Reprisal has been redesigned with Patch 9.0.5. Throughout most of PTR testing, it made
Charge and
Intervene grant 6 seconds of
Shield Block, a
Revenge proc, and 20 Rage (in addition to Charge's baseline 20 Rage). This is a terrific bonus that massively increases Shield Block uptime and significantly improves Protection Warrior's offenses and defenses. Arguably, it can make them a top-tier tank. Very near the end of the PTR, the Shield Block buff was reduced to only 4 seconds. Depending on the situation, this could be anywhere from a moderate nerf to a complete non-issue.
Imagine our collective surprise today when we logged on and found that
Reprisal was once again back to granting 6 seconds of
Shield Block. Is it a bug? Is it intentional? Only Blizzard can say for certain. In either case, it's still Protection Warrior's best Legendary, and it is still good enough to make Protection Warrior the hot new flavor of the month. If a nerf comes along, the sky isn't falling. If it stays as it currently is, congratulations, Christmas came early.
Back in Alpha/Beta for Shadowlands, the Monk community turned a meme into a website with
https://bugwalker.io/bugs to help track and catalog the many bugs that plagued the Monk class as a whole. Although Windwalker has seen more bug fixes in Shadowlands than nearly all the time before, and two largely beneficial bugs were fixed in 9.0.5, Windwalker still has more bugs under the hood that will generally go unnoticed unless you know where to look.
Here are the bugs that we’re currently aware of:
Major Windwalker Bugs
- Fists of Fury hits a max of 5 targets (primary target + 4 secondary) instead of 6 as the tooltip says (primary target + 5 secondary)
This has unfortunately been a problem with
Fists of Fury ever since the target caps were introduced. Despite the tooltip clearly stating “X damage to your primary target and up to 5 other targets”, it does not actually hit 5 other targets, it only hits 4. This is, as you can expect results in less damage in situations with multiple targets. Because of the relatively low damage that
Fists of Fury does itself, this isn’t a high impact difference, but with the change to how Mark of the Crane is handled without the beneficial bugs, it's now become more noticeable as we look to rely on
Fists of Fury more in AOE situations.
- Dance of Chi-Ji doesn’t work as it states, it gives a flat damage amount instead of 200% as tooltip says. This is a damage loss past a pretty low gear level
It took us a while to find this one out, but as our gear has increased, the gap between the damage that
Spinning Crane Kick does and the damage it should do when we get a
Dance of Chi-Ji proc gets bigger. This isn’t one that you’ll directly feel, but it cuts down on the effectiveness of the talent, and will only get worse as gear goes up.
Medium Windwalker Bugs
Anyone who has played with
Spinning Crane Kick and pressed
Expel Harm has noticed that they stop spinning. Its a minor inconvenience that happens enough time to become more than minor feeling.
- Touch of Death has a very significant delay before becoming castable once its conditions are met
This one is the most noticeable in PvP where you can’t kill a target with
Touch of Death when you think that you should be able to. There is a very obvious pause between a target hitting below the necessary health threshold and being able to use
Touch of Death on them. In a fast paced PvP environment like RBGs or Arenas that pause is very often time enough for them to use a defensive or get a heal, leave you feeling confused and disappointed.
Both of these are just continuations of the problems that occur with
Storm, Earth, and Fire. Whenever someone new is added to the spec, it inevitably doesn’t play nicely with
Storm, Earth, and Fire, and these new additions in Shadowlands are just two that have yet to be adjusted. The damage difference is small, but it’s there.
- If Expel Harm does even a single point of overhealing, it automatically only does 1 damage
This is a weird one that many people noticed but didn’t pay much attention to until we all put it together. The damage difference is small, but you’re still missing out on damage that you should have, and every little bit counts.
Minor Windwalker Bugs
- Rolling immediately after Flying Serpent Kick causes your roll to end preemptively
- Casting Roll or Flying Serpent Kick immediately after leaving a root or similar effect sometimes causes you to go nowhere
- Windwalking Aura doesn’t stack with other movement abilities (potentially intentional)
- When killing a mob with Fists of Fury, you often get stuck “in combat” for several seconds after
Many of these have been around for years, and have been reported for years, and yet remain not working correctly. They are things that many Windwalkers have just learned to live with, like just knowing not to end combat with
Fists of Fury.