This thread is dedicated to leaving feedback on Monks in Midnight. Look in this thread and in the Midnight Alpha Development Notes for adjustments and bugfixes made throughout the testing period.
Please note that off-topic or inappropriate posts will be strictly removed.
Apex Talents
Many Apex Talents are available for playtesting and may be selected using specialization tree points in the final specialization tree node. The current User interface (UI) is temporary for playtesting purposes and will be replaced with a final UI later in development. As with any test cycle, we will be adding more Apex Talents to the test over time and not all will be available with the start of the alpha test.
To help us refine Apex Talents, please consider the following questions as you playtest:
How gameplay-impacting, exciting, and fantasy forward is your Apex Talent to you?
Are your Apex Talents and new Hero Talents meeting the approachability goals laid out in our Combat for Everyone in Midnight article?
Are there cases you would consider not selecting your Apex talent?
Does the Apex talent disproportionally favor a particular talent build or Hero Talent tree?
For feedback regarding the changes on making the combat system more approachable for players of all skill levels, leave your feedback in the Combat Approachability feedback thread.
Thank You
We greatly appreciate all your feedback and are very excited for you to test out all the changes in Midnight!
Brewmasterâs kit contains a number of very niche cooldowns and abilities, as well as a number of talents which have a highly-transformative impact on gameplay. In aggregate these can cause the specialization to be difficult to learn, especially in combination with developing intuition surrounding Stagger. We are aiming to broaden some of these niches while narrowing the impact of transformational talents. In addition, some abilities have been removed in order to better concentrate both power and gameplay focus on a more manageable core. Finally, many tooltips have been adjusted to improve clarity on their function or how they are expected to impact play.
Mistweaver
Mistweaverâs Midnight updates are focused on simplifying moment to moment decision making/tracking and streamlining their cooldown moments. Weâre also removing Jadefire Stompâs positional gameplay as we felt this did not match our combat approachability goals. Way of the Crane and Way of the Serpent is a new choice node worth highlighting as well, which is something new weâre trying to highlight different aspects of Mistweaverâs toolkit in particular, based on a playerâs preferred playstyle. Our hope is that both options have relevant situations in which they are useful and therefore encourage solid build diversity between content and also a playerâs individual preferences.
Windwalker
Windwalker Monkâs Midnight updates primarily focus on removing conditional modifiers and making sure the base damage of spells feels impactful. Critical strikes will be the main way their damage changes values and otherwise each spell will remain largely consistent between in and out of cooldowns. Our goal is that this will reduce the rotational overhead and allow more focus on procs, resource management, and Mastery: Combo Strikes to drive gameplay.
Itâs been hard to test or figure out how the changes feel with how buggy/unstable/NYI the alpha has been, so just one piece of feedback from a mistweaver - Jade Infusion should summon the statue slightly beside or ahead of the player. Summoning it directly on top of you looks very clunky.
Ok, after doing some more testing and general playing around I have some actual feedback, coming from a PvE focused mistweaver perspective.
I think from a mythic+ standpoint, things are looking pretty good. Just a few pain points:
Sheiluns Gift rework requires 3 talent points invested in the bottom of the tree, making it pretty much impossible to get the fun, damage oriented m+ talents of Emperorâs elixir, Dance of Chiji etc. This will mean that unless SG is 100% required to meet healing checks, it wonât be taken. Move SG back up to the middle section of the tree where it currently is on live, and make Legacy of Wisdom baseline.
Amplified Rush - very underwhelming talent, yet it paths to the 100% required Jadefire Teachings. Even with very low haste, we are maintaining renewing mist on the whole 5 man party purely from rapid diffusion, so casting renewing mist is pointless. Remove this and move Dance of ChiJi here.
These have been requested for years now but just for sake of completeness, a better tank external (life cocoon scales off target health or gives a DR), a combat res, or a lust would be super.
From the raid side of things:
Mana economy is extremely bad, definitely need some tuning to reduce spell costs, buff mana tea, or both.
Mastery is a problem. Even with Chiji gusts being 50% effective, the sheer number of gusts produced during our celestial window turns the mastery stat from being near useless to incredible for 25 seconds every 2 minutes. This makes it impossible to balance and the only option is leaving mastery as a stat mistweavers heavily go out of their way to avoid. To fix this, heavily nerf the amount of gusts chiji can make, probably by around another 50%, and then we can start increasing its spellpower coefficient to make it not useless for yulon builds and at the same time not too strong for chiji builds.
Yulon reduces the cast speed of Enveloping Mist by 60%. When combined with instant cast Env Mists while channeling soothing mist, we are casting nearly 2 of these per second with very low haste from gear. This is similar to the machine gun regrowths resto druids are currently enjoying on live, and while I personally love it, I get the feeling this kind of gameplay is too fast paced for what you are intending. If that is true, maybe change this effect to a mastery interaction, like âDuring Yulon, enveloping mist and vivify cause a gust of mists to heal X targets within Y yardsâ. This would also help balance the mastery stat between chiji and yulon builds. Alternatively, just a simple âduring yulon, casting enveloping mist duplicates the effect to 1 additional targetâ would achive a similar payout with a more normal APM requirement.
