monk-talents
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Ghostcrawler and Daxxarri talk classes in patch 5.2
With the advent of patch 5.2, World of Warcraft Lead Systems Designer Greg Street "Ghostcrawler" and Community Manager Daxxarri have been posting a series of class overviews and changes. Part one went up on Tuesday, covering death knights, druids, and hunters. Part two was posted Wednesday evening and covers mages, paladins, and priests. Part three, on rogues, shaman, and warlocks, went up yesterday evening, and part four, covering warriors and monks, was posted earlier today. For many classes, most of the changes involve PvP balancing as well as trying to improve a number of talents in some way to make them more useful and thus more attractive to players, at least situationally. If you're curious about either the philosophy of class balance design or just want to know what happened to your class this patch, make sure to check it out. What I love about these posts is that little glimpse of insight they provide into the thought process that goes into balancing the class mechanics in a game like World of Warcraft. I'll be honest, I'm glad I'm not one of the people involved in that job. To me it seems like an endless headache to try and make sure all classes are different enough to feel unique, but similar enough such that a raid or dungeon group isn't punished for lacking one indispensable class, and I wouldn't have the patience for it. But I certainly admire and respect those who do!
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.
A guide to monk talents for all specializations
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! Due to an unfortunate family situation, I had to take a break from writing and playing right around the time of release. Now, though, I'm back and ready to talk monk! I've leveled a monk to 90, and in the process, have learned quite a bit more about all three specializations. Build some chi and follow me as we talk turkey about talents. Keep it rolling I'd originally felt that Momentum and Celerity were pretty equal choices. Now, though, Momentum has my heart. Why? Well, two reasons. First, Roll is great, but save for the interposition of a solid object, there's no way to do a half-roll. That means if the object you are trying to get to is not some multiple of 20, Roll doesn't get you "right" there, which can be a problem. (Canny PvP opponents are already discussing how to stay 10 yards away from windwalkers to ensure rolls go right past them.) Momentum doesn't fix this, but it makes closing the remaining distance much less painful.
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.
Mists of Pandaria Beta: First impressions of monk leveling
The first monk I leveled to 15 in the Mists of Pandaria beta was a tauren, and I'm still having nightmares about it. I thought it would be a grand idea, allowing me to focus entirely on the monk experience and not allowing myself to get distracted by the shininess of the new pandaren starting zone. Going with something I've already done tons of times in the past seemed to make sense, and the fact that tauren are still my favorite race in WoW was just icing on the cake. For this same reason, I eschewed heirlooms; I wanted to give myself a holistic monk leveling experience. I had the best intentions, but the actual experience was pretty bad. Most of this can be chalked up to the beta test being a beta test; I'm fairly certain the monk isn't a fully developed class yet. One of the biggest issues was ability progression. You start off with your basic chi-building attack, Jab, at level 1. After that, you get the awesome and always-useful Roll ability at level 2. I have no complaints about Roll, even though the animation hadn't been implemented on tauren models yet.
