With the 11.1.5 patch around the corner, it seems like a good time to revisit some lingering issues and put in some miscellaneous requests.
Please note that all of these “changes” are my suggestions and hopes. You haven’t missed any real blue post. You have been warned.
Tuning
- Rising Sun Kick damage increased by 10%
- Even on full single target, rsk is doing a kind of pitiful 4-5% of overall damage. Call me old-fashioned, but I really think RSK should be doing significantly more damage than BoK. Despite seemingly being a lot, this is still only 0.5% or so in overall damage (in single target).
- Whirling Dragon Punch damage increased by 10%
- Both in keys and in raid, WDP’s damage is on the low end of 3-4% overall. Pretty unimpressive, and it doesn’t really feel like the big set-up move it ought to be. Should be a 0.4% or so increase to overall damage.
- Jade Ignition base damage increased to 300% AP (from 180%)
- It’s a pretty steep increase, but it’s almost entirely aoe so it doesn’t affect raid much. Would result in approx 2% overall increase in keys.
- Increased the sqrt scaling threshold of SCK and/or FoF to 8.
- While I’m the last person to suggest that the aoe cap is definitely a problem, it would be a simple way to increase aoe output. SCK sqrt scaling after 8 instead of 5 would be an overall increase of about 3-4% in aoe situations, around the same for FoF. The effect would be mostly noticeable in bigger pulls, which is where most Windwalkers feel the worst about their spec. It would also have no effect whatsoever on single target damage.
Bug Fixes
- Fixed channels randomly cancelling.
- This still happens at a noticeable frequency, and especially for Celestial Conduit builds it’s very annoying. I wouldn’t be surprised if some people give up on playing their Windwalker character for this reason. I know that the problem is known at blizzard, and they’ve shown signs that they were working on it, but even that was already several weeks ago. This problem has persisted since beta, and it’s really quite absurd that it’s taking this long to fix.
- Fixed Unity Within automatically applying Heart of the Jade Serpent after Celestial Conduit’s channel ends.
- Again, shouldn’t be that hard and shouldn’t take this long to fix. Losing a HotJS application is really quite harmful to your overall and burst damage.
- Fixed Flurry Strikes targeting a random enemy instead of the player’s current target.
- Mostly noticeable in keys, but quite annoying that you can’t just make it hit the main target. Losing strikes to a target dying mid-discharge is far too frequent.
- Fixed Storm, Earth, and Fire damage interaction with several talent-based damage buffs, such as Acclamation.
- Another insanely long-lived bug, and one that’s costing us a solid 4-5% damage on single target. Can’t be that hard to fix, I’d imagine.
Miscellaneous requests
- Change Strike of the Windlord to sqrt(5)
- As I’ve outlined on several occasions, SotWL’s aoe scaling is terrible, and as a result, its tooltip is highly deceptive. Addressing this would make perfect sense, boost our big pull dps and burst, and it wouldn’t have a huge impact on overall dps in keys or raid.
- Rework Storm, Earth, and Fire, and Invoke Xuen, the White Tiger
- I’ve mentioned before that both of our major cooldowns are pretty weak and, more importantly perhaps, really boring. SEF’s unique flavor of splitting into three currently offers zero gameplay benefit now that Mark of the Crane has been removed, so it’s just a 20% damage buff for 15 seconds now. Ordered Elements offers a gameplay improvement while SEF is active, but SEF itself does nothing interesting. Xuen doesn’t do a whole lot by himself (around 2% in keys), and Empowered Tiger Lightning is a mere 8% damage amp for 20 seconds. Really disappointing for a (baseline) 2 minute cooldown. Reworking both of these to a more windwalker-appropriate powerup cooldown would be a fantastic change, with the side benefit of immediately fixing every pet-related bug and gameplay issue. Also, since all of both of these spells’ follow-up talents only interact with them on cast, while they’re active, or by changing their duration or cooldown, none of them would require adjustment even with a full spell rework.
- Increase Celestial Conduit’s target scaling.
