Every day would be the first day of spring summer (fuck the first day of spring, its too cold).

So I’m frequently asked what I would change if I had the power to do so, its something I’ve thought about a lot. Let me preface a few things right off the bat;

Disclaimer

1. I DON’T HAVE THE POWER TO CHANGE THINGS
2. I DON’T WORK FOR BLIZZARD
3. I DON’T CARE WHAT YOU THINK
4. ITS MY WEBSITE I WRITE WHAT I WANT
5. SNARKYLONIUS IS INVOLVED IN THE WRITING OF THIS ARTICLE! YOU’VE BEEN WARNED.

 

Now thats out of the way, I have a few aims with this post. I want to fix the spec with the least amount of changes or innovation possible. After all, why make it harder on myself. Creativity is overrated! LETS DO IIIIIIITTTTT!!!!

 

Talents

Lets start with the easy ones!

Level 15

• Chi Wave and Chi Burst stay AS IS
• Eye of the Tiger becomes Chi Orbit. It was silly as a level 100 talent, and it fits with the “Chi”-ness of the talent row and keeps the passiveness.

Level 30

• Stays as is, if it ain’t borked don’t fixt

Level 45

• Ascension and Fist of the White Tiger are fine.
• Energizing Elixir needs to come off the GCD and it goes from “OMFG I’D RATHER GOUGE MY EYES OUT” to “Hey, this is a great spell!”

Level 60

• Tiger Tail Sweep is fine I guess… does anyone use this?
• Ring of Peace is fine, should be baseline, but whatever its fine
• Good Karma is a good talent, but Touch of Karma is a GARBAGE PVE ABILITY

Level 75

• Inner Strength could use to be 3% per stack or just have a duration of 8s rather than 5, but other wise this talent tier is just fine

Level 90

• I’ve said it before but this tier should be Fury of Xuen, Dance of Chi-Ji, and Glory of the Dawn FITE ME! This gives one talent primarily for single target with some AOE; Fury of Xuen
• Hit Combo is tacky and I hate it. B.F. Skinner would say that rewards are better than punishment, and Hit Combo is just a punishment for a mistake, not a reward for good play
• Rushing Jade Wind is right there with Energizing Elixir under the “OMFG I’D RATHER GOUGE MY EYES OUT” category. It was really well designed for about a week during BfA beta, then it became god awful. I’ll cover it in a bit.
• Invoke Xuen, the White Tiger is gone and replaced with Dance of Chi-Ji in Shadowlands so thats 1/3 of the way there.

Level 100

• Spiritual Focus should become a modified version of Rushing Jade Wind that functions like Fury of Air except instead of it costing Energy, it would reduce the Energy regeneration from 10s to 7s. This would allow it to be tuned to be small to medium sustained AOE pressure, slow the spec down because of the cost, but not have it turn itself off because you ran out of energy for 0.01s, nor would we have to maintain it every 6 seconds and drive us to insanity.
• Whirling Dragon Punch is fine where it is. It doesn’t have to be baseline, go away! Its a just fine AOE focused talent.
• Serenity should become baseline and replace Storm, Earth, and Fire permanently. This would open the spot for Strike of the Windlord to be the primary single target talent of this row. Yes, I know people want this baseline also, but fuck off you can’t have everything.

Overall

Windwalker doesn’t need a TON of drastic changes to talents, but there needs to be more deliberateness with the talent rows. There’s too many things that seemed like they were just tossed in where there was a spot rather than where they fit. The Level 60 row has a heal, a knockback, and a stun, so I guess its the CC row except for Good Karma right? The Level 90 row has a repackaged version of our Mastery, a completely awful to use AOE ability and a burst cleave cooldown. Its a DPS row, obviously, but good lord it very hard to directly compare these three talents in theme, numbers, functionality, and everything. The Level 100 row has a passive CD duration increase, a DPS rotation ability, and a DPS CD, so just when you thought there couldn’t be any less consistency between talents than the Level 90 row, along comes the Level 100 row. This row just has no theme, no identity, and no fucking clue about what its trying to do.

Beyond some talent changes, Windwalker just needs the talents to have a direction. There are a TON of examples in game and in the past that Windwalker has had that could easily be brought back or continued to give really nice consistency and focus on each of the talent rows.

 

Abilities

There aren’t a ton of changes that I feel need to be made to the base Windwalker kit for it to be fun and powerful. There are a few things that would be really nice additions but not requirements, and then there are things that I feel are required for the improvement of the spec.

 

Required

1. Storm, Earth, and Fire needs to be taken out back behind the shed and put down. I have enjoyed this ability for a long time, but its slow decline into madness hasn’t been that slow. Its absolutely riddled with bugs, and every new thing added to the game introduces more, completely predictable, bugs. There isn’t a world where the theme of this spell is important enough for all the stress that it brings to Windwalkers and developers. Just end it already. It should be replaced with Tigereye Brew or Serenity, which generally work just fine and would get the job done well, plus still stay within a similar theme since they were/are abilities already.
2. STOP GIVING WINDWALKER RESOURCES VIA RANDOM PROCS!!!! SERIOUSLY STOP!!! THERE’S SO MANY OTHER PREVIOUS THINGS IN PAST EXPANSIONS THAT ARE BETTER THAN DOING THAT OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER. AND OVER.
3. AND OVER
4. AND OVER
5. AND OVER
6. Touch of Karma should not deal damage in PvE, it just causes problems and “degenerate gameplay“. The easiest thing is to have it just be a shield in PvE, with Good Karma adding in a heal, and a new PvP talent called “Bad Karma” that adds the damage reflect. PvE shouldn’t suffer because its a cool tool in PvP and visa versa. I’m just so done with this ability.
7. AND OVER
8. Something needs to be done with Auto-Attacks. Windwalker just doesn’t Auto-Attack as often as other classes. AAs stop during Fists of Fury, Spinning Crane Kick, Whirling Dragon Punch, Chi Burst, and (with a legendary) Crackling Jade Lightning. This could be solved by just continuing AA’s or by giving some kind of passive similar to Thunderfist that increases AA damage or AA speed following using something like Fists of Fury. Auto-Attacks don’t benefit from Mastery, which perpetually holds them back, but there are ways to improve them.
9. AND OVER
10. Zen Flight should work like Druid flight, there’s no reason it doesn’t. Its gotta be one button and one switch. MAKE IT SO!
11. AND OVER

