Anyone who’s been playing Windwalker for more than half a week is probably familiar with the fact that Storm, Earth, and Fire frequently suffers from bugs. This is generally a result of pet AI being troublesome for all classes, and SEF being rather unique in its functionality. The amount of bugs and impact thereof varies per season, and during Dragonflight it was highly mitigated by the alternative option of Serenity.
I don’t speak lightly when I say that this is probably the worst season for SEF functionality since early Legion.
So, what’s going on?
Let’s start with the elephant in the room:
The Conduit bug
Despite having become fairly widespread under that label in the last two days or so, this is actually a bug with SEF and has fairly little do with Celestial Conduit itself.
To put it simply, the SEF spirits determine how much damage they are supposed to deal to their targets by looking at how much damage the player is dealing. In the case of a split-damage ability like Conduit, if there are 3 targets within range, the spell is adjusted to deal 1/3rd of its damage to all targets. This is of course adjusted dynamically if more or fewer targets come within range during the channel. The spell that is cast by the SEF spirits does not calculate this damage split itself, but blindly copies whatever the calculation spits out for the player’s spell. As a result, if you cast SEF, send them to your targets by fixating them, and then cast Conduit with 1 target or fewer within range, the spell will not calculate a split and will send 100% of the damage to the SEF spirits. Their spell still hits all targets, but now for full damage.
Adding numbers to the example: let’s say you usually deal 3 million damage with Conduit. On 15 targets, you’d normally have a 30% damage buff (6% for each target struck, up to 5), and the damage will be split between them. Adding the SEF modifier of 20% (3 spirits, including the player, each dealing 40% damage), each target takes 312k damage.
If you cast Conduit while out of range with SEF in the pack, you do not receive the 30% damage buff since you’re not hitting any targets, but the damage from the spirits will be uncapped and unsplit, albeit still reduced to 40% each. Each target now takes 2.4 million damage, for a total amount of 36 million damage in one cast.
This is how some Windwalkers have been doing burst aoe comparable to or exceeding the (somehow still) blatantly overpowered Frost Death Knight and Retribution Paladin in Mythic+. I myself managed to peak at 18 million DPS and end the pull at 9 million.
In raid, Windwalker parses for Broodtwister Ovi’nax are probably not going to recover from the damage this bug has done to them.
As I mentioned, this is not a Conduit bug, but an SEF bug. Similar behavior has been observed in other spells like Spinning Crane Kick and Fists of Fury, but the effect is greatly diminished because these spells aren’t full split in the first place. Instead, it simply makes the replicated spell not affected by the normal square root scaling of target counts beyond 5, if you yourself are hitting 5 or fewer targets.
Veteran Windwalkers will remember a certain “trick” we were able to do by casting Whirling Dragon Punch in the last few miliseconds of SEF’s duration, causing the still-active spirits to cast a full damage spell for triple the base damage. This likely had the same cause as whatever it is now, demonstrating the patchwork nature of SEF’s code and the fact that this bug has been in the game for at least several years. In order to properly address this issue, SEF needs to be able to determine their own target count and calculate damage scaling accordingly.
Before we move on, I’d like to quickly mention that this bug has highlighted a pretty serious issue: despite its massive impact, it does not make Conduit of the Celestials clearly superior in Mythic+. Not relative to Shado-Pan, and especially not relative to the top performing classes. It is a clear demonstration that CotC is terribly undertuned for multi-target situations and could and should be adjusted to square root scaling past 5 targets like our other spells with no risk of breaking the balance.
To Buff or not to Buff
The second major issue with SEF is that it is unaffected by a large variety of auras. In particular, global school modifiers and global damage amplifiers from the player simply have no effect on the spirits. That means effects like “Nature damage increased by 5%” won’t increase the damage of your SEF spirits’ Crackling Jade Lightning or Jade Ignition, for example. It also means that effects like Acclamation or Fatal Touch do not increase any damage dealt by your SEF spirits, essentially reducing the value of these effects by 66% during SEF’s duration.
This should be bad enough, but it gets significantly worse. There appears to be a large interval for pets to “inherit” their casters stats whenever they change. Dubbed the “Heartbeat” of the pet, this is causing huge delays to the effect on the spirits if you activate on-use stat buff trinkets such as Treacherous Transmitter or Skardyn’s Grace, or combat potions, while SEF is already active. We’ve seen delays of more than 5 seconds in logs, which means the buff would be applied to the spirits well after your biggest burst of damage has passed. Common practice has been to synchronize the use of these effects with the first damaging spell after casting SEF, in order to fully optimize the increased value. This pet behavior is highly counter-intuitive and is causing large amounts of value to be wasted for players that are, to the best of their knowledge, playing optimally. I don’t know exactly how long this behavior has been in the game, but it has almost certainly been many years.
