Feedback: Monk Updates

[Kaivax]

In this thread, we’ll be testing and talking about Monks in The War Within. Look here for posts from the development team as adjustments and bugfixes are made throughout the testing period.

Please note that off-topic or inappropriate posts will be strictly removed.

Thank You

Before we continue testing The War Within, we’d like to take a moment to thank everyone who read and responded to the Hero Talent previews we posted over the last few months.

Looking to the Alpha

In this first Alpha build, every single class has at least one new Hero Talent tree available for testing, with the rest coming in the following weeks. We’re asking testers to initially keep several things in mind:

• There are UI elements on the talent panel that are placeholder, including things like talent icons, text, or final UI art.
• Some talents may not be functioning yet, or may be marked as not yet implemented (NYI)
• New spell visuals and audio for several new Hero Talent trees are still a work in progress. Many trees are using placeholder assets for now that will be updated over the course of Alpha.
• There are some talents that are not fully tuned yet. This is expected, and we will implement tuning adjustments throughout testing.

The combat design team has two big areas of focus right now that we are prioritizing over other concerns such as tuning or generic class updates/maintenance:

• Finish building the remainder of the Hero Talent trees that are not yet available.
• Fix bugs that are blocking testing of new talents.

With the Alpha build being playable and all of the discussion that will occur around the flood of data, we wanted to reiterate that the responses to our blog previews were highly valuable. The feedback we received allowed us to make some early improvements or revisions while we didn’t yet have a public test environment. It allowed us to take some big early swings on certain trees, and then react to early feedback quickly.

Going forward, we aren’t planning to publish any additional Hero Talent previews in blog form, since we’ll add the remaining classes to the Alpha as soon as they reach their ready-to-test state.

Working from Feedback

Several Hero Talent trees have received changes after reading feedback to the blog posts. Some of these were tuning changes to ensure that the Hero Talent tree felt competitive, while others were significant design changes. The feedback thus far has been of great benefit to us.

Going into Alpha, we feel good about the shape of the Hero Talent tree designs. Keeping a consistent number of utility and defensives nodes across all trees, having parity between number of choice nodes, and the overall structure of the trees are things we’re confident in.

We’re also working on tweaking some core class designs as well. In some cases, it was necessary to make adjustments to the class or specialization talent trees before significant work was done on a Hero Talent tree. In other cases, we did work seeking to improve base class talent tree designs.

Alpha Feedback

Now that we’re in Alpha, we’re looking for feedback on how it feels to playtest these trees. We’re specifically curious about:

• Hero Talents that you feel are “required” for your spec in a type of content, such as raiding or Mythic+, or that push you towards picking a specific tree.
• Hero Talents that create frustrating or unsatisfying gameplay or rotations for your spec.
• Hero Talents whose functionality is confusing, unclear, or difficult to track during gameplay.

Throughput comparisons of Hero Talent trees are helpful, but we’re more interested in gameplay, feel, and choice feedback at this stage. Also, when possible, we appreciate it when you focus posts or articles on a single spec and Hero Talent tree, rather than combining feedback about multiple issues.

Again, Thank You

We greatly appreciate all your feedback on Hero Talent trees and are very excited for you to see everything else we’re working on. Thank you!

– The World of Warcraft Combat Design Team

[Kaivax]

Monk Class Tree

Our main goals for the Monk Class tree are to introduce more optionality, refresh the cappers, and add a few new pieces of utility (such as an Enrage dispel), while still cutting down on overall keybind requirements. To accomplish this, we’ve added choice nodes to most active options that offer a passive option or changed pathing to allow more skipping of these spells.

We’ve also cut down on the total amount of throughput being offered within the core tree. Using Mistweaver as an example, they often found themselves feeling required to pick up both the healing and damage nodes offered throughout the tree and were therefore left with only a few points to customize their utility loadout. The reduced number of throughput nodes and the decreased amount of 2-point nodes throughout the tree is intended to help remedy this situation.

[Kaivax]

Windwalker Monk

Our updates for Windwalker in The War Within are intended to address a few issues the specialization struggled with throughout Dragonflight. These points of focus for us were the power levels of the Haste and Mastery stats falling behind other options, Jadefire Stomp’s usability, and the Touch of Death gameplay focus. Other areas that we are also looking at are resource bloat, evening out their rate of auto-attacks, and adding more pronounced thematics through both gameplay and visuals.

