Windwalker Monk Midnight Talents Guide

Disclaimer: With the Midnight prepatch, many talent builds have changed. Below is a list of recommended talent builds but given the relatively low power of most of the talents and how prepatch is an environment where most seasonal content has ended, you should experiment and use what you like the most.

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The updated Midnight class tree still retains the flexibility in what talents you can choose and there are new or reworked additions such as Stillstep Coil, Tiger Fang, Silent Sanctuary, and Zenith Stomp to name a few that will become new staple picks. However, the loss of Diffuse Magic, the nerf to Vivacious Vivification, and still relatively low strength of Fortifying Brew has turned Windwalker Monk into one of the squishier DPS specs.

Grace of the Crane: This is borderline required as a 4% increased healing taken is extremely valuable in all situations. In addition, This allows you to path towards the important Vivacious Vivification and subsequently Tiger Fang easily.

Vivacious Vivification: This acts as your self-healing for this expansion. The nice part of this is you can use it to spot heal others as well. This was nerfed coming into Midnight and no longer provides 40% bonus Vivify healing as well. It’s still useful for pathing, but the relatively low strength of Vivify has made it less appealing.

Transcendence: A staple of Monk mobility; this gates Ferocity of Xuen which is a mandatory 4% increased damage node as well as the powerful Ring of Peace.

Ring of Peace: As mentioned above, you need to pick Transcendence in order to pick this, but choosing this or the significantly less popular Song of Chi-Ji allows you to pick up your defensive nodes which are mandatory.

Martial Instincts/Chi Proficiency: These two point nodes at the bottom of the tree take up roughly half of your allotted points in this section of the tree but they are mandatory and open up pathing options to the powerful Fatal Touch and Flow of Chi nodes.

Flow of Chi: A new node and entirely passive but extremely powerful, giving you a damage reduction, increasing healing taken, or movement speed depending on your health threshold.

Lighter than Air: Probably the most valuable node on the tree for what it does to your mobility. This allows you to negate knockbacks or traverse in ways you were previously unable to by giving you air mobility.

Zenith Stomp: A new addition in Midnight and a replacement for Summon White Tiger Statue. This now frontloads all of that damage into a powerful stomp. You should be weary of using cooldowns at the start of a pull in Mythic+ as you can very easily rip aggro with most of that coming from this effect.

Much like the class tree there is a degree of flexibility to the talents you can choose. While this isn’t as great as the class tree, there are still many options and different build choices you can go with. I’d like to highlight a few notable talents that you will take in different situations that alter your gameplay significantly.

Zenith: Probably the biggest change this expansion is Storm, Earth, and Fire has been removed as the main cooldown for Windwalker Monk and in its place is Zenith. This is Weapons of Order from Shadowlands or, more recently, Ordered Elements. It still has 2 charges and a 90 sec base cooldown, but you no longer have to worry about shenanigans involving Pet AI or spaghetti code.

Glory of the Dawn: This has received quite the glow up from Dragonflight. This now benefits all nodes that affect Rising Sun Kick such as Rising Star, Xuen’s Battlegear, and Acclamation, and now it’s chance to proc now scales with haste.

Slicing Winds: This controversial ability is sticking around in our new Midnight rework and now has a supporting choice node located below it. Interestingly, the gameplay interactions that were present with this ability and Conduit of the Celestials have been removed, leaving it in an odd state.

Xuen’s Battlegear: This has been revamped in Midnight and now persistently provides the ability to reduce the cooldown of Fists of Fury when Rising Sun Kick crits and providing Rising Sun Kick crit chance as well.

Martial Agility: It may seem bland on paper but has an interesting synergy with the newly revamped Shado-Pan hero talent tree.

With the Midnight prepatch, both hero talent trees change pretty significantly especially when it comes to gameplay.

Shado-Pan

Shado-Pan’s core mechanic, Flurry Strikes, has been entirely reworked.

It no longer is based on energy spent. Instead, when you auto attack you have a chance to generate 1-2 stack(s) of Flurry Strikes up to 30 max stacks. Whenever you cast Fists of Fury, it discharges any Flurry Strikes stacks you have.

In addition, the capstone, Wisdom of the Wall, has been reworked. It no longer provides temporary pseudo-random buffs. It now causes your Rising Sun Kick and Spinning Crane Kick to discharge 3 Flurry Strikes when your Zenith is active.

The new column of talents added with Midnight mostly incorporate the Manaforge Omega tier set bonuses such as Stand Ready, which causes you to gain 10 stacks of Flurry Strikes that trigger on your next attack when you activate Zenith.

In addition, the powerful Shadow Flurries Wisdom of the Wall proc is now a permanent effect, Shado Over the Battlefield. To compensate for the uptime, it’s damage was reduced by 50%.

There are a few other changes, namely the defensive node on the left has been reworked to a mobility node and a lot of temporary buffs or effects that dealt with energy spent have been reworked.

Overall, Shado-pan feels mostly passive now, but initially there is a level of visual splendor with discharging 30 Flurry Strikes often that can be exciting.

Conduit of the Celestials

Conduit has had much fewer changes compared to Shado-Pan, but still has some pretty significant ones.

The most important change is Invoke Xuen, the White Tiger is now Conduit of the Celestials exclusive and you must cast Xuen before you can cast Celestial Conduit.

To clarify how it’s set up, Xuen and Celestial Conduit are now the same ability keybind which results in Conduit replacing Xuen when you cast it which saves you a keybind.

Xuen functions the same, but does not have Invoker’s Delight attached to him, but the follow up choice node allows you to choose from Restore Balance, which has been reworked to provide 5% bonus damage while Xuen is active, or Xuen’s Bond which reduces Xuen’s cooldown to 90 seconds.

This is somewhat exciting because it allows the possibility of playing either 2 minute or 1 minute 30 second Conduit builds depending on what trinkets are strong.

Celestial Conduit’s behavior has also been changed and is no longer split damage, instead it has a square root target cap after 5 like the rest of Windwalker’s spells.

The new column of hero talents once again add the Manaforge Omega tier set bonuses. Yu’lon’s Avatar, which is the effect that used to make Slicing Winds grant Heart of the Jade Serpent has been changed so Zenith provides Heart of the Jade Serpent instead.