Holidays are over! Let’s get back into some hot monk action.

Ring of Peace

Everybody’s talking about the new monk talent, Ring of Peace, that’s replacing Deadly Reach in the talent tree. Yes, that is what you’re reading; an AoE silence and disarm effect. What’s more, it’s currently freely targetable; you can cast it on yourself, an ally, or an enemy, and it moves with them. It’s not actually a “ring,” either, like a mage’s Ring of Frost; there’s no safe zone with this puppy.

Monks needed PvP buffs; they got one. Holy crap, is this powerful. Let’s see: 1) An 8 second silence, which would be the longest silence effect in the game if it went live. (Solar Beam is also 8 seconds, but you can move out of that.) 2) An 8 second RANGED disarm, which effectively neuters all melee classes. 3) A shortish cooldown. Yeah, this thing’s OP. Normally, I’d say it’d be in line for a nerf, but seeing the current abysmal state of monks in PvP, they may overcorrect for a while. (Hi, Nimble Brew!)

For PvE, though, it’s not a clear-cut talent choice. It’s probably the talent of choice for mistweavers looking for trash/add cooldowns, but WW/BM will have to decide if they’d rather have the 5 second damage removal or the 8 second damage reduction. Personally, I love the knockdown effect, so I’m sticking with Leg Sweep; we’ll see how the talent progresses through PTR, though. Right now, it’s bugged to affect boss mobs, which makes for some interesting scenarios.

Windwalker mastery change

In case you missed it, WW’s will no longer have the silly Combo Breaker mastery that totally screwed up stat scaling. Combo Breaker is sticking around as a passive 12% chance that’s granted at level 15 (which also makes leveling WW less tedious) and they’ve implemented a new mastery, Bottled Fury, which improves the effectiveness of Tigereye Brew. Combine this with the other changes to TeB (doubled rate of charge gain) and TeB turns from ‘meh’ to ‘whoa’. TeB was capped at a 2% increase per stack before (20% damage increase at max stacks, cue the fanfare) but a full mastery reforge could push that up to a 6% increase per stack. That’s…pretty significant.

More to come on stat weights and such later.

Storm, Earth, and Fire

Not yet implemented. Guess we have to start taking Ring of Peace for granted?