Fists of Fury’s damage and Glory of the Dawn now scale with your Haste value to help the stat be more impactful for Windwalker Monks. These will help us have the tuning knobs to increase its value more dynamically. We’ve also increased the cost of Tiger Palm to 60 Energy to help decrease resource overload while encouraging Haste to help with energy regeneration. For Mastery, we feel we can get to a point where it becomes a more competitive stat through tuning.

Jadefire Stomp’s reset mechanic is being removed in favor of a static cooldown. We feel this will be a lot more forgiving and lower the barrier of entry to playing Windwalker. Additionally, we’re adding talent support to increase the individual value of the Jadefire Stomp global in single target situations.

Most of Touch of Death’s gameplay is being replaced with a more execute-focused version through the Core Tree capper instead of the AoE and repeat cast components. This opens up more of the AoE tuning budget to be within Windwalker Monk’s base spells.

Serenity is being removed from the talent tree in The War Within to be able to focus Windwalker Monk’s cooldown window around a more consistent window and create opportunities for some gameplay options we’re excited about while reducing resource overload.

[Kaivax]

Mistweaver Monk

Mistweaver is seeing a few updates including their class 2-set Chi Harmony bonus and the removal of Essence Font. We’re also adding a talent to help Mistweavers who are focused on melee to gain more value out of their Mastery stat. Essence Font’s removal will have a few outcomes, the most important of which to address will be melee Mistweavers in raid healing scenarios.

We’re hoping the removal of Clouded Focus and consequent tuning of Vivify and Enveloping Mist will help Soothing Mist fill the gaps for them, but there are some realities around planting and casting that may feel worse than Essence Font did. Our goal here is to make the risk/reward feel worth it here through tuning, but we’re going to continue looking at this as we iterate in The War Within.

[Kaivax]

This week’s Alpha build brings more updates to Windwalker and we’d like to go over the underlying philosophy and reasoning for these changes. The main changes we’ll be discussing are to Tiger Palm and its damage distribution, making Combo Strikes more consistent and intuitive, and some incoming shifts to their spec tree talent layout.

Tiger Palm
Tiger Palm is the most commonly used button for Windwalker, but historically it has represented very little overall damage itself. We want Tiger Palm to remain mostly about generating Chi, but also represent a more meaningful percentage of Windwalker’s damage breakdown. Our goal is not to change rotational priorities, but to make every button press feel directly meaningful to your overall damage.

This also helps us tackle some interesting damage profiles by increasing their priority target damage, even in AoE scenarios. We’re excited about talents like Martial Mixture for this reason, which could offer some additional support to this profile.

Combo Strikes
We’ve removed Chi Wave and Expel Harm from the list of spells that trigger Combo Strikes for Windwalker Monks in The War Within. Since these are now automatically triggered, we didn’t think it was intuitive for these to trigger Mastery. Our intent for Combo Strikes is that the main focus should be directly on the action bar and relying on direct spell casts rather than auras to determine your next spell to cast.

Alongside this, we’re making a couple adjustments to Combat Wisdom and Storm, Earth, and Fire to support these changes.

Combat Wisdom will now rebalance Chi to 2 while out of combat instead of the default depletion. We think this will help both Windwalker’s opener feel more intuitive (only one required Tiger Palm before entering cooldowns with max Chi when playing with Ordered Elements) and also improve the experience of traveling between packs in Mythic Plus or the open world.

Storm, Earth, and Fire is being added to the list of spells that triggers Combo Strikes. Our goal here is to make the transition to bursting feel as smooth as possible – both when maximizing Rising Sun Kicks with Ordered Elements and in the cases a Windwalker may choose to Storm, Earth, and Fire immediately before using other globals to set up Combo Strikes.

Windwalker Tree Talent Layout Adjustments
In next week’s Alpha build, we’re repositioning some nodes in the Windwalker tree to free up some builds we’re excited about. The main change is moving Teachings of the Monastery to Flying Serpent Kick’s location and moving Flying Serpent Kick baseline. Teachings of the Monastery is a talent we’re now considering core to the spec’s design in all scenarios, and moving it to a more centralized location frees up a talent point to increase optionality elsewhere.

Thank you very much for your testing and feedback!

[Feelzen-draenor]

Here is my feedback on the class tree from a mainly pve windwalker player perspective.

