Recently, some mechanical changes were announced for Windwalker for the 12.0.5 patch. To be clear, this is unrelated to any tuning changes that may hit during the first few weeks of the new season.
Crashing Fists has been redesigned – Fists of Fury damage is increased by 20% (was extends duration by 1 second).
Apex Talent: Tigereye Brew (Rank 1) has been redesigned – Every 3 Chi spent generates Tigereye Brew. Zenith consumes up to 20 Tigereye Brew stacks to increase your critical strike chance for its duration by 2% per stack. Generates quickly up to 10 stacks while out of combat and may generate up a maximum of 30 stacks.
Apex Talent: Tigereye Brew (Rank 3) has been redesigned – Zenith now grants access to 2 additional Zenith Stomps.
Xuen’s Battlegear may now additionally trigger from Spinning Crane Kick, reducing the cooldown of Fists of Fury by 0.5 seconds for each unique target struck, up to 2.5 seconds.
Zenith Stomp now generates 2 Chi.
Zenith no longer generates 2 Chi on cast.
Initial impressions
The first change is likely a response to feedback given by many players that felt like they were channeling Fists of Fury more than they'd like. I don't really feel strongly either way, and this rework is pretty neutral in terms of performance. Not much else to say about it.The next change to Tigereye Brew (1) is a bit more interesting. Tying the stack generation to Chi spending brings it closer to the pre-Legion version of the ability, and it is now integrated better into the Windwalker toolkit. That’s a direction I appreciate, even if there’s not necessarily any change in performance. Necessarily, that is. With the current numbers on PTR, it appears quite easy to reach the maximum of 20 stacks for each Zenith use. That’s not quite the case for the live version, so we may see some tuning to that in the coming weeks.
The change to Tigereye Brew (3) is a bit of a mixed bag to me. While additional Zenith Stomps sounds kinda neat, the live version adds some pretty significant crit scaling to our kit. That’s not something I’m super keen on losing.
I do think the Chi generation is a good idea. Casting Tiger Palm during Zenith is not a fun time, especially in multitarget situations, and this will pretty decisively remove any need to.
The most interesting one to me personally is the Xuen’s Battlegear change. This is something I’ve personally suggested pretty recently, and while I’ll likely never know if my suggestion had a direct impact, it’s still cool to see that my opinions align with the devs. Sometimes, anyway.
Hopefully this change will elevate Spinning Crane Kick over Blackout Kick in multitarget scenarios. It’s pretty unlikely to beat Rising Sun Kick, though.
Overall impressions are quite positive. The changes seem like they’re paying decently close attention to online discussions and critiques.
Remaining issues
Today we found out that Sunfury Spiral has had its functionality changed slightly at some point. This was not announced nor datamined, so we’re not exactly sure when it happened. I won’t go into too much detail here, but in short, it’s a positive change that makes Rising Sun Kick a good amount more valuable when SFS is talented.
The reason I’m bringing it up here is because the effect currently does not work with Rushing Wind Kick. This is almost certainly a bug, as RWK benefits from almost every other effect that applies to RSK. This is likely worth about 1-2% single target dps in builds that use RWK.
Additionally, the Inner Compass talent in the Conduit of the Celestials hero tree still refers to Crane Stance, which was intended to be triggered by Flight of the Red Crane, which has since been removed. Inner Compass should be updated to reflect this.
PTR testing has also revealed some odd mastery interactions with Zenith Stomp. To summarize, Zenith Stomp doesn’t correctly function as a Combo Strike even though it is correctly being tracked by the CDM.
- If you cast Blackout Kick > Zenith Stomp > Blackout Kick, the second BoK will not benefit from Mastery and you will drop Hit Combo.
- Whether or not any of the 3 Zenith Stomps in a Zenith window benefit from mastery is determined by the Zenith cast itself. As long as the Zenith cast was a valid Combo Strike, all three Zenith Stomps will be buffed by mastery. If it wasn’t (which should never happen), none of them will.
The cast condition for Zenith Stomp seems to be a rather lazy implementation of 15 seconds after casting Zenith. This means that if you have Drinking Horn Cover talented, trying to cast Zenith Stomp within the last 5 seconds of the buff will cause you to cast another Zenith instead, which is certainly not what you’d want. The cast condition should be changed to actually check for Zenith to be active.
Lastly, talenting out of Zenith Stomp in the Monk class tree has the peculiar effect of granting you 3 charges of Zenith Stomp upon casting Zenith, rather than 2. This brings up the question if it wouldn’t be worth dropping the talent altogether, and I can’t imagine that was the intent.
For the Xuen’s Battlegear change, my only feedback is to monitor whether it’s actually strong enough to prioritize Spinning Crane Kick over Blackout Kick in multitarget situations, but also that it’s odd that it doesn’t work with critical strikes. Xuen’s Battlegear has a pretty clear theme of critical strike interaction, and this effect drops that theme.
Thanks for reading, hopefully I can post about Windwalker tuning soon.