MONK
- Paralysis now breaks based on a small damage threshold instead of any damage.
- Windwalker
- New Talent: Slicing Winds – Envelop yourself in razor-sharp winds, then lunge forward dealing Nature damage to enemies in your path. Damage reduced beyond 5 enemies. Hold to increase lunge distance. Replaces Flying Serpent Kick.
- Mastery: Combo Strikes effectiveness increased by 35%.
- Developers’ notes: We’re increasing the value Mastery: Combo Strikes for Windwalker Monks with the goal of pushing it as a stat.
- Dance of the Wind has been redesigned – Now reduces physical damage taken by 10% and an additional 10% every 4 seconds until you receive a physical attack.
- All damage done reduced by 2%.
- Spinning Crane Kick damage increased by 80%.
- Courageous Impulse now increases the damage of Blackout Kick by 350% (was 200%).
- Shadowboxing Treads now increases the damage of Blackout Kick by 10% (was 20%).
- The following talents have been removed:
- Darting Hurricane
- Mark of the Crane
- Conduit of the Celestials
- Heart of the Jade Serpent no longer reduces the cooldown of Rising Sun Kick.
- Heart of the Jade Serpent now reduces the cooldown of Flying Serpent Kick.
Tier set bonuses:
(2) Set Bonus: Your spells and abilities have a chance to activate a Winning Streak! increasing the damage of your Rising Sun Kick and Spinning Crane Kick by 3%, stacking up to 10 times. Rising Sun Kick and Spinning Crane Kick have a 15% chance to remove Winning Streak!
(4) Set Bonus: Fists of Fury applies 1 stack of Winning Streak! when cast and when finished channeling completely. The damage of your next Fists of Fury is increased by 5% per stack when Winning Streak! is removed. Your Winning Streak! is always removed once it reaches max stacks.
Let’s start with the elephant in the room: Mark of the Crane is being removed. I’m not a huge fan of this change, I like MotC and it’s a fairly unique Windwalker feature. The 80% buff to Spinning Crane Kick is meant as a compensation which is obviously necessary, and it comes out as slightly net positive (about 13% more SCK damage, assuming 5 motc pre-change). I’m a little worried that this will give Spinning Crane Kick too much value in anything but pure single target situations (and possibly even make Dance of Chi-Ji a lock-in talent for single target builds), rather than exponentially increasing in value up to 5 targets. Perhaps this could be fixed by baking it into the base spell, like “damage increased by 18% per target struck, up to 5 targets”.
It wasn’t announced in the blue post, but the datamine showed a buff to Rushing Jade Wind of about 30%, presumably to compensate for the loss in utility of applying Mark of the Crane to all targets struck by Strike of the Windlord. However, in my opinion, this doesn’t resolve the problem that Rushing Jade Wind and Storm, Earth, and Fire are too bland without MotC. Rushing Jade Wind is now nothing but “do some passive aoe damage after casting SotWL”, and SEF is just “do 20% more damage for 15 seconds (not counting adverse bugs)”. With MotC gone, both of these talents need something to spice them up.
The next big one is the new talent, Slicing Winds. This is a carbon copy of the Plunderstorm ability of the same name, datamined to deal 600% Attack power to all targets, damage reduced beyond 5, replacing Flying Serpent Kick if talented. This talent replaces Darting Hurricane, which is being removed.
Honestly, I’m excited about this one. I’m a big fan of dealing damage with movement abilities (despite the apprehension many people feel about it), and the initial value is quite high. I just hope it will be adjusted to be instantly castable, which I don’t believe was the case with the Plunderstorm ability.
I would very much appreciate if the name and aesthetic were changed, though. I keep repeating this, but Windwalkers aren’t Airbenders. The only wind-based ability we have any reason to have is Strike of the Windlord, and even that is tenuous because it was originally power we borrowed from Al’Akir the Windlord (and later relinquished). I’ve always interpreted the name Windwalker to refer to graceful movement in the sense of “walking with or as the wind”, not that we have any inherent connection with the Air element. The in-universe history of the class and specialization doesn’t imply any such connection, either. This argument applies to a few other abilities, see Thematic update suggestions for more about that.
Tangent aside, next up we have another pretty significant buff to the effectiveness of Mastery. This follows the near identical buff during the TWW Windwalker rework, and I can’t really complain. Mastery is honestly already quite good, but there’s nothing wrong with it getting even better. More stat value = better item level scaling, and I’ll never complain about that.
