https://www.wowhead.com/news=311305/upcoming-patch-8-3-class-balance-changes-for-february-25th

Monk

Windwalker

  • Damage of all abilities increased by 5%.

 

Windwalker finally saw some buffs, on the tail of a nice bug fix to a problem with Mark of the Crane that resulted in less stacks, so its been a pretty good week for Windwalkers. Now, to discuss how this will affect the spec….

First off, lets get this out of the way, its a good day to be a Windwalker in PvP. Windwalker is already one of the top DPS for PvP, especially arenas, and this buff will only help that even further.. JK, they rebalanced it in PvP:

Next, Windwalker is already very strong, certainly one of the strongest, melee in Mythic Plus, and this will, again, only help that further.

Now to what many of you are here for… Raids….

So many people know, but I take weekly data based on logs in WarcraftLogs, and put them into handy spreadsheets so that when someone is talking out of their ass in Discord, I can educate them on the facts. Here’s the chart so far. As you can see, things aren’t going well in Nyalotha for Windwalker. Indeed, if you look at just the data from the last full week, Windwalker is considerably behind on both Overall DPS and Boss DPS. Since I have this data, I can manipulate it a little bit to give us a rough idea of how things may look after next week.

A big thing to remember is that 5% buff like this is not just 5% more damage, as it only affects “abilities”. This means it leaves out trinkets, corruption, autoattacks, potions, and more. Changes like this get done to the Windwalker Aura that Blizzard uses for more overall tweaking. This means that, realistically, this “5% buff” is likely closer to 3% more damage and will vary based on how much damage each player gets from other sources. So with that in mind, if I assume that the other specs that are getting buffs are getting roughly 60% of the damage increase that the notes claim, then I can take last week’s data and make a rough assumption about how much damage everyone would be doing after these buffs.

Theoretical DPS Chart

So as you can see, these buffs help Windwalker, but its certainly not earthshaking. Using this data Windwalkers could easily get another 5% buff to move closer to the middle, or even a 10% buff to maybe even be slightly above the average for the first time all expansion. Hopefully this is just one small step in the process, but only time will tell.