Windwalker are LITERALLY worse than Shadow Priests

Community General Discussion
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So how does everyone started caring about Shadow priest when the majority if not all Windwalkers are completly unsatisfied how they are going into Shadowlands and have by DEFAULT worse design than Shadow?

I know this class is underplayed and no one gives a crap about monks but let me share some Impression over the years what went completly wrong with Windwalker and I feel like this is a fundamentally issue so that’s why i’m posting it here in the GD forums.

Blizzard you have absolutely no clue what you want to do Windwalker. Let’s go back to WoD when Windwalker was still a great and fun specc.

It all made sense you had Jab which generated free Tiger Palms and Blackout kicks - Jab got removed, Tiger Palm armor bypass on top.

You generated with usage of Chi, Tigereye Brew stacks to get a decent duration of big burst damage but instead you had weaker sustained damage it all made sense it was unique to the specc itself - Tigereye Brew got removed replaced with a MESS of burst CD which instead most of the times reduces your damage especially in PvP COMPLETE CATASTROPHE literally NO Windwalker likes the current Storm, Earth and Fire over the old version which you had great control over and was used to improve split damage especially for the sacrifice of Tigereye Brew.

In WoD you had a baked in Fists of Fury stun it all made sense Windwalker was about utility and short strong burst windows - Now a weak DH

In WoD you had you had great utility and defensive spells which used to be core part of the kit (Disarm/Zen Meditation/Healing elixirs/short paralysis/Transendence cooldowns) it all made sense Windwalker was supposed to be slippery and have great counterplay which added great flow to the class and made you differ from good great and god windwalkers - now everything dumbed down overnerfed locked behind honor talents.

Let’s go to the current obvious problems which completly show the lack of literal developement skill from Blizzards side which are part of the reason Windwalker is horrible as it is right now.

Talents:
Literally all Talent Tiers are missplaced or have absolutely no background for being there where they are or are simply so weak that you can play without chosing a talent without difference.
Some examples: Good Karma a defensive talent in an utility tier - Level 15 Tier doing absolutely no damage - Hit Combo being a Talent - Whirling Dragon punch being a Talent.

Scaling:
Ever wondered why no Windwalker stacks Haste crit or Mastery but the least wanted stat Versatility?

Versatility is literally the only one stat which improves Windwalker damage and is the literally only stat which has interaction with all windwalker abilites.

Haste literally offers NOTHING instead it will bring you to energy issues more because faster channeltime on FoF = less break and more chi useage

Mastery doesn’t interact with Touch of Karma/Death/Xuen
Same Issue with Crit while it being RNG on top and is no flat out increase like Mastery for example would be. That is why Vers>Mastery is the way.

Windwalkers also have the least apm of all melee speccs because Blizzard thought removing an iconic ability as Tiger Strikes was a fun and great idea. So they also have the least of proccs when it comes to trinkets or general damage proccs (gushing/lash/infinite star).

The sad part is there are so much more flaws but yet I WW is the only specc I enjoy in this game.

Please Blizzard I beg you there is still time we saw it this week by reworking Shadow priests on the Beta and continueing.

Windwalker needs a complete REWORK give players the choice to swap between the old Tigereye Brew gameplay as replace for our useless 100 tier Talent choice.

Make actual unpruning in terms of class flow and personal player SKILL. please finally fix scaling issues with windwalker let them profit from every stat like every other class.

NERF damage bring back utility so you actually want a Windwalker in your team bring back Fists of Fury stun as specialist for having short AoE Stuns for M+ or at least for PvP only. Just anything I am sick after BFA playing a watered down DH.

There is no other specc in this entire game who has to fight with so much flaws in a specc and missdecisions over years and I really hope that we Windwalkers don’t have to go into SL as BFA 2.0

Thanks for reading until here

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This is the first complaint thread I’ve seen about WW. I’ve seen multiple made by Spriests about spriests. Feels more like an issue within the WW community than the community as a whole.

There’s also no need to divert attention from Spriests. Both can be discussed without dragging down the other as less important.