The Dance of the Wind is unexpected but very welcome, and an interesting answer to the squishiness of Windwalker in mythic+. Physical damage is kind of a blind spot for us, since our strongest defensive spell, Diffuse Magic, unsurprisingly only works against magic damage. This change means that Dance of the Wind will work against physical abilities that cannot be dodged, while keeping the same overall “immunity” against single big hits. In fact, this could lead to situations where Windwalkers (and Mistweavers, incidentally) are able to take a tank buster if the tank isn’t able to handle it, possibly even in raid.
The overall 2% damage nerf is likely to balance out against the Mastery buff, I don’t really care. 2% is so little that it’s basically background noise between the other changes, so not worth worrying about.
Courageous Impulse is buffed to 350%, up from 200%. This is a bit surprising, since I believed CI to be in a good spot after its last buff. This now puts it at more than twice the value it had before Nov. 26th.
Shadowboxing Treads buffs Blackout Kick’s base damage by 10%, down from 20%. That’s probably fair, 20% was a pretty steep ST increase for what’s arguably a cleave talent. Might also be intended to balance out the CI increase.
I don’t really play Celestial Conduit very often, so I can’t say much about the Heart of the Jade Serpent changes. The addition of Flying Serpent Kick is likely to make it interact with Slicing Winds, but I don’t know what the impact of removing the interaction with Rising Sun Kick will be.
Wrapping up the changes, the Paralysis change is nice, no comments. Veteran’s Eye now officially stacks, instead of pretending it’s supposed to be overlapping, which is good. Martial Instincts now has a pet flag, which is probably supposed to make it work with SEF damage, although that doesn’t seem to be fully implemented yet. It seems like they’ve also finally fixed SEF damage getting buffed by Acclamation, which is a pretty huge fix. Let’s confirm that on the live servers before celebrating that, though.
Let’s move on to the tier set bonuses. I was a bit concerned when I heard that the 2-set bonuses were going to be role-specific rather than unique per spec, but the fact that it buffs spec-specific spells makes up for it a bit. It still feels a bit like a cost-cutting measure, but that’s more about vibes than results. The total set bonus is fine in terms of design, but it’s completely passive and probably not even worth tracking. In my opinion, tier sets are supposed to mix up the playstyle of their spec for a given season, so that’s kind of a missed mark. It also risks being quite weak, we’ll have to see the proc rate on the 2-set to be sure, but it’s hard to imagine it being more than about 7-8% for the combined bonuses.
So, what’s left?
Well, there’s a large Strike-of-the-Windlord shaped hole in the blue post. I’ve briefly alluded to it in my Windwalker Wishlist post from Oct. 29th, but SotWL’s aoe scaling really needs to be addressed.
For those unaware of its history, SotWL was originally released in Legion as a big uncapped aoe nuke, which turned out to be pretty overpowered and was quickly reined in. This was long before square root scaling was introduced, and even reduced secondary target scaling wasn’t added to Fists of Fury yet. The solution that the devs came up with for SotWL was to let it always do 100% damage against the main target, and (1 / targetCount) against all other targets. To give some examples, on 2 targets, the main target takes 100% and the single secondary target takes 100 / 2 = 50%, or 150% total. On 5 targets, the main target takes 100%, and the 4 secondary targets take 100 / 5 = 20%, or 180% total. On 20 targets, it’s 100 + (100 / 20) * 19, or 195% total. In other words, the total damage asymptotically approaches 2x base damage as target count increases. This is far poorer scaling than any other supposed AoE ability in the game, at least until Celestial Conduit came in with its pathetic 6% per target up to 30%. This is especially aggravating because the tooltip boldly claims that it strikes “all enemies”, with no mention of a reduced scaling factor, never mind to this degree.
To make a long story short, please give Strike of the Windlord and Celestial Conduit a proper 5 target square root scaling formula. This would be an easy fix to our currently lackluster aoe damage profile, as well as a not unwelcome buff to our overall aoe performance (yes, still).
Another thing left notably untouched is Jadefire Stomp et al. Don’t misunderstand, the changes during the TWW rework were positive and left the spell more bearable than before, but the result is an excessively boring and disconnected ability. It has no resource cost, no interaction with other abilities, and without spending even more talent points, no value beyond its pitiful damage. This is a spell that could, without hyperbole, be added to literally any other spec with zero adjustments and work perfectly fine. That’s very bad.
In conclusion, the changes are a mixed bag of interesting stuff and some minor disappointments, nothing earth shattering. Tier is a bit too boring, could do with some actual gameplay impact.