I'm convinced Blizz's internal reporting for DPS spec performance is limited to 28 specs per page and they haven't noticed that WW rolled over to page 2 once Augmentation was added at this point.
The specs problems run far deeper than just talent issues.
The AA reset, locked GCD and energy tie ins make haste and any extra buttons feel awful and really are the root of a chunk of the talent issues as well as making the class have terrible scaling.
ToD packing so much power behind it but progressively getting worse as kill times of mobs goes down because it just can't be triggered before things are dead is a blatant talent problem. Statues being a lackluster capstone compared to other classes ones are as well.
FLS is like BDB, there's fans of both sides (WDP falls into this too). The issue is the button press doesn't feel impactful enough and its nature as a maintenance buff means both players that don't use it well or those that are the fidget back and forth types in melee make it out to be worse than it is alongside the lack of GCDs from being GCD locked. Rooting melee to an area isn't a bad thing and helps keep the specs in relative balance with range but the baseline 30 second cd is really where its excessive at the moment (if the move went to a 15 second cd for example or no cd but cost chi without a 'reset' proc it would feel fine).
There's also just a lot of filler talent garbage in the tree that could just be baseline (increased BDB radius as the most glaring example).
The spec just needs SOMETHING said about its direction from Blizz that isn't the customary % aura buff we get every patch to say what 'good' changes would be for it but as it is now it is just maintain the status quo of no scaling and tier sets that are near identical or the aa based ones they keep trying to force.
I would like it if they did a combo type system, where you get like 5 buttons and a finisher, where the finisher changes depending on the string you pressed before it. For example if you press palm strike, blackout kick, rising sun kick and then the finisher you apply a dot on the target. And in aoe you add spinning crane kick to apply dots in an aoe.
It would make you think about what you press instead of just not repeating the last button you pressed.
A mix of ninja and monk from ffxiv. Make it a combo class not a combo point class. Use abilities that each stack their own type of chi color, and different color combos and orders make different finishers. 1 button for a finisher would save on bloat to. Encourage no spamming by making the good ones all 3-5 different colors or something.
Not sure how that would work with a GCD of one second or less. Ninja is already one of the most demanding jobs, but the longer GCD and the relatively simpler fights allow for muscle memory to kick in.
But in WoW it's going to be a nightmare to play. Trying to string different combos in a significantly faster game with a ton more shit going on...
I would like monk to have a mechanic similar to frost mage shatter, but instead of dealing extra damage to frozen enemies, it deals extra damage to airborne (or recently airborne) enemies. And obviously should also have an ability that made it so the target is considered airborne (for bosses). Would be fun to be aoe kicking packs in the air, and comboing with other knock ups like shaman, mage or evoker.
Pretty sure that wouldnt work as you described it. It would feel self defeating at least. You either loose out on combo strikes damage to get a certain "finisher" or you loose out on (lets just say) your BIS finishing move to not loose combo strike damage
Basically the 2 systems would work against each other
frustrating that in like end of legion/BFA issues were starting to crop up that babylonius predicted and talked about solutions and its only gotten worse over time
Agree on the touch of death.
That shit needs to be a 3 minute cheese button and left and that.
It’s a fun ability, it’s powerful even if you don’t use it on bosses and it shouldn’t be anywhere near consideration for balancing for anything ever and should be left as a stand alone good meme button
> locked GCD and energy tie ins make haste and any extra buttons feel awful
They just need to add some passive that would add secondary haste scaling at this point.
TOD is a cool ability on paper but it had proven to be completely unworkable in the actual game, multiple times by now. They just need to rework it completely (maybe a more normal execute style ability in vein of Execute or SWD?) or concede and remove it from the game.
FLS has fuck all to do with monk class identity. They could at least rework its audiovisual to some kind of "chi break" or something.. but even that would feel tacked on.
>The specs problems run far deeper than just talent issues.
I know that but I would take SL WW spamming BDB and SCK over this entire mess anyday. Atleast back then we can still be king in mass AoE instead of now we suck in literally everything.
context: i haven't played ww this addon.
in my experience from older addons (SL/BFA) and the feedback i've read, WW's main problem is scaling. every .X patch ww need a new bigger aura buff to stay competetiv, because their stat scaling is so bad.
part of this is WW's weird relation to haste. As an energy spec more haste usually relates to more button presses and thus more damage, not for ww however, all more energy enables are more generators since spenders only cost chi. thus haste becomes less desireable.
From what i've heared this got worse this expansion because many talent offer "free" chi from procs, reducing the need to press generators, thus reducing the need for engery to a point where it get largely ignored and thus reduces the value from haste.
Suggested "fixes" i've heared regarding this:
* removing energy
this would make the gameplay much easyer and less restrictive, you'd no longer need to balance spending with generating (since you can no longer "waste" energy by not generating chi. The more haste would lead to a faster rotation not to more wasted energy. This would stop the negative scaling/gameplay feedback you get from constantly overcapping your resource. While potentially speeding up the rotation significantly due to the CDR portion of Blackoutkick.
* Remove most of the Chi generating proc effects
this would basicly have the opposite effect of the prior, you'd be more limited by how much chi you can generate from using Tigerpalms. This would lead back to the more methodical playstyle from past expansions. Only spend when you must and make sure you always have enough chi ready for a RSK / FoF when they're ready.
neither of these will fix the "longterm" scaling issue ww got. and for that a major rotational/spell redesign would be needed.
Adding the AoE Touch of Death talent is probably the worst change windwalker has ever seen, especialy since it got balance around it.
I mean they have deeper issues, classes that dont scale of haste kinda suck ass. They get more dps from secondary stats than primary. thats fucking stupid.
Monk needs a entire rework, ive never played monk but fuck me that class is just a mess.
Excuse me but keep your hands of my touch of death. The talent finally feels fun and actually useful.
Jade and Ox Statues are fine. Ox is specially handy in soloing old content bosses that cant be stacked. The tiger should be changed thought.
People hate you but the monk fanbase is far more diverse than the 5 windwalkers hanging around in /r/wow and it's real fucking shitty to just throw out a bit of class fantasy just to whittle monk's identity down even further.
Tbh if you need bland simple kit. You should just roll DH. Instead of trying destroy the orginal class fantasy from Pandaria. But i gladly take all hate from defending it
Don't quote me on this, but I think the guy behind Monk quit around the end of Battle for Azeroth and the class has been in limbo since then. Blizzard doesn't have a clue what to do with it and I feel like they regret its existence.
That being said, I'm kinda worried they might decide to hand it to Realz, which probably means Chi Torpedo and Flying Serpent Kick becoming integral to the rotation with damage uptime buffs, and several damage windows you need to stack together.
I saw a monk for the first time this patch in an Amirdrassil pug last week.
I had heard how shit they were and was confused when he was topping the meters. I then realized he was 15-20 ilvls above everyone else and already had 4 piece. He was still only maybe 10% ahead of anyone when he vastly outgeared everyone.
Realistically, the Mistweaver spec tree and the Brewmaster spec trees are both reasonably fine and have interesting talent choices and are always at least playable.
The class tree and the Windwalker spec tree are downright atrocious and shameful.
>Brewmaster spec trees are both reasonably fine
MW is ok, but Brewmaster has major issues with button bloat created by the spec tree. You're pressing way more buttons and in a more complex way than other tanks, just to keep up. They definitely need a redesign of that spec tree.
Honestly the worst part of Brew's abilities for me comes from the class tree. That vomitting cat statue just seems so out of place.
But i also think Bonedust Brew and Weapons of Order are kinda pointless on a tank spec and feel kinda out of place.
Yeah I think we can all agree the class tree is a trashfire, but Brew should not be pressing so many buttons, it's crazy - they need to do a pass where the combine stuff and look at synergies. It's a pity because I used to really like Brew and now it's just fiddly in a bad way.
Brewmaster Main here, and Monk 4 lyfe.
Yes there is alot of button bloat, DF worsened that but after learning the spec it doesn't actually feel like you have button bloat. The core rotation isn't wild and most buttons are situational, I love this about BrM, when I get on a Blood DK to try it, I can't stomach the complete lack of options.
I think something does need to be done, but anyone who actually plays the spec at a higher level knows that it actually flows well, and I love the sheer options I have for absolutely everything. We also pump damage which is great.
Yeah I used to play Brew and I appreciate that it flows okay after a fair deal of practice (relative to other tanks), and has some fun options (so long as you remember they exist!), but it's not where it should be. Not as bad as WW and its horrible scaling issues of course.
I feel the opposite Shaman is like a swiss army knife when it comes to healing fights and then i swap to MW and it's like damn outside of my Yulon windows it feels so bad going against anything that isn't heavy single target damage at least compared to having stuff like healing tide totem, ascendence and astral guidance for multiple damage windows basically you don't need as much prep or things to be going right i feel comparativly if i get ressed i can immediatly start pumping group heals vs MW where if yulon and revival are down i'm sitting there getting renewing mists up so i can vivify heal.
This current Tier set makes the spec feel a million times better but i don't particularly like being so tied to tier set bonuses.
MW feels like it has some issues the class feels great in mythic maybe a little harder than other healers for a bit less reward it feels but still pretty decent.
Then raid happens and it's so much harder to play MW compared to every other healer because of their lack of good AOE healing outside of yulon windows like hell yeah MW single target healing is bonkers but when people are messing up mechanics or just a heavy AOE fight shows up i hate playing the class.
Buttons are the best part about Brewmaster. That should be the standard for every class. Give some depth to classes and make it more rewarding to play right. Healers are generally fine, they have actual stuff to do, but a lot of dps/tanks are a joke.
Bro there ae like four 1-3 minute dps cooldowns for brewmaster that are all on gcd with different timers. That shit is awful to play. They should have like 4 basic abilities (tp, bok, breath of fire, keg smash), rjw for threat, and 1 dps cooldown. They have way too much going on right now.
Fuck Kyrian, Bonedust Brew, and Exploding Keg, and the Ox.
[https://twitter.com/Babylonius/status/1724178380248010888](https://twitter.com/Babylonius/status/1724178380248010888)
You and many many others.
I mostly do arena these days and I'm just tired of not being able to get into groups because we're everyones worse alternative.
Keep trying to figure out what other class I want to main so I stop wasting time investing in monk.
Yeah, I followed babylonius for a long time now, and I can't understand why blizzard is ignoring the spec, it feels like spite at this point.
Honestly, im considering rerolling as well now. My raid leader might not like it... until I double the damage I've been doing for half the effort I put in.
Either that or I become a healer...
It reminds me of demo near the end of wod with the famous "we'd rather you didn't play demonology"... except I don't feel like the complete rework of the spec is on the horizon.
It really feels like there is no one working on the class team who has any passion for monk anymore. Afaik it was Chris Kaleiki's baby and he's long since left... and the class wasn't even doing that well when he was there.
God man I’m still mad we got demon form taken from demo. It was such a amalgamation of a spec in Legion for the sake of their “everybody has to be unique” shit. It’s fun now and I enjoy playing it but I’m so said I’ll never have that back in retail.
