Windwalker Monk Guide for The War Within - Dragonflight 10.2.7 (2024)

Last updated on Jun 18, 2024 at 21:00by Babylonius43 comments

Welcome to our War Within expansion guide for Windwalker Monk.Ahead of launch, this page will contain everything you need to know about theWindwalker Monk spec in the forthcoming The War Within expansion,including changes, Hero Talent Trees, and some light predictions on the stateof the spec going into the expansion.

This page is a constantly evolving work in progress, with regularchanges expected as updates hit the War Within beta. This is not meant to bea launch guide for Windwalker Monk, but instead serves as aresource for you to keep up to date with how the spec is evolving on Beta, andwhat you can expect from its playstyle and feel on launch.

Windwalker Monk has received a massive overhaul of the classand specialization talent tree. Many talents have been removed, repositioned,or replaced. Fortunately, the core of the spec remains mostly intact, but playerswho may have picked the spec up during Dragonflight may be surprised at thesignificant difference in available resources.

The most important change for Windwalker Monk has beenthe addition of increased Haste, Critical Strike, and Mastery scaling. Windwalkerhas long suffered from abysmal stat scaling throughout an expansion and requiredconstant bandaid buffs to keep it relevant. Hopefully with the changes to statscaling, this will no longer be a problem.

While nothing changed for Windwalker Monk's core features,The War Within still has major implications for all specs thanks to the HeroTalent Tree system, new tier sets, and the natural reduction in secondarystats when entering a new expansion.

Windwalker Monk gets to choose between the Conduit of the Celestialsand Shado-Pan Hero Talent Trees. In sections below, we will talk moredeeply about the implications of these Hero Talent Trees for the spec, and somethoughts on what looks strong and weak ahead of launch.

The Conduit of the Celestials Hero Tree Talents are primarily based on the new ability, Celestial Conduit, that invokes the four August Celestials to aid us in battle.

Looking the gameplay of Conduit of the Celestials, it is focused on increasingresource generation, reducing remaining cooldown duration, and refunding things like Teachings of the Monastery. It has a comparatively large effect on the playstyle,but most of it is behind the scenes and may not always be noticeable unless you are looking for it.The biggest affect is the addition of Celestial Conduit, which is a channeled cast you willgenerally want to use on cooldown.

Gauging the power of the hero talents is difficult, as much of it is "under-the-hood",except Celestial Conduit which will appear to dominate your damage breakdown despiteonly being used every 90 seconds. This will make it seem stronger than Shado-Pan, whenthe two talent trees may be relatively close to each other in performance.

Defensively, Conduit of the Celestials provides a small increase in defense, but notanything noticeable or overly useful.

The Shado-Pan Hero Talent tree is based mostly on the passive proc, Flurry Strike,which occurs automatically as we do damage.

Gameplay-wise, this talent tree is mostly passives and stat buffs. This means thatit generally doesn't change how you play, it just increases the power of playing the "normal"way.

When trying to assess the power of Shado-Pan, it is less obvious than when playingConduit of the Celestials. The passive damage from Flurry Strike is a significantlysmaller portion of your overall damage than Celestial Conduit. However, the strengthof this Hero Talent tree is in the increased damage to your base kit, rather than one big boom.

Defensively, Shado-Pan provides very little in regards to functional defensive power.

Below are the Tier Set Bonuses for Windwalker Monk in The WarWithin.

• Monk Windwalker 11.0 Class Set 2pc — Tiger Palm increasesthe damage of your next melee ability by 5.0%.
• Monk Windwalker 11.0 Class Set 4pc — Your other melee abilitiesincrease the damage of your next Tiger Palm by 25%, stacking up to 6 times.15% of Tiger Palm's damage is dealt onto nearby enemies, reduced beyond 5 targets.

Both set bonuses are completely passive and are not expected to have anygameplay impact.

Both tier-set bonuses are generally and numerically expected to be terrible.This is the first tier, so a tier set that doesn't fundamentally change the specis a good thing, but the prevailing thought is that these tier bonuses are especiallysmall damage increases and may not get much bigger even if you fully lean into allof the talents that improve the strength of Tiger Palm.