Windwalker monks in Dragonflight has seen some major changes, some good, and some bad. This post is where I’ll just go into more detail over an overview of my opinion on the spec in regards to those changes.
The Good
Talents
Xuen’s Battlegear as a talent provides the spec the much more needed stat based interaction it so desperately needed.
Fists of Fury and Rising Sun Kick having more interplay with one another, both in the form of Xuen’s Battlegear and the Tier set bonuses.
The general monk talent tree is an ultimately great talent tree as a whole, although the statue often feels terrible to use.
Most of the fan favorite abilities or procs being brought back in the form of talent choices, these include Fury of Xuen, Transfer the Power, Strike of the Windlord, and Last Emperor’s Capacitor. Issues aside with Capacitor, it is nice to see, and maybe in some future it’ll end up seeing the use people wanted it to have.
Shadowboxing Treads, and Blackout Kick cleaving as a whole just feels nice.
Ascension practically being a guaranteed talent, while mandatory talents are often not a great thing something has to be and Ascension is one of the better things to be this.
The Bad
Talents
Faeline Stomp and Bonedust Brew just aren’t fun or interesting abilities to play around, Faeline Stomp especially due to the numerous issues it has, issues which are mentioned in the bug post.
A lot of talents that are contingent on one another that could be taken without their requirement. Something being addressed for druids so it might get addressed for us, we’ll see. Details about this are further down under: Druid Talent Parallels
The talent tree is very heavy with Touch of Death nodes, which for reasons I’ll discuss further down feels like a complete disappointment. Fatal Flying Guillotine and Forbidden Techniques could’ve either just been combined into one node either as a choice node or a combination node.
Which I feel like is just part of a bigger problem in that we just aren’t given any choice nodes in our tree outside of Storm, Earth, and Fire / Serenity. We’re not unique in this regard, but class and spec discrepancies in regards to choice nodes in general is a much more broader issue. Especially when you have the extremes where one class has 4 choice nodes in their combined two trees, and another with 22.
Imagine not being able to use an ability that has 6 talent points allocated to it for 85% of an average boss fight, or because the server sometimes decides it will allow you to after the adds you could’ve used it on have already died. Why is this still a problem when warrior execute has the responsiveness that Touch of Death so desperately needs, at this point just scrap it and copy over execute’s code.
Xuen’s Bond as a talent choice makes very little sense, it provides next to no cooldown reduction to the ability so why it’s even an included portion of the talent is kind of pointless. The additional 10% bonus damage is the only reason this node even exists, and it isn’t a strong enough bonus to carry the fact the cooldown reduction is 0.1s. Either the cooldown reduction bonus needs to be brought up to be aligned with every other cooldown reduction bonus or it should just be removed in place of a stronger damage bonus.
Inner Peace feels like such an awful talent to grab, it’s just a weaker version of a talent that already exists in the same tree just two rows up.
Dust in the Wind as a capstone talent is one of the worst things I’ve ever seen. This feels like somebody ran out of ideas and just slapped something there for the sake of just filling a space.
Touch of Death
Touch of Death being such a big part of the spec as a whole in general is something that will be harmful in the long-term, it doesn’t scale nearly as well as general class-based abilities.
Something that is a problem given this spec as a whole, but what makes matters worse in this regard is the fact that versatility, a stat that is supposed to generally apply to all sources of damage does not in fact work with Touch of Death.
It is plagued by being one of the worst spells in the game to play around due to the horrible server delay on when the spell can be actually be cast on a given target.
If there’s any bug that I’ve missed feel free to include it as my intent is to make it an all-encompassing thread for every issue.
Skyreach
Don’t get me wrong, this spell would otherwise be in the good category if it weren’t for one small big issue.
How wildly inconsistent it is when it comes to when it decides it wants to dash you towards the target or not, this one single thing is why so many people have grown to despise this suicidal talent.
You can already be within melee range of a target, capable of Blackout Kicking, Rising Sun Kicking, Fist of Furying, or even Tiger Palming the target without Skyreach… but Skyreach will often consider you still too far from the target and dash you anyway, sometimes taking the most scenic of routes.
