Last night Blizzard announced some class changes, one of which affects Windwalkers:
Blackout Kick damage reduced by 27%.
If you’ve been keeping up with the recent articles I’ve written, then you’ve seen me be quite passionate about some of the issues that Windwalkers were facing in terms of the rotation. You’ve also seen that many of these problems could be traced back to Blackout Kick being too strong. Well it looks like Blizzard heard our cries, and they may have done it better than I suggested since I suggested roughly a 33% nerf to Blackout Kick damage, but this seems to have gotten the job done for less.
What This Means
Rising Sun Kick v Blackout Kick
Before stats, but after buffs, armor reduction and the like, Blackout Kick had previously done roughly 71% AP. This was a problem when it was compared to Rising Sun Kick that did 120% AP, which lead to Blackout Kick being used more and Rising Sun Kick being used less, so much so that using 2 Blackout Kick back to back was still better than using 1 Rising Sun Kick in some situations. This felt very alien to many people who had learned Windwalker the other way, with Rising Sun Kick being HUGE and Blackout Kick just being a filler spell/chi dump.
With this change, Blackout Kick goes down to 52% AP, which puts it safely behind Rising Sun Kick in damage per chi, before factoring in the cooldown that it provides to Rising Sun Kick and Fists of Fury. Once you include that cooldown, they’re roughly equal to each other, with Rising Sun Kick being 120% AP per 2 Chi and Blackout Kick being 118%.
This means that Rising Sun Kick is back to being used on cooldown, with Blackout Kick being woven throughout to eliminate chi capping or waste.
Mastery
Because we’ll go back to casting Rising Sun Kick pretty much on cooldown, this means we’ll go back to paying more attention to our Mastery. With more Rising Sun Kick and less Blackout Kick there will also be slightly more downtime so it will be slightly easier to plan out resources and when to Blackout Kick and when not.
This means we’re back to trying never to break Mastery and will give a slight boost to Mastery’s weight, but not enough to change the stat priority.
Chi Burst
Previously, you may have read, that Chi Burst was the default choice for everything, regardless of number of targets, and that this was, again, because of Blackout Kick being too strong. With Blackout Kick nerfed a bit, this shakes things up again.
With Chi Burst doing 36.22% AP per cast, plus 1 Chi generated by hitting one target, which translates into anther Blackout Kick, thats a total of 102% AP every 30 seconds after the CDR provided by Blackout Kick is considered. Chi Wave, on the other hand, does 44.72% AP, for a total of 89.44% AP every 30 seconds. This is close enough that you can really go with either option, as having Chi Wave to help weave more Blackout Kick into the rotation more often is often worth such a small AP difference.
This means that you can use Chi Wave or Chi Burst for single target, stick with Chi Burst if there will be more than 1 at any time in the fight.
Spinning Crane Kick
The nerf to Blackout Kick was not enough to put it behind Spinning Crane Kick when using Serenity. Honestly, its grown on me, so I don’t mind it as much now
This means you continue to spam Blackout Kick between Rising Sun Kick and Fists of Fury during Serenity.
Extra: FotWT v EE
***UPDATED*** Someone pointed out that I forgot to add damage for 2 Fist of the White Tiger, and only take the damage that Fist of the White Tiger would do over the Tiger Palm that it replaces. I also can assume at least 10% Mastery, since thats the base.
What was brought up to me, as I hadn’t considered it, is that this change also effects how we evaluated Fist of the White Tiger vs Energizing Elixir. Previously, we would look at the damage by Fist of the White Tiger and add it to the Chi it generates, and compare that to the Chi that Energizing Elixir generates. The best way to do this was to translate all that Chi into Blackout Kick damage. With the nerf to Blackout Kick, the damage provided by the Chi for both talents, is slightly less than it previously was, so they have to be reassessed.
Previously if Blackout Kick did roughly 85% AP after considering the CDR, Energizing Elixir generates roughly 4.4 Chi per minute, for a total of 374% AP. Compare this to Fist of the White Tiger which provides 2.8 Chi per minute or 238% AP, plus the 47% AP that Fist of the White Tiger deals more than the Tiger Palm it would replace, for a total of 332% AP per minute.
Now that Blackout Kick does roughly 59% AP per Chi, Energizing Elixir‘s total goes down to 259.6% AP and Fist of the White Tiger down to 259.2% AP. This is much closer than previously, and several factors help push Fist of the White Tiger over the top: more Haste means more waste for Energizing Elixir, Fist of the White Tiger benefits from Mastery, Vers, and Crit, Fist of the White Tiger benefiting from Mastery means that it helps you weave Blackout Kick in, similar to how Chi Wave can be more useful even at a slight, mathematical, DPS loss, and other factors
This means that although Energizing Elixir is still infinitesimally the mathematical best, Fist of the White Tiger is better when other factors are considered.