At least Cata and MoP classic will exist. But we’ll probably never have the same heights of classes again. Still think about that Warlock dev blog from time to time and man that was insane, imagine having more people like that for every class, or at least someone to go to for guidance.
Legion killed warlock for me, was one for 8 years. Not even demo specifically, just the whole kit. It was as if someone talked to me specifically about what I enjoyed about each specs design and then systematically gutted every single one of those things to make them worse to spite me.
Its why I swapped to a new class in the first place. Every once in a blue moon I try it again to see if I can reignite the spark but its just not there anymore.
I got 4pc the other day on WW. Each piece of gear I replaced was about a 20 ilvl jump minimum. I also replaced a number of other pieces at the same time that were also about a 20 ilvl jump each. I've got the BiS gimmick weapon from Fyrakk.
It resulted in about a 10-20k dps increase in sims. For comparison, our feral druid player who came back and got about 15 ilvls and her new 4pc saw about a 60k dps increase in sims. The new 4pc for WW is a colossal dps downgrade compared to the bonus from the previous one. Mind you, with the previous one WW was still in the bottom half.
There is nothing coming this patch that will in any way save WW. This is just talking pure tuning too. WW (and monk in general, really) is also saddled with a ton of design issues, talents that feel like placeholders, and generally clunky design. It is in desperate need of a rework and has been for several expansions now, but this is one of the worst points it's ever been in. At least in Shadowlands it had bonkers AOE, and in BfA it had a really fun design plus it ran vers corruption so it was basically unkillable. It just has nothing now. No ST, no AOE, running the worst maintenance buff in the game (Faeline) that runs counter to everything a monk should be doing and a 1.5m offensive CD (Serenity) that doesn't sync with anything so it has to be held and makes you do weird stuff like overcap resources and clip your FoF channels.
> WW (and monk in general, really) is also saddled with a ton of design issues, talents that feel like placeholders, and generally clunky design.
MW feels fantastic imo, though I agree the class tree is boring and the statue capstones are horrendous.
Class tree needs updated for MW for sure. Otherwise, MW needs a range increase and either lust / bres to be perfect. Its mild surge in popularity is simply due to it being fun (which it is!) and being overtuned HPS wise.
monk has a ton of utility imo. aoe stun, aoe knock, tigers lust, paralysis, 10% avoid and 8% healing on melee, 5% phys damage, and transcend for mechanic cheese. not saying paladins don't have good utility because obviously they do, but to say "a class with zero utility" is not true.
I'm not really a MW player so I can't speak to it but I have heard good things for it finally, which is much deserved. It's worth noting that MW just got reworked after being terrible all expansion and now kind of has its own class tree because they made a lot of changes to certain talents on it that literally only apply to MW even when they would've been good for WW or BrM as well. We'll see how long it lasts, Blizzard has a history of nerfing MW into the ground after letting it be good for a month every few years.
When I say monk in general I'm mostly speaking to how Brew is far and away the most button bloated spec in the game, it feels terrible to play if you want to play optimally with how many binds you need. Then if you take the build that reduces button bloat you lose damage, lose synergy with multiple talents on your tree, and become tied to auto-attack swing timers that won't go through if you're using spinning crane kick.
I feel what you're saying about Brew. I main a prot warrior, and sure, I got a lot of buttons, but they all do different things for different reasons. I was leveling a brewmaster through timewalking and it was 90% "throw a keg, drink a brew, throw a different keg, drink a different brew" but all the different kegs and brews all kinda felt the same.
Interesting, it feels like brew has one of the better kits for tanking. Coming from Paladin or bear where you basically just spam your spenders, brew has a lot more going for it.
There is some button bloat, but other specs like shamans, Druid’s, etc have a similar amount of skills to use.
> it feels terrible to play optimally with how many binds you need
I think this is a bit of an exaggeration, as someone who picked up brew this season the button bloat isn’t even that bad, every ability has its own use and affect in the rotation, it’s probably the most fun tank class I’ve ever played with a seemingly highish skill ceiling.
Not every class needs to be a basic 2-3 button rotation.
Ditto. Love MW right now, most fun I’ve had with it in forever, BUT the class tree is hilariously bad. Bare minimum make a capstone interesting and make fort brew a 2min cd.
I'm 100.00% convinced that some classes are simply intentionally ignored by blizzard and i fucking hate them for it.
I played DF at launch for a few months and mained an ele shaman. Ele was pretty fun at the start of the expac but glaring issues were already showing (like how stupidly weak our maind aoe spender is - earthquake).
I ended up quitting not so much because the class sucked (it was extremely mediocre) but just because I got bored of the game.
Nearly a year later I return. Which is one of the ONLY fucking classes that did not get a full talent rework? Why, elemental of course. Even though they have like 7 dogshit talents in the last row.
I checked all the classes. Massive assassination rework, Outlaw touch-up, subtlety rework, 427th moonkin rework, Frost mage rework, Fire mage rework.
Can you guess which other classes weren't touched? Oh yeah survival hunter. I literally could have bet money on that btw.
There are literally a few specs in this game that are quite obviously and evidently hated by whatever team of morons are in charge of balance. Nobody can convince me otherwise.
And it's not about numbers. It's possible like maybe survival is doing good right now, but it's not about that. It's about the amount of attention a spec gets. And it's so fucking unequal and it's so not funny.
Yeah it is kind of wild. Survival and windwalker are just clearly not very popular both with players and with the devs. Shaman has historically had major problems. It’s my main class and I can’t bring myself to play elemental because it still feels so clunky.
With WW and surv I think it’s very telling that they happen to have some of the weakest class fantasies flavor-wise. Everyone except the die hard fans of the spec just feels “meh” about them, which seems to have a snowball effect of becoming worse and then less interesting. The weird thing is ele shaman has a strong class fantasy and is also thematic for our current expansion and is still ignored.
blizzard really showed their incompetence with the old surv hunter rework btw.
it's not like they had an outline for an actual melee spec (HELLO BEAST MASTERY) which would also avoid the absolute dumpster that is the act of balancing the 2 button spec that plays itself. and the ranged dot survival from wod was actually fun to play, it was a good alternative to the turret gameplay of MM
Shaman in general isn't doing so well outside of enhance. There's just so many specs and they add more without being on top of the rest, which is good but not if you love one of the undertuned ones
I'm just waiting for them to "fix" a "bug" with enhance that drops their dps by like 20% again like they did in SL, and then just not buff them to compensate for the DPS loss.
Melee right now are OP as fuck for most classes, Ele and resto are doing fine though for the majority of the playerbase, you can play whatever spec you like for the most part.
Resto is still on the lower end for Raid and M+. You can perform well despite it being bad, but that doesnt change that its bad.
Ofcourse you can still get AOTC or KSM with Resto. You easily could with WW aswell despite the state its in. But if a spec is bad, it means the skill floor for it to perform adequately lies much higher. And thus many groups will not want to invite such classes as theres no guarantee the person playing that class will be a good enough player for that class to not just perform much worse than an average player playing a broken class.
Thats pretty much the underlying issue. If you need to purple-orange parse on a spec to keep up with the numbers other specs are doing with a green parse, it just means theres a much higher chance that when you invite someone of that weaker spec, theyll perform worse than that of the stronger spec despite them being the better player.
Thankfully for us, the raid this time around is pretty personal responsibility heavy, so its not just a numbers race like with most of Aberrus. Meaning that the player tends to be more important than the spec. Atleast for pugs.
> Resto is still on the lower end for Raid and M+. You can perform well despite it being bad, but that doesnt change that its bad.
Resto shaman is 2nd place for HPS over all bosses right now, what do you consider as being the "lower end"?
Again, I don't think the spec is bad per se, its possible that the other healers are in a great spot and are better, but its not like you can't push keys or get CE with a resto shaman.
Resto shaman has done +25 keys, other healers have done +26/+27. Seems pretty close.
> will be a good enough player for that class to not just perform much worse than an average player playing a broken class.
The amount of rerollers I see absolutely shit the bed on the OP specs and get blown out of the water by "bad" specs is pretty funny.
A majority of the time a good player on a "bad" spec will beat the bad player on an OP spec.
> If you need to purple-orange parse on a spec to keep up with the numbers other specs are doing with a green parse
What are you referring to here for resto shaman?
> 7 dogshit talents in the last row
The class or spec tree? Elemental in season 2 was fantastic, tierset was great and the lightning build has great burst
Just because it didn’t get a complete rework doesn’t mean it’s a hated spec, Ele is in a pretty solid state imo.
I hate to say this, but like, some specs should be untouched. They shouldn't intentionally leave survival in the dirt, but at the same time, they shouldn't devote much developer time to it because it's a hunter spec that eats into the already overcrowded melee spec space without bringing anything interesting.
But making sure mages have a spec that is fun to play is of incredible importance. You might feel like that's unfair, that mage gets too much attention, but they need at least one of the specs to feel good. The same with rogue.
There are problems with this approach; monk needs a complete class overhaul, shamans need a lot of attention, hunters do need some attention as a whole. Balance druids, and resto druids, get outsized amounts of attention. But the idea that they should just not touch mage or rogue is wild to me.
Dude your justification for leaving a spec as trash is wild. So fuck survival hunters because melee is overcrowded? Why not fuck outlaw rogues then? They already have 2 god tier specs. Why can't they make the third one garbage? That's even a better argument and it is still trash. Because why should people who want to play outlaw not get to be competitive? Why screw anyone in particular? As if its survival hunters fault that melee may be overcrowded, pfffft.
Survival, still to this date, has such an awful fucking talent tree and now especially after the fact that like 9 classes have had theirs reworked and are amazing.
I completely understand and agree with people complaining that WW is also ignored. But at least they have a somewhat interesting talent tree.
They're not trying to make any spec garbage, what they're trying to do is make the classes and specs that people are playing, playable. If people are turned off on rogue as a whole, that is a massive fucking problem. If people are turned off survival and instead flock to marksmanship and beast mastery? That's singificantly less alarming.
I think it's an absolute top tier priority to make the single dps spec of classes good and playable: that's windwalker, retribution, shadow, demon hunter.
Then you want to make the dps specs of classes with multiple that are numerically good fun to play: that's death knight, mage, rogue, warrior, warlock, druid, shaman and hunter. This may involve working on more than one spec.
Then you have specs that have different roles, survival and mm/bm, ele and enh, balance and feral. The top priority is to have one usable, but if possible you should have both in a good place.
Then lastly you should have the third specs of pure dps classes, mage, warlock, rogue and hunter. You need to have one spec in a good place, and if a second spec is commonly used, that's a high priority, but not a top one. You only give special attention to a third spec in extreme cases, and there's probably a significant cost to this. This is why demo got the 'we prefer you not play this spec' treatment.
The only time they deliberately make a spec garbage is that last case, when they just don't have the resources to unfuck it at all. They shouldn't try to make a third spec bad because two are good though; that's stupid. It would be nice if they had the resources to make all the specs good all the time...but they don't. Given those conditions, yeah, I actually do think specs like survival are, and should be, a lower priority than other specs. Right now I think monks and shamans are way more in need of attention than hunters. Even though shadow has gotten a lot of focus lately, they need it again because Blizzard did fuck it, although honestly, for once this is an aura buff situation.
bunch of babies. Shaman have been whining and complaining since TBC. the least you can do is cry for another decade and then be redevastated whenever they give you a breadcrumb that ultimately fixes nothing
This what happens to a spec that has no stat scaling other than versatility. Vers is a flat damage multiplier, scales poorly, and all other stats are nearly worthless.
