Windwalker Monk DPS Guide — Midnight Season 1

The Midnight Season 1 has launched, and comes with new things to play with, including a new Tier-Set, to three new raids, as well as the beginning of the Mythic+ and PvP Season 1. There is a lot of new content so, if you want to check out anything new, make sure to head over to the dedicated sections!

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.