The ability really needs to behave in a way that is less obnoxious and often suicidal, it needs to not trigger the dash when you are already fully capable of hitting the target with Tiger Palm without the dash.
I was hopeful that Unholy’s aura fix to apply to the edge of the target’s hitbox as opposed to the center would’ve meant Skyreach would’ve been a much more consistent better spell to play with, and while I’m not sure the issue is related it still would’ve been very nice to see.
Because the talent is only ruined by this horribly sporadic behavior.
Based on this the Windwalker tree is loaded with a bunch of talents that a player could take without the prerequisite ability/talent, albeit unlikely.
These include:
Taking Drinking Horn Cover without Storm, Earth, and Fire, or Serenity.
Taking Spiritual Focus without Storm, Earth, and Fire, or Serenity.
Taking Xuen’s Bond without taking Invoke Xuen, the White Tiger.
Taking Empowered Tiger Lightning without taking Invoke Xuen, the White Tiger.
Taking Invoker’s Delight without taking Invoke Xuen, the White Tiger.
As noted above in the original post, most players will never do this. But it falls in the same category breaking those supposed guidelines you are trying to abide by so I felt it important enough to just bring up.
Honestly just feels like the lack of choice nodes in the tree means there’s too much bloat for individual talents that a fix to this seems impossible without a bit of cleanup, because they can’t be linear, there just isn’t enough space as it is now.
These are significantly better off than feral’s tree though. Also layout wise it’s setup in a way where you’re highly encouraged not to do something that silly, but the tree does open up the possibility of doing so.
Great post. I am tired of being shoved into the last priority for the class devs. We know we are, there is more than enough history to prove this with evidence. Lets see the “philosophy change” you are trying to do and actually see this spec get the attention it deserves. So what if it’s the lowest population spec. Every spec deserves equal attention. Make it happen.
Very good points. I love the change to blackout kick. It feels really good to press now. Bonedust and Faeline need to be completely removed. There’s another post that pointed out how they can instead use those nodes with Whirling Dragon Punch and have the capstones buff WDP even further.
Xuen talent’s are also just bloated. Why they thought having empowered lighting strikes as a standalone talent is very stupid.
I just want less Xuen/Statues and more martial arts. Chi should be a bigger theme with windwalker, the source that makes a monks body surpass normal limits. Maybe replace some of the garbage abilities with chi themed talents that imbue our attacks (devs dont you DARE use this as an excuse to bring back chi explosion that talent was horrible) that could help with the scaling issues the spec has.
I’d be happy to see Xuen as a summon/pet completely removed and instead be something along the lines of the Monk focusing his inner chi to increase haste/damage etc, the Xuen AE could easily come from the monk instead and be described as the monk surging with so much spiritual energy that it bleeds out and damages enemies around him.
The monk is supposed to be its own ultimate weapon. Not a pet, not a freaking statue. What someone needs to take down with a giant weapon or magical dagger, a monk is supposed to tell them “hold my beer” and do it with their bare hands. That is, in my opinion, the fantasy of a monk.
I agree. BdB and Faeline stomp are disliked by most but picked because of the huge increase they offer to the particular situation whether that be M+ or Raids.
WindWalkers dmg should come from our already existing Cds/abilities like Sef/serenity and the terribly undertuned Whirling dragon punch, not a set of visually unthematic/boring click and forget buttons like BdB and Faeline stomp.
Even in pvp BDB doesnt offer much. It does offer 1 shot potential however, Alot of our damage is from Strike of the windlord>Thunderfist. WWs are even preferring Faeline stomp over it with that having somewhat more consistentcy.
In any case WW should flow, Faeline stomp and BDB are very awkward feeling compared to how say monk played in legion. Buffing faeline as you’ve suggested would introduce more randomness and thus a less flowing experience in my opinion
We could use updated particle effects also. Think about it, your maintaining hit combo so you start to glow in flames just like a fire mages hands do. Getting larger particle effects the more hit combo is maintained.
