#1 - Dec. 2, 2016, 9:08 p.m.
http://eu.battle.net/forums/en/wow/topic/17614455267
This will likely not get ANY attention since I'm using my region's feedback forums. However communication needs to happen somehow.
The monk community has allways been civil. We have rarely whined on forums even when we were in a weaker state. The community figures have allways been calm and kept our feedback tempered.
What has this gotten us? Not a word when we are bugged/underperforming, not a comment on changes. Warlocks spammed the forums and got in length answers, fixes, attention. Is this the way we are rewarded? Is the only possible communication to spam the forums with anger?
If it is, then take the time to read this, whoever you are, and bring support.
Lately windwalker suffered another change on PTR that didn't go through patchnotes, datamining or any sort of communication. This is not the first time this happens to us. We haven't had any communication on anything since Celestalon's last burst of socialisation back in early alpha.
This, and Windwalkers pulling good numbers in pvp, raiding, dungeons, is giving a general false sense that "everything is allright" when many large issues are being ignored.
I'll go over some of the promises that were made to Windwalker close to a year back and what happened to these.
When the big Storm, Earth and Fire // Spinning Crane Kick rework happened, we were made two important promises.
1) Storm, Earth, and Fire now being our major single target/AoE cooldown, Blizzard will ensure it is working correctly, with decent AI. Whenever things are not benefiting from it/not getting copied, we will fix these ASAP (part of Celestalon's initial statement)
2) Spinning Crane Kick will require tab targeting, but considering this is a very annoying thing to deal with as a melee, we're giving you Storm, Earth and Fire to do it for you EFFICIENTLY (answer to people concerned about mark of the crane's new mechanic).
We spent most of alpha testing, beta testing, legion pre-patch and begining of this year attempting to communicate about Storm, Earth and Fire issues. We have gotten 0 feedback on any of it. There have been several changes to windwalker, none of which got any comments even tho they were often not datamined.
http://walkingthewind.com/2016/10/11/what-is-up-with-sef-and-serenity/
This was my attempt, after many bug reports from several windwalkers, attempting to hand out lists of bugs to devs through community figures, to list up some issues. This article is not fully up to date, some things moved.
Issue is, I'm just a fan, I can't spend my time checking every week which bugs have been fixed.
However, it is infuriating when I take a lot of my free time to write stuff, report bugs, ask people to pass the information along and windwalkers don't get a WORD in return. I'm not asking for any answer to me, just to see our spec named in blue posts one day.
Before I go any further: DO NOT turn this, ever, in a numbers discussion. The issues at hand are NOT numbers related; just because a spec does good numbers doesn't mean its working (re: Hunter's sidewinders/marking shot gameplay).
Up untill 7.1, we reported several things not benefiting Storm, Earth, and Fire. Hitcombo stacking separately, transfer the power being ignored, trinkets being reduced, artifact traits misfunctioning. In prepatch, SEF could go as far as being a dps loss due to bugs+not benefiting from mastery.
Since september, some bugs were more of a concern than others, namely clones not benefiting from haste, making them cancel 1 or 2 ticks of Fists of Fury (27% loss), making Fists of Fury oftentimes deal more damage outside of our burst cooldown than inside.
What caught our eye later was that this was "fixed": clone's channel bar changed to be as short as ours. However, they didn't do any more ticks: their ticks of damage were evenly spaced still, you just couldn't wait for them to finish the channel anymore, they canceled it themselves. This change went undocumented.
Once again here, on PTR we're seeing another change, this time to serenity, the highly favored alternative to SEF.
In heroic/mythic raiding, it makes absolutely no doubt serenity is considered the superior talent. Exceptionally, someone specs out of it and does good, mostly by cheesing on irrelevant targets.
This new change is reworking one of the key aspects of serenity, reducing spell cooldowns, by making these spells go back to full, unhalved, cooldown as soon as serenity is over.
This might be seen as a deserved nerf to serenity, an overperforming talent. However the issue is NOT in serenity, but in SEF, and you have to face this issue.