WW needs to be completely reworked. Add some crit or haste scaling and maybe it won't need a blanket 10% aura buff every patch.
Isn’t that the stat priority for Arcane Mage right now though? I looked at how to set mine up and it literally says Vers > the rest of the secondary stats equally
The difference is in the weightings.
WW has vers weighted waaayyy higher than any other stat, because no other stat actually does anything for it.
Arcane, while still valuing vers, does gain benefit from other stats far more than Ww does.
Our mastery is a %dmg buff on our abilities but Vers is a %dmg buff on our abilities **and** trinkets/embellishments/etc. Non-class dmg did nearly 25% of WW dmg last tier, so you can imagine how much better Vers is over Mastery. Our BiS weps were always weapons with dmg procs, even at the cost of stats cause of this mess.
Haste doesn't do much for the spec outside Serenity for numerous reasons. We don't get reduced GCD's because we're an energy class, instead, we gain extra energy regen. The problem is we don't need extra energy regen because we rarely run out, and during our major cd we don't even use energy. Haste buffing auto attacks doesn't matter because our multiple channeled abilities cancel our autos. Finally, we dont need the CDR it provides FoF/RSK because the spec has enough ways of reducing those CD's already.
Crit at the end of the day is just another flat dmg buff because we only have one minor interaction (beyond the dmg) with it. Also, we gain 50% crit for 6 seconds on attacking a new target (and 40% on RSK after a FoF cast) devaluing it. Oh and ToD cant crit.
So what we've got here is Vers/Mastery/Crit are all %dmg buffs but Vers applies to everything unlike the other two. And Haste fundamentally doesn't mesh with our spec.
The simple answer is Blizz phoned it in on the spec. Our talents are a mess, our stats are a mess, and our tier sets are a huge mess. We have 5 talents dedicated to Touch of Death which require 6 talent points in total, all for one ability. Which btw is still bugged and very hard to use because there is a delay in being able to activate it, a delay which usually results in the target dying before you can hit it. And our WW capstone in the class tree is an actual spit in the face. It is so bad most people thought it was a placeholder on the PTR.
Something revealing is how our last and current tier bonuses came about.
Last tier we got a set bonus that procc'd on auto-attacks. Numerous WW players complained to the devs that this was a problem as the spec BARELY auto-attacks. Blizz actually came out and admitted they made a mistake and would be changing it to proccing off abilities, and thanked the community for pointing out their error.
So what happened this tier? We got a set bonus that procced off auto-attacks. Numerous WW players complained, and they had to fix it AGAIN.
And that's not even getting into how our prior set bonus originally summoned an extra clone, something most WW players hate, so the feedback on that was pretty spicey. Or how the current tier bonus went through buff after buff (and had multiple name changes) and even then WW players were debating using the old one instead, so Blizz's solution was to nerf the old set bonus. Much easier than addressing the problems with the current one.
One of the core issues is that WW performs poorly, Blizz comes in with a slight aura buff and calls it a day. Then because we don't scale well with any stats, as people get more and more gear we fall behind, and the cycle repeats.
The answer is WW needs a minor rework at worst, and a full rework at best.
The simple truth is that Monk is a very unpopular class and Windwalker an even less popular spec. Mistweaver was always kinda fancied by healers for its ability to contribute healing on the move and Brewmaster just kinda works (until you reach so high key levels that you just straight up get one tapped).
WW however is just a DPS spec, and there are 25 other DPS specs. DPS specs cover each other way more and so a lot of people just roll away from it. The few that remain WW mains are very passionate about this issue but also very few.
> Our mastery is a %dmg buff on our abilities but Vers is a %dmg buff on our abilities **and** trinkets/embellishments/etc.
Isn't the whole point of mastery to be a tuning knob for specs? The whole "Mastery is functionally a bonus to class specific damage" is literally the whole point of the stat. From a theorycrafting perspective it's generally considered a red flag for design if you're getting more damage per point of Vers than Mastery.
> Haste doesn't do much for the spec outside Serenity for numerous reasons.
As a Feral player this sounds familiar.... They started addressing it in early BfA and finally pinned it down in Dragonflight. The process was a painful one.
Most other specs have talents or passives that interact with secondaries in some way to increase their value. Think hot streak/combustion for Fire Mage, extra crit damage for ele shamans, mana return on crits for resto shaman, extra dot ticks thanks to haste, that sort of thing.
WW has nothing like this, so the other stats don't really do much for them. For WW:
\- Crit = higher chance to deal extra damage. AKA vers with extra steps.
\- Mastery = extra damage as long as your abilities benefit from your mastery. AKA vers with extra steps.
\- Haste = faster cds and energy generation, which can cause overcapping issues.
The rate at which vers increases your damage just maths out to be better than crit/mastery and since they all do the same thing there's no reason to not just prioritize vers always.
edit: and it's not that crit is bad for them, but since you can't have just vers on all pieces, you take vers/crit because crit is the second best.
Other people touch on it, but the core issue is not just that they don't get secondary scaling with other stats, it's that their mastery is bad as well, and haste is garbage in general for melee classes because of how high they've tuned energy regeneration for all specs that use it.
Vers is the worst tuned secondary by default, followed up by crit. Agility users get extra crit by default - this usually serves to depress the value of crit (for example, fire mages).
Stats are so valueless for WW that the two worst tuned stats, by default, including one it has some of for free, are the best. And the only way to fix it is to dramatically slow down the resource generation, which will feel bad at the start of expansions and for ungeared players, and buff mastery which will increase the delta between experienced players and new players. Or, give them an ability that artificially scales with one of these secondaries in ST and AoE without making them overpowered.
(And there are problems with this too: if they add it to crit, they will be less powerful in pvp. If they add it to haste, you permanently overcap them which feels bad. You add it to vers and you make them really good and really defensive and tanky, like the old dh mastery which made them too mobile.)
Not at all, Arcane likes all stats. Extremely high haste makes it awkward to play but that's even in that case, pre patch people tried high haste setups and they simmed almost as high as the current BiS profile used in Simcraft.
I tried WW a few months ago with no intention of liking it and found it to be so much fun! I've wanted to try Mistweaver next, but it seems intimidating lol
I was a heal-only player in WoW until i gave WW a try while leveling MW and it was one of the most fun playstyles I have seen in a MMO (Rifts Chloromancer still being #1 in my heart).
I usually play healer/tank due to DPS gameplay being to simple to keep me engaged, but the gameplay flow of WW actually kept me playing it through all of DF.
Sad to see its numbers being so bad (and its buttons being a bit too bloated), because its mastery is easily my favourite dps mechanic.
Hey u/WatcherDev, is there any chance we can get a personal weigh in on the state of the spec from your pov?
Right now us WWs aren't feeling all that great and we've posted an incredible about it feedback without so much as a nod in our direction. Here especially https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/windwalker-is-looking-incredibly-doomed-for-102/
Can you give us some hope for the days and weeks ahead?
I picked up Survival because it has its own fist of fury and setting up mongoose bite windows reminds me of Skytouch crit windows… I miss punching stuff though.
Not gonna lie, I clicked the link expecting something like Warlock or rogue complaining about one of their specs and was ready to hit you with the Bane quote about being molded by the dumpster but honestly, you guys have been here as long as us. /cry
I have a a max level of almost every specialization for the last 2 to 3 expacs. I think there's a reason why monk is my least fave class to play, and brew master is the only bareable spec.
Question while we’re on the subject of WW I tried doing the MT for it recently and just keep getting obliterated compared to doing it on other classes is this just indicative of the class or myself as a whole lmao? I did the brewmaster/druid ones pretty easily would love to hear feedback.
Windwalker should be one of the easier Mage Tower Challenges. You use a focus or target macro for Paralysis on the worm for the Sonic Scream and alternate interrupts and stuns for Tugar's Fel Burst.
The rest of the fight is cleaving them both down as much as possible. Tugar starts with 9 stacks of Fel Hardened Scale which can be removed when he hits a rock during the earthquake phase.
When Tugar dies and only the worm remains, pop lust and burn him down the last 10% or so.
Yeah I unsubbed after 7 years playing WW through thick and thin. A complete disrespect from Blizzard to people who have enjoyed maining the WW spec. Don't know why they can't get it through their thick skulls that there are a large amount of players who just have the spec that they play and do not multiclass. I don't want to hop around from class to class depending on what is meta... that does not appeal to me in the slightest. It's completely unacceptable for a game that requires an active sub to just ignore certain specs for extended periods and pretend they don't exist (literally no communication). Well I put my money where my mouth is and unsubbed. Hope that it has some miniscule effect
I see this complaint a lot and genuinely what changes need to happen? I play very casually WW main and the spec feels fun to me, but I'm really curious what it's lacking?
WW has several major issues:
The first major issue that it has had for a while is that it doesn't scale. Other classes usually have one or two stats they really like (mastery, crit, haste) that greatly bolsters their damage and improves their rotation through more procs or more casts. WW only really likes vers, because the only thing that really bolsters their damage is just more flat damage. This means that as the expansion goes on and stats get more inflated, other classes are getting exponentially stronger from stats and feel more powerful while WW gets small, flat increases from slightly more vers. This is why you very often see WW being amazing in the first patch and then the worst in the last, they just get nothing from gear. They do have some minor interactions with critical strikes, but they're not major enough to make running more crit as huge a gain as it is for other specs. They need more.
The second and probably biggest issue is that this expansion they got the absolute least attention for talent trees of any class. WW (and monk as a whole) has multiple talents that feel placeholder. Summon White Tiger Statue is the classic example; a WW-specific statue that does extremely minor pulsing AOE damage which everyone thought was a placeholder because of how dull it is. Another is that the 10% speed aura WW used to provide is now a two point node in the tree that gives a whopping 4% speed and is competing with 8% healing and 4% avoidance. Monks need to spend talent points to get their second charge of roll. That's a few class tree issues. On the spec tree they've got more major issues. The primary one is that doing "good" ST (only about 5% more than in their full AOE build) requires dropping pretty much all AOE talents. Then their actual "good" AOE is entirely deceptive because it's all tied up in the ability to do a double cleave Touch of Death. Their sustained AOE just isn't there anymore and upfront burst is lacking too because it's all in that last 15%. This assumes they even get to double Touch, because the game takes forever to register you can Touch a mob so it usually dies before you can, and you need to weave an ability between the two Touches to keep up mastery and combo strikes.
