Windwalker Advanced Guide

​Disclaimer

This guide is meant to be a complement to the main Windwalker PvE Guide and assumes that you have read and understand what is in the main guide. This guide will not cover obvious spell interactions like using Diffuse Magic to dispel magic debuffs, Tiger’s Lust to get rid of snares, or other “tricks” that should be obvious and general knowledge. This guide, nor its writers/maintainers are not responsible for any deaths, mishaps, or pissed off raid members that may result from you practicing or trying to implement any of these tricks. Some are riskier than others, so use them at your own discretion.

The Saving Dash

The first “advanced” trick is important for everyone who often faces death when casting Whirling Dragon Punch. Using Lighter than Air mid Whirling Dragon Punch can allow you to escape dangerous situations. To allow you a saving dash like that we abuse the fact that Roll is not on the same global cooldown as our damaging spells. When a dangerous effect on the ground happens beneath you while you are midair you can just cast Roll and immediately press Spacebar to force the dash in the middle of your Whirling Dragon Punch.
Seiryoku perfectly executed that technique in this clip.

Snapshotting

This “advanced” trick is rather simple, it takes advantage of a phenomenon called “snapshotting” where an ability takes a “snapshot” of something when it is cast. This used to happen nearly all the time, but now it happens infrequently. For example, Warlock DoTs, such as Curse of Agony, used to deal damage based off of the stats you had when you cast it. This meant that you could get big, temporary, stat buffs and use them to drastically buff the damage that it does for its whole duration; and in some cases, even refresh it, assuming you did it before the timer ran out, to just lengthen the timer but not recalculate the damage it does. Blizzard did away with this a few years ago, making ability damage update dynamically, but it still exists in a few places, and Windwalkers have one of them. Now most things update “dynamically” which means that they look at your stats or buffs at the millisecond they do damage and calculate the damage they will do that way, and recalculate the next millisecond or time they do damage. Its why one tick of a channeled ability like Fists of Fury can do slightly different damage from the next, and why we aim to fit the entirety of a channel inside a buff like Storm, Earth, and Fire.

Although our abilities like Eye of the Tiger, Fists of Fury, and Invoke Xuen, the White Tiger update the damage they do dynamically, Touch of Karma does not. Touch of Karma absorbs damage equal to 50% of your health x Versatility that you have when you cast it and redirects 70% of that absorb back to your target. This means that if you know you have more health or Versatility than you normally would, for whatever reason, you can cast this ability to “snapshot” those stats and have them benefit that ability, even though it deals damage later.

Example: If you are using a trinket like Plumage, if for some reason you had to, you could cast Touch of Karma at the last millisecond of that buff and the damage would still be modified by the increased Versatility. The same applies to other, smaller, buffs like weapon enchant procs.

Transcendence Immuning

This is a trick that has come to our attention more recently, mostly championed by WuSage, although likely has been in place for awhile. It is simple to understand, but difficult to execute. It takes advantage of the very very slight lag time between the visuals of some encounter mechanics and when they actually do damage. During this small window, if you have Trans preset elsewhere and use Trans Transfer, you can avoid taking the damage. This is possible on some, but not all, mechanics that have visuals that fall from the sky or come from another place before they hit you and do damage.

Example: If you are targeted with Coin Shower on Opulence, you would obviously place your Trans on the group to get back there quickly. There is a small window between when the visual for the Coin Shower appears above your character and when it hits the ground and deals damage. If you use Transfer during that window, you’ll escape out and not take any damage. However, do it too early and the Shower will fall on your raid, and do it too late and it will kill you.

Changelog

• July 31, 2023 – Removed “Double Dipping”
• March 10, 2021 – Removed All the SEF bug stuff
• Jan 25, 2021 – Added Mark of the Crane bugs
• Dec 7, 2020 – Added FoF Clipping
• Nov 20, 2020 – Updated for Shadowlands
• May 17, 2019 – Page created