Introduction
Disclaimer: This post is a bit of a rant
Good Karma is a new talent introduced in Battle for Azeroth that increases the amount of damage that your Touch of Karma can absorb and redirect by 50% for a total of 100% your max health. Now that we have established what Good Karma is. I’m going to try to explain why it is a problem.
Location, Location, Location.
First off, the talent is located in probably the worst spot it could be put in. It is located in the 60 talent row also known as the utility row. Good Karma is a throughput talent in a utility row which makes it the default talent pick in almost every conceivable situation. Now many people in the Discord have suggested they change the talent so that the extra damage absorbed doesn’t do damage. This would be an okay compromise in theory but it would still result in becoming the default pick in most situations where you can’t utilize Ring of Peace where the design direction for that row is supposed to be preference like it has been in the past.
It seemed like to me they were trying to give each monk spec a flavor talent in that spot and have the other two options be universal. Because Brewmaster has Dave, Mistweaver has Pocket Mist.
Stand In The Fire for DPS
The biggest problem with that talent that pretty much everyone has noticed and groaned about. This talent is a HUGE part of our damage currently in the BfA prepatch. Touch of Karma averages out to be 16-20% of your damage on ST fights in prepatch Antorus. This is mostly because of Cenedril, Reflector of Hatred. Now while this is more of an issue in the prepatch the problem doesn’t magically go away in BfA. Touch of Karma still remains 6-14% of your damage on single target encounters in Uldir from the raid testing I have done. The reason for the wild variance is because of Good Karma and how it requires you to stand in a mechanic that will normally kill you or do most your health in damage. You can’t always do that on fights.
Now normally this doesn’t result in super degenerate behavior on most fights because usually there is a mechanic you can stand in. Where this does cause problems are the few fights where this option doesn’t exist. Fetid Devourer in Uldir is a perfect example, Fetid’s AoE mechanics don’t do enough damage to get the full value of Touch of Karma but he does have a mechanic called Terrible Thrash, where every 4 auto attacks he does he will attack the target closest to his current target for 300% of his normal auto attack damage. This is the only mechanic I found on this fight that would do enough consistent damage to pop it. Now in Heroic Uldir testing, I would have to run next to the tank on pull pop Karma and Dampen Harm and I would survive with about 25% of my HP left. Now if I don’t do this I miss out on potentially 14% damage.
Now you may be thinking, “Kuya you don’t need to do this if you aren’t going for good parses”. I would disagree having this extra damage will allow you to kill the boss faster which means that everyone involved will need to do less because the kill time will be shorter. There is also the off chance you are soaking a mechanic that was going to deal damage to someone else.
At its worst this talent is encouraging purposefully poor play in exchange for damage, at its best it gives Windwalker Monks a strength they’ve never really had which is soaking important mechanics, think Seeker Swarm from Tichondrius in the Nighthold.
Tuning around Good Karma
The long term problem that Good Karma will cause is that because it is such a significant portion of your damage, it may cause us to be tuned around getting decent value from Touch of Karma every fight. Otherwise Windwalker could potentially do way more damage than intended because they are using a defensive cooldown as an offensive one. This would be an incredibly frustrating outcome if it did come to pass and a big part of why it should be changed/removed.
Fixing the Problem
The easiest solution would be just to remove the talent and bring good ol’ Dave back. A more complex solution is trying to somehow balance/rework how the talent works so that it doesn’t give us damage. Other solutions would be to give us a new talent that somehow increases utility. Suggestions that i have thought of would be having a talent that made Fists of Fury apply Disable to all targets hit. A talent that increases the effect of our Windwalking aura. Anything that would give us utility that would want people to bring us over other classes while also not increasing our DPS or Survivability. Allowing us to pick what we want and not have to worry about it which is not the case right now.
TL;DR
Good Karma is bad for the future of Windwalker because it causes us to play around it to maximize damage and may eventually cause us to be tuned with the damage it does in mind. Which further enforces the degenerate playstyle that it promotes.
Conclusion
This is the main problem with Windwalker going into BfA for me. While the spec has many other problems this one stands out because they can’t just fix it with tuning. They rushed a talent out with not a lot of testing and didn’t really see how it would impact gameplay in the long run.
