There has been another build on the Alpha, and this one came with another small change for Windwalkers;

•  Touch of Death   Use ancient Pandaren knowledge of anatomy to Inflict mortal damage on an enemy, After 8 sec, the target will causing the target to take damage equal to 50% of your maximum health reduced against players.after 8 sec, reduced against players.
  During the 8 sec duration, 10% of all other damage you deal to the target will be added to the final damage dealt.
• NEW Touch of Death Amplifier   Increases damage done by Touch of Death by 10% of all damage you dealt to the target during the duration.

•  Serenity   Enter an elevated state of mental and physical serenity for 89 sec. While in this state, you deal 40% increased damage and healing, and all Chi consumers are free and cool down 100% more quickly.

I’ll start with the Serenity change, because in reality that appears to be consistent with some of the other changes to offensive cooldowns on Alpha. Many of them appear to be on the GCD now, so many are getting an extra second of duration to account for that. This may be an attempt to limit or prevent people from stacking their cooldowns all on top of one another for no loss, as putting them on the GCD would mean that if you used 3 at the same time, you’d lose 3s from the first CD, 2s from the second, and 1s from the third.

Currently most offsensive cooldowns are on the GCD, and not all that are on the GCD have gotten an extra second to their duration to account for the lost second from the GCD. Its almost certain that this is a method that they’re trying out and are in the middle of testing or implementing.

EDIT: Looks like this popped up in the Official Forums: https://us.battle.net/forums/en/wow/topic/20762126139#post-6

It looks like they have a good grasp of what they’re trying to accomplish and the push-back that they expect. It will be interesting to see how it evolves over time.

Now the Touch of Death is the change that many people have been waiting for. This, effectively, turns Gale Burst into a baseline part of how Touch of Death works. So, as it is now, 10% of your damage that you do during the 8s duration between when you use Touch of Death and when it explodes its damage, is added to the, 50% Health times Mastery times Versatility, damage that Touch of Death does.

Beyond being roughly a 1% increase in average damage, and a pretty drastic increase in burst potential, this also provides Touch of Death with a small ability to scale with other stats beyond Health, Mastery, and Versatility. While it’s not as effective as just allowing Touch of Death to Crit, or have some other benefit from our Critical Strike chance, such as simply multiplying its damage by your Crit % like it does with Mastery and Versatility. Its a small change, but a step closer to helping our stats affect a larger portion of our overall damage.

It is currently unclear whether Touch of Death Amplifier is simply the way they’re adding the 10% to the existing Touch of Death, or whether it will be an Azerite Trait that adds an additional 10% of your damage to Touch of Death. I will say that having it go up to potentially 20% of your damage would be quite awesome for your burst damage.

This was on my, and many people’s wishlist for Battle for Azeroth, so its nice to see that they are either listening, or have similar ideas as the community for keeping Windwalker in such a good place. Coupled with some of the other changes so far going into next expansion, some of the few issues with Windwalker are getting addressed, and while others still need to be dealt with, I personally feel that Windwalker is looking to be in a good place at the moment. Maybe one of these days I’ll get access to the Alpha to be able to test it out myself.

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