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WW does suck and does need a redesign to make stats useful

I also hate using ESF for single target and I wish there was a glyph to make my damn character not turn into the one with a dress

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This is because not many people play WW. WW has been in a broken state for all of bfa, with boring, cookie cutter talents, the interesting talents are non viable, and we have become a useless spec in raids, and are just budget demon hunters in mythic plus.

We need fixing too.

PS: Also yeah on the stat scaling thing, it’s a joke. We scale TERRIBLY and half of our abilities scale like garbage too.

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I can’t speak much about WW, considering that I only leveled one to 45ish before getting bored. Is it tuning, class fantasy in abilities, or an overhaul that would be beneficial?

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Always thought WW should of been the Survival Hunter type with the celestial/white lion.

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While I agree I use the less important card now because Shadow Priest is getting actual attention right now so Windwalker is left with probably some other outliers being among the worst speccs designed.

Shadow is getting attention everywhere I hear from it because of course they suck right now. but I feel and strongly believe Windwalker always had it worse especially in BFA but there never was a real community to express the feelings of this specc because Monk in general is an underplayed class. And let’s be real do you think they care anything about what the Monk community says in the monk forums or in the big monk thread on the Beta forums? No

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I main demon hunter so I deeply apologize that I can’t feel your pain :frowning:

I hope things get better for you guys soon

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The class doesn’t need an overhaul, the fantasy is fine. The issue lies within the tuning, and has lied here for years. Abilities like invoke Xuen scale like absolute garbage, and Xuen is becoming our main damage CD in shadowlands in addition to being on the AOE target cap. Our abilities scale so badly with mainstat and weapon damage it leads to blizzard adding these stupid 5% blanket damage increases every raid tier that fix nothing.

90% of our talents are dead. You never pick them. The whole talent tree needs to be removed and reworked, with nearly half the things in there becoming baseline or removed.

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I think the fanatsy behind the Combo strikes is fine and our Mastery is also great.

Our Mastery however and all stats should scale much much better and I really believe the current SEF is such a mistake of ability. The old Tigereye Brew gameplay with current Mastery would be insanely lit with SEF being reworked into a split damaging option again.

And the talents are just a pure joke but I already explained that.

It’s just so sad comparing MoP Windwalker with BFA/SL Windwalker especially with DH being a thing

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Oh yeah! Forgot about hit combo. Remove it/bake it into our mastery lol.

The base spec is honestly fine but I would prefer the tigerseye brew style any day of the week.

BFA WW truly is a shell of its MOP counterpart.

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Yes you’re right to an extent - we are the least played spec of the least played class. Starter build in Shadowlands is going back to Mastery/Versatility as our main stats.

I agree with this.

My musings:

  • I’m not sure how I feel about Touch of Death change in SL. It’s strong as a finisher, but it was a strong DPS cooldown which would mean our other skills would need to be tuned.

  • Touch of Karma as both an offensive and defensive cooldown is problematic. I agree with Babylonius’s suggestion that it be a defensive talent and the offensive part of it made a PvP skill. This would allow it to be better timed.

  • Scaling is an issue: Fists/Kicks scale off Mastery best and Versatility/Xuen which is now baseline scales off Haste for it’s autoattacks and Crit/Vers.

  • Night Fae (moderate) and Venthyr (very strong for us) are our best covenants by a mile. The Kyrian skill indicates a lack of awareness in how our skills our made or it was created to align better with MW/Brew. Necrolord only empowers Spinning Crane kick and only has viability if you’ve talented into it on the second last talent row (competes with Hit Combo so yeah nah)

Love Windwalker and planning to play it all the way through Shadowlands! :slight_smile:

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Since they added the gale burst mechanic to Xuen I am interested to see how this will work out especially with our terrible scaling.

Touch of Death in SL is kinda nice for PvP because the execute was always a really deadly part of windwalkers class kit back in the days but was kinda mediocore in PvE Situations but maybe it will see much actual use because M+ did not exist when it was around.

I agree with reworking it but I rather have it designed differently than making it another forced honor talent.

I always thought removing the damage part and replacing it with Good Karma baseline would be the best choice and make Karma an actual defensive CD again.

