It has been a long time since I have written an actual article about Windwalker, for a variety of reasons, mostly real life ones. However, with the school year over, and a boost of motivation from preparing for Mists Classic, I’ve decided to try and get back into the swing of things for today’s announced 11.2 tier set bonuses. You can see the whole list on WowHead.
What Are They?
This time around, Blizzard is trying something new and tripling down on the Hero Talents. Each tier set will do different things depending on what Hero Talent you’re set up in. I imagine this is aimed at giving people options and making sure that one Hero Talent tree doesn’t dominate all content all the time.
Shado-Pan
- Monk Shado-Pan 11.2 Class Set 2pc
Flurry Strikes deal 30% more damage and activating Storm, Earth, and Fire instantly grants 10 stacks of Flurry Strikes that trigger on your next attack at 100% effectiveness. - Monk Shado-Pan 11.2 Class Set 4pc
Flurry charge generation is increased by 100% and Flurry Strikes triggers every 120 energy spent during Storm, Earth, and Fire.
Conduit of the Celestials
- Monk Conduit of the Celestials 11.2 Class Set 2pc
Heart of the Jade Serpent additionally triggers for 8 sec at 100% effectiveness after you cast Slicing Winds. - Monk Conduit of the Celestials 11.2 Class Set 4pc
Heart of the Jade Serpent increases your haste by 15% while active and for 4 sec afterwards.
First Impressions
Since it is WAY too early to make predictions about how strong the tier sets will be, what Hero Talent we’ll want to use, or who will win the next Super Bowl (hint: not the Giants), the easiest thing to do is to just make some educated opinions about the new stuff. Disclaimer: these are opinions, not any fact or prediction.
My Opinion
I will preface all of my opinions by stating that I have been playing Rogue in Season 2 since my raid team, Zero Percent Wipe, had a very capable Windwalker and I was the only person with a capable Rogue. I enjoy Rogue and I am quite good at it, so its unlikely that I will go back to Windwalker as my main for Season 3. I have played my Monk sporadically in Season 2, mainly in alt raids, and really not putting a ton of practice into it mainly due to a lack of free time and energy this school year. With that out of the way, here are my thoughts.
The first thing that jumps out at me is that these tier sets certainly lean heavily into the major aspects of the Hero Talents. The Shado-Pan set is all about increasing the damage and frequency of Flurry Strikes and the Conduit of the Celestials set bonuses are all about increasing the damage and frequency of Heart of the Jade Serpent, both of which are the foundation of the damage and fun for their respective Hero Talents. While Flurry Strikes is still a passive damage proc, as are the buffs that come from it, getting more procs means more buffs which means less thinking about “do I have Wisdom of the Wall so I can do AOE damage” and more spamming the hell out of Tiger Palm. Personally, even though it is antithetical to the way I like to play Windwalker and the way that Windwalker has been designed for years, I do enjoy not needing to pay much attention to Chi while playing Shado-Pan since it means I always have the Chi I need for my abilities and there is more downtime, which I love. Flurry Strikes themselves needed a buff, so this provides some of that in the form of damage and frequency.
The main issue I have with these should be no surprise to anyone who’s known me for a few years. I LOATHE movement as DPS, so I have never vibed with Slicing Winds. When I play my Windwalker I don’t play Slicing Winds even if its better on fights. It’s only alt raids so I don’t have to worry about hurting progression, if I was progressing on my Windwalker then I’d bite the bullet and use it. The Conduit of the Celestials tier set forces you to use Slicing Winds at the expense of Power of the Thunder King and Last Emperor’s Capacitor which have really grown on me this tier. While it does mean more Heart of the Jade Serpent, which is enormously fun, I just can’t get behind even more movement for DPS and I expect I will hate it as much as I think. Apparently, you can get multiples of Heart of the Jade Serpent that seem to stack with each other. This both seems awesome and terrifying, could be intended, could be unintended, who TF knows.
Thankfully, I would be SHOCKED if I can’t just play Shado-Pan for alt raids.