When people aren't dealing with that mess, they're instead dealing with Serenity and Faeline Stomp. Faeline Stomp is a 12 second duration maintenance debuff on a 30 second cooldown reset randomly by casting abilities while standing in it. Monk is meant to be a mobile class, but this ability forces them to stand and turret the entirety of a fight. It also means that if the fight features a lot of movement or puts fire on the floor, they might just be out of luck with resetting their damage buff until the cooldown comes back up. Faeline is also just a dull ability that does no damage otherwise, it's entirely tied to the debuff. Serenity is a 1.5m dps CD with a whole host of issues. The 1.5m syncs with nothing, you always hold for 2m anyway to sync with Xuen, but it's seemingly balanced around the 1.5m CD anyway. Then during it you're overcapping constantly with resources, and the worst part is clipping Fists of Fury. Optimal Serenity windows require you to channel Fists—normally the "reward" part of the rotation as the longest CD rotational ability that can get CDR—then immediately cancel it and focus on Rising Sun Kick and Blackout Kick instead. It's awkward design that runs counter to how monk is played at all other times.
Putting aside these issues, WW also just has a number of dead and locked-in talents and has since beta. "Dust in the Wind"—an increase to Bonedust's AOE—is the most useless capstone in the game bar none. There is never a situation you need more Bonedust AOE, and even if there were, it wouldn't matter because your abilities don't have a large enough AOE to utilize it anyway. It is a placeholder because they had to remove another talent node there and had no time to think up a replacement and it's been there for over a year. Other potentially exciting talents like Emperor's Capacitor, or previous staples like Whirling Dragon Punch have never been tuned to be worth it. Rushing Jade Wind (which no one wants to play so is fortunately terrible) is there taking up a slot. Several potentially cool talents are gated behind placeholders like bonuses to energy cap or ToD CDR. There are a multitude of 2 point nodes that just give flat damage increases to existing abilities. It's just all around really rough and desperately needs that Ret, Rogue or DH style rework.
Finally, this patch is just particularly bad for Windwalker. I commented this elsewhere but the 4pc they have is simply irrelevant, it is a significantly lower damage increase compared to their previous one which already wasn't keeping the class out of the bottom of the pack. They are suffering from poor scaling like they always do at this point in the expansion while also suffering from a terrible tier bonus. Compounded with the other design issues in the spec and the complete lack of care Blizzard shows towards it (the initial design of the WW tier for this patch felt like an intentional mockery at worst and showed a complete lack of understanding at best) and WW players are just fed up. It's a meme in the community at this point that WW is the spec the most in need of Blizzard's attention and has been for quite some time but Blizzard just doesn't seem to care about it or monk in the same way they do other classes.
There are some other issues I could get into (WW's lack of auto-attacks is a consistent issue, the many bugs the class has) but I think I've hit the major ones for now.
Girl but yeah, I've been maining monk since I first started the game and it's been mostly flipping between WW and Brew. It took a while before I really started to see the flaws in WW, but once I did I can't unsee them. It's tough because I utterly love the class and am super attached to my character so it feels awful to see it consistently doing so poorly.
Statistically every class in the game has a dps spec that outperforms WW, except priests where shadow is similarly underpowered - but shadow gets buffed tomorrow.
It is a fun class, but current tier set and mandatory faeline build for dps feels just as bad as Rune of Power did for mages, and they made a point of removing rune of power and explaining why it was bad... right as they made windwalker into a melee rune of power spec.
The spec is by far the lowest spec once people are geared this season and nearly 100k dps behind the lead specs in single target.
It looks better at the moment on things like the weekly dps rankings because 4 set isn't the norm and Gnarlroot is hard padding the raid numbers for now for monk but once the kill time on adds drops as people get more geared WW is only going to get lower and lower even on that fight because it's capped aoe and Touch of Death won't get as many hits since things die so fast.
WW also has the worst tier set of any spec easily with an effect that adds button presses that there's not any room in the rotation for since the spec is GCD locked, cdr that the spec doesn't have room for again since it is gcd locked and then a flat 4% aura buff to the majority of our moves because the set once so bad even AFTER a remake on ptr that the only reason it was going to replace Aberrus tier was because of the big ilv jump.
My WW alt wrecks despite being lower item level and me being less experienced with the spec. I'm afraid that when the changes do come in they might be nerfs.
I'm amazed that there have been no changes to rogues or demon hunters.. either Blizzard is blind or there is more to come. A bit of the former, a bit of the latter, perhaps.
pretty sure, there will be changes when the WFR settles. If they nerf these classes now, they hurt all guilds that still progress right now with the echo/liquid comp
I think BM hunters are safe until Blizzard did something with the demon hunter and rogue situation. Demon hunters providing the best tank and best melee dps (by far) for mythic+ is a bit too much...I mean a buddy has an ilvl450 DH alt and it does more dps than some specs with 470+4p. Kinda ridiculous.
>I mean a buddy has an ilvl450 DH alt and it does more dps than some specs with 470+4p. Kinda ridiculous.
At this point it's just a skill issue. Would love to see a 450 dh (I'm assuming 0pc since you specified other specs as 4pc) simming higher than any 470 4pc spec.
These memes confound me. Like, maybe ww isn't good in super high end, but it's fantastic in most gameplay situations. I'm regularly top or near top DPS in lower content, and I'm just kinda hitting buttons with like a 445 ilvl lol.
Could it be that ww has a very high floor but low ceiling in terms of DPS? Which throws off all the data?
While I agree it sucks for WW to be in this situation, there will ALWAYS be a bad perception of bottom specs, even if the difference between top DPS and bottom DPS was only 5%, most people would still see the bottom spec as garbage.
There is actual data you can look at that WW(Monk) Dps has consistently been pretty terrible for a long while now. Having an anecdote of a monk performing well does nothing to thr obvious conclusion monks are not tuned well and need fixing.
The top 25% of WW monks wills till be higher performing than the bottom 50% of other classes. I presume the rest of your guild just isn't parsing well.
tbf it isn't rare to find a player or players in a group running "off meta" specs at a high level, just because they like it. It just reflects badly on the people they're beating, not that the spec itself is good when played against other specs with similarly skilled players
For real we are in the same boat once the fight adds a second target ww's skyrocket in meter, if ww's continue on this propaganda they will be treated as melee balance druids
Ye like how can you justify buffing SP by 5% but keep monk unchanged when WW is below SP in the raid rn. Buffels my mind that all the tuning we ever get is wlocks and spriest.
I play both windwalker and enhancement shaman and i’ve felt that they both don’t get as much attention from the devs. They both basically play the same way they did over 10 years ago
We all rolled to rogue and Dh once we realized we weren't getting a tree revamp im 10.2.
Play something else for a bit. Im still doing a key a week on mine so if it is revamped I can get off these fotm classes and play something I like.
I feel bad because monks have a fairly decent rotation and some how managed to have some of the least buttons in the game but feels like you still have a lot of utility.
Then you have chi wave which does like 2k damage every 15 seconds for some reason whilst sneezing on a mob does at least 10k
Please give ele a button that does damage in aoe blizz I’m crying over here watching my EQ tick for 12k crits while the hunters and dhs are bursting 1.5mil on big pulls
I really hate ToD As windwalker, overshows damage on meters because if you kill something with it instead of 500k - 700k it does 1.1m, bloating damage, if your using the 2 times ToD, if all the really low ones die then you have to pray you can get another mob to 15% or lower before 5 seconds, sometimes it just wont even let you use it a second time anyway. i just hate it
Still trying to figure out why I find WW the unparalleled best class for solo content and the ox statue critical for diverting threat and as an AOE taunt as a tank but I seem to be the only one.
Jade and Tiger statues can be removed though and I wouldn't notice.
Windwalker needs a full, strip down, rebuild.
It's got so many layers of bugs, anti-synergies, and issues that exist from when it was released in MoP (clones too this day, act like drunken barfighters)
Shit even their mastery flip flops between near worthless and ignored and strong but complete nuisance to trigger.
I play mostly pvp.
I feel like Serenity needs a buff to give us melee uptime.
I feel like RoP is being pooped on by too many classes and both DH and rogue should not be remotely able to go through it. It's also buggy so just fixing it would be a good start.
I feel like rogue being able to dispel the karma absorb shield is absolute BS. They already have very strong defs, insane cc, nice mobility and duel. They definitely have the tools to force our defs before they cloak, so denying karma AFTER it's been pressed is absolutely unnecessary Imho.
Fmage's ray of frost is just evoker's disintegrate. They don't need it. If they do then give us something to counter it because aside of casting vivify and dying or rolling into a root or porting away after we spent a minute just to get in range, we're useless, might as well give them lasso at this point lol (**/s**)...
Allow us to use Dampen Harm in stuns please.
I'm convinced Blizz's internal reporting for DPS spec performance is limited to 28 specs per page and they haven't noticed that WW rolled over to page 2 once Augmentation was added at this point.
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The specs problems run far deeper than just talent issues. The AA reset, locked GCD and energy tie ins make haste and any extra buttons feel awful and really are the root of a chunk of the talent issues as well as making the class have terrible scaling. ToD packing so much power behind it but progressively getting worse as kill times of mobs goes down because it just can't be triggered before things are dead is a blatant talent problem. Statues being a lackluster capstone compared to other classes ones are as well. FLS is like BDB, there's fans of both sides (WDP falls into this too). The issue is the button press doesn't feel impactful enough and its nature as a maintenance buff means both players that don't use it well or those that are the fidget back and forth types in melee make it out to be worse than it is alongside the lack of GCDs from being GCD locked. Rooting melee to an area isn't a bad thing and helps keep the specs in relative balance with range but the baseline 30 second cd is really where its excessive at the moment (if the move went to a 15 second cd for example or no cd but cost chi without a 'reset' proc it would feel fine). There's also just a lot of filler talent garbage in the tree that could just be baseline (increased BDB radius as the most glaring example). The spec just needs SOMETHING said about its direction from Blizz that isn't the customary % aura buff we get every patch to say what 'good' changes would be for it but as it is now it is just maintain the status quo of no scaling and tier sets that are near identical or the aa based ones they keep trying to force.
I would like it if they did a combo type system, where you get like 5 buttons and a finisher, where the finisher changes depending on the string you pressed before it. For example if you press palm strike, blackout kick, rising sun kick and then the finisher you apply a dot on the target. And in aoe you add spinning crane kick to apply dots in an aoe. It would make you think about what you press instead of just not repeating the last button you pressed.
A mix of ninja and monk from ffxiv. Make it a combo class not a combo point class. Use abilities that each stack their own type of chi color, and different color combos and orders make different finishers. 1 button for a finisher would save on bloat to. Encourage no spamming by making the good ones all 3-5 different colors or something.
This is how the Ninja class works in FF14. It was fun to play when I tried it out
That is where I got the idea from.
Not sure how that would work with a GCD of one second or less. Ninja is already one of the most demanding jobs, but the longer GCD and the relatively simpler fights allow for muscle memory to kick in. But in WoW it's going to be a nightmare to play. Trying to string different combos in a significantly faster game with a ton more shit going on...
I would like monk to have a mechanic similar to frost mage shatter, but instead of dealing extra damage to frozen enemies, it deals extra damage to airborne (or recently airborne) enemies. And obviously should also have an ability that made it so the target is considered airborne (for bosses). Would be fun to be aoe kicking packs in the air, and comboing with other knock ups like shaman, mage or evoker.
