Blizzard has been iterating some private Alpha builds for Shadowlands, and today we got a post outlining some of their class changes and design philosophy. While its far from an exhaustive list, I expect we’ll start to see that list in the next few days and start to really see what Shadowlands has in store for Windwalkers. Here’s what was said that matters to Windwalker:

Expel Harm, Fortifying Brew, Spinning Crane Kick, and Touch of Death are now available for all Monks to use. Additionally, Touch of Death returns to its original design, killing an enemy with less health than the Monk. Each specialization also gains a unique benefit by dealing damage with Touch of Death.

Breakdown

So, as is my custom, lets break down each aspect of this and I’ll give my opinion and thoughts on the matter. These thoughts are entirely my own, and may not be consistent with what others think, but its my website so too bad.

Class Wide Abilities

Expel Harm, Fortifying Brew, Spinning Crane Kick, and Touch of Death are now available for all Monks to use.

So to get started, I love the addition of Expel Harm and Fortifying Brew back to a Windwalker’s kit. Its unclear whether this version of Expel Harm will be purely a heal, or generate some resources as it had in the past, or deal damage to the target like Reverse Harm does. For my own personal thinking, I hope its not Reverse Harm unless they change who it heals and how it does damage, because having to heal others that may or may not be in range of you or the target, and just hoping they’re taking enough damage to get the use out of the heal, just sucks. I hope that if it does deal damage like Reverse Harm that its only to the player and that it always deals the same amount of damage regardless of how much it heals, or it does such a small amount of damage that its not game breaking. This has the potential to be really great, if it can be a replacement for TP that heals you some and always deals the same damage then it will be great. If it requires you to take damage, or to heal someone else who may not be in range of you or the target, just to get the maximum use, then I hate it.

Touch of Death

Additionally, Touch of Death returns to its original design, killing an enemy with less health than the Monk and will spawn Chi Spheres that the Windwalker can consume to perform devastating blows.

This is something I thought about the other day and I want to be excited for it. However, there are a lot of questions that need answering before I can really be excited. The real question is how “original” are they going with, here’s the “history” of ToD:

If they are true about using the “original” version of ToD then it will go back to really only be usable when out questing or maybe in dungeons if you’re quick. The original version was just used to annihilate lower targets and not as the DPS cooldown that it is now. I’m mostly OK with this change. Although I love the Gale Burst mechanic, I can’t stand DPS scaling from Stamina and health as it just seems to cause more problems than its worth. If they do want it to stay as a primary DPS cooldown then I’m OK with that as well, just add in this instant kill functionality for flavor and to help blow up lower targets, but make Gale Burst the primary way that it does damage. By doing away with the Health scaling and making it do 50% (just randomly picked out number) of the damage that you do during those 8 seconds will feel impactful without the added silliness of Health scaling.

I’m most ambivalent to the 3 Chi cost if its added, as its only every 90-120 seconds, so its not hard to stockpile that. Getting Chi orbs could be a nice Quality of Life addition if you’re using it to demolish mobs while questing.

This is one of those things that if they commit to a direction then it can be really good, but if they waffle or get stuck between versions, it can be really bad.

2H Weapons

Like their Brewmaster brethren, Windwalker Monks will once again be able to choose between two 1-handed weapons or one 2-handed weapon in their fight to restore balance.

So, I’ll be honest… I have a real love/hate feeling with this change. On one hand, having more flexibility with weapons is rarely a bad thing, and I know its something people were clamoring about since the restriction on FoF was first put into place. However, Blizzard shifted to classes either being 1H or 2H strictly because it was very difficult to balance the difference so that one wasn’t much more powerful than the other. This is/was because of the big difference in weapon DPS on a 2H weapon compared to a 1H weapon, so they needed to work out a way that abilities would scale similarly regardless of what you were wearing. I’m hoping they have it figured out this time around, or else I fear we’ll have just more confusion and some of the weird forum posts that came about because of that discussion.

Xuen

All Windwalker Monks will be able to call upon a powerful ally with Invoke Xuen, the White Tiger (previously a Talent). Xuen will fight by their side and assault enemies with Tiger Lightning, dealing additional damage to targets the Monk has recently attacked.

F**king finally! Although I’m not very excited about pet management, maybe we’ll get lucky and it wont be that bad. It will be interesting to see if he is a permanent pet or a DPS cooldown and if there’s anything else that comes with it. Part of me hopes that he does replace SEF as a cooldown and gets some other interesting interaction, but we’ll have to wait and see. What is also interesting is that it will deal “additional damage to targets that the Monk has recently attacked”, which leads me to believe that this is either in addition to or in place of the Mark of the Crane mechanic for SCK. I’m not a super big fan of Mark of the Crane, and it being tied to Xuen probably won’t change my opinion of it too much, but we’ll have to wait and get more information.

Like ToD, this is something that could go really well or really poorly depending on how it works.

Dance of Chi-Ji

In the Shadowlands, Wild Gods freely wander the woods of Ardenweald, and their magic awakens Windwalker Monks’ knowledge to perform Dance of Chi-Ji. This new passive Talent has a moderate chance to make the next Spinning Crane Kick free to use and deal a significant amount of extra damage to all it strikes.

This is definitely one that I expected to happen, and its something that I also have mixed feelings about. I think from our current Azerite Traits, Dance makes sense, as would FoX. However, it does continue to add an element of randomness to the Windwalkers kit, where Windwalker has long been a very consistent and not-proc-focused spec. It also can easily feel that Windwalker AOE is lacking without the proc depending on how much damage it does relative to SCK without a proc.

Overall Impressions and Hopes

Overall I think these are a good start. There’s more to Windwalker that needs help and many of these listed changes don’t really address the problems. SEF is still a mess of functionality, Serenity is still difficult to balance and currently useless, Hit Combo still exists, and many more of my complaints could use to be addressed, but its a start. There’s lots of questions that still need to be answered once we get more information and some people can get their hands on Alpha to start playing around with the changes, plus see how the level and stat squish affect things.

I’d definitely like to see some changes to much of the talent tree and how its balanced, things like making WDP baseline would be nice. I am happy that Windwalker didn’t magically get a bunch more buttons so far, because my keybindings are already stretched thin as it is. I know a lot of people were hoping for Chi Explosion, and while that’s not completely crossed off the list at the moment, it would be a very difficult ability to come into the spec without heavy changes.

I’m personally feeling optimistic and hopeful about the future for Windwalker, but I’ve always trended that way in the face of the blind negativity that can come from forums and Discord.

Basically try to take it all easy and understand that its a process. There will be plenty of changes in the next few months and I will document them all on here. Even things that are listed here are not set in stone, and my/our interpretations of how things are looking may not be correct until we can actually get into the game and see how it all goes down. I’m hoping to get that before the end of the week, and regardless of its directly through my experience or through others, we’ll continue to have as much information as we can on Peak.

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