I hope to see it removed or changed in the near future, but until then you’ll see me standing in the bad. I’d like to hear what you all think and what you propose should happen to the spell.
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Hey thanks for your feedback.
I totally agree with you. We now need our timing and positioning to be perfect when launching touch of karma in order to maximise dps, that’s dumb. It’s even worse during progression cause it will add stress on healers for nothing if you don’t time your escape greatly. It’s not like we have so many defensive CDs that we can use them everytime like rogues. I agree that the row is wrongly choose too. It’s the only dps increase on a utility row… Obviously we will choose that one and neglect the others. And now when RL will tell us to take ring of peace, we will now we can forget the parse 🙁
I hope they will change this for sure
I think it’s one of those things that get old very quickly. It was fun for the first raid night or so, but as outlined here, causes a lot of problems.
I remember when Havoc had a trait that gave them 2 charges of Fel Rush when they used their defensive, and it was shortly changed due to the idea of an offensive defense. I’d be surprised if this makes it too long.
I would say bring back the Karma trait, “touch of karma now heals you for the damage it absorbs” but that’s rather boring. I really like the FoF/disable combo, but I also really like the PvP talent “FoF causes the target to deal 20% less damage stacking up to 3 times”. Ofc, this would need to be numbers tuned, and maybe even be tied to a slow so it’s not usable on boss mobs or something, but I think it would be an awesome piece of utility in places like m+ for a short “external” dr for the tank.
WW went from a great spec to such a half assed broken mess …
They have not learned a single thing from Legion. It’s a bit scary.
I would rather have the heal back personally, right now that is where WW is hurting in solo PVE, and it would help PvP as well. Naturally if they are removing that much of our damage though, we need something bumped up in damage…like maybe RSK 🙂
Normally the solution is easy: Bring back the healing effect of Karma and reduce the damage to an amount where it is NOT worthid to use it offensively. Fixing good karma will not be easy when the 2 remaining choices remain the same 🙂
One of the thing pissing me off is the fact that the damages of the ToK synergize with the “gale burst” effect of the ToD, increasing the toxcicity of this talent.
Gale Burst was an artifact trait which means it no longer exists as far as I’m aware. Which means you don’t have to fit all the burst in the ToD window any more, you just want to get everything including ToD and ToK on cooldown as soon as possible. If gale burst still worked to your advantage it would definitely make it even more cancerous though, because you could easily imagine a case where you have to hold ToD/ToK for more heavy outgoing damage
ToD has a 10% damage done during added on baked into it now. So maximizing damage done during it is still beneficial.
I like the idea of improving the Windwalking aura. Maybe add the March of the Legion legendary effect as a talent.
I’ve honestly swapped to rogue because of this talent and the gameplay it brings. Hopefully they make the changes and I’ll play WW again.
Honestly, Good Karma should be baseline. While there are many new WWs out there due to the strength we had in Antorus, many people out there seem to forget that during MoP ToK was always a flat 100% health absorb. Now changing it in WoD made sense as we had too many defensives – ToK, Diffuse AND Zen Med made us incredibly strong soak powerhouses. Going into Legion we lost Zen Meditation and diffuse was nerfed from 90% to 60%, and all we got was ToK healing on damage dealt. ToK healing us was very powerful, but with that trait gone and essentially losing a huge part of our survivability we never got back from the loss of Zen Med, I think it’s time it was reverted to how it was in MoP and just make it 100% all the time.
Also the talk of “degenerate behaviour” regarding standing in things to boost DPS is silly, that’s always been something part of ToK itself. If players want to play risky and go for that extra damage instead of holding onto ToK for another mechanic what’s wrong with that? There will always be players that take the risk for extra damage, just as there will always be players that think they can take that risk and then die because they didn’t have it up. Good decisions should be rewarded, and Windwalker has always been a spec about taking advantages of opportunities.
