Let’s do a bit of a compilation post again where I list all of the changes that I would like to see whenever the next blue post comes around. I fully realize that many of the changes I’m suggesting are unlikely to happen in the next patch, but if they make it onto the backlog, that’s good enough.
Remove Storm, Earth, and Fire
I’ll keep repeating it for as long as needed: Despite its long-standing reputation as a core Windwalker spell and nostalgic reference to WC3, the ability continues to cause long-term issues and produces new ones every patch like clockwork. This, combined with its lackluster gameplay interaction, justifies its retirement many times over.
To replace it, one simple option is to reintroduce Serenity.
Enter an elevated state of mental and physical serenity for 15 sec. While in this state, you deal 20% increased damage and healing, your Energy recharges 20% faster, and all Chi consumers cool down 20% more quickly.
Serenity is a much more thematically appropriate spell for the life-energy utilizing martial artist that we ostensibly are, rather than a shaman with itchy knuckles. That said, I recognize that the old Serenity’s Chi cost removal was somewhat problematic, so in order to address that and to keep it closer to SEF’s current value, I’ve changed it to just generate more Energy during your burst window. There are many other possibilities that should be considered, and I’ll cover more in a topic further down.
Rework Slicing Winds
Envelop yourself in razor-sharp energy, then lunge forward, dealing (550% of Attack Power) Nature damage to enemies in your path. Damage reduced beyond 5 enemies.
Hold to consume 1 Chi to deal an additional 20% damage per charge. If fully empowered, your Tiger Palm generates 1 additional Chi for 10 sec.
For 2 seconds after the lunge, Slicing Winds can be recast to jump back to your original position.
This rework addresses several problems with the spell:
- It currently doesn’t feel like a Windwalker ability. This should be an obvious result from it being practically identical to its Plunderstorm iteration, but apparently it needs to be pointed out. Sorry, but having “Wind” in the name doesn’t even count. So, I’ve added a Chi cost that’s linked to the empower level. This way you need to prepare a full Chi bar before you can fully empower the ability, but in return, a fully empowered cast will do more damage than the live version. For additional compensation, you gain additional Chi generation for a short while.
- The mobility aspect is not appreciated by many. Having it replace Flying Serpent Kick already feels like a massive negative, since FSK’s mobility is fluid and nuanced, while SW’s mobility is clunky and hard to control. On top of that, SW is a core damage ability. It is used nearly on cooldown, removing any decision-making in terms of mobility and more often than not taking you away from where you want to be. While this rework doesn’t fix the former issue, the latter issue is fixed by just allowing you to quickly relocate back to where you started. This should make it more attractive to fully empower it, despite still increasing the lunge distance.
As a minor detail, I’d also retouch the visual effect to be more “Chi” than “wind”. Something that continues to confuse devs and players alike is the idea that Windwalker should control wind in some way. I do not agree. The name Windwalker, given the context of spiritual energy and martial arts, should be interpreted as a reference to agility and skillful technique, not literal wind. I’ll remind you that the most overtly wind-themed ability before Slicing Winds, Strike of the Windlord, was literally “borrowed” power from an actual elemental lord of Air, not an inherent ability. Poorly justified as it was in Legion, it is made much worse by not having a direct connection to any Air elementals now. Once again, we are not shamans.
Remove the Jadefire Stomp sub-tree
I’ll be honest, I don’t really hate the current version of Jadefire Stomp. Removing the god-awful reset chance tied to specific floor zones has made the spell overall a fairly inoffensive one. At least, that would be my assumption, since the spell has been tuned so poorly during its rework that it has quite literally not seen any use since. Despite this, or really partly because of this, the majority of the relevant playerbase still dislikes the ability. I too don’t particularly see any reason to salvage it, and would rather see it retired altogether. It just doesn’t fit into Windwalker’s theme as well as it does for Mistweaver.
I’d say that the devs seem to agree with this take, given how hilariously poorly the spell itself and its follow-up talents have been tuned. It’s giving some strong “you don’t need to play this unless you really want to” vibes.
Could it be salvaged? Well, maybe, but it would take some legwork. Like Slicing Winds, it feels entirely disconnected from the Windwalker kit. I also don’t really feel how it “works” as an in-universe ability. It’s also one more button, which really makes the spec very bloaty with Slicing Winds, Whirling Dragon Punch, and Crackling Jade Lightning. The follow-up talents also really need to be re-examined to offer different gameplay styles. Funnel is a hot commodity in M+ these days, so that could be an angle.
Address the ability lock problem
Windwalker is rather unique in that it has undoubtedly spends the most time casting, channeling, or empowering abilities out of any melee spec. Between Fists of Fury, Spinning Crane Kick, Chi Burst and Slicing Winds, there’s an awfully high ratio of time wherein we cannot use any utility abilities like Spear Hand Strike or Leg Sweep. In a given minute of combat time, it’s not unlikely to spend as much as 20 seconds unable to cast abilities. This very often puts us in the awkward position of giving up damage to interrupt a spell or use a defensive, or finishing our current channel and letting the dice fall where they may. The higher level the content, the more likely that the latter option isn’t acceptable.
Now I should point out that I actually quite like the casting and channeling. It’s immersive and makes me feel like I’m actually throwing a flurry of punches or kicks rather than a single action. I can’t think of any variation on Spinning Crane Kick or Fists of Fury that would remove the channeling aspect while maintaining the same feeling.
