Why Windwalker is just a bad version of Rogue

PVP Arenas
1

A 6% buff? Great? I’m sure that will help out being denied your damage by over 80% of the specs in the game.

Seriously though. Every season seems to be getting harder and harder for Windwalker, it keeps retaining the same amount of spells and fixed PvP talents while the majority of other specs get something new.

The spec is literally becoming outdated design in PvP. You get countered by nearly everything. You can’t pre-disarm a Rogue’s go, because he can now cloak it. You can’t parry Warrior damage well anymore, because he will triple DR shockwave you, he will fear you every Serenity because the CD is the same. The Warrior will use one of infinite bladestorms to pass through ring (WW used to be a counter to Warrior, now it’s the opposite lol).

There’s a billion other things, but I won’t write a novel here. 0% Chance into Rogues, Mages, any kind of Paladins, and now even things like Shamans,Druids, Hunters and Warriors completely counter you.

Windwalker relies on killing you during Serenity and having uptime during it. Yes, you have a lot of burst damage. And all it takes is for someone to press CC, you trinket, CC again, go wait another 90 seconds to do dmg.Windwalker has a stun on 50 second cd. Meanwhile now every Rogue spec has Shadow dance for Cheap shot spam every 20 seconds because of stun DR, or simply Kidney shots you on 25s CD. Rogue has no uptime problems - short duration stun, cloak immunities, 50 more CC abilities than Windwalker.

Rogue’s mobility is instant and can’t be denied. Rogue can trinket offensively any time they want as if things go bad there’s always Cheat death to boost every Rogue’s rating by 300-500 higher than what it should be.

Anyway. There is a reason multiple Rogue players in the AWC were previously Windwalker Mains and barely touch the spec anymore, after playing it for years previously.

Windwalker needs some serious redesign of the PvP talents. Or at least Roll. The spec feels more miserable to play every new season, it never gets anything except small Dmg buffs or slight defensive buffs. This just makes you a DMG bot that can’t even kill outside of Serenity, and Serenity always gets denied since you can only trinket once and cannot remove any kind of CC from yourself.

Essentially the few remaining Windwalker mains literally almost fully rely on their team in order to win. You need instant dispels, freedoms, cross-cc so you can utilize your role of just being a brainless dmg bot.

Funny how people talk about Windwalker doing setups. Man, theres literally one stun and one incap. ANY OTHER DPS HAS MORE CC.

Anyway, rant over.

3 Likes
2

Tldr ?
10 char

3

I tend to agree with you. my observation from my own gameplay is that ww looks incredibly strong, broken even, when playing against enemies with little to no experience in PvP.
in stark contrast, it gets more and more frustrating to play as soon as 1800 mmr this early in the season. people seem to be laser focused about serenity, you are cc’d to infinity instantly and feel completely useless in the process.
I’m afraid a flat dmg buff isn’t gonna help at all.

what’s exaggerating this situation is that we have a caster meta on the horizon which is a horror for ww monk.
I’m being ping pongd around in between locks, eles, mages and boomkins just to connect for 2 seconds where they have an actual defensive ready.
even if you do somehow manage to get a kill it doesn’t really feel rewarding after being bombarded with micro cc, knocks, roots.

1 Like
5

Like Taranzui mjao jao (I forgot this guy name) countered Garosh

6

^ this.

Yep. But the game is apparently balanced around lower ratings where people don’t understand what the enemy class does. And classes like Rogue just skyrocket out of low MMR and don’t exist there, therefore they aren’t a problem. Dying 100-0 every 20 seconds is always fun.

7

The question is, what you would want changed. Right now, ww technically has infinite mobility with 3 rolls, serpent kick, freedom, port and a free charge on your builder. Give cc immunity on serenity like warrior kinda has? Then damage needs to go down. Increase serenity duration to at least get some value out of it? Maybe.
Right now it feels like blizzard can’t balance ww properly without making it wither broken or complete trash…

8

This spell is literally the worst mobility spell in the entire game. Travel time, short distance, does not come with CC. Could give it a range bump or at least make it happen faster. Using roll 3 times is usually worse than pressing Charge once on a Warrior.

Also extremely bad travel time. Isn’t exactly difficult to cast literally any root or hard CC mid travel and deny it.

This is a defensive in 95% of scenarios, outside of putting port where a Warlock’s port is to chase him.