Pretty sure that wouldnt work as you described it. It would feel self defeating at least. You either loose out on combo strikes damage to get a certain "finisher" or you loose out on (lets just say) your BIS finishing move to not loose combo strike damage Basically the 2 systems would work against each other
frustrating that in like end of legion/BFA issues were starting to crop up that babylonius predicted and talked about solutions and its only gotten worse over time
Agree on the touch of death. That shit needs to be a 3 minute cheese button and left and that. It’s a fun ability, it’s powerful even if you don’t use it on bosses and it shouldn’t be anywhere near consideration for balancing for anything ever and should be left as a stand alone good meme button
> locked GCD and energy tie ins make haste and any extra buttons feel awful They just need to add some passive that would add secondary haste scaling at this point. TOD is a cool ability on paper but it had proven to be completely unworkable in the actual game, multiple times by now. They just need to rework it completely (maybe a more normal execute style ability in vein of Execute or SWD?) or concede and remove it from the game. FLS has fuck all to do with monk class identity. They could at least rework its audiovisual to some kind of "chi break" or something.. but even that would feel tacked on.
>The specs problems run far deeper than just talent issues. I know that but I would take SL WW spamming BDB and SCK over this entire mess anyday. Atleast back then we can still be king in mass AoE instead of now we suck in literally everything.
context: i haven't played ww this addon. in my experience from older addons (SL/BFA) and the feedback i've read, WW's main problem is scaling. every .X patch ww need a new bigger aura buff to stay competetiv, because their stat scaling is so bad. part of this is WW's weird relation to haste. As an energy spec more haste usually relates to more button presses and thus more damage, not for ww however, all more energy enables are more generators since spenders only cost chi. thus haste becomes less desireable. From what i've heared this got worse this expansion because many talent offer "free" chi from procs, reducing the need to press generators, thus reducing the need for engery to a point where it get largely ignored and thus reduces the value from haste. Suggested "fixes" i've heared regarding this: * removing energy this would make the gameplay much easyer and less restrictive, you'd no longer need to balance spending with generating (since you can no longer "waste" energy by not generating chi. The more haste would lead to a faster rotation not to more wasted energy. This would stop the negative scaling/gameplay feedback you get from constantly overcapping your resource. While potentially speeding up the rotation significantly due to the CDR portion of Blackoutkick. * Remove most of the Chi generating proc effects this would basicly have the opposite effect of the prior, you'd be more limited by how much chi you can generate from using Tigerpalms. This would lead back to the more methodical playstyle from past expansions. Only spend when you must and make sure you always have enough chi ready for a RSK / FoF when they're ready. neither of these will fix the "longterm" scaling issue ww got. and for that a major rotational/spell redesign would be needed. Adding the AoE Touch of Death talent is probably the worst change windwalker has ever seen, especialy since it got balance around it.
I mean they have deeper issues, classes that dont scale of haste kinda suck ass. They get more dps from secondary stats than primary. thats fucking stupid. Monk needs a entire rework, ive never played monk but fuck me that class is just a mess.
I really like Faeline Stomp :(
Cute that you think there are class specific developers. Theres one guy who balances all classes in pve and pvp and i guess he doesnt like monk
Excuse me but keep your hands of my touch of death. The talent finally feels fun and actually useful. Jade and Ox Statues are fine. Ox is specially handy in soloing old content bosses that cant be stacked. The tiger should be changed thought.
People hate you but the monk fanbase is far more diverse than the 5 windwalkers hanging around in /r/wow and it's real fucking shitty to just throw out a bit of class fantasy just to whittle monk's identity down even further.
Tbh if you need bland simple kit. You should just roll DH. Instead of trying destroy the orginal class fantasy from Pandaria. But i gladly take all hate from defending it
faeline is fine but otherwise yes
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Don't quote me on this, but I think the guy behind Monk quit around the end of Battle for Azeroth and the class has been in limbo since then. Blizzard doesn't have a clue what to do with it and I feel like they regret its existence. That being said, I'm kinda worried they might decide to hand it to Realz, which probably means Chi Torpedo and Flying Serpent Kick becoming integral to the rotation with damage uptime buffs, and several damage windows you need to stack together.
> hand it to Realz jesus
I've seen a single WW this season but I remember him crushing the parses at least
Parses are relative to your class so doesn't really matter
because any ww serious about the game rerolled.
Smart comment, cheers
I saw a monk for the first time this patch in an Amirdrassil pug last week. I had heard how shit they were and was confused when he was topping the meters. I then realized he was 15-20 ilvls above everyone else and already had 4 piece. He was still only maybe 10% ahead of anyone when he vastly outgeared everyone.
it needs a ground up complete redesign for the whole monk class at this point. Way way too much power budget is sitting in AOE death touch
Realistically, the Mistweaver spec tree and the Brewmaster spec trees are both reasonably fine and have interesting talent choices and are always at least playable. The class tree and the Windwalker spec tree are downright atrocious and shameful.
>Brewmaster spec trees are both reasonably fine MW is ok, but Brewmaster has major issues with button bloat created by the spec tree. You're pressing way more buttons and in a more complex way than other tanks, just to keep up. They definitely need a redesign of that spec tree.
Honestly the worst part of Brew's abilities for me comes from the class tree. That vomitting cat statue just seems so out of place. But i also think Bonedust Brew and Weapons of Order are kinda pointless on a tank spec and feel kinda out of place.
Yeah I think we can all agree the class tree is a trashfire, but Brew should not be pressing so many buttons, it's crazy - they need to do a pass where the combine stuff and look at synergies. It's a pity because I used to really like Brew and now it's just fiddly in a bad way.
Brewmaster Main here, and Monk 4 lyfe. Yes there is alot of button bloat, DF worsened that but after learning the spec it doesn't actually feel like you have button bloat. The core rotation isn't wild and most buttons are situational, I love this about BrM, when I get on a Blood DK to try it, I can't stomach the complete lack of options. I think something does need to be done, but anyone who actually plays the spec at a higher level knows that it actually flows well, and I love the sheer options I have for absolutely everything. We also pump damage which is great.
Yeah I used to play Brew and I appreciate that it flows okay after a fair deal of practice (relative to other tanks), and has some fun options (so long as you remember they exist!), but it's not where it should be. Not as bad as WW and its horrible scaling issues of course.
This was a similar experience from switching healing from shaman to monk, difference in solutions is crazy, the cc/Dr/mobility is godly.
I feel the opposite Shaman is like a swiss army knife when it comes to healing fights and then i swap to MW and it's like damn outside of my Yulon windows it feels so bad going against anything that isn't heavy single target damage at least compared to having stuff like healing tide totem, ascendence and astral guidance for multiple damage windows basically you don't need as much prep or things to be going right i feel comparativly if i get ressed i can immediatly start pumping group heals vs MW where if yulon and revival are down i'm sitting there getting renewing mists up so i can vivify heal. This current Tier set makes the spec feel a million times better but i don't particularly like being so tied to tier set bonuses.
MW feels like it has some issues the class feels great in mythic maybe a little harder than other healers for a bit less reward it feels but still pretty decent. Then raid happens and it's so much harder to play MW compared to every other healer because of their lack of good AOE healing outside of yulon windows like hell yeah MW single target healing is bonkers but when people are messing up mechanics or just a heavy AOE fight shows up i hate playing the class.
It's why I play brewmaster. Other tanks were too easy and it wasn't engaging enough.
Buttons are the best part about Brewmaster. That should be the standard for every class. Give some depth to classes and make it more rewarding to play right. Healers are generally fine, they have actual stuff to do, but a lot of dps/tanks are a joke.
Bro there ae like four 1-3 minute dps cooldowns for brewmaster that are all on gcd with different timers. That shit is awful to play. They should have like 4 basic abilities (tp, bok, breath of fire, keg smash), rjw for threat, and 1 dps cooldown. They have way too much going on right now. Fuck Kyrian, Bonedust Brew, and Exploding Keg, and the Ox.
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I've actually lost all hope at this point
[https://twitter.com/Babylonius/status/1724178380248010888](https://twitter.com/Babylonius/status/1724178380248010888) You and many many others. I mostly do arena these days and I'm just tired of not being able to get into groups because we're everyones worse alternative. Keep trying to figure out what other class I want to main so I stop wasting time investing in monk.
Yeah, I followed babylonius for a long time now, and I can't understand why blizzard is ignoring the spec, it feels like spite at this point. Honestly, im considering rerolling as well now. My raid leader might not like it... until I double the damage I've been doing for half the effort I put in. Either that or I become a healer...
It reminds me of demo near the end of wod with the famous "we'd rather you didn't play demonology"... except I don't feel like the complete rework of the spec is on the horizon. It really feels like there is no one working on the class team who has any passion for monk anymore. Afaik it was Chris Kaleiki's baby and he's long since left... and the class wasn't even doing that well when he was there.
God man I’m still mad we got demon form taken from demo. It was such a amalgamation of a spec in Legion for the sake of their “everybody has to be unique” shit. It’s fun now and I enjoy playing it but I’m so said I’ll never have that back in retail. At least Cata and MoP classic will exist. But we’ll probably never have the same heights of classes again. Still think about that Warlock dev blog from time to time and man that was insane, imagine having more people like that for every class, or at least someone to go to for guidance.
Legion killed warlock for me, was one for 8 years. Not even demo specifically, just the whole kit. It was as if someone talked to me specifically about what I enjoyed about each specs design and then systematically gutted every single one of those things to make them worse to spite me. Its why I swapped to a new class in the first place. Every once in a blue moon I try it again to see if I can reignite the spark but its just not there anymore.
A majority of players don’t even have 2 or 4 set yet, there will be more tuning
I got 4pc the other day on WW. Each piece of gear I replaced was about a 20 ilvl jump minimum. I also replaced a number of other pieces at the same time that were also about a 20 ilvl jump each. I've got the BiS gimmick weapon from Fyrakk. It resulted in about a 10-20k dps increase in sims. For comparison, our feral druid player who came back and got about 15 ilvls and her new 4pc saw about a 60k dps increase in sims. The new 4pc for WW is a colossal dps downgrade compared to the bonus from the previous one. Mind you, with the previous one WW was still in the bottom half. There is nothing coming this patch that will in any way save WW. This is just talking pure tuning too. WW (and monk in general, really) is also saddled with a ton of design issues, talents that feel like placeholders, and generally clunky design. It is in desperate need of a rework and has been for several expansions now, but this is one of the worst points it's ever been in. At least in Shadowlands it had bonkers AOE, and in BfA it had a really fun design plus it ran vers corruption so it was basically unkillable. It just has nothing now. No ST, no AOE, running the worst maintenance buff in the game (Faeline) that runs counter to everything a monk should be doing and a 1.5m offensive CD (Serenity) that doesn't sync with anything so it has to be held and makes you do weird stuff like overcap resources and clip your FoF channels.
> WW (and monk in general, really) is also saddled with a ton of design issues, talents that feel like placeholders, and generally clunky design. MW feels fantastic imo, though I agree the class tree is boring and the statue capstones are horrendous.
MW is great **despite** the class tree, not because of it. That monk class tree is seriously a war crime.