Then we can change bonedust into a poison hand strike, same kinda debuff, but actual martial arts strikes not magical kegs from no where.
Then replace faeline with something else as a filler rotational move. We can do a series of rapid fireballs dragon ball style or we can do one massive hadoken like the super version of ryu’s hadoken. Keep it aoe, short cool down, but martial arts theme.
The points of flow with things like Faeline are also true. Monk feels like a slow 1-2 brawler than a lightning fast martial artist right now.
I might be the only person that despises this, but I hate the fact that a windwalker has downtime through energy starvation at times. How is someone thats supposed to go through the most gruesome physical and spiritual training to go beyond normal mortal limits get gassed after a couple of tiger palms? The only thing that should stop a monk from tiger palming over and over is the mastery and/or hit combo. Not “omg those tiger palms really drained me!”
I’d disagree with this, I feel this is probably the worst class tree I’ve played with. Monk tree feels like you gain nothing.
Its bloated down with a bunch of healing passives that feel like they do nothing with how vivify/expel is tuned.
Group utility is passive % non interactive
Didn’t pick up any new CC or choice nodes to alter CC, not sure why Song was put in MW tree either
As you’ve said statues are awful, There is very little interplay between specs.
Like they have 5 ToD talents implemented for monk but 1 Jade Lightning for WW, why not make a functionality talent for that in the class tree. Or a disable/spinning fire blossom choice node, Tiger tail sweep/ chi spender CC choice node. The class is old enough that its had variation to nit pick and bring back some interesting engaging things, but its disappointing this was the final product.
ironically the first iteration of touch of death in MoP worked exactly this way, there was zero delay. The amount of people who were able to live through my burst because ToD wouldn’t activate is beyond annoying.
Edit: To me my biggest gripe is that our defensives are absolutely dog and blizzard justifies this with “oh you can self heal.” With a health pool of about 340k I’m casting for 25k (over estimation) it would require me 14 casts to get to full health, which with energy regen I’m looking at potentially 30 seconds on the low end of standing still casting heals.
But you have a lot pure dps classes who rock much stronger defensives and better self healing.
After thinking about it, while I still think the general tree is mostly fine (not perfect) the WW tree is actually just an awful mess.
Way too much of the tree is dedicated to Touch of Death and Xuen when a lot of the nodes could’ve either been merged, or turned into a choice node to open up more talent choices overall in the tree. Something which is a bit more concerning when you realize there is a single choice node in the entire spec tree. Given that there are specs that push closer to the double digit choice nodes it’s just sad to see.
Another thing of concern is how pointless some of the talents are too, I mentioned it before but Dust in the Wind is insultingly bad and almost feels like it only exists because something had to go there and they didn’t want to actually put in the BdB proc effect.
If they removed a lot of the bloat in the tree it opens up more more nodes that could buff Crackling Jade Lightning (which means emperor’s capacitor might actually see use), more ST oriented talents, or even just something new.
At the very least I have things I want to include whenever I have the time to organize those thoughts.
Pets have been my biggest gripe about the spec for the longest time, not because of anything regarding class/spec fantasy. But just because they have an awful habit of making pets a problem, and while it’s not incredibly significant things like Ferocity of Xuen’s 4% damage increase doesn’t apply to pet damage. So it doesn’t apply to Xuen (kind of ironic given the name) or Storm, Earth, and Fire spirits (which means that it’s not really a 26% damage increase over your base damage).
Thankfully aside from some AI issues, and a couple of other albeit major but unrelated to pet problems Storm, Earth, and Fire hasn’t been that bad. At the very least my distaste for it of late has been less it’s fault and more just Blizzards.
Class tree is to sit and forget, very little situational choices and the throughput nodes are to powerful and thats universal across all the specs like Fast Feet… like why is there a random 70% damage amp on the hardest hitting ability for all 3 specs same with resonate fists.
I don’t think Xuen talents are an issue, more of a missed opportunity. If the CDR on Xuens Bond got a big buff and Invokers proc’d off Fury of Xuen they could have a more engaging AOE alternative to the dog**** ability that is Bone Dust Brew.