Last week Blizzard announced some tuning to many specs, and Windwalker got included. There’s not a ton of changes that result from these buffs, but people will ask, so its easier to put them into an article. As always, if new information comes out then this article will be updated for the next few days.
What Changed?
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Conduit of the Celestials: Strength of the Black Ox damage increased by 100%.
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Conduit of the Celestials: Flight of the Red Crane damage increased by 100%.
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Conduit of the Celestials: Courage of the White Tiger damage increased by 35%.
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Fists of Fury damage increased by 20%.
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Blackout Kick damage increased by 8%.
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Flurry of Xuen damage increased by 40%.
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Courageous Impulse now increases the damage of your next Blackout Kick by 200% (was 125%).
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Shadowboxing Treads now increases the damage of Blackout Kick by 20% (was 10%) and causes additional Blackout Kicks at 80% effectiveness (was 70%).
What Changes?
Hero Talents
As I said above, not much changes. Conduit of the Celestials gains some damage from the targeted buffs, but Shado-Pan gains a little bit more damage from the buffs to Fists of Fury and Blackout Kick, so they remain mostly in the same place. It boils down to this:
- Shado-Pan will remain the general recommendation for all content.
- Conduit of the Celestials may be slightly better if the fight is single target and lasts less than 2-minutes.
- They may be roughly equal if the fight is single target and lasts less than 4 minutes.
- You still want/need Treacherous Transmitter to maximize the value of playing Conduit of the Celestials.
Other Talents
With the buffs to many of the Blackout Kick relevant talents, its understandable that they become more desirable.
- Nothing is changing in Single Target
- Flurry of Xuen can be used in AOE situations or if you find you’re particularly bad at keeping up Hit Combo.
- Courageous Impulse and Shadowboxing Treads are likely best in cleave and AOE situations.
- Drinking Horn Cover and Ordered Elements can be dropped to give you the points to take them, neither are as good as you think in AOE situations.
- Rising Star is dropped for Sequenced Strikes and you pick up Martial Mixture or Energy Burst to get there.
- This means that the AOE talents will look something like this: Conduit and Shado-Pan.
One of the things that is worth noting is that there are several permutations of talents that are close enough to be considered options. If you do not enjoy playing with the current recommended setup, then definitely use the Talent combination option on Raidbots’ TopGear to see what your options are and if a more enjoyable talent set up is worth the theoretical damage loss.
Damage Changes
The changes above amount to a 4-5% increase in single target damage and a 5-6% increase in AOE damage. Neither of these will push Windwalker into “The Meta”, but should be sufficient to bring Windwalker toward the middle of the pack, if not slightly above average with the additional nerfs to some of the stronger specs. A few people (myself included) weren’t expecting any class tuning until 11.0.7, so it’s nice to see Blizzard being a little bit more proactive. Hopefully, specs like Windwalker will continue to get the attention they need as time goes on, but all we have is hope.
Playing around Courageous Impulse
With Courageous Impulse becoming worthwhile, you want to prioritize using Blackout Kick! so that you don’t waste procs. This just means that if you have two stacks of Blackout Kick! you will want to try to make sure to use one before you risk creating another. This isn’t so strong that you want to save up Blackout Kick! procs so that you only use it when you have two, just worth bumping up the priority if you happen to end up with two stacks.
Functionally this makes very little differences, since you already should be trying not to overcap Blackout Kick!, just like Dance of Chi-Ji. It’s just something you can store away in your brain in case you’re in that situation.
