow-up talents are, whether counted as a package or individually, terrible. The removal of the reset mechanic isn’t even getting a solid chance in the field if no one wants to play it due to just being bad.
