windwalker-monk
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Blizzard's new level 90 crash-course videos
Blizzard has released 11 instructional videos designed to give a new level 90 a quick and dirty introduction to their class. The title is perhaps a bit misleading, because these are not complete class overviews. Instead, each video focuses on a particular specialization of that class--and specifically, a DPS specialization. The specs featured are: Frost death night, Balance druid, Survival hunter, Arcane mage, Windwalker monk, Retribution paladin, Shadow priest, Combat rogue, Elemental shaman, Destruction warlock, and Arms warrior. If you've got a brand-new 90 that you're still figuring out, or if you're looking to busy yourself learning a new aspect of your class before Warlords of Draenor, these might be of interest to you. It is nice to see a Blizzard-sponsored guide for specs such as the Balance druid, which I personally find annoyingly complicated to play, but I'm a bit puzzled by the extremely specific nature of the videos. Are there going to be further guides for tanking and healing specs? Or for the DPS specs not covered here, such as Affliction warlocks, Fury warriors, Feral druids, Subtlety rogues, and more? I think videos like this that come straight from the horse's mouth of Blizzard are a great idea, but it's strange to see a set of them that feels so incomplete. Still, if you're toying with the idea of learning one of the specs covered, the videos are a good place to start.
How to gear your new windwalker monk for raiding
So you've finally hit level 90 on your windwalker monk and you're trying to decide where to go from here. There are lots of things you can do at level 90, but if you want to keep advancing through PvE content, the first thing you'll need to do is grab better gear that will let you hop into heroics and raids. While the one of the best ways to gear up is by jumping into heroics and, especially, raids to grab item drops, each raid has an item level requirement -- and you definitely won't meet it after initially hitting 90. But that's not to say it's out of reach -- just that you'll need to put a bit of effort in before you're ready to head into heroics (which require an ilvl of 435) or raids (which start with the ilvl 460 Mogu'shan Vaults). For new monks who aren't sure where to start -- or old hat players who just aren't confident of their windwalking skills -- we'll help you through the stats that are important for your gear and point you in the right direction to get ready for raiding.
Short-lived bug gives windwalker monks huge damage numbers
Hotfixes have already been rolled out to correct this, as noted in the latest hotfix blog, but windwalker monks enjoyed a brief, rather confusing, night of crazy DPS. It should be noted that deliberate use of this bug would most likely have been considered exploiting, hence why WoW Insider isn't in the habit of reporting these things until they've been dealt with. The bug was ostensibly called by combining two abilities together: Rushing Jade Wind and Spinning Crane Kick. The former gives the latter a multiplier, which is supposed to be around 30%, but appears to have had at least a couple of extra zeros accidentally added to the end. As can be seen from the header image, windwalkers were posting incredibly high DPS when using these two abilities together. This wasn't an isolated issue, there were various reports on the forums, as well as videos. Another example can be seen to the right, from Wowmartiean, in the raid finder. WoW Insider readers will no doubt recall the previous bug with retribution paladins, where Censure had a similar modifier problem, resulting, again, in some disproportionately high numbers. As we mentioned in our recent patch 5.2 PvP round-up, windwalkers were due some buffs, but this seemed a step too far! Blizzard agreed, and for clarity, this is no longer in the game. It remains to be seen whether any action will be taken against anyone who is considered to have exploited this bug, but it has appeared and been hotfixed so quickly that, with any luck, it will not have had any major impact. As Blizzard noted on twitter, they ran rolling restarts to repair this within a very short time of its occurrence, and PvP Developer Brian Holinka noted that a fix was underway shortly earlier.