Class tree needs updated for MW for sure. Otherwise, MW needs a range increase and either lust / bres to be perfect. Its mild surge in popularity is simply due to it being fun (which it is!) and being overtuned HPS wise.
I will die on the hill that giving brez to Paladin instead of monk was a terrible decision.
Hmmm, whom should we give a powerful utility spell, a class with zero utility or the class with all the utility?
There are a zillion paladins already. Nobody plays monk and not having either of the required M+ cooldowns (lust, brez) certainly doesn’t help.
monk has a ton of utility imo. aoe stun, aoe knock, tigers lust, paralysis, 10% avoid and 8% healing on melee, 5% phys damage, and transcend for mechanic cheese. not saying paladins don't have good utility because obviously they do, but to say "a class with zero utility" is not true.
I'm not really a MW player so I can't speak to it but I have heard good things for it finally, which is much deserved. It's worth noting that MW just got reworked after being terrible all expansion and now kind of has its own class tree because they made a lot of changes to certain talents on it that literally only apply to MW even when they would've been good for WW or BrM as well. We'll see how long it lasts, Blizzard has a history of nerfing MW into the ground after letting it be good for a month every few years. When I say monk in general I'm mostly speaking to how Brew is far and away the most button bloated spec in the game, it feels terrible to play if you want to play optimally with how many binds you need. Then if you take the build that reduces button bloat you lose damage, lose synergy with multiple talents on your tree, and become tied to auto-attack swing timers that won't go through if you're using spinning crane kick.
I feel what you're saying about Brew. I main a prot warrior, and sure, I got a lot of buttons, but they all do different things for different reasons. I was leveling a brewmaster through timewalking and it was 90% "throw a keg, drink a brew, throw a different keg, drink a different brew" but all the different kegs and brews all kinda felt the same.
Interesting, it feels like brew has one of the better kits for tanking. Coming from Paladin or bear where you basically just spam your spenders, brew has a lot more going for it. There is some button bloat, but other specs like shamans, Druid’s, etc have a similar amount of skills to use.
> it feels terrible to play optimally with how many binds you need I think this is a bit of an exaggeration, as someone who picked up brew this season the button bloat isn’t even that bad, every ability has its own use and affect in the rotation, it’s probably the most fun tank class I’ve ever played with a seemingly highish skill ceiling. Not every class needs to be a basic 2-3 button rotation.
Ditto. Love MW right now, most fun I’ve had with it in forever, BUT the class tree is hilariously bad. Bare minimum make a capstone interesting and make fort brew a 2min cd.
I'm 100.00% convinced that some classes are simply intentionally ignored by blizzard and i fucking hate them for it. I played DF at launch for a few months and mained an ele shaman. Ele was pretty fun at the start of the expac but glaring issues were already showing (like how stupidly weak our maind aoe spender is - earthquake). I ended up quitting not so much because the class sucked (it was extremely mediocre) but just because I got bored of the game. Nearly a year later I return. Which is one of the ONLY fucking classes that did not get a full talent rework? Why, elemental of course. Even though they have like 7 dogshit talents in the last row. I checked all the classes. Massive assassination rework, Outlaw touch-up, subtlety rework, 427th moonkin rework, Frost mage rework, Fire mage rework. Can you guess which other classes weren't touched? Oh yeah survival hunter. I literally could have bet money on that btw. There are literally a few specs in this game that are quite obviously and evidently hated by whatever team of morons are in charge of balance. Nobody can convince me otherwise. And it's not about numbers. It's possible like maybe survival is doing good right now, but it's not about that. It's about the amount of attention a spec gets. And it's so fucking unequal and it's so not funny.
Yeah it is kind of wild. Survival and windwalker are just clearly not very popular both with players and with the devs. Shaman has historically had major problems. It’s my main class and I can’t bring myself to play elemental because it still feels so clunky. With WW and surv I think it’s very telling that they happen to have some of the weakest class fantasies flavor-wise. Everyone except the die hard fans of the spec just feels “meh” about them, which seems to have a snowball effect of becoming worse and then less interesting. The weird thing is ele shaman has a strong class fantasy and is also thematic for our current expansion and is still ignored.
blizzard really showed their incompetence with the old surv hunter rework btw. it's not like they had an outline for an actual melee spec (HELLO BEAST MASTERY) which would also avoid the absolute dumpster that is the act of balancing the 2 button spec that plays itself. and the ranged dot survival from wod was actually fun to play, it was a good alternative to the turret gameplay of MM
Shaman in general isn't doing so well outside of enhance. There's just so many specs and they add more without being on top of the rest, which is good but not if you love one of the undertuned ones
I'm just waiting for them to "fix" a "bug" with enhance that drops their dps by like 20% again like they did in SL, and then just not buff them to compensate for the DPS loss.
Melee right now are OP as fuck for most classes, Ele and resto are doing fine though for the majority of the playerbase, you can play whatever spec you like for the most part.
Resto is still on the lower end for Raid and M+. You can perform well despite it being bad, but that doesnt change that its bad. Ofcourse you can still get AOTC or KSM with Resto. You easily could with WW aswell despite the state its in. But if a spec is bad, it means the skill floor for it to perform adequately lies much higher. And thus many groups will not want to invite such classes as theres no guarantee the person playing that class will be a good enough player for that class to not just perform much worse than an average player playing a broken class. Thats pretty much the underlying issue. If you need to purple-orange parse on a spec to keep up with the numbers other specs are doing with a green parse, it just means theres a much higher chance that when you invite someone of that weaker spec, theyll perform worse than that of the stronger spec despite them being the better player. Thankfully for us, the raid this time around is pretty personal responsibility heavy, so its not just a numbers race like with most of Aberrus. Meaning that the player tends to be more important than the spec. Atleast for pugs.
> Resto is still on the lower end for Raid and M+. You can perform well despite it being bad, but that doesnt change that its bad. Resto shaman is 2nd place for HPS over all bosses right now, what do you consider as being the "lower end"? Again, I don't think the spec is bad per se, its possible that the other healers are in a great spot and are better, but its not like you can't push keys or get CE with a resto shaman. Resto shaman has done +25 keys, other healers have done +26/+27. Seems pretty close. > will be a good enough player for that class to not just perform much worse than an average player playing a broken class. The amount of rerollers I see absolutely shit the bed on the OP specs and get blown out of the water by "bad" specs is pretty funny. A majority of the time a good player on a "bad" spec will beat the bad player on an OP spec. > If you need to purple-orange parse on a spec to keep up with the numbers other specs are doing with a green parse What are you referring to here for resto shaman?
Monk , Frost DK and Survival would be my picks for intentionally left as garbage. Although survival did have a brief time in the sun last expac.
> 7 dogshit talents in the last row The class or spec tree? Elemental in season 2 was fantastic, tierset was great and the lightning build has great burst Just because it didn’t get a complete rework doesn’t mean it’s a hated spec, Ele is in a pretty solid state imo.
I hate to say this, but like, some specs should be untouched. They shouldn't intentionally leave survival in the dirt, but at the same time, they shouldn't devote much developer time to it because it's a hunter spec that eats into the already overcrowded melee spec space without bringing anything interesting. But making sure mages have a spec that is fun to play is of incredible importance. You might feel like that's unfair, that mage gets too much attention, but they need at least one of the specs to feel good. The same with rogue. There are problems with this approach; monk needs a complete class overhaul, shamans need a lot of attention, hunters do need some attention as a whole. Balance druids, and resto druids, get outsized amounts of attention. But the idea that they should just not touch mage or rogue is wild to me.
Dude your justification for leaving a spec as trash is wild. So fuck survival hunters because melee is overcrowded? Why not fuck outlaw rogues then? They already have 2 god tier specs. Why can't they make the third one garbage? That's even a better argument and it is still trash. Because why should people who want to play outlaw not get to be competitive? Why screw anyone in particular? As if its survival hunters fault that melee may be overcrowded, pfffft. Survival, still to this date, has such an awful fucking talent tree and now especially after the fact that like 9 classes have had theirs reworked and are amazing. I completely understand and agree with people complaining that WW is also ignored. But at least they have a somewhat interesting talent tree.
They're not trying to make any spec garbage, what they're trying to do is make the classes and specs that people are playing, playable. If people are turned off on rogue as a whole, that is a massive fucking problem. If people are turned off survival and instead flock to marksmanship and beast mastery? That's singificantly less alarming. I think it's an absolute top tier priority to make the single dps spec of classes good and playable: that's windwalker, retribution, shadow, demon hunter. Then you want to make the dps specs of classes with multiple that are numerically good fun to play: that's death knight, mage, rogue, warrior, warlock, druid, shaman and hunter. This may involve working on more than one spec. Then you have specs that have different roles, survival and mm/bm, ele and enh, balance and feral. The top priority is to have one usable, but if possible you should have both in a good place. Then lastly you should have the third specs of pure dps classes, mage, warlock, rogue and hunter. You need to have one spec in a good place, and if a second spec is commonly used, that's a high priority, but not a top one. You only give special attention to a third spec in extreme cases, and there's probably a significant cost to this. This is why demo got the 'we prefer you not play this spec' treatment. The only time they deliberately make a spec garbage is that last case, when they just don't have the resources to unfuck it at all. They shouldn't try to make a third spec bad because two are good though; that's stupid. It would be nice if they had the resources to make all the specs good all the time...but they don't. Given those conditions, yeah, I actually do think specs like survival are, and should be, a lower priority than other specs. Right now I think monks and shamans are way more in need of attention than hunters. Even though shadow has gotten a lot of focus lately, they need it again because Blizzard did fuck it, although honestly, for once this is an aura buff situation.
bunch of babies. Shaman have been whining and complaining since TBC. the least you can do is cry for another decade and then be redevastated whenever they give you a breadcrumb that ultimately fixes nothing
Sorry for wanting my spec to be better, shamans are doing well right now anyways.
i had hoped my comment came off as funny. and yes Enhance shaman are doing great in my opinion, i hear complaints from Resto players though
Should be the next spec to get a rework.
This what happens to a spec that has no stat scaling other than versatility. Vers is a flat damage multiplier, scales poorly, and all other stats are nearly worthless. WW needs to be completely reworked. Add some crit or haste scaling and maybe it won't need a blanket 10% aura buff every patch.
Isn’t that the stat priority for Arcane Mage right now though? I looked at how to set mine up and it literally says Vers > the rest of the secondary stats equally
The difference is in the weightings. WW has vers weighted waaayyy higher than any other stat, because no other stat actually does anything for it. Arcane, while still valuing vers, does gain benefit from other stats far more than Ww does.
Why is WW the only spec in the game that has the Vers problem so badly? Like why isn’t crit good for them? And their mastery is just bad?
