It is no secret that our mastery is a point of contention for people that play WW. On one hand, it makes the rotation fun, but on the other it’s boring and more or less idiot proof on the spells that matter. Let’s be honest, we have to actually try and double up on FoF and RSK.
With that in mind, I’d like propose an improvement/alteration to our mastery. Scrap non-repeats increasing damage by X%. Unless FoF and RSK get charges, it’s boring and easy. Change our mastery to each non-repeat reduces the CD on all our abilities by a further X% and have the default be 1 second CDR on all abilities. No CDR given if abilities are repeats.
Then to help this build and make it stronger if played right, I would make EE baseline again and correct Blizz’s mistake that they made at the end of MoP. I’d set our base GCD to .75 seconds and then reduce TP back to 40. Apparently we were GCD capped at the end of MoP and rather than reducing our base GCD, Blizz slowed us down.
To incorporate the new talent tree I’d have Chi Brew back on the talent tree that replaces EE. Then I’d make a 2 rank talent that reduces our GCD even more. Rank 1 would drop our GCD to .5 seconds and rank 2 would drop our GCD to .25. That way people can play at the pace they like. I would also baseline WDP and put old SotWL on the talent tree as something that would replace WDP if talented.
The broad strokes/theme of this rework is to make our mastery more involved while also making it rewarding while adding more uniqueness to WW. Long term expected results would be to have permanent uptime on CDs. And before you ask “isn’t that OP?” the answer is yes. However, if you can play 240+ APM perfectly, you ought to be rewarded.
GCD is capped at .75 for server sync latency reasons and who in their right mind would want to have to type over 60 APM anyway? Sounds like you’re just trying to get carpel tunnel. Hard pass on this idea from me.
60 APM is painfully slow. I could do .75 GCD easily .5 would be fun and .25 would be a challenge. There are also probably ways to bypass that .75 by recycling code from old raid mechanics.
Thats cool that you can do that but we can already see that blizzard doesn’t want GCDs like that cough cough elemental shaman and storm elemental cough cough
Ah, so blizz made a bad change and bonked something people found fun. And judging by the responses, it was not well received. Which isn’t to say there weren’t complaints.
That said, going .5 and .25 are purely optional for my proposal. They would be talents. If people would be that irate about a .75 base GCD, then the talent could just be three ranks instead of two while keeping a base 1 second GCD. .25/.5 GCD aren’t meant to be the go to talents or the default. They’re meant to be broken whereas I’m gonna guess that Ele’s Storm Ele was made to be balanced.
Its more having such rapid input required to play optimally is causing accessibility concerns for the players. We are going to fix this issue.
Then the players went crazy because they are able-bodied people that didn’t share that same issue.
if your proposed talent ever because the optimal pick then you’re excluding players from playing how they need to which as seen in the ele post isn’t something Blizzard wants.
That’s the thing though. WW would designed to still be optimal and competitive w/o the talents. And designed to be OP if played perfectly with them (like burning M raid bosses). It would be purely be the players’ choice. WW would just have that high a ceiling.
If the .25 or .5 sec GCD was complained about to execute, it’d basically be complaining about it being hard to to play so well that you’re OP, or complaining about putting in significant effort to get the best results.
This is still designing an accessibility access into the game… If it ever became optimal then you run into the same issue but far worse since its perma not during a given window
Go look at last season. And that’s with me being lazy and not constantly swapping between necro and Kyrian, changing talents every other fight, or potting.
That is a valid concern. My rough number of .25 GCD played perfectly would put it at least 50% more damage than the next spec down in the rankings. However, WW always scales funny and lags behind as expacs go on. It would require some degree of maintenance or some other fundamental change to WW which I can cook up.
I’ve always found it funny that Blizz gave us Xuen in SL to help us scale better with other stats. It just seems so inefficient. Rather than give us an extra button/CD that’s also on the GCD and also a pet, Blizz could have dumped Xuen’s damage into our rotation or dump it into another 10% amp for SEF, and just mathematically make us scale better with our secondary stats. It wouldn’t be hard to remove diminishing returns on our secondary stats, or better yet give us increasing returns.
Improvements and changes can always be made, and honestly it’s very fitting in theme for monk, and we also have the most interesting things we can pair with manipulating GCD in Serenity and our rotation. Infinite resources suddenly gets significantly more interesting when GCD doesn’t hold you back.
Plus, .5 and .25 GCD would in no way be mandatory. They’re just there to make the ceiling high, and see who can reach in it.
My desire is to make WW better and to make the spec more unique. Sure beats the hell out of the boring “developments” we’ve had as of late. Honestly, BoK giving RSK and FoF CDR feels like the last good bit of development we’ve gotten. Maybe current RoP too, but I’d still take MoP RoP over the current one in a heartbeat. FoX was nice, but blizz didn’t carry it over into SL for some reason.
Storm Elemental was no way mandatory but still was an accessibility issue that blizzard didn’t like… So they removed it and made it clear that consistent sub .6 seconds GCDs isn’t for wow
They would be fast. If you want to pseudo-“test” this, go fart around on like M Elisande with potato gear. Her adds drop pink bubbles when they die that if you stand in makes you go like 50% or 100% faster in terms of time stuff.
I don’t mind the mastery as it fits the martial artist theme. A flow of abilities in a combo almost. What I don’t like is that our kit in no way interacts with other secondary stats. There’s no “ability x has a chance to y based on crit %” or something to that affect.
It’s always, for the most part, just been Mastery/Verse stacking. Which is why Monks are super strong at the start of an expansion when secondary stats are low on entry level gear. Then as high ilvl gear becomes available other classes “come online” while Monk falls behind, until blizz decides to do simple “FOF/RSK damage increased by 5%”.
So hopefully (probably not) DF will address this and give the WW monk kit some interaction with a stat other than mastery.
I can accept that it’s something they. I also recognize that in the times they’ve done it, it’s been really dumb. And as far as design goes for monk, I have little faith in Blizzard.
I don’t either. However, my bit against it is that BoK and TP don’t really matter all that much when it comes to our damage. RSK and FoF (and SCK procs) are our big hitters, but it’s more or less impossible for them to be repeats.
We almost that with XBG, but blizz neutered it as the leggo. They should have put it in as how it more or less originally was at FoF gives RSK 70% (70% because we lost 5% passive crit at some point in Legion) instead of the current 50.
Yea… I’ve been proposing removing DR on monk secondary stats and even going so far as to give us increasing returns for a while now.