 

Recommended

1. Fists of Fury and Spinning Crane Kick shouldn’t have two caps. What I mean by that is that Spinning Crane Kick currently is capped at 6 targets and Mark of the Crane is capped at 5 stacks/targets, so the two of them together just seems overkill, especially since they’re different numbers. If one was uncapped then it wouldn’t break the world since the other could stay capped. Similarly Fists of Fury has a cap of 100% to one target and 50% to 5 other targets. The combination of the half damage and the cap at 5 targets is just excessive. It either needs to hit any target in its cone for 50% or hit 6 targets total for 100%, there’s no reason that it should be both.
2. Touch of Death hits like a wet noodle right now. The last time it was an “execute” it hit for 100% of our health, so it should be that again. There’s no reason it shouldn’t be that much now. AT THE VERY LEAST it should reset or have its CD reduced if you kill something with it. At best, its a great skill shot in some encounters, at worst; its FUCKING AWESOME when leveling and lets you make things go POP!
3. Whirling Dragon Punch should function like a Demon Hunter’s Blade Dance and not lock us into movement. The problems that I have died a horrible death to pressing it at the wrong time massively outnumber the times that I’ve avoided something bad with the knock back. Its cool that you can avoid a knock back or stuff while in the air, but functionally the cons MASSIVELY outweigh the pros.
4. Expel Harm needs a place in the world. Either let it be as useful as it was in the past as a decent heal that generated Chi, or just get rid of it or make it so useless that we don’t need it for anything.

 

BUGS!!!

Look… I am a speech therapist, I went to grad school and got a masters in Speech Pathology.. I don’t know fuck all about coding. I took one marking period of HTML in high school, but I have a feeling its a bit more than that. Its just that some of these bugs are so incredibly predictable.

Easiest way to fix half the bugs is to get rid of Storm, Earth, and Fire. BING BONG BOOM! SOLVED!

 

Covenants

Listen… if this was the thing that killed all those Nazi’s in the desert in Indiana Jones, then I’m all for it. I even get the desire not to make them easily switchable. Realistically, assuming Covenants are balanced (haha yeah right), there’s really no reason you should have to go back to one you previously had. HOWEVER, assuming makes an ass out of u and you.

In the real world, there will be a best Covenant for Raiding, one for Mythic Plus, one for PvP, one for sheer gorgeous looks (hey there Night Fae), and its unlikely that they will all be the same one. I really only raid, so I don’t much mind being locked in and not changing, but I have heard tell of other aspects of the game, so I’ll have to take your word for it. There are a dozen ways to make it better, like halving your renown, or setting a CD for coming back to a Covenant based on your renown. Maybe at 1 renown you couldn’t come back to that Covenant for 10 days, but at 10 renown, you can come back in 1 day, or whatever the renown numbers are, idfk, ask me again in December.

I find it thematically bizarre that a Covenant would forget everything good you’ve done for them because you checked out someone else. I get that they’re disparate Covenants, but they’re all working toward the same goal right? Are the Covenants going to act like a jilted lover because they saw you with someone dead in a different way than they are? I guess if I think about it like that then maybe its good that they stand their ground, don’t let the cheating ex come crawling back, fuck that nerd. Well don’t, that’s counterproductive.

 

Legen… wait for it… daries

• We have to be able to cast Crackling Jade Lightning while moving or I’ll continue to hate Emp Cap
• Jade Ignition being enjoyable is entirely dependent on Dance of Chi-Ji being used or not. If I have to use Spinning Crane Kick in single target just to proc CX I think I’ll scream. If you are using Dance of Chi-Ji then its a fabulously enjoyable legendary and definitely my favorite of the group. But that is a fickle mistress
• Xuen’s Battlegear is a shell of the shadow of an echo of its former self. Its like opening a bag of candy that you left from Halloween only to find that Mounds are the only thing left in there because they’re fucking gross.
• Keefer’s Skyreach is a lot of fun zipping around, but no one is going to use it seriously in PvE if they have the other options.
• Fatal Touch would be great if you could use Touch of Death more than once in most fights. Let it reset if you kill something with it and I love you long time.
• Autobots Roll Out! Everyone knows the Decepticons were the correct side in that war, Optimus was a short sighted relic of a bygone era.

 

Miss-alaineous

• I know people want new animations. I couldn’t care less, but anything to stop the whining
• I’ve talked a lot about scaling, but thats because its just always been a problem. There’s a dozen ways to improve it so I wont rehash them here, but it really should be helped. It doesn’t HAVE to be fixed as long as damage tuning is done regularly, but since that definitely didn’t happen in BfA, maybe its just easier to help along the underlying problem.

 

There’s absolutely more to this, but I’m tired and Snarkylonius is an energy vampire. FUCK YOU SCIENCE!

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