Thankfully a perfect solution already exists and is actively being utilized: Celestial Conduit. Despite its animation being more static than any of other spells I’ve listed, we can actually cast utility and defensive spells while Celestial Conduit is channeling. Just… make the other casts and channels work the same way. It’s such an obvious solution that it’s somewhat odd that it hasn’t been done already.
Improve AoE damage
While it’s easy to cry “target caps” and move on, I’ve personally been rather actively trying to combat the notion that the target scaling threshold is the only or even the main problem with our mutitarget performance. That said, we are currently on the cusp of the 7th or 8th season in a row where Windwalker’s AoE output is majorly lacking. This can be attributed to many factors, most of them being a “lack of” something. Many specs that do have great AoE damage do so by generating their resources quicker in multitarget scenarios, allowing them to fire off their stronger spells faster. Others may have some kind of passive interaction that scales with target count. Often, the overall target scaling of a spec is a compounding result of several simple effects.
Thing is, Windwalker doesn’t really have anything like that. Beyond the direct target scaling of our multitarget abilities, we have no interaction with target count. Our cooldowns are just flat damage buffs to our overall damage. We have no Festering Wounds, no Rain of Fire (+Inferno), no Ascendance with its Flame Shocks. Simple tuning is also not really enough, since it’s more a problem with scaling with target count than the actual numbers.
To further complicate things, there’s probably no single change that would fix this. Even if some kind of ability would increase Chi generation per minute with multiple targets (say, Chi Burst generating Chi for each target hit, or Spinning Crane Kick refunding Chi), we’re fairly limited in how many Spinning Crane Kicks we can cast while still keeping Fists of Fury and Whirling Dragon Punch on cooldown.
I do have one suggestion that I think has potential to go a long way: a secondary effect to one of our major class cooldowns.
While {cooldown} is active, your Spinning Crane Kick deals 10% increased damage per unique target struck.
Tying this to Xuen would be interesting since that would offer additional synergy with Fury of Xuen, but adding it to Storm, Earth, and Fire or Serenity would work just as well.
Now you might just think “well this is just a simplified version of Mark of the Crane”, and you’d be right. To this day I cannot fathom why Mark of the Crane was unceremoniously dropped from the Windwalker kit with a straightforward buff to Spinning Crane Kick’s base damage. Surely the main reason was that many players found the manual marking of targets to be tedious, but ditching the concept altogether was not the correct path to take in my opinion.
Reintroducing this minor bit of exponential scaling would be one step to addressing the inherent lack of target scaling in our kit, though I do not believe that it alone is quite enough.
Spice up our class cooldowns
I’ve sprinkled some suggestions regarding this topic throughout the post so far, but I do want to call it out directly: our current class cooldowns are boring. All we have is one button that increases our damage by 20% for 15 seconds, and one that summons a pet that does damage and increases our damage by 8% for 20 seconds. There’s no interactions, no up-front damage, no gameplay impact whatsoever. Ordered Elements is a pretty good addition, but it’s still pretty boring as far as gameplay effects go, and it costs an additional talent point.
I frankly don’t even care too much what it is, but give Xuen and SEF something to make you feel that they’re active. A cooldown that can’t be felt without damage meters is a bad cooldown.
Reverse or adjust the S3 tier set bonuses
This is basically just a repeat of my feedback on the PTR forums, but it most certainly belongs on a wishlist. Both of the 11.2 tier sets were really exciting in their first iterations, which is frankly uncommon for us. Stacking two instances of Heart of the Jade Serpent gave us a supercharged feeling that should be the kind of impact our class cooldowns have, but getting it from a tier set is a start. Making it possible to stack Against All Odds to 20 for the entire duration of Storm, Earth, and Fire is exactly the kind of cooldown flavor that I want.
So it was more than a little bit disappointing to see that both of these playstyles were nerfed in last week’s ptr patch.
Since the Shado-Pan change is as of yet not implemented and only a tooltip change, my primary suggestion would be to leave it as is. Changing the energy threshold to 150 during Storm, Earth, and Fire instead of 120 puts it in an awkward spot where it might be necessary to break mastery with Tiger Palm in order to maintain Against All Odds, and incentivizing mastery breaking should always be avoided.
An even better option would be the suggestion I posted on the PTR forums:
Make Flurry Strikes discharge after 4 casts of Tiger Palm. For Brewmaster, this number can be increased a bit and include Spinning Crane Kick and Keg Smash as triggers. The tier set effect can then lower the required amount to 2 while SEF is active.
For the Celestial Conduit set I will just repeat my PTR forum suggestion as well:
Rather than overwriting different Heart buffs, make them extend each other. This might require some fiddling with the “big” and “small” buffs, but just having the big buff transition into a small buff when its duration expires would be ideal. As an example:
- Casting Strike of the Windlord > Slicing Winds or vice versa would simply extend the Heart buff by 8 sec.
- Casting Celestial Conduit > Strike of the Windlord would add 8 sec to the duration, but after 8 sec, the buff would convert into a “small” buff.
- Casting Strike of the Windlord > Celestial Conduit would add 8 sec to the duration, as well as convert it to a “big” buff for 8 sec, then convert back to “small”.
