Preach made a video where he says how great it is to play a windwalker. While i agree on some things, this is a very damaging feedback from the perspective of a casual monk. Playing windwalker prety hardcore through the years I could see how many annoyances there are in the class. Unfortunately blizzard’s response is to leave us as we are. I can list a few:
-Tier 15 talent row is not impactful at all
-Tier 90 talent row is pretty much always hit combo (despite it being +% mastery basically, really boring)
-Tier 100 has been Whirling Dragon Punch for years now
-Touch of Death max health=dmg scaling (still going to be a thing in Shadowlands but less impactful)
-Touch of Karma damage (why?) (make it either a defensive ability or offensive one)
-Storm Earth and Fire spirits doing whatever they like, not repeating spells often, this terrible AI and almost no control over them
-Whirling Dragon Punch going unusable despite FoF and RSK being on CD
-Mark of the Crane mechanic with SCK having a target cap makes literally no sense. Either make it uncapped for marks or targets it hits or scrap completely.
-Xuen damage scaling with haste only (really badly as it only impacts his autoattacks)
-Fist of the White tiger made as a replacement for Strike of the Windlord, but FoTW barely deals any damage and feels bad to press.
These are just the things I can easily get out of my head without any research. I believe the spec is far from being done and I’m not very excited about the changes going into shadowlands.
I’ll try to provide some examples and my ideas to how these might get fixed soon.
Edit:
Here are some ideas as promised.
-Tier 15:
The talent row is quite fun to play with and the talents are vastly different from each other, however i feel like the balance is really bad, they are so unimpactful that you can literally pick any or none and barely feel any difference. I feel like we should have the talents buffed both numbers-wise and their effect. I wish they all had special effects for diffrerent specs like Chi generation on WW for all of them or stagger reduction for brews.
-Tier 90:
Hit Combo removed/redesigned. We need the “combo” part of this talent to really be a thing, obviously I’m not someone who can balance the thing but something like “Increase the damage of your next ability by 10% if your last three abilities triggered Combo Strikes”. I think this would add some skill ceiling making it “okayish” in standard rotation and really shine with skilled windwalkers.
Apart from that, Dance of Chi-Ji isn’t particularly fun and/or strong with target cap, also it’s a very random proc which makes it quite bad to play with. I’d rather see Fury of Xuen in that tier which i believe is the best designed azerite trait of all monk’s.
-Tier 100:
Finally, Whirling Dragon Punch, it’s such a cool and interesting ability i believe any monk feels bad not to pick (if serenity was somewhat competitive). My idea is to actually gives windwalker the spell baseline. This would make other choices more viable and balance this tier a little bit better given a new talent is fine. Also this enables us to potentially play serenity which is a great spell just incredibly underpowered, however i feel like many windwalkers would like that in order to drop SEF.
-Touch of Death:
As I love the Gale burst mechanic, i’m torn here. Either Gale Burst should be the majority (entirety) of the ToD damage or the spell should get change like it is going to happen in SL. I’m fine with ToD going to a more “world content” ability. What I dont particularly like is the idea of this spell becoming a single use execute on targets below 15% health. This spell is still going to scale with Max HP which is a huge bummer. I’d rather have it unusable on targets below 15% than this, or giving us a gale burst like execute. (I’m fine with the ability being out from the standard rotation though).
-Touch of Karma:
My Favorite. Please, Redesign this ability, either make us use it as a spell that can be used on other players or remove the shield aspect simply stating “redirect X amount of damage taken in the last few seconds to the target” so that we do not have to waste our defensive to deal damage. This is especially important with Fortifying Brew coming back as we’ll see windwalkers popping two defensive abilities just to deal more damage which is completely absurd. Also that’s another ability scaling with our Max HP which shouldn’t really be a factor.
-Storm Earth and Fire:
I’d like to propose my idea to change Storm Earthand Fire and Xuen at the same time. What windwalker lacks is a huge offensive ability that will makes us feel good about our damage for a while (outside of ToD which is actually going away). I think our main CD should be Invoke Xuen, but not in a way we have now. This idea comes from the Vale of Eternal Blossom external buttons. What if the monk would Invoke the Xuen in himself, turning into the lightning tiger, grating him new abilities, increased attack speed and aoe lightning. I think both SEF and Xuen are extremely bad to use as one is a mess with clones being bugged for literal patches long not benefitting from azerite traits or essences etc, the other one is a tiger that mauls with his auto attacks… well, at least up until the first patch simply because he scales so badly it’s not worth running him.
Thats just my idea, otherwise I’d say we could have another mechanic that simply makes Xuen more interactive like speding Chi improves our next Xuen or so.
-Whirling Dragon Punch:
If we get WDP baseline, please take care of this bug. It’s incredibly annoying and to me it shouldn’t be hard to fix. It’s just mechanically bad that if your haste is suddenly reduced or increased, the cooldown on spells changes dynamically. However the buff “WDP is active to use” doesn’t change the duration. I think that’s obvious what is the cause of this buff and the entire trigger for WDP should be changed to internally check for RSK and FOF to be on CD instead of giving us the external buff.
-Mark of the Crane:
Not much to talk about here, this mechanic is obsolete in a world where target cap is at 8 targets, however that might change if we lift the Mark of the Crane cap itself. I think legion had it really cool, we could get to 15-20 stacks even in huge pulls and while I understand it was dangerous back then, with current 10% buff per stack and 8 target cap on SCK i think that would be a great change.
-Xuen:
Already talked about that, we need better scaling and some more interaction, would like Fury of Xuen back to be honest, preferably baseline instead of boring Xuen.
-First of the White Tiger:
Really bad damage, i think it’s a fine spell however I’d rather see it in another tier of talents, making our level 45 row entirely about energy and not Chi. On another note I’d like to add that Energizing Elixir feels super-bad on the GCD and I have never picked it once since 8.0 i think.
Please let me know what you think.
Hopefully I’ll get the alpha access to test and provide even more feedback. I’m still a guy who cares, but it doesn’t seem like they care about windwalkers which is really sad. The spec has a super cool base but we really should improve on it vastly. Hopefully together we can do it. Thanks.