Windwalker's Unknown Degenerate Playstyle Needs to be Fixed

Classes Monk
1

For those unaware, the Windwalker Talent “Courageous Impulse” is currently bugged on live. The talent reads “The Blackout Kick! effect also increases the damage of your next Blackout Kick by 125%.” This buff stacks up to two times.

The bug lies in the stacks themselves. Typically, Courageous Impulse does not buff our Teachings of the Monastery additional BoK hits. That is a good thing. If it did, it would lead to awkward/degenerate gameplay where we don’t press BoK until we have 4 or 8 stacks of ToTM alongside a BoK! proc to press BoK!. This leads to high afk windows in gameplay, since we have no other filler spenders.

However, things get weird when you have two stacks. If you have 2 stacks of Blackout Kick!, the initial hit gets buffed by 250% (125% * 2) and then every additional ToTM hit gets buffed by 125%. So essentially the initial hit benefits from 2 Blackout Kick! stacks from Courageous Impulse then the additional ToTM stacks get buffed by 125% from 1 stack of Courageous Impulse.

If optimized, this gameplay would be super degenerate. You have to manage procs in awkward ways to align high ToTM stacks with 2 BoK! stacks. So once you get one BoK! proc, you pretty much cannot press BoK anymore until you get a 2nd stack, which could be up to 10-15s, so you just sit there waiting for RSK or FoF for multiple seconds at a time.

Did I forget to mention that these damage amps are also applying to Shadowboxing Tread (BoK cleave) hits as well? So if any adds are apparent, now you have to deal with aligning procs with ToTM stacks during adds; good luck with that.

I really hope Blizzard addresses this bug, because I foresee it becoming the optimal way to actually play if its not removed, and after testing with it, it is not a fun playstyle having to just afk and not press BoK to keep the fluidity of the spec going.

4 Likes
2

I have to 100% agree with Jarrod here, even in pvp where its just a 75% → 150% increase it is incredibly unfun to track those buffs and basically either luck out or deal significantly less dmg with BoK…

I’d 100% support a fix here

1 Like
3

How much extra damage was this bug unintentionally generating? It should definitely be fixed, but would it warrant a minor damage buff to compensate? Also I’m surprised we have a big bug that isn’t associated with SEF.

1 Like
4

Cant say for certain since the bug is not implemented in sims for Windwalker at the moment. It was assumed that this bug would be fixed, but since it has not, I believe the plan will be to have the interaction reflected in sims.

Hard to say for certain if this will 100% be the better playstyle. I don’t think its resulting in us doing more damage. You have to intentionally play in a way that results in having two BoK! stacks at a time alongside high ToTM stacks. But in AoE or cleave scenarios I could see it being quite gross.

5

Does DoCJ also have a similar issue since it can also stack to two?

6

Nope DoCJ does not have that interaction. Just looking at tooltips you see the difference. When you have 2 DoCJ stacks, the tooltip still says “200% increased”, the same as when at 1 stack, but for CI and BoK!, at 1 stack is says “125% increased” then at 2 stacks it says “250% increased”.