Loss of chi generating/mastery upkeeping element of chi wave and chi burst makes these two quite underwhelming for WW, the dmg/healing they provide is weak. Chi wave being uncontrollable is also a big loss for brew’s range pulling ability, crackling jade lightning is there but super awkward to use. Nothing feels worse than going into a pull and having to pause momentum and getting my camera snapped left and right to tag enemies. These two needs work especially how we have hero talent nodes that build on them so there must be a better base benefit/gameplay element.

Both WW and MW traded an active defensive dampen harm in exchange for easy to get passive and some extra healing. I support reducing the defensive bloat a lot of classes have in the game if that’s the direction you are going. Windwalkers felt left behind when MW got buffs to Calming presence and bounce back, but now that dampen is gone you should consider buffing these for WW too. Personally, I’m not a big fan of nodes like bounce back, most of the time it just procs when I’m not in danger and goes on CD wasting the defensive potential completely.

Lighter than Air is a cool addition, the time delay for jump activation feels a bit too long. A lot of times I want to dash but because I pressed space too quickly nothing happens, might be a EU latency thing. This needs to be more aggressive and snappier if I want to use it for dodging things. Tooltip does not say but it works with chi torpedo too.

All the extra added functionality for Transcendence is great, always feels very rewarding when pulling off some cool gameplay with it what other classes might not be able to do.

Fatal Touch is a weird one, from a pve perspective I see the benefit in raids, in M+ this buff will just go to waste unless you actively snipe low HP targets which is something I don’t want to see being rewarded. Whatever your power target for this talent node is I would like to see that given to the players in a different, more unique way that does not cause frustration. If you want to keep it simple just let it give us permanent stacks or a dmg proc we can carry into the next pull and spend it with attacks. I don’t think any of the monk specs have a problem with base Touch of death, AoE tod is behind us now a little something extra on the bottom of the class tree is fine as long as it is done well.

Rushing reflexes is probably in a very early stage because most of the times is does not work at all. I was trying to test its behaviour, see the limits of the frontal cone and distance but now it just seems to not work at all, maybe I need to relog idk. Other than the bugs, inconsistencies, random target selection, time delay, I don’t see myself picking up this talent at any point. In situations I can think of where this can be useful the last thing I want is my character uncontrollably dashing somewhere. People say wow combat feels amazing because how precise and connected your inputs feel and I strongly agree with that. This talent goes directly against that, if there are multiple enemies nearby you will just dash somewhere, sometimes to the edge of the hitboxes, other times right in the middle of it. Same issue a lot of people had with skyreach you never knew where your character will end up after a tiger palm. I don’t know about this one how to make it better, what the technical limitations are when it comes to charging, dashing, mob hitboxes. Warrior charge is ok, felblade is fine, surv hunter coodinated assault terrible. Maybe all these are implemented differently ingame but in it’s current state rushing reflexes does more harm than good.

Clash is clash if you played brew you know this ability has its uses when it works but it has been in the same kind of broken state forever. Last time I used it was during SL mostly for the extra stop or rooting spiteful shades, I like it its cool, i just wish it worked every time.

Class tree is a huge improvement, leans into what monks are good at and make it better. No real power choices which I like, pure utility and mobility. Feels great to be able to spend points on things I personally like when I’m playing my monk instead of being forced into a path for performance reasons.

Old healing, avoidance auras are gone and it’s a pretty big loss of raid/party utility, mystic touch is there but weak compared to other raid buffs.

Lot of niche talents, 6 nodes related to snares, yet to see how most of these ever will be picked outside pvp maybe.

[Feelzen-draenor]

After trying out both windwalker hero specs want to give some feedback on the new spell visuals, animations, sounds. These might not be super important for some but I play with sound on and rely both on the animations and sound ques to know what happening to my character. I know look and feel is very subjective and it is equally as important as it is hard to please every monk player. Here are my thoughts.

Dual Threat: This one I really like, does exactly how the talent read, subtle animation and a small sound that hit the fighter theme.

Flurry of Xuen: Way too much, overpowering, in your face effect what happens quite frequently. Seems to completely break other animations, especially when it procs during channels like Fist of fury (can’t tell if fof ended or not) or Celestial conduit (my monk’s lower body is invoking the celestials while my upper body is having a seizure) Just feels cheap. I know the animation needs to indicate the duration and the fact that it’s a frontal cone, hope you can come up with something less jarring and distracting.

