Advanced: PvE Conduits

Welcome to PeakofSerenity’s Windwalker Monk PvE Conduit Guide. This guide is designed to be a more in-depth look at the Conduit recommendations from the main PvE guide. Navigate quickly to the section you need using the sidebar on the right.

This guide has been updated for Patch 9.0 and is regularly updated when discussion, theorycrafting, or testing yields new information.

Conduits

Kyrian

Necrolord

Night Fae

Venthyr

Overall Potency Rankings

Single Target

Multi Target

Calculated Strikes
Bone Marrow Hops (Necrolord Only)
Coordinated Offensive (Only take this if you can keep up MotC stacks while fixating your clones)
Xuen’s Bond
Strike with Clarity (Kyrian Only)
Way of the Fae (Night Fae Only)
Inner Fury
Imbued Reflections (Venthyr Only)

Windwalker Conduits

Calculated Strikes

Overall: Great
Raiding: Good
Mythic+: Great

Spinning Crane Kick is a very common spell in multi-target situations, and even more common with the addition of Dance of Chi-Ji as a talent in Shadowlands. While this never quite reaches the power of this ability in Legion, more damage to the ability that does most of our damage in AOE situations is always a good thing. This is currently REALLY strong for AOE, but in single target it won’t be as powerful even with Dance of Chi-Ji talented.

Coordinated Offensive

Overall: Great
Raiding: Great
Mythic+: Good

While this doesn’t quite increase your damage as much as it might look at first glance, since it currently increases the damage that your clones do, and not you, this is still a very strong Conduit for single target in situations where you can focus your Storm, Earth, and Fire clones. In AOE situations this CAN be incredibly strong, but it requires a little bit more management of your Mark of the Crane stacks since you’ll have to balance the clones getting them for you and keeping them focused for maximum damage.

Inner Fury

Overall: Meh
Raiding: Meh
Mythic+: Meh

This conduit may look to be super strong, but you have to remember how much of Fists of Fury‘s current damage profile was based on Open Palm Strikes, without this Azerite Trait to prop up Fists of Fury‘s damage, adding a modifier to it just doesn’t increase things as much as it should. If Fists of Fury is ever tuned to be stronger in the future then this Conduit may become super powerful, but its currently relatively mediocre. However, if you’re looking for one that’s decent at both single target and AOE without being spectacular at either, then this will be a reasonable choice.

Xuen’s Bond

Overall: Great
Raiding: Good
Mythic+: Great

At first implementing, it looked like this was going to be THE conduit. However, with the relatively lackluster performance of Xuen as cooldown, it’s not as strong as it once could be. The strongest that it could/should be is when using Kyrian, but unfortunately this just de-syncs the major cooldowns, weakening its possibilities.

Covenant Conduits

Bone Marrow Hops

Overall: Great
Raiding: Great
Mythic+: Great

This increases the damage that you do during its duration and lets you use it more, if you’re going to go with Necrolord then this will be a very powerful increase in damage.

Imbued Reflections

Overall: Meh
Raiding: Good
Mythic+: Bad

Sadly, adding a modifier to something that’s already not great doesn’t make it magically better.

Strike with Clarity

Overall: Great
Raiding: Great
Mythic+: Good

This provides more Mastery during the duration of Weapons of Order, which just furthers to cement that you’ll want to continue alternating abilities and obeying the Mastery. The extra duration isn’t as important since it already lasts longer than Xuen does and its 30s baseline duration is as long as two Storm, Earth, and Fire casts.

Way of the Fae

Overall: Meh
Raiding: Bad
Mythic+: Meh

This is potentially the weakest of the Covenant-specific Conduits. In situations where you’re likely to use Faeline Stomp to its fullest potential, this just magnifies that potential. In Mythic Plus, 5 targets to hit is a very common occurrence. You are at the mercy of getting a Faeline that hits them all, but given the size of some packs and how closely they can be stacked, this shouldn’t frequently be a game-breaking problem.

Endurance Conduits

Harm Denial is the Conduit that you’re most likely to see regular use out of since you will be using Expel Harm practically on cooldown. Most of the time it will simply add to the overhealing, but when you need it, its there. Fortifying Ingredients will certainly have niche scenarios where you’d like a more powerful defensive in addition to the tools that Windwalker already has. Grounding Breath is more likely to see use in PvP or potentially Questing to cut down on time between packs.

Fortifying Ingredients

Overall: Good
Raiding: Good
Mythic+: Good

Fortifying Brew is back in Shadowlands and more defensive ability is something that Windwalker had lacked. Giving a shield helps to increase the strength of this defensive, so it can be very useful in situations where you’re using

Fortifying Brew to keep you alive.

Grounding Breath

Overall: Bad
Raiding: Bad
Mythic+: Bad

While this isn’t a conduit you’ll really get a lot of use out of in instanced scenarios, if you find yourself needing to spam Vivify then this will be very helpful.

Harm Denial

Overall: Great
Raiding: Great
Mythic+: Great

One of the biggest complaints with the return of Expel Harm was that it did very poor healing, so increasing the healing for an ability that you are likely to be using naturally every 15 seconds is a HUGE increase in potential self-healing. In reality it just means more overhealing, but more free healing is always better.

Finesse Conduits

The strength of these Conduits are mostly based on how you play and what you feel like you can use. Tumbling Technique is a good default Conduit as more mobility is never a bad thing. Swift Transference would be second in how often you may get to access its benefit. Lingering Numbness is another one that may have niche use. Dizzying Tumble is likely to be completely worthless most of the time.

Dizzying Tumble

Overall: Good
Raiding: Good
Mythic+: Good

Leg Sweep already stuns them for 3 seconds, so this provides an additional 5 seconds of damage reduction on top of that. In situations where its useful, it should be rather strong.