[Blizzard] Brewmaster Feedback Thread

Classes Monk
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As Season 1 of The War Within lurches forward myself, and presumably many others, have essentially “finished” the Mythic+ content, experiencing the dungeons in the +10-12 range which is functionally the reward and mechanic limit for the period. As our gear approaches and surpases the i620 range and we can enjoy the full breadth of BiS trinkets, tier set-bonuses, nerubian embellishments and the like, we have our first real holistic, encompassing view of how the spec plays and performs for the expansion. There is nothing we’re missing now - we have literally all we can have for the time being.

And we’re in some trouble.

We can no longer say “Well, it will get better with more gear”. We have almost all the gear. And we cannot say “Well, it will get better with set bonuses” as we have the set bonuses. And we can no longer say “Well with this trinket combination, or this specific raid drop, you can compensate for that area” because we have those things now. It’s not getting better from here. This is where we’re at.

We are definitively, without a doubt, unquestionably, incontrovertibly and objectively the worst Mythic+ tank in the game.

I don’t think this is any longer up for debate. Even the much-maligned Prot Paladin has several keys completed in the top world 20 (nice job, Goh and Growl!). We have Guardian druids completing +12 keys without a healer that even some of the top Brewmaster monks are sweating through. We’re not “near the bottom” or “potentially struggling”. We. Are. The. Worst. Tank.

Disclaimer - We’re not unplayable. I’ve completed numerous higher keys now with a veteran, premade group of friends. It’s doable. And even at my admittedly high Mythic+ rating, there are almost 2500 monks in the world above me, nearly 1000 in North America. People ARE making it work. If you’re dying in a +6 key it’s not because of Brewmaster. I’m more or less talking about 12+ here

First, I’ll going over our weakest areas, then I’ll offer some suggestions for improvement.

  1. Our self healing was gutted with TWW. This was intentional, as Blizzard wanted every tank to be more healer reliant. The problem is they seemed to have missed Blood DK, Vengeance DH and Guardian Druid with this memo. I can do maybe 700k-800k HPS to myself during big pulls, but it’s cooldown reliant and inconsistent. If you want us to have such little self-healing, please gut the other tanks too. This just feels unfair.

  2. Stagger is a really cool mechanic and I like it. But our stagger bar being capped at our max health feels restrictive. I hit max stagger literally within a single global in the highest keys and then I’m just taking full damage. I think stagger agility scaling needs to be adjusted, especially early expansion and stagger purification needs to be addressed.

  3. We can do quite high damage (we’re currently the highest DPS tank per the statistics) but the process is convoluted and locked behind specific spec choices. Our damage is also far too baked into Keg Smash. We need better options for sustained AoE damage that are more approachable and will offer better snap-AoE threat. Keg Smash radius is problematic.

  4. As a leather wearing tank with the lowest HP in the game, we need to be more evasive. Shuffle and Elusive Brawler are really cool mechanics, but not really doing their job.

So here are my suggestions in order of my own perceived importance. If every one of these things is addressed, we could be potentially overpowered. But I think each idea has merit individually:

