I can’t see many (or any) people talking about this and I’m not sure why. One of the main things I love about WW is their burst capability, and I am worried this is being snuffed out in shadowlands.
ToD being made into an execute - First of all. This is a significant nerf. It takes away a large burst of damage (35% of my health as damage + 10% of all further damage dealt over the next 8 seconds) that is usable at my discretion to instead do; 35% of my health as damage to someone or something with 10-15% health remaining. This means that in most cases I will be overkilling, dealing far more damage than is required, essentially wasting damage, and now I am pigeon holed into only being able to use this to finish off an almost dead target. Additionally, I don’t see the need for so many specs to have an execute ability. This is not worthy of a damage cool down, and certainly doesn’t compare to the BFA version.
Invoke Xuen inheriting the ‘+10 % damage dealt over (x) sec’ from the BFA version of ToD - this could work, but currently doesn’t serve as a burst cd. The first thing to note is that it is baked into a 24 second ability. There is nothing bursty about that. Also, it deals multiple small amounts of damage which translates to smooth predictable damage. It’s been through a couple of incarnations so far; Deal damage equal to 10% of damage dealt over last 8 seconds (3 times over the 24 seconds). This could work if it takes into account the damage that Xuen itself does and that Xuen’s damage is strong, possibly also taking into account all other damage from trinkets etc. Or even up the % damage dealt to something much more than 10%. Whatever it is it would need to be quite strong to make up for the loss of 35% Of max heath as damage, and now; Deal damage equal to 10% of damage dealt Over the last 4 seconds (6 times over the 24 seconds). This is basically an even less bursty version of the 8 second version, and honestly, how much damage can we really pack out in a 4 second window… we’re not fire mages! I might get one FoF in… This just doesn’t work in my opinion.
I’m obviously not an expert nor a game developer so I’m don’t know the right fix or if I am on my own in this boat, but I have been playing wow since vanilla and do play games a lot so there must be some merit Olin what I’m saying - the point is (amongst a plethora of monk issues) that the thing that makes them fun is having good mobility (tick) and having high burst damage on demand at the users discretion. The current builds thus far on shadowlands seem to be dampening that and if it isn’t sorted out with the other issues I think monks will be even less played than that are already.
It’s a shame as I’d love to main a monk but just can’t bring myself to do it unless things like this are sorted out. I’ve seen a lot of noise from other monk players too and looks like there’s a fair bit of fixing that needs to be done, if not an overhaul of the class completely. I can’t see much happening from blizzard on this front at the moment. I hope they address it soon.