2.1.
Midnight Season 1 Release Changes
Midnight Season 1 has released, and with it came a lot of new content.
It brought with it three new Raids, alongside heralding the start of Season
1 for both Mythic+ and PvP. With all the new things available, we've provided
some dedicated hubs covering everything available!
2.2.
Patch 12.0.5 Changes
The changes for Windwalkers in Patch 12.0.5 are largely redesigns of existing talents
and the addition of a new, active, version of 
Zenith Stomp that had previously triggered
automatically when you cast 
Zenith.
Crashing Fists now increases the damage of 
Fists of Fury by 20% instead
extending the duration by 1 second.
Tigereye Brew now generates 1 stack for every 3 Chi spent. Using Zenith
consumes up to 20 stacks to increase your critical strike chance by 1% per stack. Now stacks
up to 30 stacks instead of 20.- Tigereye Brew now gives you 2 additional Zenith Stomps to cast during
Zenith.
Xuen's Battlegear now triggers from 
Spinning Crane Kick, reducing the
cooldown of Fists of Fury by 0.5 seconds for each unique target struck, up to 2.5 seconds.- Zenith no longer generates 2 Chi but Zenith Stomp now generates 2 Chi instead.
In addition to this, a variety of open world content releases worth checking out!
The Voidforge Unlocks!
The Voidforge is Midnight's take on Bonus Rolls and Turbo Boost, allowing you to
target specific big ticket items through a new bonus roll system. You can also
further empower trinkets and weapons, and we have recommendations on our
Gear page.
Void Assaults are Unleashed
Eversong Woods and Zul'Aman are under siege from the forces of the Void. Thwarting
their attacks provide a new way to acquire gear all the way up to Hero level, and
you can check out more on our Void Assault hub.
Disrupt Ritual Sites
Sharing a similar reward structure to Void Assaults, Ritual Sites are instanced
content similar to Delves. You can find out all about them on our Ritual Sites page.
Click for Previous Season 1 Hotfixes
For the start of Season 1, Windwalker did not receive any tuning in the announced
March 17th patch notes. However, Blizzard mentioned that you can expect many things to change in the
first few weeks of the Season. We will ensure to update this guide as soon as new changes occur,
or new theorycrafting findings have been made.
When it comes to tuning adjustments, our next planned pass is expected to arrive
with the Midnight Season 1 launch on March 17. Our next pass will follow immediately
afterwards utilizing data gathered during the week Heroic difficulties are available;
these changes will go live with the launch of Mythic raid difficulty and Mythic+ on
March 24.
Beyond these dates, we will look to perform more tuning passes based on data gathered
during the starting weeks of Mythic difficulty for Season 1 and the March on Quel’Danas
available the week of March 31.For these two passes we err on the side of caution with
the amount of tuning we do until their respective Mythic end-bosses die to avoid being
overly disruptive to progression. After these key dates we will have several check-in passes
planned roughly a month apart. Once players obtain higher item level and better optimized gear
sets, the throughput of several specs will shift up or down relative to others and we feel
it’s important to be diligent in looking at the current state of class balance as time goes on.
2.3.
Midnight Changes for Windwalker Monk
With Midnight, there are a large amount of changes
to Windwalker Monks, both for the Spec itself as well as changes to the Monk
class in general. The main goal behind these changes is to prune the excessive
number of buffs and mechanics that you could track but largely ignored and to shift
damage back into the base abilities.
As a result of these changes, a lot of skills have been pruned or re-designed, and we
have outlined the most impactful changes below, highlighting how they affect your regular
gameplay compared to the version of Windwalker that you might already be used to. Fret not,
however, as the rotational gameplay loop is still very similar to the one that Windwalker
has relied on for years, so even if you are returning to the game with Midnight after a longer break,
you won't feel lost!
2.3.1.
Apex Talent: Tigereye Brew
Tigereye Brew is the new Apex talent node and is a callback to
Windwalker's original damage cooldown, although mostly in name only. As the tooltip
suggests, during combat you generate stacks that are then spent when you cast Zenith
to increase your chance to Crit. Outside of combat it stacks back up to 10 very quickly, or
will maintain its stacks if you are already at or above 10.
Generally you do not have to play around this buff, as you should be naturally using
Zenith frequently enough to not need to worry about the cap of 20 stacks. The primary
way that this buff affect's your thought process is that it lessens the incentive to use both
charges of Zenith back-to-back because the second use will have very few stacks.
Most of the time, spreading them out is a reasonable choice to make, but sometimes you will still
want to use them one after the other. This talent can be taken and ignored outside of the more extreme
min-maxing situations that may be figured out as time goes on.
After the first talent point, the other three are passive damage increases that don't change anything.
2.3.2.
Hero Talent Changes
Conduit of the Celestials is mostly the same as The War Within, except with the addition of
Invoke Xuen, the White Tiger as a button you press so that you can then press 
Celestial Conduit.
Activating 
Heart of the Jade Serpent has also been added to Zenith instead of 
Slicing Winds
which will take some getting used to.
Shado-Pan has also remained mostly the same, but has seen much of its Hero tree simplified.
Windwalker no longer has to track how much Energy you've spent in order to maximize your 
Flurry Strikes,
Wisdom of the Wall has been simplified and the Shadow buff that provided considerable AoE has been
moved to a separate talent node with 
Shado Over the Battlefield.
2.3.3.
Rotational Aspects
For the most part, the core playstyle and priority has changed very little, with the
design focus being on cutting out excess rather than changing what was already there.
Because of this, the general playstyle and button pressing remains largely the same
from The War Within, just with fewer buffs to track or ignore.
2.3.4.
Cooldown Adjustments
The largest changes to Windwalker is that 
Storm, Earth, and Fire has been replaced with
Zenith, Invoke Xuen, the White Tiger has been moved strictly into the Conduit of the Celestials
talent tree, and the large haste buff from 
Invoker's Delight has been removed.
Zenith functions almost identically to 
Ordered Elements except is is now a cooldown that you can use.
Because it has two stacks and a variable cooldown, able to be 60, 70, 80, or 90-seconds, Zenith provides an
enormous amount of flexibility in how often you use your cooldown. Zenith can pivot between 1-minute, 90-second, 2-minute,
and 3-minute cooldown usage easily with minor changes to the talents. However, with the loss of things like Invoker's Delight,
Windwalker lacks some of its burst capability that many people will have been used to from The War Within.
This is largely the new norm for most specs, but it will be quite different at first.
2.3.5.
AoE DPS
With the changes for Midnight, most of Windwalker's AoE damage profile is squeezed into Fists of Fury and Slicing Winds.
Spinning Crane Kick is very week compared to other abilities and will rarely be used, even in AoE. Because of this,
Windwalker will likely be considerably weak in AoE, even compared to The War Within.
Shado-Pan
Conduit of the Celestials
