I play 22 specs competently. Monk is my main though and we have the worst Level 15 talent row in the game. All 3 options are pointless. The damage, healing and utility are next to zero. The impact on gameplay is zero or less. Only Chi Burst is worth using as a filler. Only Mist Wrap interacts with any of the 3 specs.
Chi Burst is forever awkward to use and is barely worth using. It makes up at most 2% of most high WW M+ damage profiles, though I’ll admit some people do like the Hadouken flavour it adds. For me, Chi Burst is a distraction and I’m never excited to press it. It’s just an annoying filler cooldown that I have to press because rarely it is a DPS gain.
Mist Wrap is good because it buffs part of the MW kit and therefore contributes to my enjoyment of the MW kit. It’s a very simple one, but it benefits from not distracting from the gameplay I enjoy focusing on. It’s a passive so I don’t have to break my “flow state” to fix my positioning or something.
Chi Wave is fire-and-forget, and it heals for less than a tick of Soothing Mist, and is a DPS loss in almost any situation. It is harder to fit into a crowded rotation. It has an RNG component. It offer no discernible advantage over Chi Burst. It has no place continuing to exist after 5 expansion of being a dead talent.
Eye of the Tiger does like 40 DPS at level 60 as WW! This has always been bad but now it’s just depressing. I get that it’s the passive talent for easy mode, the kind of talent I never take on any class because there’s always something more interesting, but this is the one I take on my main because the alternatives only detract from my kit. This lets me ignore the row to focus on other improvements I can make to playing my class. And I suffer little to no penalty for doing so because the whole row’s contribution to our kit is so small that any difference between them is negligible.
None of these talents interact with our specs. None of them particularly add to the engaging mechanics of each spec. They don’t add anything to our gameplay. They don’t add to our throughput. You could remove them tomorrow and it wouldn’t change a thing for our viability.
Alternatives
We have a great Honor Talent in Alpha Tiger (first time you hit a new target with Tiger Palm you gain 30% Haste) which could be baked into Eye of the Tiger, and Alpha Tiger is great for world content and PvP. It makes enabling War Mode fun! It’s a good talent because it is situational and can open potential for playing around it, pacing out the first hits on new targets.
Similar level 15 talents include;- Feral: Predator, Boomkin: Nature’s Balance, MM: Murder of Crows, Shadow: Death and Madness, Sub: Premeditation, Affliction: Drain Soul and Fury: Fresh Meat and War Machine
There’s a Torghast Anima Power that’s neat. Flowing Chi Rolls (Chi Wave is cast on all enemies you roll through) renews some of the original pitch for Monks, whereby Roll would have been a throughput button. That was scrapped in MoP Beta for being too awkward to fit into combat. But combat has evolved since then, as has the variety of content on offer. We have Demon Hunter silliness with Vengeful Retreat and stuff. So maybe that’s a Leve 15 talent that could replace Chi Wave.
*This sort of “niche” talent is concurrent with Level 15 talents like;- Frost DK: Cold Heart, Balance: Force of Nature, Feral: Lunar Inspiration, Surv: Terms of Engagement, Sub: Gloomblade and Affliction: Inevitable Demise.
As for Chi Burst, it’s the only option for throughput right now and people do seem to have a certain fondness for the Hadouken/Kamehameha thing. It could stand to be left as it is. I’d rather replace it with an interaction, perhaps the -now class wide- Expel Harm fits here. Maybe “Expel Harm now also heals up to 2 nearby allies and your next Blackout Kick projects a Chi Burst for the amount healed.” BfA proved a niche fondness for Expel Harm as a WW filler.
In summary, the Level 15 talents are usually the place where niche but impactful choices are offered. The Monk L15 row is amongst the oldest rows to survive in its original Talents 2.0 form and it is a terrible row to draw people into the variety of fun gameplay Monk has to offer. The row offers no choice, variety, impactful gameplay or fun. It is also very weak but buffing it would not fix the problem.