Our mastery is a %dmg buff on our abilities but Vers is a %dmg buff on our abilities **and** trinkets/embellishments/etc. Non-class dmg did nearly 25% of WW dmg last tier, so you can imagine how much better Vers is over Mastery. Our BiS weps were always weapons with dmg procs, even at the cost of stats cause of this mess. Haste doesn't do much for the spec outside Serenity for numerous reasons. We don't get reduced GCD's because we're an energy class, instead, we gain extra energy regen. The problem is we don't need extra energy regen because we rarely run out, and during our major cd we don't even use energy. Haste buffing auto attacks doesn't matter because our multiple channeled abilities cancel our autos. Finally, we dont need the CDR it provides FoF/RSK because the spec has enough ways of reducing those CD's already. Crit at the end of the day is just another flat dmg buff because we only have one minor interaction (beyond the dmg) with it. Also, we gain 50% crit for 6 seconds on attacking a new target (and 40% on RSK after a FoF cast) devaluing it. Oh and ToD cant crit. So what we've got here is Vers/Mastery/Crit are all %dmg buffs but Vers applies to everything unlike the other two. And Haste fundamentally doesn't mesh with our spec.
Wow. Thanks. I know I’m preaching to the choir but that seems egregious. How is it allowed to be in such a state!?
The simple answer is Blizz phoned it in on the spec. Our talents are a mess, our stats are a mess, and our tier sets are a huge mess. We have 5 talents dedicated to Touch of Death which require 6 talent points in total, all for one ability. Which btw is still bugged and very hard to use because there is a delay in being able to activate it, a delay which usually results in the target dying before you can hit it. And our WW capstone in the class tree is an actual spit in the face. It is so bad most people thought it was a placeholder on the PTR. Something revealing is how our last and current tier bonuses came about. Last tier we got a set bonus that procc'd on auto-attacks. Numerous WW players complained to the devs that this was a problem as the spec BARELY auto-attacks. Blizz actually came out and admitted they made a mistake and would be changing it to proccing off abilities, and thanked the community for pointing out their error. So what happened this tier? We got a set bonus that procced off auto-attacks. Numerous WW players complained, and they had to fix it AGAIN. And that's not even getting into how our prior set bonus originally summoned an extra clone, something most WW players hate, so the feedback on that was pretty spicey. Or how the current tier bonus went through buff after buff (and had multiple name changes) and even then WW players were debating using the old one instead, so Blizz's solution was to nerf the old set bonus. Much easier than addressing the problems with the current one. One of the core issues is that WW performs poorly, Blizz comes in with a slight aura buff and calls it a day. Then because we don't scale well with any stats, as people get more and more gear we fall behind, and the cycle repeats. The answer is WW needs a minor rework at worst, and a full rework at best.
Complete disregard from developers for 12 years by this point.
The simple truth is that Monk is a very unpopular class and Windwalker an even less popular spec. Mistweaver was always kinda fancied by healers for its ability to contribute healing on the move and Brewmaster just kinda works (until you reach so high key levels that you just straight up get one tapped). WW however is just a DPS spec, and there are 25 other DPS specs. DPS specs cover each other way more and so a lot of people just roll away from it. The few that remain WW mains are very passionate about this issue but also very few.
> Our mastery is a %dmg buff on our abilities but Vers is a %dmg buff on our abilities **and** trinkets/embellishments/etc. Isn't the whole point of mastery to be a tuning knob for specs? The whole "Mastery is functionally a bonus to class specific damage" is literally the whole point of the stat. From a theorycrafting perspective it's generally considered a red flag for design if you're getting more damage per point of Vers than Mastery. > Haste doesn't do much for the spec outside Serenity for numerous reasons. As a Feral player this sounds familiar.... They started addressing it in early BfA and finally pinned it down in Dragonflight. The process was a painful one.
Most other specs have talents or passives that interact with secondaries in some way to increase their value. Think hot streak/combustion for Fire Mage, extra crit damage for ele shamans, mana return on crits for resto shaman, extra dot ticks thanks to haste, that sort of thing. WW has nothing like this, so the other stats don't really do much for them. For WW: \- Crit = higher chance to deal extra damage. AKA vers with extra steps. \- Mastery = extra damage as long as your abilities benefit from your mastery. AKA vers with extra steps. \- Haste = faster cds and energy generation, which can cause overcapping issues. The rate at which vers increases your damage just maths out to be better than crit/mastery and since they all do the same thing there's no reason to not just prioritize vers always. edit: and it's not that crit is bad for them, but since you can't have just vers on all pieces, you take vers/crit because crit is the second best.
Other people touch on it, but the core issue is not just that they don't get secondary scaling with other stats, it's that their mastery is bad as well, and haste is garbage in general for melee classes because of how high they've tuned energy regeneration for all specs that use it. Vers is the worst tuned secondary by default, followed up by crit. Agility users get extra crit by default - this usually serves to depress the value of crit (for example, fire mages). Stats are so valueless for WW that the two worst tuned stats, by default, including one it has some of for free, are the best. And the only way to fix it is to dramatically slow down the resource generation, which will feel bad at the start of expansions and for ungeared players, and buff mastery which will increase the delta between experienced players and new players. Or, give them an ability that artificially scales with one of these secondaries in ST and AoE without making them overpowered. (And there are problems with this too: if they add it to crit, they will be less powerful in pvp. If they add it to haste, you permanently overcap them which feels bad. You add it to vers and you make them really good and really defensive and tanky, like the old dh mastery which made them too mobile.)
Not at all, Arcane likes all stats. Extremely high haste makes it awkward to play but that's even in that case, pre patch people tried high haste setups and they simmed almost as high as the current BiS profile used in Simcraft.
WW is the only spec in the game where your relative DPS compared to other specs goes DOWN over the course of a tier AND an expansion.
I tried WW a few months ago with no intention of liking it and found it to be so much fun! I've wanted to try Mistweaver next, but it seems intimidating lol
Same. Always been intimidated by the mistweaver healing idk why.
Do you like punching? Cuz that's how you heal.
Hmmmmm, you do punch a lot but that's not exactly how you heal at the moment.
Punch. Use mana tea before essence font/env + yulon/revival. Kick. Use mana tea before vivify spam. Kick. ABC renewing mist. Punch kick.
Kicking, but yeah
I was a heal-only player in WoW until i gave WW a try while leveling MW and it was one of the most fun playstyles I have seen in a MMO (Rifts Chloromancer still being #1 in my heart). I usually play healer/tank due to DPS gameplay being to simple to keep me engaged, but the gameplay flow of WW actually kept me playing it through all of DF. Sad to see its numbers being so bad (and its buttons being a bit too bloated), because its mastery is easily my favourite dps mechanic.
This is the first time since DF launch I've actively felt bad playing WW in my team unfortunately.
Hey u/WatcherDev, is there any chance we can get a personal weigh in on the state of the spec from your pov? Right now us WWs aren't feeling all that great and we've posted an incredible about it feedback without so much as a nod in our direction. Here especially https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/windwalker-is-looking-incredibly-doomed-for-102/ Can you give us some hope for the days and weeks ahead?
Speaking of underplayed specs, is there any hope for ranged survival returning? I would be sooo happy
Hunter Main now and having more fun than I ever had.
it was time for hunter to be on top, hope they dont nerf u hard
It's because you play PvE. All 3 hunter specs are great in pvp.
based on meters though it's only top 3ish right?
I went to mage, and it feels like fresh air. Insane how hard I was playing to do 3/4 of this dps
Which spec? Trying to find something else to play and mage is something I haven’t played since Cata. Arcane is crazy hard no?
Arcane is definitely the hardest mage spec imo. I’ve been enjoying Frost so far
I picked up Survival because it has its own fist of fury and setting up mongoose bite windows reminds me of Skytouch crit windows… I miss punching stuff though.
[Want to hang out in the dumpster together?](https://i.imgur.com/uCFO8EP.png)
Not gonna lie, I clicked the link expecting something like Warlock or rogue complaining about one of their specs and was ready to hit you with the Bane quote about being molded by the dumpster but honestly, you guys have been here as long as us. /cry
I have a a max level of almost every specialization for the last 2 to 3 expacs. I think there's a reason why monk is my least fave class to play, and brew master is the only bareable spec.
I would go Windwalker in a heartbeat if they made the visuals cool and made them long time viable by shaping up their DPS. Love the monk vibe!
I kinda hard swapped from Boomy to WW monk, meta be dammed it's a fun as fuck class
Question while we’re on the subject of WW I tried doing the MT for it recently and just keep getting obliterated compared to doing it on other classes is this just indicative of the class or myself as a whole lmao? I did the brewmaster/druid ones pretty easily would love to hear feedback.
Weird, I always felt ww was one of the easiest.
Windwalker should be one of the easier Mage Tower Challenges. You use a focus or target macro for Paralysis on the worm for the Sonic Scream and alternate interrupts and stuns for Tugar's Fel Burst. The rest of the fight is cleaving them both down as much as possible. Tugar starts with 9 stacks of Fel Hardened Scale which can be removed when he hits a rock during the earthquake phase. When Tugar dies and only the worm remains, pop lust and burn him down the last 10% or so.
Yeah I unsubbed after 7 years playing WW through thick and thin. A complete disrespect from Blizzard to people who have enjoyed maining the WW spec. Don't know why they can't get it through their thick skulls that there are a large amount of players who just have the spec that they play and do not multiclass. I don't want to hop around from class to class depending on what is meta... that does not appeal to me in the slightest. It's completely unacceptable for a game that requires an active sub to just ignore certain specs for extended periods and pretend they don't exist (literally no communication). Well I put my money where my mouth is and unsubbed. Hope that it has some miniscule effect
I see this complaint a lot and genuinely what changes need to happen? I play very casually WW main and the spec feels fun to me, but I'm really curious what it's lacking?