Tiger’s lust isn’t Freedom. If it was, it would be great, but it isn’t. Once you remove a slow / root from yourself, you can immediately be slowed / rooted again with it. Nearly every spec in the game has spammable slows. This could actually be made to be Freedom and at least provide slow immunity for a few seconds. The spell is quite literally useless into things like Mages and Warlocks, which have a no-cd ranged slow, or even things like the new Warrior bladestorm slow.

This won’t help much.

It’s neither right now. The core problem is that it feels extremely unrewarding to play, the design itself feels outdated.

I was doing my placement games in 2v2 and I’m nearly losing to 1400xp Warriors, Mages, Rogues, Druids and Paladins because I just don’t have the necessary tools to punish mistakes. The amount of effort I had to put to win those games compared to the effort the enemy classes had to do was like the difference between doing a marathon run and walking to the store for groceries.

Ok cool, you pressed BoP, guess I go make a coffee cause I can’t do anything.
Ok cool, you pressed Alter time, blinked 6 times in a row, alright.
Bash into Cyclone 3 times?
Scatter shot into root spams?
Oh great I’m dead again in smoke bomb because I ran out of CDs and can’t press anything in a stun, the guy cloak of shadows my pre-Disarm.

The list goes on.

Take into consideration that this is the only melee in the game that will do 0, literally ZERO damage without uptime. There are no dots, bleeds, random ranged spells. No. Either you’re in melee range doing damage or you’re chasing something with their health bar only going up or staying the same.

9

It’s funny that the supposedly mobile Windwalker now has less mobility than Rogues, DH’s and Warriors. But giving WW the same broken level of mobility and CC is not the answer, it’s those three that need to be nerfed and pruned.

10

The way Windwalker is designed does not fit the class at all and is a problem blizzard tries to shove into every class this expansion making every class rely around unhealable sustained damage. Which is also a reason overall why this expansion feels so weirdly slow/fast paced.

Windwalker never should be about running people down constantly and trading all your defensive buttons for uptime, it should be more about planned setups which turn into a kill with heavy burst damage. Windwalker also should be a more defining leader melee which can only happen by bringing back fists of fury stun and some team utility (reverse magic like).
Windwalker also has a plethora of issues based on the class design, if we speak about the current state of WW. let me name some:

  1. PvP Talents are hard forced into Turbo Fists and Alpha Tiger and Disarm vs melees. Even if those were baseline in another way all other pvp talents suck hard and does not offer strong defining choices like other classes have.
  2. Talent Trees forces you to play one singular build at all times and everything else is useless. Even the one singular build includes a ton of dead talent points and things which should be baseline (flying serpent kick, transendance, karma, Roll etc). A lot of talents are still overnerfed from SL for unknown reasons (bonedust hello -33% multiplier, -50% on dance of chi-ji). A lot of talents also rely around Touch of Death (most trash ability ingame) spinning crane kick (0 damage at all times) and Tigerpalm (builder) which is absolutely awful. And then there are also talents which are straight up useless (more radius on sck, more radius on bonedust, all statue capstones) and I could go on and on.
  3. Scaling Issues: Im not an expert in this but something definitely does not add up with how windwalker is scaling during the expansion. If you remember how broken Windwalker used to be during the prepatch that instantly had consequences with flat -23% nerf on all abilites rightfully. By the state of right now all those nerfs are reverted and all abilites are even buffed by an additional 20% with blackout kick being around a 60-70% increase from that prepatch where windwalker used to oneshot everyone. And right now that Reality is far far off. An important Issue ww has is that Haste is absolutely terrible as a stat and does not serve anything other than making your Fists of Fury channel faster (which could be a negative even vs melees) and increase your energy regen which you really do not need at all, since you already work with too many resources and are gcd locked. The gcd is also at a flat 1 second and will not be reduced further from haste, which means even if you play with 100% haste you will still press the same abilites in the same time manner like a guy who has 0% haste. Crit is useless in pvp at least it is not justified to stack since the pvp value for crits are back to 150% (bad change). So it leaves ww with mastery stacking where the damage increase itself at a certain threshold (im unsure about the exact one) also has a big diminishing return, so in easy words if you have 40% Mastery your actual damage increase is not 40% but something lower.
  4. Windwalker has no way compared to most other melees to bruteforce your damage because you are an easily cc’d target. Like I already mentioned before the one way is to bring back a 2nd stun so you can dictate the game and do reasonable damage without being shutdown everytime. The other way the more complicated way is to add additional utility to windwalker something berserker rage like or something to defend against casting attacks which would CC you. One idea is Sparring which used to exist during MoP, what it did is it gave you a 15% chance to deflect all casted attacks against you whenever you were struck. It also had 15% Parry but I dont think that is needed atm. The way this ability could also work is in a holy ward theme which would deflect all upcoming 2 or 3 magical CC spells on you or in the straight way or make it have a timer 5 sec duration or something and let you deflect all magical CC for that duration (with low cd obviously 1 min ish). This could be a great addition as an honor talent.
  5. WW Mobility is a bit outdated, I dont like how Roll is the only one ability ingame which you cannot control and it locks you from pressing anything whenever you use it, i feel like that should be lifted. I also dont like how you constantly are stuck in pillars or ceilings while using those spells it makes this class feel really really old since DH just slides off pillars and is not stuck in ceilings or ground clutter whenever they use Fel Rush in comparison. Also one thing which is probably an universal issue by other classes, but if keefers (skyreach) didn’t exist at the moment windwalker would be one of the worst melees mobility wise. Mobility in this game does not only come from being able to move from A to B in the quickest way, it also revolves around being able to surprass slows and roots (death advance/freedom etc) being able to do significant ranged damage (dk, hunters, ret, enh even), being able to counter enemy mobility (death grip, apply big slows etc) and so on. WW literally next to warrior and Enh is the only melee in the game who has to stand in actual melee range to do significant damage.
  6. Armor issues: talking about significant damage also comes with the other problem which is super outdated and does nothing other than punish classes which rely on it = Physical Damage. The majority of melees in this game do magic spell DPS, do have options to bypass Armor regulary and/or work with Dots. Only a handful of melees do pure physical damage and thats outlaw/ww/warrior. The problem which lies here is that everytime you face a high armored target pala/shaman/dk/warrior/boomy etc all your attacks do SIGNIFICANT less damage for absolutely no reason which makes those classes a bad matchup for you just by ARMOR TYPE which is insane and doesnt exist for any other classes in that game. Armor does not work in the current game anymore and everyones Armor should be put equal or static to lesser values for plate/mail users or just straight up removed and balance physical damage just around normal numbers. If armor should ever be an important thing in that game then give classes which are affected by it ways to counteract it. Back in the days you could use Armor Penetration for exactly those situations on your gear for example.