Rushing Jade Wind: The effect is nothing new, but with the rework it is something we are potentially going to see a lot of. Having one monk with rjw up on my screen is fine but add your storm earth and fire clones and things really become impossible to see.

Flurry strikes: Goes under my radar every time, barely noticeable, also tends breaks other animations, but because it is short duration it’s not too bad. Currently does not have a sound which is very much needed. Obviously, most people will track the buff with an addon but still, I am proccing the main thing in my hero talent and I don’t feel or notice anything. I was expecting something that would make me feel powerful, these little series of strikes don’t really do that for me.

In general, there is not much to the Shado-pan when it comes to look and feel, sure they can’t be as flashy as summoning celestials. I wish there were some small things added or changed on base abilities when playing it. I am not a lore genius, don’t really know what the Shao-pan is all about but I’m sure there are cool spell changes you can do that would better fit the theme and represent them.

Celestial conduit: Looks great, me and everyone around me knows I just used my cooldown. Wish it had a more audible sound effect that kind of intensified as you kept channelling the ability. Having the celestials sort of roar in the end as they all summon is nice, good indicator for the end of the cast.

Out of the celestials that assist you during combat baby Xuen and Niuzao are awesome, cool sound effects, one quick attack and they are gone. Chi-Ji currently just bounces everywhere which is quite distracting, especially when it ninja pulls half the dungeon.

Yu’lon feels like a placeholder, too big, right in the middle covering most of the important part of the screen (my character included) also stays for way too long. Quess she is there to indicate buff duration. I would much prefer her just appear behind your back and swoop forward and gone if you really want to go with her appearing in game. Another way I can think of doing this is something like the MoP legendary cloak visual, let our cloaks glow up, grow some cool wings.

Other than that there is not much to fault about this hero talent, to moment I spec into it and start doing a basic rotation I know exactly what I’m playing.

[Feelzen-draenor]

TWW Windwalker spec tree feedback

Combat Wisdom

Losing expel harm, chi burst and chi wave as generators/mastery maintainers is a weird one and will take time to get used to. One one hand I understand the change, it wasn’t very intuitive, extra keybinds definitely turned a lot of people off from the spec. On the other hand for me they felt very natural to use. Helped to eliminate downtime, maintain mastery, sometimes you just needed one quick chi on half a gcd to get that spender. If you asked me before the rework what buttons or gameplay elements need removing to make the spec more approachable and better to play, expel harm was gonna be one of the last things to come to mind. With all the chi economy changes, new talents, better haste scaling it’s not easy to tell right now how a S1 geared windwalker will feel to play in raids and dungeons but the builds I tried in dungeons, on dummies it felt good. There were definitely times when I was energy and chi starved, but I wouldn’t blame that on the new tree I was definitely not playing these “builds” I came up with optimally. I’m sure as more people get their hands on the alpha/beta there will be enough feedback to get the chi economy into an excellent place, because the rest of the tree has so much room for all kinds of builds to emerge.

Skytouch

Skytouch change is a welcome one, I very much hated the old version, it was painful at times to play with. On paper the more frequent less powerful version just sounds way less punishing when not played optimally.

Glory of the dawn

Absolutely love this talent, always did even then it used to only tickle the bosses. Something about pressing rsk and seeing my character doing a double backflip never gets old. Now finally the numbers actually match the epicness of the visuals. This with ordered elements, during bloodlust and invoker’s is going to be pure bliss thanks to the added haste scaling.

Meridian Strike

This one can be useful on boss fights where the cdr makes tod line up with adds so we can carry the 5% dmg amp into the boss. In m+ we are likely gonna lose most of the buff’s duration due to travel between packs. I mentioned in a previous feedback post how I don’t like that 5% for 30 seconds buff, hope we see some changes to it.

Rushing Jade Wind

Finally passive, thank you. I remember how good it felt when SotWL was giving motc stacks in DF alpha/beta. I’m glad that it is back and hopefully here to stay this time. Greatly reduces the setup required before big pulls, we can get to the fun part faster.

Jadefire stomp

Removing the positional requirements and the resetting mechanic was absolutely the first changes this ability needed. Dislike how it is still 3 talent points, the base ability on its own holds no value. With the 500% single target dmg buff talent at least it doesn’t feel like an empty global just to apply the debuff. I probably need to play around with pure single target oriented builds to see how this fits into openers and just general rotation. At the 15s cd this lines up well with skyreach windows at least, but I might just prefer a longer cd longer duration.