Extra: Hit Combo
With the fact that we’re going to be following our Mastery again, Hit Combo will be a little bit better, and its a question that we’ve already gotten several times. It was already proving to be slightly better than originally though, as Invoke Xuen, the White Tiger wasn’t as big a chunk of our damage with the crazy Touch of Karma damage. With the Touch of Karma damage going down a bit at 120 without legendaries, Invoke Xuen, the White Tiger will go back to being a larger % of our damage than it is now, but Hit Combo will also affect more % of our damage since it didn’t affect Touch of Karma.
This means that although Invoke Xuen, the White Tiger will likely still be the recommendation for Single Target, Hit Combo is a somewhat reasonable alternative for sustained damage, where Invoke Xuen, the White Tiger is more focused on Burst.
But Babs, MY DEEPS
Yes, currently we haven’t seen any buffs to compensate for this damage loss, as this change to Blackout Kick equates to (very) roughly a 3-4% damage loss. That doesn’t mean that compensation buffs aren’t coming, but its possible that they aren’t needed quite yet.
Right now the best indicator, even with all its caveats, is our SimulationCraft DPS rankings. On that, at the time of writing this article, Windwalker is #3 overall behind Retribution and Assassination. While there are a dozen reasons why this isn’t 100% accurate, most notably that it assumes 100% usage of Touch of Karma, its just the best prediction for 120 we have right now. If you take away even the high end of 5% damage, Windwalker falls to 8th overall. Since these colored bars are what drive many people’s opinions of classes, hopefully it shows that Windwalker may not NEED a buff to stay “viable” and that its unlikely to be “complete garbage” despite what people on the forums may say.
If we look at current data using WarcraftLogs, we can see that when looking at the 75th percentile for all Mythic bosses during the Prepatch, Windwalker has “fallen” down to 5th. If we, once again, take away 5% damage, Windwalker drops down to 10th, or mostly right in the middle. This, again, shows that although its never fun to lose damage, the data we have right now shows that Windwalker should still be completely viable and competitive.
There will certainly be more changes to classes over the next few weeks, but this is where it stands now.
Now the Final Boss
Over the last few weeks, the problem that has popped up as the real killer for Windwalkers is the amount of damage that Touch of Karma does, which is pretty much entirely because of the new Good Karma talent. This talent took using Touch of Karma as a fun way to get a little bit extra damage, and nearly turned it into a requirement. This brings up a plethora of complicating factors and issues, that Kuya very adequately outlined in his article The Good Karma Problem. Because of the large chunk of damage that you can get from it, the spec needs to be balanced with some % usage in mind, and if you can go over that % you will over perform, and if you can’t reach that %, you’ll under perform. Our abilities to deal maximum damage shouldn’t depend on our ability to take damage that should otherwise kill us, or taunt the boss to get 100% usage out of it.
This is the next crusade that Windwalkers need to rally behind, as the affect it can have on our spec and how we compete against other specs can have HUGE and far reaching consequences, and is just not a fun gameplay style to do consistently.
My suggestion is to just bring Dave (summon ox) back, and let that Utility row of talents stay 100% Utility.
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I do not mind using karma in offensive way. It’s high risk to min max. Something fun for me. Do not like it being on same talent line with talents that do not provide dps increase, as this locks it in as default choice.
Also I’d like to see EE removed from GCD. Brewmaster doesn’t have GCD on it’s EE version, why does WW have to have it?
Return some aoe potential in FOF and SCK and we are back where we were in legion 🙂
Oh man, I would love to see the damage from Karma only apply to PvP via a talent and have them bring back the healing portion in its place for the PvE talent. BFA will be my first time raiding as a Windwalker and as the raid leader I’m going to have a very hard time justifying me standing in the fire to do more damage when I yell at other people to not do the same, ESPECIALLY if they decide to balance our numbers around that. Hopefully they can tune that down or completely out. Standing in bad mechanics to do more dps should be the hallmark of being a bad dps, not playing your class right.
I’m totally with you on ToK. It’s not a fun way to play a dps spec. Even more during progression where healers will yell at us for taking useless damage.
But for the damage buff, I do not agree. The problem is that we are already not that required in raids. We are not bringing buffs like warriors, we are really squichy unlike rogues, we have the mobility for us ok but still, for raiding, we are not equal to others. So being 8th in the theorical ranking is not fair. Why bother taking a monk if he doesn’t bring anything to the raid and all the other melees are doing more damage ?
We need something more or at least a great theorical ranking. And ToK is clearly not the answer 🙂
Monks do provide the 5% increased damage debuff.
Yes, but things like 15% hp increase, BR, Portal, healing stones, % damage reduc, avoidance, immunity … Almost every will bring a new ‘buff’ or ‘debuff’. What I mean is it doesn’t make us that necessary if we are only a mid tier damage class (even if 5% physical damage increase is great, I don’t challenge that)
The Monk debuff is required and unlike the warrior, priest, or mage buffs you cant get 70% of the affect by buying s scroll.
That’s a good point, I agree. We might have gained some raid utility compared to legion after all ^^
Why bother taking a monk if he doesn’t bring anything to the raid and all the other melees are doing more damage?
Because he’s a good player and a fun person to raid with. Full stop.
Why didnt you suggest buffing RSK?