An early look at patch 5.2 for monks, part 2
Interested in trying out the new monk class, but can't tell your Tiger Strikes from your Tiger Palms? Written by Chase Hasbrouck of World of Monkcraft, WoW Insider's new monk coverage will get you kicking in no time! In my last column, I explored how monks (well, windwalkers and mistweavers) are dramatically changing in terms of PvP. This week, we'll take a spec-by-spec look at what you can expect to change for PvE content, and draw some tentative conclusions as to what abilities and stats you'll be using and not using. Keep in mind that this is still PTR content, so things change on a day-by-day basis; a hotfix tomorrow might invalidate every conclusion I make today. Changes for all specs When you first log in for patch 5.2, take a look at your healing talents. All of them have been redesigned from the "uses chi and no-cooldown" model to "free with cooldown" model, so the only cost to using your self-heals now is one global cooldown. The actual strength of the heals are still being tweaked, but given this new model, I expect Brewmasters to continue to go for Chi Wave; Chi Burst to be decent for Mistweavers needing to raid heal; and Windwalkers to go "meh," since they'll want the GCD's for damaging abilities. Zen Sphere is interesting, but it took a massive nerf (62%) which makes it not very desirable at first glance.
An early look at patch 5.2 for monks, part 1
Interested in trying out the new monk class, but can't tell your Tiger Strikes from your Tiger Palms? Written by Chase Hasbrouck of World of Monkcraft, WoW Insider's new monk coverage will get you kicking in no time! Greetings! I've been bitten by the real-life bug for the last few weeks, but I'm back and ready to break down the changes occurring in patch 5.2. As a new class, Monks have a ton of changes and new abilities coming, so let's buckle down and take a look! This week, we'll look at the major mechanics changes from a PvP perspective; next week, we'll take a look at PvE and speculate how your rotations and weighting might be affected. PvP woes Let's face it: Monks were pretty weak for PvP. Windwalkers were reasonably good at generating sustained damage but had trouble putting out good burst (getting a kill typically required having a high Tigereye Brew stack, full chi, and a damage trinket effect active). Unfortunately, they frequently didn't have time to generate the brew stacks they needed due to having weak passive defense. Once your trinket was down, a Shockwave or Deep Freeze usually meant you were done. Touch of Karma helped, but required skill to use pre-emptively. Add to this diffficult-to-use CC making it hard for Monks to help land lockdown chains on healers, and windwalkers were, well, terrible.
A closer look at the Ascension talent for monks
Interested in trying out the new monk class, but can't tell your Tiger Strikes from your Tiger Palms? Written by Chase Hasbrouck of World of Monkcraft, WoW Insider's new monk coverage will get you kicking in no time! Ascension: Passive talent. Increases your maximum Chi by 1, your maximum mana by 15%, and your energy regen by 15%. In patch 5.1, Blizzard quietly reworked Ascension to make it a more useful talent. (I say quietly, because the change wasn't listed in the official patch notes, which was likely an oversight.) Previously, the talent had only increased maximum chi by 1, which made the talent useless for most players. Sure, in theory, you could use it to save up an extra chi for burst-type situations, but Chi Brew and its instant four chi was a much better choice for those anyway. After finding out about the changes, my initial reaction (after a bit of napkin math) was that the talent was significantly improved to the level where it was a reasonable choice, but probably still not ideal over Power Strikes or Chi Brew. After I posted that in last week's column, a few commenters asked me to take a closer look, so I'll go spec-by-spec and take a closer look at the talent.
3 advanced monk tactics you might not be using
Interested in trying out the new monk class, but can't tell your Tiger Strikes from your Tiger Palms? Written by Chase Hasbrouck of World of Monkcraft, WoW Insider's new monk coverage will get you kicking in no time! In the previous weeks, I've covered the basics for brewmasters, mistweavers, and windwalkers. Now that we've had a month to get used to the new specializations, it's time to try some advanced tactics. Stick with me as we roll through one ability for each specialization that'll help propel you to the top of the charts, be they healing, damage, or your healer's Christmas card list. Windwalker: Touch of Karma All damage you take is redirected to the enemy target over 6 sec instead of you. Damage cannot exceed your total health. Lasts for 10 sec. 90 second cooldown. Touch of Karma is amazing. First, this is one of the best defensive skills for a DPS'er in the game, as it essentially gives you a 350k HP shield which works against everything. It won't save you from insta-kill void zones, but for damage you know is coming, it's much better than a druid's Barkskin or a paladin's Divine Protection. In a raid setting, it's worth telling your healers to add Touch of Karma to their raid frames so they don't waste heals on you for the duration.