  1. A Brewmaster talent that increases our maximum health by 20%. This would give us a larger stagger bar as well.
  2. Purifying Brew needs to clear substantially more stagger with each usage. It’s currently 50%.
  3. Celestial Brew needs to scale with purified stagger at a substantially higher rate. Our current Celestial Brew absorption shields are utterly laughable. If #2 is implemented and Celestial Brew’s ratio is tweaked, in concert, maybe this could be a meaningful button.
  4. Ox Statue Orbs need to spawn FAR more frequently. This was traditionally one of our most reliable sources of self healing through Expel Harm (or Spinning Crane kick). Now, I barely generate any orbs, and a 200,000 heal from an orb feels utterly negligible on 8mil health when I’m taking millions of damage per second.
  5. Elusive Brawler Mastery is SO bad we avoid Mastery like the absolute plague. I want all Crit/Vers. Right now, Elusive Brawler gives us increased dodge chance until our next dodge. I’d suggest Elusive Brawler be a flat 2-3sec buff that stacks up to maybe 3 times with a duration refreshed on each new application.
  6. Spinning Crane Kick is an awful button. The damage is terrible. Please buff Spinning Crane Kick and Rushing Jade Wind, I’d even argue by 200%.
  7. Keg Smash’s radius is too small for the current content in my opinion. It feels awful to essentially “miss” targets with Keg Smash because it’s sometimes as much as 60% of our overall damage / threat. If you’re going to make us THIS dependent on the button, please expand the radius.
  8. Charred Passions is a super cool talent that often isn’t taken because it adds up to about 1% of our overall. Buffing Charred Passions in concert with Spinning Crane Kick would be an elegant solution to several of our problems at once.
  9. Zen Meditation is a huge missed opportunity for it to be a super meaningful defensive cooldown. I’d suggest one of two directions:
  • Make it a 3min CD, channeled, and while we’re channeling we stagger 100% of incoming damage and our incoming stagger damage is paused for the duration. Maybe a 4-5sec duration. Let me pull the entire entrance to Necrotic Wake, generate a huge threat lead with Weapons of Order and then Zen Med. Every other tank has buttons to do this pull except for us.
  • Make it a 2min CD, channeled, and while we’re channeling every party member near us has their incoming damage diverted to the monk, and we stagger 100% of this damage for the duration. Give us a nice AoE group defensive like AMS, Darkness etc.
  1. Allow us to stagger some percentage of incoming magic damage. Please.

Those are my biggest gripes and suggestions so far. More health, more self healing, better stagger purification, make Celestial Brew Great Again, increase Keg Smash radius, do something with Zen Meditation and diversify our damage profile.

Brew has long been traditionally one of the least played specs in the game, even when it is relatively strong. By making it essentially the worst tank in WoW you’re punishing an already extremely small player base that have elected to try and make a complicated and somewhat demanding fringe-spec viable. I’ve seen your upcoming Anniversary Event changes. They’re insufficient. We’re drowning here at the highest end of play. I realize that very few players are currently engaging in the bleeding edge keys, and even fewer even play Monk at all, but you cannot let us languish this way deeper into the season. When we were all running 4s and 6s and 8s it wasn’t a huge problem, but now that we’re chewing into 12s and 14s our glaring issues are becoming insurmountable.

Signed,

A frustrated Brewmaster

14 Likes
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I really love the AoE zen meditation idea that would be really fun! My M+ group is begging me to switch classes right now, it hurts!

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Something to help smooth incoming damage in aoe situations would be nice. In Season of Discovery there are a few inspirations for this - like lightning shield proccing when hit every 1s or whatever, or the rogue tank aoe rune where they attack after being hit once per second or something.

Taking that and some martial arts examples like aikido, maybe we can “redirect” an attack capped at occurring every 1s (maybe non-boss attacks too so it doesn’t impact anything other than m+ aoe style situations). So basically if we’re in aoe we’re “redirecting”/reducing a melee attack by 100% every 1s, or tuned however to make sense. I guess more armor/hp/stagger works too!

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2718 brew here. Only class I play currently.

Brewmaster in 12 and up keys is sitting at 4.6% representation (at the time of posting) among tanks in this backet. This looks about on par with Dragonflight.

Honestly we don’t need ideas on the forums to fix the spec. That’s always going to be too retroactive and lag behind dungeon and encounter design. We need different game designers at Blizzard that know the spec exists.

We do need people voicing their concerns though, so this is helpful, but right now Blizzard probably just understands that some minority group of the playerbase is upset and that’s not the thing to tackle. It’s held true for a very very long time. This is why Paladin at 6.4% (12 and up) is more likely to see incoming changes and indeed has had buffs despite being more popular and performing at a higher level than brew.

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Ideas on these forums are mostly a conversation between players anyways, I HIGHLY doubt a class designer is going to lay eyes on anything that’s said on the monk forums. At least from my experience in classic, usually there are a few groups of players with a larger voice in the ears of the developers that pass along concerns, ideas, feedback in channels that normal players don’t have access to.

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Those are some good ideas. Would love to see some of those implemented, especially celestial brew.
-Replacing vivify with something better or at least taking it off GCD would be nice.

  • reworking Press the Advantage would be nice also
  • adding more brews… We are a Brewmaster after all…why don’t we have a cool brew as a capstone??
  • August Blessing - can we get that as a shield instead of a HOT?
  • something to help the team in damage reduction. Every other tank has 1-2 things that can be a life saver… We have nothing… Perhaps a better Niuzao or black oxe statue could pulse AOE stagger or shield instead of threat
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Zen Meditation and BlackOx Statue could be be changed.