- 6% per additional target is just terrible. It’s really not fun to cast Conduit when there’s a priority target in the pack, but it’s splitting damage across it and the 5 useless trash mobs. I’d much prefer full damage to the main target and 10-20% on ALL secondary targets.
- Re-evaluate the aoe value of the Shado-Pan tree. At the moment, most of its value in aoe comes from Veteran’s Eye and Wisdom of the Wall (shadow). While the former is… fine, I guess, relying on WotW for aoe damage is really not satisfying. There’s no good way to control uptime on the shadow buff, and flurry strike discharges are already kind of sketchy to control, so you often just miss a big pack with the aoe damage. It’s very frustrating and there’s nothing you can really do about it as the player.
- Loosen up a bit on the caution when designing Windwalker? Between adding a square root cap to Whirling Dragon Punch, nerfing Invoker’s Delight significantly, nerfing overall dps after just a week or two of solid performance, and just generally having very few interesting synergies in aoe, it seems like there’s an intentional hesitation to give Windwalkers decidedly powerful tools.
- Give Monks a more noticeable raid buff. Mystic Touch is really weak, not helped by the fact that only about 3 classes use physical damage as a majority of their breakdown. It’s very much not on the same level as Chaos Brand, but simply buffing the value is probably not a healthy solution. A new raid buff that grants Critical Strike or Haste would be much more interesting, or even primary stats (legacy of the emperor, anyone?). Of course, some new interesting effect would also be highly appreciated.
Diffuse Magic
Ok so this is kind of just a rant, but I want to quickly* highlight the weird caution that has been affecting Diffuse Magic.
*
Reading this back afterwards, “quickly” was a lie.
If you’re new to Monk, Diffuse Magic is a very powerful defensive. It’s on a relatively short 90 sec cooldown, reduces any magic (i.e. non-Physical) damage by 60%, removes any magic-type debuff (the ones with a blue border which any healer spec can dispel), and can reflect some of these effects back to their caster. Do note that this reflect only ever works for abilities that can be dispelled, so any poison/curse/disease debuffs are already out.
It’s that last effect that I want to talk about, since I have no complaints about the rest. For some reason, the list of spells that can be reflected to their caster is extremely short. Only 3 spells can technically be reflected, and only ONE of these is realistically useful (Flashpoint from Royal Wicklighters in Darkflame Cleft). While the list has never been particularly long, it used to also contain Fiery Jaws and Arcing Zap from Mechagon: Workshop and Soul Corruption from Theater of Pain (which was removed entirely). The list is also significantly longer in PvP, where (afaik) it still works on a large amount of class abilities from warlocks, priests, druids, mages, etc.
There was once a time we could reliably assume a handful of things about the Diffuse reflect:
- If it’s a complex effect without a damage component, odds are it won’t get reflected
- If it’s a straightfoward damage-over-time effect, it probably gets reflected
- If it’s a raid ability, it practically never gets reflected
So, the question: why is it so restrictive? Why is there literally one decent reflect in the entire dungeon pool? Why were some valuable reflects removed shortly after the season started? There’s between 8 and 10 effects in the dungeon pool that one would expect would be reflectable (not counting the ones that already are), what gives?
Look, like I said, diffuse is already pretty powerful. But Spell Reflect and Anti-Magic Shield also exist and their utility is frankly in another dimension compared to Diffuse. Spell Reflect works on tons of different spells, and isn’t even restricted to debuffs, nevermind specifically magic-type debuffs. Anti-Magic Shield straight up prevents many debuffs (again, not just magic-types) from even being applied at all, completely breaking certain boss mechanics. So it really feels, well, unfair that Diffuse has its offensively value scrutinized so heavily and effectively neutered.
If we consider Spell Reflect and Anti-Magic Shield to be “fine” in terms of utility balance, every magic-type debuff should be reflectable and inflict its full effect onto the caster. Heal absorb? Damage amp? Snare? It should all be on the table, but especially the straightfoward damage effects. You could even argue that it should have some offensive value on non-magic-type debuffs, such as poisons or even typeless auras. Maybe the caster just takes a certain percentage of the damage as the Monk while Diffuse is active (from their own debuffs, at least).