So the first PTR posting for 8.3 was released today, and it comes with some long awaited buffs.

  •  Rising Sun Kick
    Kick upwards, dealing [(115% 143.8% of Attack power) * ((Attack power + Offhand attack power) * 2 / 3) / Attack power] Physical damage, and reducing the effectiveness of healing on the target for 10 sec
  •  Blackout Kick
    Kick with a blast of Chi energy, dealing [(77% 84.7% of Attack power) * ((Attack power + Offhand attack power) * 2 / 3) / Attack power] Physical damage.
    Reduces the cooldown of Rising Sun Kick and Fists of Fury by 1.0 sec when used.

This amounts to a 25% increase to Rising Sun Kick and 10% to Blackout Kick which is an area that Windwalker has sorely struggled with. This has two effects:

First, the change in the balance of power means that we’ll no longer be considering dropping Rising Sun Kick from our rotation regardless of your Azerite traits and essences. It puts Rising Sun Kick safely back into the “use on cooldown” category. There shouldn’t be very much shifting in anything else about the spec, we’ll still look at the same traits and essences, stats, etc.

Secondly, obviously its a DPS increase. Using the current base Windwalker profile and some overrides, the single target DPS goes up from 44,847 in 8.2.5 to 46,518 in 8.3 for an increase of about 3.7%. This is obviously less than what many of us were hoping. Looking at this past week’s data for the raid, Windwalker is currently securely in the bottom spot for Melee at 7.48% below average on Overall Damage and 6.92% on boss damage. If you apply a simple increase of 3.7% to Boss Damage, it moves Windwalkers above Ret and up to 3.72% below the average on Boss Damage. The change would be even smaller in Overall Damage where single target is less impactful.

So really, based on the current numbers and data, instead of Windwalker being currently the last or 2nd to last DPS on Boss Damage, it would be the 5th or 6th lowest DPS on Boss Damage. I guess something is better than nothing. Historically we undervalue the change a bit more than tends to bear out in the logs, but we’d have to be REEEEEAAAAAALLLLLLYYYYY undervaluing this buff for it to be adequate to get Windwalkers any reasonable distance from the average.

As a general caveat, this is only the first changes that were announced and there could be many more left, but based on what we’ve got so far, its getting better, but still not going to be good; maybe moving Windwalker’s Boss Damage in raids from “hilariously awful” to just “laughably awful”.

 


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