How To Improve As Windwalker Monk — The War Within (11.0.5)

One of the main difficulties of the Windwalker Monk specialization is managing all the different resources at your disposal.

Energy is your main resource as a Windwalker Monk. Energy is used to cast Tiger Palm, Expel Harm, and to keep up Rushing Jade Wind.

Energy regenerates naturally at a pace of 10 points per second. This amount is increased by haste and Ascension. Whenever you are at maximum Energy, you are wasting this amount per second. This quickly translate into a large damage loss. Avoid this situation.

The biggest use of Energy is to be turned into Chi using Tiger Palm.

Chi decreases to 2 outside of combat, gets reset to a maximum of 1 when entering a raid encounter. It caps at 5 Chi, 6 with Ascension.

You do not want to waste Chi if you can avoid it, and to achieve that make sure you spend it early enough, mostly through Rising Sun Kick and Fists of Fury. However, you might need to use Blackout Kick rather than waste Chi.

It is important, however, not to run out of Chi when needed. Most important of all, you want to have 3 Chi available whenever Fists of Fury comes off cooldown.

Windwalker is a spec that almost always has natural downtime. It can be detrimental to try and force filling every blank space by using Tiger Palm or Blackout Kick too often and not leaving enough resources for Rising Sun Kick and Fists of Fury.

The best Windwalkers are ones that can look ahead a few seconds and plan out what resources they are going to need in the near future and adjust accordingly so that you do not use too many or not enough resources.

It is impossible to correctly play and optimize a Windwalker Monk without using Raidbots to sim your own character, as there are simply too many variables involved to intuitively figure out what gear to wear and so on without simming it first. Generally speaking, a simulation should be the first and final say in the gear you end up wearing for any given situation.

On top of this, simming is now very easy with no need to understand SimulationCraft APLs or installation yourself. All you will need is the in-game SimulationCraft AddOn, and the Raidbots website.

When it comes to identifying and improving your mistakes, we strongly recommend the website WoWAnalyzer — it will analyze your logs and give you a report detailing how you did on the problems above and more.