Encrypted Text: How to gank a monk
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Encrypted Text for assassination, combat and subtlety rogues. Chase Christian will be your guide to the world of shadows every Wednesday. Feel free to email me with any questions or article suggestions you'd like to see covered here. With the launch of Mists of Pandaria, the season of world PvP is upon us once again. Over the next few weeks, there will be thousands of players trying out the new monk class. These rerollers are likely to be undergeared and inexperienced, making them perfect targets for your daggers. Rogues were able to take advantage of fledgling death knights as they were still learning to use their awkward new bodies in Wrath. Blizzard promised to bring world PvP back in Mists, and with the massive influx of grounded players trying to level, they've made good on their promise. Don't plan on facing many mistweaver monks out in the open world, as they'll be safe inside of their dungeon queues. The staff-wielding brewmaster tanking monks will be very difficult to defeat unless they're at a significantly lower level than you, so be careful. Our primary targets will be our melee DPS rivals, the windwalker monks. You can identify them by their dual weapons and smug (likely pandaren) faces.
Walking on Air: The windwalker monk 101 guide
Interested in trying out the new monk class, but can't tell your Tiger Strikes from your Tiger Palms? Written by Chase Hasbrouck of World of Monkcraft, WoW Insider's new monk coverage will get you kicking in no time! With Mists of Pandaria nearing release, the monk class is rounding into its final form. While a few things may still be tweaked, the design and abilities have now stabilized enough that I feel comfortable presenting you with a series of guides for each specialization. This week: windwalkers! Windwalkers are the melee DPS specialization for the monk class. Themed after martial artists, your job as a windwalker is to punch and kick things repeatedly until they stop moving. Any race, except for worgen and goblin, can play a monk. Like all monks, they have two resources that must be managed; energy and chi. Energy functions identically to rogues and feral druids, as a 100-point pool that regenerates at 10 points per second, in and out of combat. This energy regeneration can be increased with haste, and is used to power a monk's basic attacks. These abilities aren't very damaging, but they build the monk's second resource: chi. Chi is a static 4-point pool, similar to a rogue's combo points, that decays when out of combat. After the windwalker generates chi, he uses it to power his more iconic abilities, that generate the bulk of the windwalker's damage. One key difference between chi and combo points, however, is that all chi-consuming abilities have a fixed cost and damage, compared to the others where the effect scales based on the amount of combo points consumed.
Leveling a monk in Mists of Pandaria, part 2
Interested in trying out the new monk class, but can't tell your Tiger Strikes from your Tiger Palms? Written by Chase Hasbrouck of World of Monkcraft, WoW Insider's new monk coverage will get you kicking in no time! Two weeks ago, I covered the stuff you'll want to level, and last week, I covered the abilities your new monk will gain from levels 1 to 30. This week, we'll finish out the list. Read: Leveling a monk in Mists of Pandaria, part 1 Levels 31 to 45 For this set of levels, there's not too much going on for windwalkers. You've already received the majority of your core moveset, so now you'll be picking up a bit of utility. (I neglected to mention last week that you unlock your first glyph slot at level 25. I recommend picking up the Glyph of Afterlife for leveling, to help minimize your downtime.) At 32, you'll get Spear Hand Strike, which is a standard interrupt with a nice all-schools lockout bonus for PvP. Following that, you'll get Energizing Brew at level 36. EBrew (as I call it) is deceptively powerful. It'll seem kind of useless while out questing, as most of your fights are pretty short-duration in nature. Jump into a group scenario, however, and you'll soon run into situations where you have no chi left to use on finishers and no energy for Jab. In that case, popping this will effective give you a little kickstart. It's not an instant kick like a feral druid's Tiger's Fury or an assassination rogue's Cold Blood, but in the end, more energy means more chi means more damage. After Energizing Brew, you won't get anything new for a little while, but make sure to grab Journeyman Riding at 40. Continuing on the utility theme, at level 44 you'll receive Paralysis. This is your crowd control ability and functions similarly to a retribution paladin's Repentance. It's limited to melee range, though, which will make using it in a coordinated fashion somewhat problematic. (Later, you do unlock a talent that gives it a limited ranged capability.) It does have a shorter cooldown than duration, so you can refresh it as long as necessary; try to use it from behind, though, to get the full effect. Finally, level 45 unlocks your third choice of talents, which all relate to chi in some fashion. I don't find Ascension particularly useful, so I'd recommend picking up either Power Strikes or Chi Brew. Personally, I prefer Power Strikes since I don't have to think about using it, plus it generally allows me to Jab once and go straight into Fists of Fury or a Touch of Death.