These particular issues, other than being detrimental to Windwalkers’ performance directly, also make it extremely difficult to accurately model Windwalkers in simulations.
Job’s Done
One particular annoyance that became abundantly obvious during Shadowlands is the inability for SEF spirits to “unfixate”. That is, if you fixate your spirits to a target and that target is killed, the spirits essentially stay stuck to it until manually fixated again. Single target spells will simply not be replicated, and they will continuously attempt to run back to the corpse of their target. Intuitively, one would expect them to simply return to unfixated behavior whenever their fixated target dies. This bug has been present in the game for at least three expansions, and likely has been around since the Windwalker rework in Legion.
and that’s not all
There are still more miscellaneous bugs that aren’t easily categorized:
- SEF spirits will target units that aren’t in combat with the caster, as long as those units are in combat with something. This can lead to unintentional pulling when npcs are in combat with each other for story-related reasons. (A recent example is the battle between Arathi npcs and Order of the Night npcs in the Dawnbreaker dungeon.)
- For whatever reason, Flurry of Xuen deals 250% of the normal damage if it procs during SEF.
- Storm, Earth, and Fire: Fixate is considered a “cast” and will interrupt Spinning Crane Kick and Celestial Conduit. Since this doesn’t happen with Fists of Fury, I’m calling it a bug, albeit arguably a bug with SCK and CC.
- Damage dealt by SEF spirits doesn’t contribute to Shado-Pan’s Flurry Charges.
- SEF spirits’ Tiger Palm is not affected by Tiger’s Ferocity, Windwalker’s 4-set bonus.
- SEF spirits don’t seem to aim their Fists of Fury in any capacity, often missing several targets in any given pull.
So, now what?
This is the part where I make suggestions to fix the issue, where I usually try my best to find solutions that require the least possible developer time to implement. In this case, however, I need to be direct: I have no faith that you will be able to completely eradicate all bugs from Storm, Earth, and Fire’s code. Frankly, I don’t even trust that you’ll be able to fix it to a more-or-less acceptable degree. Even though we haven’t always been aware of everything I’ve described, they are all problems that have been present for many, many years. This means that either there have been grossly insufficient efforts to address them, or the code has spaghettified so much over the years that no one even knows how to address them.
I do acknowledge, like I did in my Thematic rework suggestion thread, that SEF is obviously a nostalgic callback to Warcraft 3’s ultimate spell of the same name, used by Chen Stormstout. Even for players that have not experienced WC3, Storm, Earth, and Fire has been an iconic Windwalker spell since the specialization’s very conception. As such, it is to be expected that you will be very hesitant to completely remove it. I fully sympathize with that, but to repeat myself, you are not going to succeed in making this spell functional to an acceptable degree without a significant amount of developing work. It would be much more efficient and much better for the long term if you completely cut out the tumor and start from scratch.
Keeping the above in mind, there are some things I will be trying to accomplish with the rework suggestions:
- It should be a damage buff approximately equal to 20% or more, with an uptime of 15-20% of a given encounter.
- It should use a flexible, charge-based cooldown system.
- It should fit within Windwalker’s established themes and the expected possibilities of Chi and/or martial arts.
- It should not rely on pets or totems in any way.
- Optionally:
- It should assist with applying Mark of the Crane in multitarget situations.
- It should offer a way to temporarily deal damage at a great distance.
Serenity
2 charges, 90 sec recharge
Your damage is increased by 20% for 15 sec, and your Tiger Palm, Blackout Kick, and Rising Sun kick apply Mark of the Crane to one additional target within 20 yards.
Resonant Fists
4 charges, 45 sec recharge
Brand your target with Chi, echoing all damage you deal at 10% effectiveness to this target for 15 sec. Spinning Crane Kick and Fists of Fury cause all targets affected by Resonant Fists to radiate damage equal to 15% of the spell’s damage to 8 nearby targets.
Flickering Fists
2 charges, 90 sec recharge
Your damage is increased by 20% for 15 sec. Tiger Palm, Blackout Kick, and Rising Sun Kick each strike an additional 2 targets at 20% effectiveness.
(^ This one might require a rework to Shadowboxing Treads)
Temples of the Celestials
3 charges, 1m recharge
Your damage is increased by 10% for 15 sec, and your abilities reflect the teachings of the August Celestials.
Spinning Crane Kick: your next Blackout Kick strikes 4 additional targets.
Fists of Fury: your next Spinning Crane Kick strikes 2 more times.
Rising Sun Kick: your next Strike of the Windlord or Whirling Dragon Punch penetrates Armor.
Flying Serpent Kick: your next Rising Sun Kick deals 150% damage and costs no Chi.
Chi Overload
2 charges, 90 sec cd
Your damage is increased by 20% for 15 sec, and targets affected by your Mark of the Crane suffer (400% of Attack power) Nature damage over 8 sec. (Affects active and newly applied Marks.)
