Issue of Windwalkers : a weapon matter

#1 - Jan. 26, 2017, 10:55 a.m.
Blizzard Post
Hello, I want to talk about a problematic situation that you may have read about if you've followed recent discussions about balance (especially CoF trinket) : WW's scaling issue.

There are 2 reasons why WW has currently the worst ilvl scaling in all Legion specs :

-Haste and legendaries
Haste is overall our worst secondary stat, mainly because it doesn't fit most of our gameplay phases and few spells benefit from it. If we have too much haste we just spend energy too fast, ending up with greater gaps in our rotations.
You'll tell me "yeah okay no big deal", but this is much more anoying when all of your legendaries (all the windwalker specific legs) except 7.1.5 chest Emperor's "Capacitor" have haste on them, including our 2 possible rings : March of the Legion and Sephuz.

Weapon's damages
The biggest problem is that all of our melee techniques don't scale on our Weapon's damages (except Strike of the Windlord which represents at best 15% of our overall damage input). So when all other melee specs scale from decently to extremely good on their weapon's ilvl (even caster dps specs actually, yes), we only benefit from the stats on them. Which results in my third point.

Relics
As our weapon's ilvl don't matter much, an optimal weapon is just one with 3 Fists of Fury relics (+5% damage/each on our main singletarget and multitarget damage source). It is consequently hard to improve our Fists' ilvl (hopefully NH have FoF relics) while staying opti. With 2P T19 bonus, Rising Sun Kick (+5% dmg relic) necomes interesting, but that's in imaginary pure singletarget situations, so FoF will remain godlike, ScK being only competitive on a higher ilvl relic. The case is worse than Paladins getting multiple Crusade relics, because THEIR weapon's damages matter.
I think that specs like this shouldn't exist, it just breaks loot system, makes any personal choice of gameplay from relics impossible; and WW is by far the most extreme here.

With all of that, situation is that dps monks need to get buff via hotfix every week for at least a month after new gear release so they can stay competitive. Else their damage input will just plummet to the far bottom, compared to all dps specs which scale better.
I see 2 simple solutions : review WW legendaries secondary stats, and calculate a good scaling of our melee techniques on Fists' damages.
Oh, I can add a third one : revert this 0 sense overnerf on Converge of Fates trinket, all of NightHold trinkets already suck enough, we need at least one to be good for us.
Tell me what you think about it, if you agree or help me improve/replace solutions we could make it real.

A windwalker lover.
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Game Designer
#24 - March 16, 2017, 6:59 a.m.
Blizzard Post
It is an astute observation that Windwalker has very little scaling with its weapon DPS. It's not something we have a short-term fix for, and we recognize the problem relating to relic choice. Longer-term, it's probably best for us to reevaluate the difference between weapondamage-based attacks and AP-based attacks entirely, and what purpose it serves.

To be clear, being focused mostly on AP-based attacks doesn't impair your overall scaling with ilvl--your AP still increases in the correct proportion as you upgrade all of your items. It just means that weapons make up less of the pie (and armor fills up more of it) for Windwalker compared to other specs. It would be nicer to clean this all up so that weapons were consistently important on all specs, and so that we didn't run into things like the relic choice issue.