Leveling a monk in Mists of Pandaria, part 1
Interested in trying out the new monk class, but can't tell your Tiger Strikes from your Tiger Palms? Written by Chase Hasbrouck of World of Monkcraft, WoW Insider's new monk coverage will get you kicking in no time! In less than two months, Mists of Pandaria comes out. If you followed my guide from last week, you'll have all the stuff you need to level -- but that still leaves you with a brand new class with a bunch of buttons that you don't recognize. Yay. Don't worry, I'm here to help. This week and next, I'll give you the leveling lowdown so you know exactly what abilities you'll need and what you won't. After that, I'll bring you a series of 101 articles on how to play your chosen specialization of monk at level 90. Excited? Good. Bow, and let's begin. First Steps: Levels 1 to 10 Like all classes, you don't start out with much. Your only usable ability will be Jab, which is your basic attack that generates chi. Your basic auto-attacks will likely do a lot more damage than Jab at first; don't fret. You'll also have Stance of the Fierce Tiger, which will cause your Jab to generate extra chi, which you won't have any use for at first. Finally, you'll have several passive abilities, the most noticeable being Tiger Strikes. This proc gives you (essentially) +50% melee attack speed and +100% melee damage for your next four swings, which means whatever you're fighting will die very quickly. So jab, jab, and jab some more until you hit level 3, when you will learn Tiger Palm. (You don't have to visit trainers to learn abilities anymore; they just pop right into your spellbook. Hooray for progress!) This is your first chi-consuming ability, hitting about twice as hard as Jab for 1 chi. This sets up your first rotation: Jab, Tiger Palm, Tiger Palm, repeat. The armor penetration buff you gain from Tiger Palm is helpful but not overly significant, so don't worry about it too much. Keep punching away, until you get to level 5 and learn Roll. (Whee!) You'll likely be using Roll a lot, so stick it somewhere easy to hit. This tosses you forward about 20 yards in the direction you're moving (or facing, if standing still) and has two charges, so it can be used twice in succession. It's good for travel from point A to point B or as a quick escape from a bad situation.
So you want to play a windwalker monk?
Interested in trying out the new monk class, but can't tell your Tiger Strikes from your Tiger Palms? Written by Chase Hasbrouck of World of Monkcraft, WoW Insider's new monk coverage will get you kicking in no time! If you're anything like me, as soon as premade monks became available, you dived in. Pick the right name, get the right look, log in for the first time, admire your look, open the spellbook ... Whoa. Wha? Stop! Don't feel like you need to run back to that character creation screen to start from the beginning. Over the next few weeks, I'll give you all the info you need to start playing with power; you won't even need to spend $3.99 per minute. One caveat, though: Because this is still beta, things will likely change somewhat between now and live. We'll have a full 101 guide that covers things like enchants, gems, and stats when Mists is released, but this will cover you until then. What is a windwalker monk? Monks have three role options: damage, tanking, and healing, of which windwalker is the melee damage role. I'm covering this first because I expect windwalker to be the most commonly used specialization, especially for leveling. How do windwalker monks work? Windwalker monks have two primary resources, energy and chi. Energy replenishes at a constant rate and is used to power your basic attacks and abilities. These attacks generate chi, which is then used to power your stronger attacks. Since the chi pool is small, though, you'll typically be rotating the use of chi generators and chi spenders in order to maximize efficiency.
