I've been away from the game for about 8 years. Picking it back up as my son wants to play. I'll be basically ground zero. I have friends who play horde, and I can get the legion 100 bump. I'm sorta interested in playing a Monk, but don't want to gimp myself....so couple questions for the Gurus...
a) Are monks fun/viable late game?
b) If they are, would there be an ideal Horde race, or is it basically an aestetic choice at this level? (Leaning towards Blood Elf)
IF monks suck balls, then I'd probably go Death Knight. Also haven't played one of those.
Thanks in advance.
Monks are in a pretty bad place overall. The tank spec is much maligned and even if it will eventually overgear/overcome/fix its own inadequacies it will forever be tainted this expansion with 'almost as shitty as a DH'. You will be declined as an 880+ monk tank from +2/+3 mythic plus (a complete joke) just because of the bad press. It is currently a very GOOD tank that suffers from a fatal flaw in that it takes a high level of skill to play one well AND it runs out of steam in mythic raid content due to the way brews work right now. It's very good otherwise and a few minor tweaks will make it an amazing tank - the question is A) will those come in 7.1.5 and B) if they do will the negative image wash away to not be a pain in the ass if you are not super geared (just your average Joe tank).
Healer spec is competitive but nothing special. You will probably suffer in that people aren't as familiar with the healing patterns so you will fall behind sometimes when they expect you to be able to spot heal like a paladin/priest/sham but overall it is decent and I don't think you would struggle to get groups. It plays like a handicap druid with a bigger non-hot toolkit and worse/niche cooldowns. For instance, the main single target cooldown puts a healing buff on the target and a shield, however the shield evaporates in one hit on a tank usually and the healing debuff is slaved to the shield debuff so it is basically one mediocre PW:S on a 3 min cooldown. The artifact power is a ~2 sec cast time heal that heals for a ton so it will pretty much always go off after another healer has used a quick heal/CD rather than let your 2-3M megaheal hit. It's just pretty bad. Still it's fun to play and goes to amazing with the right legendaries - but good luck in Vegas on that one.
DPS wise, monks are currently the worst class for raiding. There are a few specs worse than WW, but all of those classes have at least one stronger dps spec than WW. That isn't to say they are not serviceable or that they are useless or there are not insane people with huge gear/lucky legendaries and good parses, but you should be aware they are the worst sustained dps in single target of any class. TL;DR: part of the issue is that the core spell/dps cooldown (SEF) is bugged beyond belief and currently can net you a DPS
loss when you use it depending on circumstances. Blizzard has known about the bugs since alpha, they have promised to fix, have not. This means in order to parse well on almost all fights you must go Serenity which requires ABSOLUTE PRECISION on spell usage (we're talking planning out several minutes ahead into the fight) in order to pull ahead of even the broken SEF. If you miss one ability by half a sec, Serenity is a dps loss. It's very razor thin - not hard - but you have to play it well.
On the plus side, WW is amazing in random world content and good in M+. They are, however, one of the most laborious and tedious classes to play properly due to the mastery and the 100% necessary combo strikes talent. They are fun to play if you can stomach the playstyle but very punishing for bad play and unintuitive at times (you have to plan attacks several ahead to maximize resource uses and the rotation is very dynamic). Also, you will barely see your weapons as fist weapons are rarely visible while the monk attacks, which may be a huge negative for you if you like hitting things with swords or axes or whatever.
All that said, depending on how 7.1.5 shakes out they could be very viable again to quasi-insane on multi target if they fix SEF but no one knows how that will play out at this point. If I had to put money on it, I'd say stay away because they are the lowest pop class for a reason and Blizzard does not invest dev time in low ROI fixes.
Any race is fine at this point, play what you like.
DKs are very good but almost immobile at this point compared to every other class.
