Windwalker Monk Guide for The War Within

Welcome to our War Within expansion guide for Windwalker Monk. Ahead of launch, this page will contain everything you need to know about the Windwalker Monk spec in the forthcoming The War Within expansion, including changes, Hero Talent Trees, and some light predictions on the state of the spec going into the expansion.

This page is a constantly evolving work in progress, with regular changes expected as updates hit the War Within beta. This is not meant to be a launch guide for Windwalker Monk, but instead serves as a resource for you to keep up to date with how the spec is evolving on Beta, and what you can expect from its playstyle and feel on launch.

Windwalker Monk has received a massive overhaul of the class and specialization talent tree. Many talents have been removed, repositioned, or replaced. Fortunately, the core of the spec remains mostly intact, but players who may have picked the spec up during Dragonflight may be surprised at the significant difference in available resources.

The most important change for Windwalker Monk has been the addition of increased Haste, Critical Strike, and Mastery scaling. Windwalker has long suffered from abysmal stat scaling throughout an expansion and required constant bandaid buffs to keep it relevant. Hopefully with the changes to stat scaling, this will no longer be a problem.

While nothing changed for Windwalker Monk's core features, The War Within still has major implications for all specs thanks to the Hero Talent Tree system, new tier sets, and the natural reduction in secondary stats when entering a new expansion.

Windwalker Monk gets to choose between the Conduit of the Celestials and Shado-Pan Hero Talent Trees. In sections below, we will talk more deeply about the implications of these Hero Talent Trees for the spec, and some thoughts on what looks strong and weak ahead of launch.

The Conduit of the Celestials Hero Tree Talents are primarily based on the new ability, Celestial Conduit, that invokes the four August Celestials to aid us in battle.

Looking the gameplay of Conduit of the Celestials, it is focused on increasing resource generation, reducing remaining cooldown duration, and refunding things like Teachings of the Monastery. It has a comparatively large effect on the playstyle, but most of it is behind the scenes and may not always be noticeable unless you are looking for it. The biggest affect is the addition of Celestial Conduit, which is a channeled cast you will generally want to use on cooldown.

Gauging the power of the hero talents is difficult, as much of it is "under-the-hood", except Celestial Conduit which will appear to dominate your damage breakdown despite only being used every 90 seconds. This will make it seem stronger than Shado-Pan, when the two talent trees may be relatively close to each other in performance.

Defensively, Conduit of the Celestials provides a small increase in defense, but not anything noticeable or overly useful.

The Shado-Pan Hero Talent tree is based mostly on the passive proc, Flurry Strike, which occurs automatically as we do damage.

Gameplay-wise, this talent tree is mostly passives and stat buffs. This means that it generally doesn't change how you play, it just increases the power of playing the "normal" way.

When trying to assess the power of Shado-Pan, it is less obvious than when playing Conduit of the Celestials. The passive damage from Flurry Strike is a significantly smaller portion of your overall damage than Celestial Conduit. However, the strength of this Hero Talent tree is in the increased damage to your base kit, rather than one big boom.

Defensively, Shado-Pan provides very little in regards to functional defensive power.

Below are the Tier Set Bonuses for Windwalker Monk in The War Within.

• Monk Windwalker Season 1 2pc — Tiger Palm increases the damage of your next melee ability by 5.0%.
• Monk Windwalker Season 1 4pc — Your other melee abilities increase the damage of your next Tiger Palm by 25%, stacking up to 6 times. 15% of Tiger Palm's damage is dealt onto nearby enemies, reduced beyond 5 targets.

Both set bonuses are completely passive and are not expected to have any gameplay impact.

Both tier-set bonuses are generally and numerically expected to be terrible. This is the first tier, so a tier set that doesn't fundamentally change the spec is a good thing, but the prevailing thought is that these tier bonuses are especially small damage increases and may not get much bigger even if you fully lean into all of the talents that improve the strength of Tiger Palm.

Strengths

• Stat scaling should be significantly improved, especially with Haste.
• Mobility remains nearly unparalleled, if not improved from Dragonflight.
• Burst damage should be significant during cooldown windows, which can be every 90 seconds depending on talents.
• Could be one of the top targets for Power Infusion.
• Talent choices to adjust for how much downtime you enjoy.
• Playstyle similar to Dragonflight.
• Little to no damage loss for switching targets.

Weaknesses

• Reduced defensive ability with the loss of Dampen Harm.
• Reduced burst AOE potential without Fatal Flying Guillotine.
• Lacks an immunity or unique utility.