I love the windwalker. However, the class is disincentivized to handle mythic plus mechanics (interrupting / stunning / explosive) during a fist of fury channel.
The problem is that Fist of Fury makes up the bulk of your damage (40%+), is a 4 second channel with a 24 second cooldown. Such an overwhelming amount of our damage come from THAT crucial window. Casting anything, including spear hand strike, interrupts the channel and can cause you to go upwards of 48 seconds without fist of fury damage if you’re forced to interrupt during the cast.
I think class-fantasy-wise it makes tons of sense that a strike that silences could slip seamlessly into the deluge of punches you’re already throwing.
I love the spec, but the incentive to ignore mechanics makes me think i may need to main swap for the good of my friends i play with. Please consider this change.
If your FoF is going the full duration between uses you are seriously mismanaging your resources.
Casting blackout kick reduces the cd, haste affects it’s speed of recovery.
However I would like to see fof channel be removed and get something like
Flurry of Blows: Your next X attacks also cause you to melee swing X times instantly.
X variables determined with balance.
Absolutely! Explosive was a really bad experience last week. I want to be the one to handle kicks, stops and explosives (like a good teammate) but dang if you don’t feel constantly stuck between contributing dps vs contributing mechanically.
[Edit] also, I realize that most ranged classes have to interrupt a cast to kick; but it’s a fundamentally different situation.
Firstly, apart from shaman, the kicks are much less frequent. This makes them affect your personal casts less. Your kicking contribution to the team is also less crucial to your roll since ranged characters tend not to be your primary interrupters due to your long cooldowns.
Secondly, and I absolutely may not be considering something, but most ranged classes don’t have such a reliance on a single channeled ability. Interrupting an arcane blast, fireball, aimed shot, lightning bolt etc isn’t as big a deal. You can restart the cast. Beginning a FoF puts it on cooldown and you cannot recast for 20+ seconds.
I agree that there is a problem with fof channel and interrupts, and believe the proposed solution is reasonable. I seem to recall fof used to interrupt(stun) for its duration, so in essence chalk it up as yet another function we’ve lost over time.
I barely play Windwalker as a Mistweaver main, and the biggest reason is Fists of Fury. It is clunky, doesn’t feel good to use, looks silly and is so frustrating when any circumstance (like the interrupt scenario mentioned here) causes you to break the channel. I’d love to see it get replaced with something similar to Teachings of the Monastery that Mistweavers have, like every time you successfully execute your mastery it adds another punch up to 8 or whatever makes sense for balance purposes and it is a single GCD AOE cone or much shorter channel similar to eye beams from Demon Hunters. I know OP just wanted to be able to interrupt during FoF and that would indeed help a lot but I think FoF needs to be redesigned for Shadowlands.
On the one hand, FoF as a channeled ability feels really cool to me on my Monk. On the other, Rampage on my Fury Warrior has a similar vibe. It’s not channeled on a Warrior but it is on a Monk.
Do all classes have to be exactly the same? Heck no! But it certainly is awkward that I have to sacrifice a huge chunk of my damage to interrupt.
I agree tubbly. Personally I think fof channeling is pretty cool and interesting from a resource management point, but the utility restrictions are pretty rough.
Only thing i hate about FoF is like if you have the 3 second cast you are apparently swinging your fist a ton and yet only likehit like what a handful of times?
That just feels wonky to me.
Yeah FoF hits 5 times over the cast, rather than a hit for everyone of the little particle effects or a hit that would match the motions of the jabbing animation your character does. I want to say this is because of some balancing reason that a smaller number of hits on an ability is manageable… but then you look at MM hunter and they have rapid fire, which at baseline hits 10 times over 3 seconds and they can talent into Double Up which makes them shoot twice as many shots in the same amount of time, so its definitely doable. Breaking it up into a smaller amount of hits means we get to see bigger numbers per tick, so maybe that could be it?
Sounds good. I’m assuming you would similarly advocate for Demon Hunters to be able to use Disrupt without it impacting our Eye Beam channel.
I had always just assumed that was the trade off of having big damage tied to a channeled ability but if Monks feel thet it’s no big deal to be able to have the full toolkit available while channeling, then sign us up.
Really hoping to keep away from a “this class vs that class” conversation.
I’ve mained demon hunter for most of this xpac. I would prefer to play windwalker, due to class fantasy, thoughtfulness of the rotation, BM/MW offspecs and … transmog options. I fell absolutely in love with WW in legion.
Just to reiterate the purpose of the thread: my experience in mythic+ (my preferred content) is that the inability to contribute both mechanics and throughput at the same time is what may keep me from making the long term swap to the class I’d otherwise prefer.
I can only say anecdotally, but with great conviction, that havoc very much doesn’t suffer from this from this problem. I would in fact argue the opposite - havoc may be the best equipped class I’ve played for handling dungeon mechanics while maintaining output.
But if havoc gets interrupt during eye beams, great! I think taking all interrupts off cd and castable during casting/channeling would be a positive change for the whole game. I think you’d see pug groups more successfully kicking!
I hope someone with the ability to pitch a change is watching our thread!
This discussion really comes down to a debate about QoL changes and the potential lowering of the skill-gap.
To that end, let me bring something up: formerly FoF was immediately interrupted by any movement by the caster. (It also used to stun, which mitigated this problem somewhat for dungeon mobs, but certainly not bosses.) I imagine the rhetoric used to justify these conditions was: “it is dependent on you, the player, to be thinking ahead when it comes to any possible movements.” and so on about being a prudent player.
But obviously blizzard made the change to what we have today. You can cast this spell on the move.
So let me end by asking: Do you think the change to FoF that this thread is proposing is in accord with the rationale behind the previously mentioned change to FoF that blizzard implemented?
It was even worse back in the day. I’m glad they allowed the player to move when using it because it was only usable while stationary when it came out. The upside to that was that it had 100% parry chance and stunned those in a cone in front of you.
Now it does neither.
Personally a talent enhancing it to where it allows interrupts during channelling and maybe 100% parry or stun added in would be amazing. Keep the movement addition.