With the rest I kinda agree.

It is sad that they are not paying attention especially to the wowhead Windwalker article many points were sorted out really good.

But unfortunately Blizzard doesn’t care about their windwalker community

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I want to laugh, but it’s so true it’s sad :worried:

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I like the new version over the old. I found it way too clunky back then. Same with tiger eye brew.

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I like how WW plays now. Tigerseye brew is trash gameplay.

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The new version is literally a small budget burst CD which came around with the homogenization of more speccs in Legion. And this with so much problems.

First off it’s AI controlled and not even smart AI. It’s also the only one burst CD in WoW where you lose damage in PvP when the clones are getting cc’d (Frost Nova for example you Tiger Lust yourself and you do 65% less damage during your burst cooldown)

With the new version of SEF you absolutely have no control which target theyre splitting on. The only choice you have is to target them on a certain target and then for the rest of the duration you have to deal with it.

Old SEF you could decide which target it hits if you want to resummon them if you want to remove them etc.

Also it wasn’t on GCD which makes it today even more clunky than it ever was back then.

While I can see that you have this opinion I strongly believe that with the old SEF and Tigereye Brew Windwalker plays 100x better. Especially with current Mastery.

Mentioning GCD: remove GCD from Xuen/ToD/Energizing elixir/SEF/Tigereye brew (Honor Talent) what the hell blizzard

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  • cracks knuckles *. where to even begin.

the obvious place is stat scaling. we scale horrifically badly. touch of death doesnt scale with agil or our mastery. it cannot crit. haste does nothing to it. it cannot cleave. its 1 hit on 1 target. its one heavy hit, but ive seen star surges and chaos bolts which are regular rotational abilities hitting for half of touch of deaths damage. and its a 2 min CD where stats dont effect it. touch of death is a big issue.

touch of karma. while the actual purpose of the move is defensive in nature ( and it used to be a deterrent from hitting the monk in MOP ), over half of the specs in the game can remove it or ignore it. in pve though is the main problem. we are balanced around using it offensively by purposefully trying to kill ourselves to maximise our dps by the damage portion of this abilities damage reflect. it is degenerate gameplay that hasnt been iterated on by blizzard ever. the original design was for players to swap off of the monk otherwise they kill themselves in pvp. but its such ignorable damage in pvp while being very powerful in pve. it doesnt scale with anything except for HP, so it has 0 dps stat scaling. touch of karma is a big issue.

storm earth and fire… where to even begin. ANY time blizz come up with a new weapon enchant, trinket, ingame systems like the netherlight crucible through to essences and corruptions etcs, storm earth and fire reduces its damage because of how the ability works. it splits the monk into 3 and our damage is shared by our clones to even percentages of damage ( ie: its 33% split between the 3 clones. the parent monk is doing 66% less damage ). but what this means until blizz catch the million bugs is that if its a weapon enchant as an example, only the parent monks weapon damage is effective, any positive effect that the enchant would be doing is reduced by 66% unless its raw stats. the clones dont get there own versions of the weapon enchant. same with things like on proc damage trinkets. the damage is reduced when we have our main dps CD going. thus losing overall dps when our dps is supposed to be increased.

on top of this negative effect and all of those subsequent bugs, the AI of the stupid clones is also a massive issue. our primary dps ability fists of fury, if the clones are facing the wrong direction when we use it because of there stupid janky coding, again 33-66% of our damage is just whiffing the air not going off. if the clones are travelling to a new target while you press an attack it will wiff the air and attack nothing, losing dps when your supposed to be getting a dps increase with a dps CD going. the ability is HOT GARBAGE. and has been a gigantic pain in the backside ever since blizz changed it in the legion alpha. the entire ability should be scraped from the game. blizz might think its thematic ( even though its was originally a brewmaster ability, not windwalkers ), but it needs to be shelved because of the sheer mountain of issues it has. storm earth and fire is a massive issue.