Xuen’s Bond

There seems to be a bug at the moment where abilities copied by sef clones also contribute towards the cdr. By abusing that it will get xuen down to 90 seconds in ideal situations. But as soon as it gets fixed and let’s say you lose uptime we have to hold sef and celestial conduit to sync it with Xuen. I really dislike having 1.5m and 2m cds, with sef alone its ok because of the charges there is flexibility but with celestial conduit it’s just awkward again like how it was with serenity. In a game where encounters, trinkets are usually designed around 1.5m or 2m CDs, getting xuen down to 1:44 just feels pointless. Please make this a flat 30s cdr without the uptime requirement.

Ordered Elements

Very happy to see the return of this effect, being tied to SEF gives it the flexibility to be used in two shooter bursts. One concern I have is the anti-synergy with drinking horn cover and to a lesser extent with spiritual focus. Don’t have exact numbers but the possible extended duration is heavily affected by basically everything costing 1 less chi for full sef duration.

Left side of the tree

Everything on the left side down from momentum boost can be treated as one big piece, I was very excited when I first saw the reworked tree and playing it I was not disappointed one bit. Really like how there are a lot of increasingly powerful effects that all feed into each other, in the end Whirling Dragon Punch and the choice node between Revolving Whirl and Knowledge of the Broken Temple take it all up to 11. Everything is heavily interconnected, no issues picking up the things that actually make sense for different builds. The only odd one is the position of Rising Star and Crane Vortex. These should probably be swapped, its not that I need to path through any of these to get what I want, but still it’s just an odd placement for those.

I also find Last Emperor’s Capacitor down here on the far left a very random placement for a talent that I consider a single target nuke, this would need an ungodly amount of buffing for me to consider picking up. Could be useful for burning important targets or getting rid of some downtime. I don’t see how the placement makes any sense however.

The different builds I tried all flow very well, the change that was made to Dance of Chi-Ji and Blackout Kick! so that now they can now stack to two is a huge qol improvement.The positive effect of not being forced to use them asap or lose them can not be overstated. There is one major issue with all these exciting builds, the usability of the centrepiece that kind of enables it all, Whirling Dragon Punch. I tried WDP in dragonflight, I knew Xuen’s Battlegear and random Teaching’s of the Monastery resets are going to work against me, but with this new tree and especially with Conduit of the Celestials it is way worse than I thought. I feel like the activation criteria of WDP is just simply outdated and does not work well at all. The amount of times I get random resets, crazy amounts of cdr on both rsk and fof and fail to use wdp is very frustrating. Other times I just simply pause my rotation because I know If I spend these teachings stacks (even though I should) ill lose wdp. Not to mention that because wdp launches you in the air there needs to be a bit of freedom given to us players to be able to adjust position if mechanics happen under us, this can’t be I have a split second time window to use this ability ending up killing myself in the process.

A lot of our aoe now seems to depend on this one button, please don’t let this be the AoE touch of Death of the new expansion.

Heart of the Jade Serpent (Conduit of the Celestials)

I have many problems with this. The proc requires active tracking, the buff too powerful to go to waste at random times, feels really bad when it happens. Should be “after consuming 30 chi your next FoF channels 50% faster and summons Yu’Lon”

Getting her instantly after unity within activates is clunky, end up wasting some of its duration on other globals.

Giving even more cdr on rsk and fof is completely overkill, even at baseline haste with all the other talents that has a chance to reset or reduce them I barely have a chance to use whirling dragon punch. Too many talents work on these 2 spells, the rotation becomes too chaotic, some procs and resets are nice to change things up, but this is way too much.
At 200% effectiveness during cooldowns with invoker’s and Ordered elements there is no rotation anymore, it is just silly and confusing. Things go from 17 sec CD to none in one RSK.

Anti synergy with dance of chi-ji, ordered elements, combo breaker/Blackout Kick!, revolving Whirl because you consume less chi or chi no chi at all.

[Kaivax]

Hello Mistweavers!

We’ve made an update to Revival in this Alpha build that caps the amount of magical debuffs the spell can dispel off of each target.

This is mainly targeted at Battlegrounds, where Revival has been overly oppressive to other specializations that rely on magic debuffs to function. We are not expecting this to impact PvE.

Edited to add: This will not change how Revival functions with debuffs that stack multiple times, such as bursting.

Thank you for your feedback!