Chi: World of Warcraft's new resource for monks
Secondary resource systems are all the rage in World of Warcraft these days. Gone are the days of simply energy, rage, or mana. Now, the majority of classes in the game have an additional resource that must be managed in order to do their role well. From the traditional (combo points for feral druids and rogues, or runes for death knights) to the new (Burning Embers for warlocks, or Shadow Orbs for shadow priests), it's clear secondary resources are here to stay. Chi is the secondary resource common to all three monk specializations in Mists of Pandaria. It is conceptually most similar to paladins' holy power, as a stored 4-point pool. Through his level 30 talents, a monk can choose to buff chi generation in one of three ways, either increasing the maximum pool size via Ascendance, increasing the rate of generation via Power Strikes, or enabling an ability that can periodically completely refill chi (Chi Brew). For all monk specializations, chi is required in order to use the majority of abilities. Before I move on, let's make one thing clear: Chi and combo points (CPs) are very different systems. CPs are stored on a single target; if a rogue or feral switches targets and uses a CP-generating ability, any CPs stored on the previous target are lost. Chi, in comparison, is stored on the monk, making target switches much simpler. Second, most abilities that consume CP scale with the number of CPs used; for example, a 5-CP Ferocious Bite hits much harder than a 1-CP Ferocious Bite. All of the monk's chi-consuming abilities have a fixed cost, though this may change later in the beta.
3 windwalker monk abilities that channel classic fighting games
One of the key themes being presented with the new monk class is arcade brawlers, and the new windwalker specialization delivers this in spades. I spent my youth getting rocked by Sagat in Street Fighter II on the SNES, and I've enjoyed the genre ever since. From my time on the beta with windwalkers, here are three abilities that immediately evoke my childhood. Sorry, brewmasters and mistweavers; these abilities are only for those of us who can kick back and knuckle up. Flying Serpent Kick Josh Myers touched on this in his earlier article on monk abilities, but remember Liu Kang's signature flying kick from Mortal Kombat? It's here, and it's every bit as awesome now as it was then. Hit Flying Serpent Kick, and your windwalker takes off at what appears to be epic mount speed, which lasts for several seconds (about 100 yards of travel). Click again and he lands, damaging and slowing anything in the area. This doesn't hit overly hard, but combined with Roll, it's amazing maneuverability around the battlefield. I used to call feral druids the fastest spec on the battlefield, but not anymore. Forget Heroic Leap; this is now my favorite ability in the game.
Ghostcrawler introduces you to the Pandaren monk
Mists of Pandaria is bringing us the new monk class as well as the new Pandaren race, finally making its way to World of Warcraft after years of speculation and wondering. Blizzard Insider, Blizzard's own internal look at the wheelings, dealings, and development processes of the company, pulled Lead Systems Designer Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street aside and asked him a bunch of questions about the Pandaren, monks, and the newest expansion. Ghostcrawler discusses the motivations behind the Pandaren and how they differ from the other races of Azeroth, how the monk class came about and was decided upon, and what monk players outside the Pandaren race will have in store for them when they travel the world. One of the more interesting pieces of information is how player character monks who choose to start as a race other than Pandaren will still have a heavy Pandaria-inspired kit and experience, since it is the Pandaren that bring the monk class to both the Horde and the Alliance. Of course, we have extra confirmation that DPS and tank monks will be sporting agility leather gear, and the healer archetype will don intellect-based leather gear. I don't believe that I am alone in this observation, but Blizzard has been out and about like crazy talking about the Pandaren and the monk class nonstop. Personally, I'm loving it. The more, the better. Over the years, Blizzard has gone from a very secretive company to pulling back many of the curtains for players and fans alike, with peeks into the development process and getting out ahead of the speculation machine. It's learned a lot from The Burning Crusade and Wrath days. Hit the jump for the full interview with Greg Street.