Flight of the red crane would be nice to have back. It wasnât particularly noticable from a practical standpoint - we lose a small amount of healing, some mana tea stacks and getting haste from inner compass. But from a flavour perspective its very strange to have a Celestial focused hero talent tree that just ignores the red crane, one of the iconic mistweaver Celestials. Bring the talent back and have it proc from soothing mist and spinning crane kick.
Morning Breeze is an interesting way to make mastery a good but not OP stat. Not sure how this one will work out but its a very cool idea, please tune the conversion rate to be actually noticable.
An idea for fixing the imbalance between the mystic touch and chaos brand:
Mystic Touch now increases physical, nature and shadow damage by 3%
Chaos brand now increases fire, frost, arcane and holy damage by 3%
This should put both buffs in a place where they are definitely a must have in raid, and very nice to have in m+.
Overall, Iâm very happy with the direction Windwalker is heading. The class feels more thematically focused and is opening up new possibilities for both playstyle and identity. That said, there are still a few areas that could use refinement before launch.
Thematic and Design Direction
I really like how Shado-Pan and Conduit of the Celestials have been separated thematically. It creates a clear distinction between the martial arts and mystical aspects of the class.
This opens the door for more diverse gameplay options. I just hope both paths are balanced in power at launch, so players can pick based on style rather than strength.
Talent and Gameplay Concerns
Slicing Winds is starting to feel outdated. It doesnât add much flavour to the kit anymore. It could either be moved to a lower side node or removed entirely, possibly reworked into something more fitting for Outlaw Rogues. Iâd prefer if that design space went toward empowering Flying Serpent Kick or something for Zenith instead.
The Strike of the Windlord and Whirling Dragon Punch node feels awkward. WDP should be baseline. That would restore the smooth flow the spec used to have, while keeping SoTW as a strong, optional talent.
Tigerâs Eye Brew feels underwhelming for an apex talent. It lacks both visual impact and excitement. Some sort of animation or aura would make it feel more meaningful when stacks are at max, rather than buff watching. Perhaps changing the icon of Fists of Fury into an empowered version when max stacks?
The Flurry charges gained through Auto-Attack are a great change, I can see that you are aiming to make AAâs for melee more important.
The animation layering during Fists of Fury looks terrible - a mess. It would look much better if the Flurry charge punches didnât replace the Fists of Fury punch animations. Instead, only the jade visual effects should override the usual blue effects, keeping the original animation intact.
General Thoughts
The spec is moving in the right direction, and it feels great to see Windwalker embracing its identity again.
As a combo-focused class, though, it still feels like it could use one more active button to round out the rotation and keep the flow engaging.
These two points are exactly what i was thinking. SW has been odd from the start imo and iĂŚd rather see it go. The choice node of WDP and SotW is an odd one. They flow very well together.
Iâd like to give some feedback on the Harmonic Surge Spell alert visual for Mistweaver Monk. Right now, the proc appears with everyRising Sun Kick and gives two procs when using Thunder Focus Tea. This means the visual is showing up almost constantly during normal gameplay.
Because it appears so frequently, it ends up blocking nameplates and covering important combat information. Instead of being helpful feedback, it just adds unnecessary visual clutter and makes it harder to see whatâs happening â especially in group content.
I strongly suggest removing the visual effect entirely, or at least providing an option to turn it off. The ability already provides clear feedback through other means, and removing the on-character proc would make the experience much cleaner and easier to play.
I like the changes to Windwalker for the most parts, but going away from haste and more into crit makes the energy feel like a problem. One way I think might solve this would be to make whirling dragon punch baseline. It also feels bad to only have one of them at the time.
Whirling dragon punch has always felt like it compliments the combo playstyle, while Strike of the windlord feels like a button with some oomph to it and feels good to press.
choosing between Whirling Dragon Punch and Strike of the Windlord, dont make us choose it sucks
making WW have autoattack based talents (flurry), sure in PvE its fine but in PvP its gonna suck especially against mages, evokers etcâŚjust think about it
Slicing Winds still feels horrible to use. With current tuning it is unfortunately a mandatory pick (with the Hurricane Vault node).
Some thoughts:
Remove the Whirling Dragon Punch / Strike of The Windlord node
Make WDP baseline; Fists of Fury button changes into WDP when FoF and RSK are on CD (compliments button squish)
Replace Slicing Winds with SoTW on the tree
Bake Airborne Rhythm [Generate 2 Chi] and Hurricane Vault [2 Chi cost + 100% dmg] node into SoTW.
This opens up a slot under Zenith to either move Weapon of Wind (Zenith +10% dmg), or to do something with Zenith Stomp, either move it to the Spec tree or some other form of empowerment. Zenithâs talents feel all over the place so this feels like a nice âspare slotâ to have for talent shifting
EDIT 1:
WW/SP: Wisdom of the Wall still feels like an underwhelming end-node for a Hero talent. Iâm glad they dropped the aura-tracking from TWW, and the odd clone concept they were planning in pre-alpha, but this version still comes across as dull.