our talent tree is a disaster. our entire T15 row of talent does less than 0.5% of our dps. they add NOTHING to gameplay at all except for very slightly helping to keep the hit combo talent going. we have literally 100% dead talents which have never EVER been taken by any windwalker ever. whirling dragon punch is a 100% lock in talent that should of been baseline years ago. nerfing it into oblivion wont actually make that talent row any better, it will still be the go to talent because of what it does to our rotation. speaking of WDP, it is still bugged 1 year on now, when it isnt even usable when its supposed to be, and its STILL better than both other talents on that talent row. serenity would need a 70% increase to its effectiveness on ST for it to break even with WDP, and it would need a hell of a lot more than that on aoe for it to just break even. again, our talent tree is a shambles. hit combo should just be a part of the base mastery, it shouldnt even be a talent. our talent tree is a big issue.

mark of the crane is a hold over from legion and shouldnt even be in the spec anymore. it should of been pruned 2 years ago.

xuen. only scales with vers and agil. he scales very poorly.

our mastery doesnt work with a number of our damage sources.

windwalking buff is just… pointless. its range and effectiveness and the fact it doesnt scale with other movement abilities is a problem.

our interrupt ironically interrupts our heaviest damaging ability.

our auto attacks turn off during a number of our animations and abilities which causes us to not only lose that dps, it also means we proc things like twilight dev a hell of a lot less than other specs. this is actually a larger issue itself that needs to be resolved.

blizz cant decide how they want fists of fury to be handled. every other xpack it has aoe scaling on it, then they take it off again. then they put it back, and then take it off again.

we fold like paper in pvp. our healing is laughably horrifically bad. 1 vivify is lucky to be 6% of your HP. meanwhile my undergeared ret paladin alt can instant cast heal itself for almost half its HP bar. dont even get me started on demon hunters or rogues. for windwalkers being unmatched hand to hand fighters in the warcraft universe, they fold like paper and cannot stand toe to toe with anyone except a shaman or shadow priest. we are just too damn squishy.

the spec is so unpopular because it gets absolutely 0 attention from blizzard. its basically always in the bottom 6 performing specs in the game, and offers near no group utility of its own. the only thing it does bring both brewmaster and mistweavers also bring. additionally monks are the ONLY class that DIDNT get a visual update. blizz cared so little for the class that they just did nothing for us. our abilities just lack visceral punch and snappiness to them.

and then to add further, we just dont exist in the lore. there isnt even an A tier monk or windwalker in the lore. let alone a C tier one. its hard for players to want to emulate a hero in the story if they just dont exist in the first place.

TLDR: blizz gave up on this spec. its getting absolutely nothing in shadowlands, and it receives so little attention from blizzard that issues that have been going on for years are still to be resolved or iterated on. blizz just slap on there routine 10-25% damage buff every other patch that keeps windwalkers in the bottom 6 specs in the game and go back to leaving us to rot. its really sad really, because rotationally we are fun, but the spec is just left in a disastrous state by blizzard who plain just dont care in the slightest. and this post is just some of the cliff notes versions of SOME of our issues. i havnt actually seen a single change to the spec in the beta/alpha in months now. the spec isnt even getting worked on by blizzard. and i can guarantee we wont see anything until 2 weeks before shadowlands. and then ignored again for the subsequent following 5 months until we get that hotfix 10-25% dmg increase.

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Would be nice to see WW and Monks as a whole get some attention.

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I’ve noticed several specs just don’t ever seem to pop up anywhere, be it raids, arenas, or M+; Namely Shadow Priests, Survival Hunters, Arcane Mages, Marksmanship Hunters, Windwalker Monks, Demonology Warlocks, Feral Druids, Frost Death Knights, and Subtlety Rogues. I’ve played Shadow, Arcane, Demo, and Survival, and all four of them desperately need reworks of some sort, though I can’t speak personally on the others.

Luckily Shadow is getting it’s rework, but there seem to be several specs that could use some attention in regards to class design. It just seems like there’s so many specs that need help… but we’ve got probably three months or so at most before Shadowlands launches. Feels like Blizzard is going to pull a BFA on most of those specs and say, “Sorry! We don’t have any time to fix these. We’ll fix them later.”