Disclimer: The original post does not belong to me but to Vi from US forum (link below). Still, some of the arguments are so weighty and well-written that I decided to share them with our forum too:
The obvious place is stat scaling. we scale horrifically badly. touch of death doesnt scale with agil or our mastery. It cannot crit. Haste does nothing to it. It cannot cleave. Its 1 hit on 1 target. Its one heavy hit, but I’ve seen star surges and chaos bolts which are regular rotational abilities hitting for half of touch of deaths damage, and its a 2 min CD where stats don’t effect it. touch of death is a big issue.
Touch of karma. While the actual purpose of the move is defensive in nature ( and it used to be a deterrent from hitting the monk in MOP ), over half of the specs in the game can remove it or ignore it. In pve though is the main problem. we are balanced around using it offensively by purposefully trying to kill ourselves to maximise our dps by the damage portion of this abilities damage reflect. It is degenerate gameplay that hasnt been iterated on by blizzard ever. The original design was for players to swap off of the monk otherwise they kill themselves in pvp. But its such ignorable damage in pvp while being very powerful in pve. It doesnt scale with anything except for HP, so it has 0 dps stat scaling. touch of karma is a big issue.
Storm earth and fire… where to even begin. ANY time blizz come up with a new weapon enchant, trinket, ingame systems like the netherlight crucible through to essences and corruptions etcs, storm earth and fire reduces its damage because of how the ability works. it splits the monk into 3 and our damage is shared by our clones to even percentages of damage ( ie: its 33% split between the 3 clones. the parent monk is doing 66% less damage ). But what this means until blizz catch the million bugs is that if its a weapon enchant as an example, only the parent monks weapon damage is effective, any positive effect that the enchant would be doing is reduced by 66% unless its raw stats. the clones don’t get there own versions of the weapon enchant. Same with things like on proc damage trinkets. The damage is reduced when we have our main dps CD going. Thus losing overall dps when our dps is supposed to be increased.
On top of this negative effect and all of those subsequent bugs, the AI of the stupid clones is also a massive issue. Our primary dps ability fists of fury, if the clones are facing the wrong direction when we use it because of there stupid janky coding, again 33-66% of our damage is just whiffing the air not going off. If the clones are travelling to a new target while you press an attack it will wiff the air and attack nothing, losing dps when your supposed to be getting a dps increase with a dps CD going. The ability is HOT GARBAGE. and has been a gigantic pain in the backside ever since blizz changed it in the legion alpha. the entire ability should be scraped from the game. Blizz might think its thematic ( even though its was originally a brewmaster ability, not windwalkers ), but it needs to be shelved because of the sheer mountain of issues it has. storm earth and fire is a massive issue.
Our talent tree is a disaster. Our entire T15 row of talent does less than 0.5% of our dps. They add NOTHING to gameplay at all except for very slightly helping to keep the hit combo talent going. We have literally 100% dead talents which have never EVER been taken by any windwalker ever. Whirling dragon punch is a 100% lock in talent that should of been baseline years ago. Nerfing it into oblivion wont actually make that talent row any better, it will still be the go to talent because of what it does to our rotation. Speaking of WDP, it is still bugged 1 year on now, when it isn’t even usable when its supposed to be, and its STILL better than both other talents on that talent row. serenity would need a 70% increase to its effectiveness on ST for it to break even with WDP, and it would need a hell of a lot more than that on aoe for it to just break even. Again, our talent tree is a shambles. Hit combo should just be a part of the base mastery, it shouldnt even be a talent. our talent tree is a big issue.
Mark of the crane is a hold over from legion and shouldnt even be in the spec anymore. it should of been pruned 2 years ago.
Xuen. only scales with vers and agil. he scales very poorly.
Our mastery doesn’t work with a number of our damage sources.
Windwalking buff is just… pointless. its range and effectiveness and the fact it doesn’t scale with other movement abilities is a problem.
Our interrupt ironically interrupts our heaviest damaging ability.
Our auto attacks turn off during a number of our animations and abilities which causes us to not only lose that dps, it also means we proc things like twilight dev a hell of a lot less than other specs. this is actually a larger issue itself that needs to be resolved.
Blizz can’t decide how they want fists of fury to be handled. Every other xpack it has AoE scaling on it, then they take it off again. Then they put it back, and then take it off again.
The spec is so unpopular because it gets absolutely 0 attention from blizzard. Its basically always in the bottom 6 performing specs in the game, and offers near no group utility of its own. the only thing it does bring both Brewmaster and Mistweavers also bring. additionally monks are the ONLY class that DIDNT get a visual update. Blizz cared so little for the class that they just did nothing for us. our abilities just lack visceral punch and snappiness to them.
And then to add further, we just don’t exist in the lore. there isn’t even an A tier monk or windwalker in the lore. let alone a C tier one. Its hard for players to want to emulate a hero in the story if they just don’t exist in the first place.
TLDR: Blizz gave up on this spec. Its getting absolutely nothing in Shadowlands, and it receives so little attention from blizzard that issues that have been going on for years are still to be resolved or iterated on. Blizz just slap on there routine 10-25% damage buff every other patch that keeps windwalkers in the bottom 6 specs in the game and go back to leaving us to rot. Its really sad really, because rotationally we are fun, but the spec is just left in a disastrous state by blizzard who plain just don’ care in the slightest. and this post is just some of the cliff notes versions of SOME of our issues. I haven’t actually seen a single change to the spec in the beta/alpha in months now. The spec isn’t even getting worked on by blizzard, and i can guarantee we wont see anything until 2 weeks before Shadowlands and then ignored again for the subsequent following 5 months until we get that hotfix 10-25% dmg increase.