Continuing my series on the hardships that Windwalker’s have experienced…

Anyone who was playing Windwalker this past year remembers the elation that was getting a response from Blizzard about the Storm, Earth, and Fire situation. Well a few years ago, Siege of Orgrimmar, we had some public interactions with Blizzard that were as maddening as the Storm, Earth, and Fire post was exciting. Back then there was no Discord and no Peak, so we just had MMOChampion and (I think) ElitistJerks, so many who played back then may have never heard of this.

The Preface

So back during Siege, Windwalker were still reeling from having to learn our third mastery since the expansion started and the mourning loss of our OP-ness (I know what it says) from Rune. Windwalker in Siege was pretty different from how it is now…

Windwalker’s were, at the time, stacking haste to a set level to get a decent amount of energy regen, then putting the rest into Multistrike and other stats, but pretty much ignoring Mastery, since the new Mastery only provided us with an increased chance to generate an additional stack of Tigereye Brew and with the stat budgets as they were, and Chi Brew providing 2-4 stacks of Tigereye Brew, we didn’t really need much Mastery to be swimming in Tigereye Brew stacks when we needed them. Fists of Fury was also primarily a regen ability, only using it when you had the chi and had literally nothing else you could be doing with that time, just to get some extra damage while you waited for the rest of the abilities to come up.

The Incident

Well at some point toward the middle-ish of Siege, I remember I was working on Heroic (now Mythic) Klaxxi at the time, there was a Blue post (Lore) responding to a post on the Official Forums, about something thats been lost to the annals of time, but if anyone finds it please let me know. And in this Blue post, Lore basically told the Windwalker community that we were playing the spec the wrong way: we should be stacking less Haste and our simulations were giving us bad information. (Source 1)(Source 2)

Well as this was almost directly in opposition of what we were doing, and what was being theorycrafted at that time by Hinalover, Calligraphy, and others (I was just getting involved back then). That was the end of that conversation line. There was no response when everyone asked for some kind of hint. The rotation was checked a dozen different ways by a dozen different people and no one could find anything to support their claims, nor did Blizzard ever provide more information. To this day, we have no idea what their secret method was to get the most out of Windwalkers, but a few dozen or hundred Windwalkers couldn’t figure it out, so it will remain a secret forever.

As you can imagine, this was infuriating, and I know I wasn’t one of the people who had put the hours into working on it up to that point, I was still a TC novice. As I became more involved in theorycrafting this situation stuck with me like the ghost of theorycrafting past. To constantly have Blizzard change the spec every new patch then tell the community that they’re playing it wrong, just seemed purposefully disrespectful. If you’ve read a lot of my posts over the years, you may see a common theme of me trying to understand Blizzard’s motivations for changes beyond just the numbers themselves, and it often comes across as me defending Blizzard. However, this is one situation that, even looking back, I cannot find a silver lining to some way that Lore telling us that what we were doing was wrong, without providing any additional information, was in anyone’s best interest. As you can tell, this is a situation that has always been in the back of my mind. And now you know about it if you didn’t already. Just another example of life as a Windwalker.

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