Hero Talent Showdowns in The War Within
Frost DK
Havoc DH
Restoration Druid
Augmentation Evoker
Devastation Evoker
Beast Mastery Hunter
Survival Hunter
Arcane Mage
Brewmaster Monk
Mistweaver Monk
Holy Paladin
Protection Paladin
Holy Priest
Shadow Priest
Outlaw Rogue
Subtlety Rogue
Elemental Shaman
Enhancement Shaman
Affliction Warlock
Protection Warrior
For more information on Hero Talents coming in the War Within, check out our Hero Talents Overview.
The War Within Hero Talents Overview
Windwalker Monk in the War Within
With The War Within approaching, its time to take a look at the two Hero talent trees that Windwalker has access to. In this article I’ll talk about what each tree does, pros and cons, how the two trees compare to each other in a variety of categories, as well as cover lingering issues or necessary improvements, discuss the base Windwalker toolkit, and whether or not you should consider playing Windwalker in The War Within.
I leaned heavily on the opinions and help from several of the Windwalker Vets in Discord, like Seiryoku and Hursti, so feel free to come join us in the PeakofSerenity Monk Discord to discuss the spec.
Hero Talent Showdown: Conduit of the Celestials vs. Shado-pan
For Hero Talents, Windwalker Monks have to pick between Conduit of the Celestials and Shado-pan. Conduit of the Celestials Windwalker Monks focus on getting big damage buffs from the August Celestials and pouring as much burst into damage windows with Celestial Conduit. In contrast, Shado-pan Monks use a variety of passive damage increases and buffs plus Flurry Strikes to deal consistent damage and increase the power of the standard Windwalker kit.
Conduit of the Celestials
Conduit of the Celestials centers around Celestial Conduit and gaining damage through “summoned” Celestials. Because of the focus on Celestial Conduit, this leads Conduit of the Celestials to want to do everything it can to maximize those burst windows. This leads to this Hero tree being incredibly strong in situations where burst damage is desirable.
Shado-pan
Shado-pan is focused on consistent damage output and stacking the various buffs to increase the damage of the base toolkit. This leads to an overall increase in damage, rather than focusing it all into one spell or a burst window. This Hero tree is also focused almost entirely on single target damage with some funneling.
What’s Changed?
Conduit of the Celestials
Conduit of the Celestials hasn’t changed much since my initial review of the Hero talents. It didn’t really need many changes out of the box, so it was mostly left alone.
Shado-pan
Shado-pan has changed the most of the two Hero talent options. It has had several rounds of changes to the energy required to trigger Flurry Strikes’s damage as well as many of the modifiers in the other talents. This has led to a significant increase in its potential, although continued improvement is needed.
And the Winner Is…
- Class Fantasy & Visuals: Conduit of the Celestials (Winner)
While Shado-pan’s focus on Martial Arts is closer to the way that Windwalker fights, there’s almost no visual flair and the “Class Fantasy” is tangential at best, since the Shado-Pan weren’t just Monks. Conduit of the Celestials has a fantastic visual, even though some people think it would be nice if the visual was a bit more active. The problem with Conduit of the Celestials is that Windwalker interacts with the other Celestials after being focused on Xuen for so long. Due to the very very loose connection between Windwalker Monk and Shado-pan, Conduit of the Celestials can be the only winner of this category.
- Fun & Rewarding Gameplay: Conduit of the Celestials & Shado-pan (Tie / Toss-Up)
Conduit of the Celestials has the biggest effect on the gameplay, but not everyone will enjoy an extra button and extra cooldown. Some people may prefer the more steady, Windwalker-toolkit-enhancing, and passive nature of Shado-pan, but that just depends on each person’s preferences.
- Difficulty: Conduit of the Celestials (Winner)
Conduit of the Celestials is the Hero tree that has the most “active” and also has several buffs, like Heart of the Jade Serpent and Strength of the Black Ox that can have a significant impact on how Windwalker plays. This leads to Conduit of the Celestials having the highest learning curve, but also the highest skill ceiling. Shado-pan is mostly passive, so the only difficulty comes in learning and performing the standard Windwalker stuff. An argument could be made that Shado-pan is difficult because, ideally, you need to track and manage a slew of passive damage bonuses, but for 99.999% of people, that is moot and will lead to more damage loss than just ignoring them and letting it happen.
- Defensiveness & Utility: Conduit of the Celestials (Winner)
Conduit of the Celestials has some very strong defensive bonuses with Niuzao’s Protection, Jade Sanctuary, and Chi-Ji’s Swiftness. Shado-pan has Protect and Serve and Lead from the Front which increase our very low self-healing very slightly, and Whirling Steel and Predictive Training which are almost completely useless as a Windwalker and are clearly designed with Brewmasters in mind. This category is maybe the biggest no brainer of them all.
- Leveling: Conduit of the Celestials (Winner)
The burst damage that comes from Celestial Conduit and decently strong defensive bonuses make Conduit of the Celestials the clear winner.
- Mythic+: Conduit of the Celestials (Winner)
Similar to leveling, the Mythic+ damage profile tends towards AOE and burst damage, which is Conduit of the Celestials’s forte. Shado-pan has potential due to strong priority damage, but is heavily held back by the stack cap.
- Raid: Shado-pan (Slight lead)
The damage profile that tends to do best in raid favors Shado-pan’s consistent flow of damage. However, there will be fights or situations where the burst from Conduit of the Celestials will fit perfectly and put it ahead of what Shado-pan can do.
- Best Overall: Conduit of the Celestials (Winner)
While Shado-pan has seen significant improvements, it’s still littered with weird interactions and bugs. There is an above average chance that Shado-pan is the numerically superior option in many circumstances, but also that it may require unhealthy or counterintuitive gameplay to get there. Conduit of the Celestials has the edge in enough categories and is close enough behind in others, that it is the overall best option between the two.