I’m not totally with you on this. I agree good decisions about your rotation should be rewarded (spend 2 chi because you will generate a flat 3 on next GCD, not wasting procs etc) but you should never have to choose to risk taking damage and die to deal more damage. I mean, yes, it was already the case in Legion but it wasn’t that impactful, now it’s almost compulsory to do great percentiles (https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports/H6VFAjmpKybvRxLC#fight=1&type=damage-done&source=22). And if RL says you need to take Ring of Peace, you can say goodbye to your parse too.
Dunno.
Good karma is less of aproblem than rising sun kick.
This post says only that you have to take damage to deal dmg.
Dks have the same with ams.
Problem is only that the good karma has in most situations more absorb than th actual non-Tank mechanic does dmg.
If the absorb amount gets lowered to 66% of max health combined with a 33% reduce of the cd it would be fine.
And heroic and normal… We have to see the dmg in mythic and btw soaks like tychondrius or avatar were done mostly by immunity classes or classes with a higher frequency in such abilities.
Therefore a cd reduce and absorb reduce in relation to each other are the best way to fix it.
Yea not too fond of the karma dps mechanic unless we are the strongest with it. It’s unique to other classes sure but for it to be a worthy playstyle we absolutely must be top single target dps to reward us for that risk – and it looks like WW is just 2nd class to rogues atm. So i’l be levelling a rogue as well as a WW because I just have some vibes that this will be a repeat of Legion where we’re one of the weakest classes in the first raid tier. Maybe they’ll buff us a bit though
I think the difficulty here is that with ToK only at 50% we really don’t have any good defensives. I’m already not looking forward to losing port heal, healing elixers, and the healing from our artifact trait on ToK. This goes doubly so for any kind of PvP.
I’m actually thinking of switching to BrM simply because they’ve pruned way to much out of WW and they are continuing to slow the playstyle. We are a far cry from the haste stacking gcd capped class I fell in love with in MoP.
What if the talent instead reduced the cooldown 50%? That would essentially double the damage like it does now, without encouraging players to stand in heavy damage areas risking death. The shorter cooldown would encourage players to use it offensively more often, while still be up when it is needed for survival. Then add the heal on top?
Most annoying thing for me before the changes in the pre-patch was I always was out of range of a mob when I needed to pop-it. I’d be happy if the talent removed the targetting component.
I’d honestly like it if we kept the talent as it is now but maybe have it reduce the damage you reflect with it to counteract the extra gain it will have for the shield.
What if they just made the base line touch of karma a 50/50 heal/damage thing so 50% of reflected damage is used to heal the player while the other 50% damages the enemy so so 25% would heal you and 25% would damage the enemy. Then you could have the talent either bump both of those up to 50% of the damage reflected or if that is to much just have it give the extra shield only while there is no increase to damage/healing from touch of karma.
Good Karma – if you look at it really closely – is just a reverse of Mages’ Rune of Power: you have to know the fight mechanics well enough so you can trigger it at the right time at the right spot and not die for wanting more DPS.
It only requires of you to know exact damage numbers of boss abilities, your own absorb amount and calculate before the fight which abilities you can soak and which ones you can’t.
Will be great for unavoidable damage like Taesalach techniques of Aggramar.
I agree that it’s silly that it requires of us to “unlearn for the benefit of this one ability” evertyhing about movement we have been taught for 13 years, but at least it does hefty damage to compensate.
I agree with your presentation. It’s the major windwalker problem.
Good karma and touch of karma are the only defensive (and really good) spell we have.
And reverse the effect and using as an offensive is not rational.
RL in raids don’t like we stay with tanks to take damage, not good for the stress 🙂
In order to keep the defensive effect of Touch of Karma, I will prefer a heal instead of the damage reflected.
Good karma could be an energy gain talent, propotionnal to the damage taken.
100% of your max health damage give you 100% of energy regain.
The energy you gain is instant as you take damage else you will loose too much by reaching 100% too often.
A mini serenity effect in fact.
The second effect of good karma could be a cool down reduction of touch of karma.
We gain in survivability. But in pvp it’s maybe a little too much…(not my cup of tea but I must consider it also).
And to give the choice between DPS and survivability we could increase the “hit combo” bonus stack up to 10 (instead of 6 now).
This option give us the choice in the same talent raw: overall DPS gain, best survivability or burst DPS using Xuen