Asking the Pros
As I often do, I consulted the big brain and big skill Vets in Discord and got some of their thoughts. Overall, the opinions were more favorable for Shado-Pan, in that the majority of them felt that the set bonuses were “Good” or “Great” for Shado-Pan, as opposed to the majority picking “Neutral” or “Good” for Conduit of the Celestials. This shouldn’t come as a surprise, the general discourse in Discord after these sets were revealed were that the Shado-Pan bonuses were strong and should be easy to maximize, whereas the Conduit bonuses are much more difficult to put an accurate number to as the additional uptime of Heart of the Jade Serpent may lead to starving for resources, or perhaps not necessarily using Slicing Winds on cooldown but using it to maximize Heart of the Jade Serpent uptime, or maybe using it on cooldown and letting there be some overlap and stack like I mentioned above. Several of them gave a small blurb of their opinion, except J-Funk who has a very… generous… definition of “quick”.
Mickey
I dislike that Slicing Winds is being enforced as a must pick for Conduit right after we had relatively healthy choice between Slicing Winds and Last Emperor’s Capacitor, but basically it seems like I can stick with my current build which I like
Jarrod
I think the Conduit stuff felt really good to play surprisingly. Alternate the Slicing Winds and Strike of the Windlord triggered Heart of the Jade Serpents, and you get like 70% uptime. The SP set also is bugged and works by fixating; at least the portion that makes the next ability after casting Storm, Earth, and Fire proc Flurry Strikes. The tier also introduces faster spending though by reducing energy requirements by 50% during Storm, Earth, and Fire, the period of time where we sit capped the most, so if anything I think it works out pretty well
Trill (yes, really)
It just seems counterintuitive to force Heart of the Jade Serpent from Slicing Winds when you’d want to keep Slicing Winds on cooldown to benefit from Heart of the Jade Serpent anyway, so I’m not a big fan of that interaction unless it starts adding to your current Heart of the Jade Serpent buff. Also concerned about Shado-Pan’s tier set contributing more Flurry Strikes Charge generation when it’s been one of the most confusing and pointless parts of the hero tree. We already sit at 10 stacks so often, adding more does not make sense.
J-Funk
Shado-Pan
For much of The War Within, the major pain points of Shado-Pan were its lack of burst and interactivity with Flurry Strikes and our major CDs, the relative lack of gameplay interaction and oomph that Flurry Strikes had, and the RNG of Wisdom of the Wall. This tier set manages to address all of these major points and enhances the gameplay so much that it I can’t imagine what it’s going to feel like when it goes away eventually. The Flurry Strikes from the tier set operate on a separate counter allowing you to build up to 20 stacks of Against All Odds (not previously possible) and maintain that stack for the entirety of your Storm, Earth, and Fire duration. This is sort of a fun minigame, but my only critique of this tier set would be that this may become frustrating to players as the low duration of Against All Odds (5 seconds) would lead to players having to not press Fists of Fury momentarily in order to trigger Flurry Strikes Strikes first so they don’t drop their Against All Odds stacks. My suggestion would be to increase the duration of Against All Odds by 1-2 sec to prevent this from happening. Overall, I think it’s a pretty great design and have a fear that it may possibly be nerfed. I only hope that any nerfs that come won’t change the gameplay because it feels much more engaging and fun.
Conduit
This is a much tougher nut to crack as the implications of being able to effectively be in Heart of the Jade Serpent nearly permanently cause resource problems to pop-up. This is slightly alleviated by the 15% haste buff provided by the 4pc bonus, but there are also other issues such as it feels inefficient to press any button that doesn’t feed into the cooldown reduction cycle that Heart of the Jade Serpent provides. This includes Last Emperor’s Capacitor and could honestly have a big impact on talent builds in an almost negative way. Overall, I can’t really tell if I like what it does to Conduit as it makes me feel way more frantic and anxious constantly but this may be alleviated by more testing and getting used to it.
Sidenote: I noticed during testing that the Heart of the Jade Serpent window from Slicing Winds stacks with other Heart of the Jade Serpent windows from Strike of the Windlord/Celestial Conduit, making your Fists of Fury a near instant channel and supercharging your cooldown reduction immensely. This is pretty fun to play with but not sure if this is intended. It does seem like it would be intended so you don’t run into awkward situations in your rotation where you are forced to make a decision between using Slicing Winds for damage like you normally do now or save it for a Heart of the Jade Serpent window.
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