Hero Talent Feedback
Conduit of the Celestials
Even though Conduit of the Celestials is in a much better place than Shado-pan, it is not without its faults, problems, and ways it could be improved.
- Neither the damage from Celestial Conduit nor the damage from the various procs scale with Mastery: Combo Strikes or Hit Combo. Given the historically large problems that Windwalker has had with scaling, not having such a big damage source scale with Mastery is concerning, even with the additional Haste scaling that Windwalker has in The War Within.
- During Heart of the Jade Serpent the spec feels frantic and out of control. Changing what spells are affected, such as reducing the cooldown of just Strike of the Windlord and Whirling Dragon Punch could help with keeping the spec under control. Similarly, reducing the GCD during this buff, which they seem to be testing out with Darting Hurricane, would also allow Windwalker to squeeze more into the window and minimize clashes of too many things to press and not enough time. Even with the new grace window, Whirling Dragon Punch is very difficult and awkward to use during Heart of the Jade Serpent.
- Unity Within doesn’t trigger some of the effects from the other talents such as the regeneration bonus of Flight of the Red Crane and the stat changes of Inner Compass.
- The Chi-Ji from Flight of the Red Crane has the tendency to go completely insane and sprint off to far away enemies who aren’t in combat, pulling them.
Shado-pan
Despite getting some attention and changes recently, Shado-pan suffers from the “jankiness” dialed up to maximum. There are numerous flaws that seem to be at odds with the rest of the tree.
- Against All Odds has a 20 stack cap, but it is impossible to get anywhere near this cap with Flurry Strikes capped at 10.
- Flurry Strikes seems to have two different damage events that it alternates between without an apparent reason.
- Vigilant Watch doesn’t stack, so as long as you use Blackout Kick at least once between Flurry Strikes then its automatic. Since Flurry Strikes gets triggered every 20-25 seconds, it should be impossible not to use Blackout Kick once in that window. This should either be changed to be a passive or a stacking buff.
- You already hit the cap of 10 Flurry Strikes very quickly, so the extra count from One Versus Many has no effect at all.
- Given that Flurry Strikes only really hits one target, High Impact does next to nothing. Wisdom of the Wall doesn’t proc it to make it hit multiple targets.
- The defensive/healing talents are practically meaningless.
- Wisdom of the Wall makes us want to lean more into Versatility, despite the clear effort to help Windwalker scale with other stats, having it scale from our highest secondary stat would make more sense and help us scale even better.
A lot of the problems could be solved or helped by removing the cap on Flurry Strikes stacks and tuning everything appropriately with that in mind. The cap makes it feel like you’re rushing to hit it, then just waiting for the reward and cuts down on some of the flow and smoothness that Windwalker and Shado-pan seem to want to build. It seems like the Hero tree started out with Windwalkers in mind then was updated for Brewmasters without thinking about Windwalker again.
Base Windwalker Monk Gameplay & Talents
Windwalker Monks have received a reasonably sized overhaul to the specialization and class talent trees. Many of these changes should be successful in improving the spec’s scaling as gear increases and brings Haste strongly into the forefront for strongest secondary stats. The end result of these changes are that the spec should play similar enough to how it played in Dragonflight that players won’t feel that they are learning a new spec. However, it is still different enough to be noticeable. The core playstyle of managing resources, using abilities on cooldown, and avoiding repeating remain strongly in place.
Even with the significant improvements to the spec, there are some things that people may notice as issues both for new players and experienced players alike. The biggest thing that people will notice is that both Hero specs can have drastic effects on how many resources we have to use, with Shado-pan often feeling very flooded with resources and Conduit of the Celestials often alternating between feeling overloaded with resources at times and starving for resources at others. Because of this increase in resources, the talent Darting Hurricane is hoisted up to a nearly required level since it lets you fit more into windows and spend more of the resources that you get so much of.
The return of needing to manually manage Mark of the Crane without Shadowboxing Treads to help is one of the first gripes that people talk about when they hop into Discord. Fists of Fury dealing strong damage and Spinning Crane Kick now being cancelled if you cast something else just makes macros that prevent cancelling them mandatory without really adding value beyond that requirement. This is a punishment focused on newer players that may not know about the macros. Not wanting to cancel them is a good thing, but there has to be better solutions than making macro conditionals mandatory to every other rotational button.
Should You Play Windwalker Monk in the War Within?
Most long time Windwalkers are very excited for where the spec is going from Dragonflight into The War Within. Many players, new and old, will enjoy the increased flow and what I call “controlled speed”. There are periods of time where it can feel overwhelming and frantic, as I talked about above, but this should be fixed with practice and comfort.
The biggest gripe that people have had over the years, certainly myself included, has been how poorly Windwalker scales as an expansion goes on and how often it needs assistance from Blizzard to stay above water. With the changes made for The War Within, this should be less of a problem, and with some additional changes like the few I listed above, it will hopefully be a thing of the past.
Its a good time to be a Monk, and it will hopefully be a great time to be a Windwalker.
About the Author
| This guide is written and maintained by Babylonius; former moderator on MMO-Champion; current owner and administrator of the PeakofSerenity Monk class discord; founder and Windwalker author of the Monk Class site, PeakofSerenity.com and those that came before it; Windwalker main since early Mists of Pandaria, guide writer/theorycrafter/teacher for almost that whole time.Discord | Twitter | Twitch | YouTube |
For more information on playing Windwalker Monk, please see our class guide updated for The War Within Pre-Patch:
Windwalker Monk Guide
About The Author