All of this and i could talk about more things, are reasons why windwalker as an melee just kinda sucks and can’t really hold up as an class in the modern game anymore unless its overbuffed

4 Likes
11

We could remove the cooldown on Paralysis and let it have a 1.5s cast time instead.

And you could get a PvP talent + Tier set bonus that buffs your damage when using Paralysis (something like 10% in pvp sounds fair, but the rest of the WW kit damage would have to be balanced down to account for that).

Though, we probably need to move Paralysis in the talent tree so that you need to spend like a minimum of 6 talents on other useless stuff, like Elusive Mists or something. To keep things balanced, you know.

12

little bloodluck still stuck on rival?

13

And who are you?

14

Rogue needs to get pooped at.
Id say remove cloak and evasion. 1x vanish 3minCD. Yes I know this sounds extreme. It HAS to be like this because the way rogue is now is extreme. We need complete polar shift 360 degrees treatment on rogue.

15

Windwalker is trash.

One of the worst specs in game.

Windwalker has no survivability at all and an outdated toolkit. It’s one of those specs that needs a complete overhaul.

16

I’m pretty sure the SL balance wasn’t any better. Bonedust spin kills in 0.5 seconds every 1 minute were extremely cheese and nobody actually enjoyed playing around that. There should be a better way to design the class.

This is half the reason I made this thread.

And this is the other half.

Don’t think it needs an overbuff. I think it needs a redesign to provide uptime. The so called “setups” are not really setups because of you, you depend extremely hard on your teammates to provide you uptime which is the problem. Having 1 incap and 1 aoe stun is hard in Dragonflight to consider your class a “setup” class.

The permanent requirement of getting instant Serenity dispels, preference to play with Holy paladins and a caster or DK only to be provided uptime kind of scuffs the class by default.

It makes more sense to provide the class with more meaningful uptime instead of going back to the bonedust cheese kill times. As I said, the class currently is just a budget Rogue, it needs more identity, it’s worse than Warrior for uptime and worse than Rogue for setups.

17

Nothing is more EXTREME then your posts buddy :clown_face: :clown_face:

18

Were you ironic or you dont know? xd

19

It’s more like a worse version of ret.

Wings cannot be dispelled, and ret has more defenses, even though the playstyle is largely the same.

20

I mean i assume it’s Rakar on another bought account but i don’t really care enough to bother and try find out myself. :man_shrugging:

21

raider io would tell you its naviic xd