Because it wouldn’t have fixed as many problems as nerfing BoK did
What other problems does it fix? Rsk buff would have had the same result? All I see coming to monks in BFA are heavy nerfs. Why are we constantly suggesting nerfs, it makes the class unappealing to people looking to switch.
You’re replying to an article that outlines all the problems that got fixed by this change. RSK buff wouldn’t have fixed all of these problems. I also showed, in the article, that right now WW is still in a strong place. Did you read the article you’re commenting on or any of the ones preceding it?
Sorry for the ignorance, but I’m a relatively new Monk player. First, to explain my position let me tell you my experience w/ Monk. I’m primarily a casual “LFR Hero” if you will, but I don’t consider casual to be synonymous with incompetent. I boosted a Monk to 110 with my BfA Pre-Purchase boost. I went WW and was blown away by how much damage it was doing. I think it was fair to say it probably deserved some nerfs, but the important part was that it felt fun.
Once the pre-patch hit I hopped on my Monk for a bit and honestly have no interest in playing it now. The pre-patch seems to have not only toned down the damage of my WW, but completely decimated it. All of my skills, to include BOK, feel incredibly weak regardless of whether I’m rotating skills to benefit from mastery.
With regards to your BOK assessment, as a novice monk I found it very informative and I can’t find any holes in it. Here’s the problem I’m having though – now that my monk feels like he’s flailing around wet noodles, I have to ask, why is massively nerfing BOK the solution, as opposed to buffing other skills? From my perspective, this nerf isn’t fixing broken gameplay as much as it is making what recently became an un-fun class even less fun.
It seems to me that your approval of this nerf comes more from a personal stance that we’re likely to get nerfs rather than buffs, so this is the best we can hope for. Am I misreading that?
The reason that nerfing BoK was better than buffing RSK or other abilities is that this one change fixed more problems, so you’d need to tun many abilities to fix the problems with buffs, and that would almost certainly require nerfs to keep things under control.
In regards to the prepatch decimating WW damage, it did that to all specs due to the stat squish. We went from doing 2 mil dps to 7,000. Windwalker was still as strong relative to other classes as everyone lost damage.
My approval of this nerf comes from having asked for it for several months as a way to fix many things all with the same cause. It also comes from an understanding that if the nerf puts Windwalker damage too low, that there will be buffs to compensate for it. Right now it doesn’t look like that is needed, but we won’t know for sure till 120.
I think Markoko was thinking buff RSK now that BOK is gutted. With our horrid self healing now, in world pve it was a dps race to survive in bfa already, they really should buff RSK, and FoF, and put ToK back to the traited version from legion..
They may not have buffed RSK because BoK fixes the problems and they consider WW damage to be in a good enough spot to not need a buff to compensate
I would argue that they are right until we lose the cloak damage.
And they may want to wait till that happens to see how much, if any, a buff is needed
that’s what im afraid of, that now the class is even more dependent on a toxic skill (ToK+cloak) to do damage, and it does such a large portion of our damage once we hit 116 we will truly struggle to keep up. That legendary/talent combo needs to be changed, and then some significant buffs to RSK/FOF added.
They could also change Good Karma to the heal that Touch of Karma got from the Artifact weapon.
Why not Eye of the Tiger for single target. It does 105% AP over 30 seconds which is more than you listed for the other two and requires no GCD. Is there something I am missing?
The others benefit from Mastery, and doesn’t give you another button to help not repeat BoK to manage resources.
This is basically part of blizzards ethos in class balancing to make ‘every class desirable and bring something unique’ as Ion said in the Q and A
Apparently whats supposed to make other classes look up to us is the ability to stand in stuff and soak damage while dealing damage…when really I think what made is desirable was our uncapped SCK which allowed us, even in weaker states, to be competitive in M+ and environments where single target was not the only thing that mattered. The other thing is that soaking is done better by rogues anyway,
Basically if we end up being a mid tier or even slightly above average single target spec, WW will be in a bad spot.capped SCK gimped us hard and good karma does not compensate for that as its a risky playstyle.
Heyho I guess you forgot to multiply FotWT-DMG with 2, because you use it twice in 1 Minute.
Because with 2,8Chi vs 4,8Chi you can simply compare 2x (FotWT-DMG – TP-DMG) vs. 2x (BoK-DMG+CDR-DMG) leaving EE slightly ahead in optimal scenarios, while FotWT is ahead if you use more realistic energy values around 50-55 instead of 70.
You’re right, I’ll adjust
Great post! Thanks for doing all the heavy lifting! I’d like to see Dave back in that row as well, but move Good Karma to the 100 tier, and make WDP baseline.
Using ToK offensively is fun when it could be the difference between a good parse and a great one, but not when it’s as important as it currently is. right now its the difference between a crappy parse and a great one.
ToK was fun a few times when I first switched to WW in ToS, but I would much prefer the utility of Dave back then intentionally standing in crap that get me killed (and thus hurts my DPS).
How are people using the skill offensively without pissing of the tanks or healer or worse, dying because you took too much damage?