So, I was one of the people who was very annoyed by all of the covenant abilities being copy-pasted into the talent trees without any attempt at integrating them into the spec fantasy. I was pleasantly surprised when the visual rework was announced, and I generally like the new effect well enough.
However.
I’m really sorry to say it, but it’s a total failure in terms of visual clarity. The Faeline Stomp animation was more or less opaque, so even if the hitbox wasn’t perfect, you could at least be relatively sure that you were “in it” if you were standing on blue stuff. The reworked version on the other hand is a green pattern on a fully transparent background. That means it’s entirely possible to stand “in it”, even though your feet aren’t touching any green stuff. In fact, when you first cast it, the pattern nicely forms AROUND your feet, and you’re not standing in it at all. To make things even worse, you seem to have fiddled with the actual hitbox as well for some reason and there are blind spots on the actual pattern, as demonstrated by Megasett (pretty much on the 10.2.5 release day).
I don’t have words to express how frustrating this is. I’m currently progressing mythic Fyrakk, which is a fight with an insane amount of boss movement. I cannot maintain a decent Jadefire Brand uptime because I’m frequently standing where I think my Jadefire Stomp pattern is, only to never get a reset even after casting a Chi Burst. Even when it works “properly”, I’m still cursed by boss movement 5 seconds after casting JFS and just getting a bit unlucky with resets.
Blizzard, we have expressed our dislike for FLS/JFS for the ENTIRE EXPANSION. It is absurd that a highly mobile melee spec has to keep themselves rooted to a small area in order to get a massive damage increase (and then still do average overall damage). The visual rework was a good thing on paper, but you’ve managed to make it a failure by making it even more frustrating to use.
To be perfectly clear, if a Windwalker monk wants to do any reasonable amount of damage in mythic or heroic raids, they need to run Jadefire Stomp and Jadefire Harmony. So please meet us halfway and make it not a terrible talent to play.
Suggestions:
- The best thing you can do is to rework Jadefire Stomp to apply a debuff to the targets it’s hitting, and add a reset chance with a ~0.3 sec ICD to any damage done to affected targets. If that means making a whole new version of it for Windwalker and deviate from the Mistweaver version, so be it. They’re specialization spells anyway, a visual similarity is perfectly sufficient, they don’t need to also function the same way.
- If for some godawful reason you refuse to do the above, well, please reconsider, but at least add a semi-transparent background to the current green pattern to clearly display where the reset area is.
- Concurrently with the above, ADD A BUFF TO TRACK WHEN YOU’RE STANDING IN THE AREA. It is insanely outdated design to have no way to track this with a weakaura or a buff. You’re clearly tracking some hidden buff in the background, so just make it visible to players for god’s sake.
To conclude, this is one of the biggest issues that Windwalker players are struggling with in raid. Solutions exist, and I can only attribute the delayed implementations to a lack of interest in addressing issues on an unpopular specialization. But enough is enough, this has lasted FAR too long already.
Side note, why did Bonedust Brew get ignored when reworking covenant abilities? As far as I know, it’s the only ability that didn’t get redesigned, but it’s just as poorly a fit for the Windwalker and Brewmaster tree as any other covenant spell.