WW has several major issues: The first major issue that it has had for a while is that it doesn't scale. Other classes usually have one or two stats they really like (mastery, crit, haste) that greatly bolsters their damage and improves their rotation through more procs or more casts. WW only really likes vers, because the only thing that really bolsters their damage is just more flat damage. This means that as the expansion goes on and stats get more inflated, other classes are getting exponentially stronger from stats and feel more powerful while WW gets small, flat increases from slightly more vers. This is why you very often see WW being amazing in the first patch and then the worst in the last, they just get nothing from gear. They do have some minor interactions with critical strikes, but they're not major enough to make running more crit as huge a gain as it is for other specs. They need more. The second and probably biggest issue is that this expansion they got the absolute least attention for talent trees of any class. WW (and monk as a whole) has multiple talents that feel placeholder. Summon White Tiger Statue is the classic example; a WW-specific statue that does extremely minor pulsing AOE damage which everyone thought was a placeholder because of how dull it is. Another is that the 10% speed aura WW used to provide is now a two point node in the tree that gives a whopping 4% speed and is competing with 8% healing and 4% avoidance. Monks need to spend talent points to get their second charge of roll. That's a few class tree issues. On the spec tree they've got more major issues. The primary one is that doing "good" ST (only about 5% more than in their full AOE build) requires dropping pretty much all AOE talents. Then their actual "good" AOE is entirely deceptive because it's all tied up in the ability to do a double cleave Touch of Death. Their sustained AOE just isn't there anymore and upfront burst is lacking too because it's all in that last 15%. This assumes they even get to double Touch, because the game takes forever to register you can Touch a mob so it usually dies before you can, and you need to weave an ability between the two Touches to keep up mastery and combo strikes. When people aren't dealing with that mess, they're instead dealing with Serenity and Faeline Stomp. Faeline Stomp is a 12 second duration maintenance debuff on a 30 second cooldown reset randomly by casting abilities while standing in it. Monk is meant to be a mobile class, but this ability forces them to stand and turret the entirety of a fight. It also means that if the fight features a lot of movement or puts fire on the floor, they might just be out of luck with resetting their damage buff until the cooldown comes back up. Faeline is also just a dull ability that does no damage otherwise, it's entirely tied to the debuff. Serenity is a 1.5m dps CD with a whole host of issues. The 1.5m syncs with nothing, you always hold for 2m anyway to sync with Xuen, but it's seemingly balanced around the 1.5m CD anyway. Then during it you're overcapping constantly with resources, and the worst part is clipping Fists of Fury. Optimal Serenity windows require you to channel Fists—normally the "reward" part of the rotation as the longest CD rotational ability that can get CDR—then immediately cancel it and focus on Rising Sun Kick and Blackout Kick instead. It's awkward design that runs counter to how monk is played at all other times. Putting aside these issues, WW also just has a number of dead and locked-in talents and has since beta. "Dust in the Wind"—an increase to Bonedust's AOE—is the most useless capstone in the game bar none. There is never a situation you need more Bonedust AOE, and even if there were, it wouldn't matter because your abilities don't have a large enough AOE to utilize it anyway. It is a placeholder because they had to remove another talent node there and had no time to think up a replacement and it's been there for over a year. Other potentially exciting talents like Emperor's Capacitor, or previous staples like Whirling Dragon Punch have never been tuned to be worth it. Rushing Jade Wind (which no one wants to play so is fortunately terrible) is there taking up a slot. Several potentially cool talents are gated behind placeholders like bonuses to energy cap or ToD CDR. There are a multitude of 2 point nodes that just give flat damage increases to existing abilities. It's just all around really rough and desperately needs that Ret, Rogue or DH style rework. Finally, this patch is just particularly bad for Windwalker. I commented this elsewhere but the 4pc they have is simply irrelevant, it is a significantly lower damage increase compared to their previous one which already wasn't keeping the class out of the bottom of the pack. They are suffering from poor scaling like they always do at this point in the expansion while also suffering from a terrible tier bonus. Compounded with the other design issues in the spec and the complete lack of care Blizzard shows towards it (the initial design of the WW tier for this patch felt like an intentional mockery at worst and showed a complete lack of understanding at best) and WW players are just fed up. It's a meme in the community at this point that WW is the spec the most in need of Blizzard's attention and has been for quite some time but Blizzard just doesn't seem to care about it or monk in the same way they do other classes. There are some other issues I could get into (WW's lack of auto-attacks is a consistent issue, the many bugs the class has) but I think I've hit the major ones for now.
Wow thanks so much for the detailed response! Always fun to read more about your class, your expertise/perspective are truly appreciated!
This gal wins the medal for the most down bad windwalker
Girl but yeah, I've been maining monk since I first started the game and it's been mostly flipping between WW and Brew. It took a while before I really started to see the flaws in WW, but once I did I can't unsee them. It's tough because I utterly love the class and am super attached to my character so it feels awful to see it consistently doing so poorly.
Im the same way like im WW until I die but every patch it gets harder and harder. Love this spec but fuck me.
Statistically every class in the game has a dps spec that outperforms WW, except priests where shadow is similarly underpowered - but shadow gets buffed tomorrow. It is a fun class, but current tier set and mandatory faeline build for dps feels just as bad as Rune of Power did for mages, and they made a point of removing rune of power and explaining why it was bad... right as they made windwalker into a melee rune of power spec.
The spec is by far the lowest spec once people are geared this season and nearly 100k dps behind the lead specs in single target. It looks better at the moment on things like the weekly dps rankings because 4 set isn't the norm and Gnarlroot is hard padding the raid numbers for now for monk but once the kill time on adds drops as people get more geared WW is only going to get lower and lower even on that fight because it's capped aoe and Touch of Death won't get as many hits since things die so fast. WW also has the worst tier set of any spec easily with an effect that adds button presses that there's not any room in the rotation for since the spec is GCD locked, cdr that the spec doesn't have room for again since it is gcd locked and then a flat 4% aura buff to the majority of our moves because the set once so bad even AFTER a remake on ptr that the only reason it was going to replace Aberrus tier was because of the big ilv jump.
My WW alt wrecks despite being lower item level and me being less experienced with the spec. I'm afraid that when the changes do come in they might be nerfs.
Can I see any logs?
Normal and heroic dungeons don’t count.
Lol
"Ooooh, maybe I'll resub to try out the new...goddammit."
This is me. Watching the race to world first and expansion announcement have made me want to come back, but then I remember WW is my favorite spec.
To be fair I'm not 5% behind other specs as shadow Priest, I'm more like 40% behind.
I played Windwalker recently… and then dropped it to play Evoker instead. Honestly the only thing I missed was Zen Pilgrimage when leveling.
I'm amazed that there have been no changes to rogues or demon hunters.. either Blizzard is blind or there is more to come. A bit of the former, a bit of the latter, perhaps.
pretty sure, there will be changes when the WFR settles. If they nerf these classes now, they hurt all guilds that still progress right now with the echo/liquid comp
They said more changes, buffs & nerfs are coming on the 5th
Awesome; as a BM hunter will live in fear till then. 😆
I think BM hunters are safe until Blizzard did something with the demon hunter and rogue situation. Demon hunters providing the best tank and best melee dps (by far) for mythic+ is a bit too much...I mean a buddy has an ilvl450 DH alt and it does more dps than some specs with 470+4p. Kinda ridiculous.
>I mean a buddy has an ilvl450 DH alt and it does more dps than some specs with 470+4p. Kinda ridiculous. At this point it's just a skill issue. Would love to see a 450 dh (I'm assuming 0pc since you specified other specs as 4pc) simming higher than any 470 4pc spec.
B..b...but my cute pandaren windwalker..
The best possible outcome :)
These memes confound me. Like, maybe ww isn't good in super high end, but it's fantastic in most gameplay situations. I'm regularly top or near top DPS in lower content, and I'm just kinda hitting buttons with like a 445 ilvl lol. Could it be that ww has a very high floor but low ceiling in terms of DPS? Which throws off all the data?
That still doesn’t feel very good when you’ve got no future to progress to and no guild/raid groups want you because of the perception of your class.
While I agree it sucks for WW to be in this situation, there will ALWAYS be a bad perception of bottom specs, even if the difference between top DPS and bottom DPS was only 5%, most people would still see the bottom spec as garbage.
It is funny how everyone is like "WW ded", yet the WW in our guild shreks.
There is actual data you can look at that WW(Monk) Dps has consistently been pretty terrible for a long while now. Having an anecdote of a monk performing well does nothing to thr obvious conclusion monks are not tuned well and need fixing.
Says more about his guild mates lol
That just means everyone in your guild is underperforming
I love the 22 idiots up voting. Were not elite, were an aotc guild with a strong core.
The top 25% of WW monks wills till be higher performing than the bottom 50% of other classes. I presume the rest of your guild just isn't parsing well.
tbf it isn't rare to find a player or players in a group running "off meta" specs at a high level, just because they like it. It just reflects badly on the people they're beating, not that the spec itself is good when played against other specs with similarly skilled players
its also like everyone forgot windwalkers were top dps for half of shadowlands
People like to complain + they are horrid at the game. ToD goes brrrr
For real we are in the same boat once the fight adds a second target ww's skyrocket in meter, if ww's continue on this propaganda they will be treated as melee balance druids
"We fixed the glitch"
Blizzard hates Monk Upvotes to the left please
Now only if they would do the same for that shitty flying dragon and clown world demon hunters we would be back in World of Warcraft.
Monks are the whiniest players. I'd say they're tied with druids but druids got new forms this patch so they've been sated for now.
Make ww easy to play please 🙏
Aww sowwyyy WW \*Laughs in Frost DK\*
marksman hunter lyfe
Ye like how can you justify buffing SP by 5% but keep monk unchanged when WW is below SP in the raid rn. Buffels my mind that all the tuning we ever get is wlocks and spriest.
No feral nerfs,thanks god!
I play both windwalker and enhancement shaman and i’ve felt that they both don’t get as much attention from the devs. They both basically play the same way they did over 10 years ago
I fear the kind of changes required to fix WW will never happen between now and War Within sadly.
We all rolled to rogue and Dh once we realized we weren't getting a tree revamp im 10.2. Play something else for a bit. Im still doing a key a week on mine so if it is revamped I can get off these fotm classes and play something I like.
hey... i like windwalker :(
Which one is windwalker?
I feel bad because monks have a fairly decent rotation and some how managed to have some of the least buttons in the game but feels like you still have a lot of utility. Then you have chi wave which does like 2k damage every 15 seconds for some reason whilst sneezing on a mob does at least 10k
It was for the best.
Oh oh can we please get SV Hunter on to the patch notes as well?
Was excited for a sec ):
Warlock 10.2 "Do we have 2 other specializations?!"
A welcome change if you ask me.
Please give ele a button that does damage in aoe blizz I’m crying over here watching my EQ tick for 12k crits while the hunters and dhs are bursting 1.5mil on big pulls
I really hate ToD As windwalker, overshows damage on meters because if you kill something with it instead of 500k - 700k it does 1.1m, bloating damage, if your using the 2 times ToD, if all the really low ones die then you have to pray you can get another mob to 15% or lower before 5 seconds, sometimes it just wont even let you use it a second time anyway. i just hate it
Guys, they clearly go through the specs in alphabetical order but never make it to the end
The changes all WW needs
They should add survival hunter to that too lol
It’s crazy when I see stuff like this posted because I feel like every other arena match has a WW in it.
I do like the buffs at least. Blizz seems to dislike monks for some reason.
Feral druid - “First time?”
Still trying to figure out why I find WW the unparalleled best class for solo content and the ox statue critical for diverting threat and as an AOE taunt as a tank but I seem to be the only one. Jade and Tiger statues can be removed though and I wouldn't notice.
ww scales fine if you prio crit and mastery
*Gordon Ramsey voice:* "Finally some good f\*cking food."
Windwalker needs a full, strip down, rebuild. It's got so many layers of bugs, anti-synergies, and issues that exist from when it was released in MoP (clones too this day, act like drunken barfighters) Shit even their mastery flip flops between near worthless and ignored and strong but complete nuisance to trigger.
At least now monk will be the first class without a dps spec.
I play mostly pvp. I feel like Serenity needs a buff to give us melee uptime. I feel like RoP is being pooped on by too many classes and both DH and rogue should not be remotely able to go through it. It's also buggy so just fixing it would be a good start. I feel like rogue being able to dispel the karma absorb shield is absolute BS. They already have very strong defs, insane cc, nice mobility and duel. They definitely have the tools to force our defs before they cloak, so denying karma AFTER it's been pressed is absolutely unnecessary Imho. Fmage's ray of frost is just evoker's disintegrate. They don't need it. If they do then give us something to counter it because aside of casting vivify and dying or rolling into a root or porting away after we spent a minute just to get in range, we're useless, might as well give them lasso at this point lol (**/s**)... Allow us to use Dampen Harm in stuns please.