With how much moving is useful to avoid tank busters and frontals, ZM is a forgettable talent. Ive used it mainly on SV first boss and MAYBE on a trash pack here and there is CCs or other defensives are on CD.

BoS could be more like a Shaman’s Earthen Wall Totem. Reducing group damage taken by X amount up to X amount. Would see plenty of use in most dungeons and raid bosses with group wide AoE.

CB increased by base % of your HP, further increased by purifying brew Stacks up to a max of like 60% HP

PB adding Purified Stagger damage to your next RSK would be huge for our ST

SCK - increased threat generation, damage. Instead of pulling in orbs, give a small chance to create orbs on damage done. 4-8% kind of thing

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brm is the kind of tank rn that has to bake in healing potions and cavedweller’s delights as defensives, rather than these just being oh-shot buttons.

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I use both brew and prot pal and I use them as defensives on both, the struggle never ends.

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Yeah I did a BG yesterday, CTF en my full of casters can’t even stay in flag room cause of being blasted too hard. I just ended up giving up tbh, not proud of it.

Zen meditation is useless, idk if it’s an addon or what but even with warmode talent it gets instantly kicked sometimes. Transcendence Transfer breaks it too, which makes no sense. Plus you can’t move with it anymore they should have buffed it so you can freaking fly with it cause the ability is still bad.

Self heals are very meh especially at low HP.

Aesthetically there’s always been problems, like literal kegs? Where’s a glyph to have some kind of dark chi colored kegs.

Statues and pets are puny straight outta the rumble foil. Brew can’t even spin flags with their ox statue.

I tried every trick in the book. Sometimes I actually mess up but I know when I’m in a bad spot. Games rigged.

Back to balance, if they want tanks more dependant on healers then they just going to keep brew poorly performing. Or they are going to cut any form of weaknesses from brew, like magic damage not being fully staggered… It’s kinda eh

Anyways. I’ma go.

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That had been said even before TWW launch.
I think you misunderstood the myth of brew’s scaling. Before slands, there were broken passive healing items. And thank to brew’s passive celestial fortune, it scales better than other tanks with external healing sources. However, blizz has gutted down all those trinkets and items. The reality is Brew has been always outshined by other tanks even at the end of the expansions. There was only one season when brew was considered to be close to the top at the moment tank. It was patch 8.2 when you got a broken trinket that gave an absurd passive healing power.
You just got gaslighted if you ever thought that brew scales better than other tanks, and your standing would be improved along with gear progression.

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Stagger is a really cool mechanic and I like it. But our stagger bar being capped at our max health feels restrictive. I hit max stagger literally within a single global in the highest keys and then I’m just taking full damage. I think stagger agility scaling needs to be adjusted, especially early expansion and stagger purification needs to be addressed.

Is there actually a cap? Looking at various sites and nobody mentions a cap, I can see addons showing more than 100% stagger too, but that could all be outdated.

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The actual cap is 1000% from memory, you would be dead long before reaching this value. The UI is misleading.

Edit

My opinion the underlying stagger issue is;

  • In raids and against dungeon bosses big damage events are typically a single event or small time window, they are predictable so they can be covered with a defensive (personal or external) followed by a purifying brew.
  • On trash damage events are more spread out and variable. Defensive and purifying brew are still effective but its harder to maximize their effect vs condensed predictable events seen with bosses.

In Dragonflight talents were added for passive stagger reduction as part of our standard rotation. Good idea …but they were underwhelming and lacked interaction with Gai Plin’s Imperial Brew. They should probably review this, make it more core to the spec with better interactions.

And I am a broken record but i wish they would consider things like…

  • Further reduce auto attack damage received by monks (white damage DR, more dodge, reduce enemy attack speed, etc).
  • Give more charges of defensive cds to allow for more liberal use.
  • Retrofit Niuzao in to a M+ focused defensive.
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k, yeah I’d read healthx10 in at least one other place after posting that question, thanks

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You’re not supposed to face tank on brew. You’re a slippery tank at least that is why I think Blizz makes them more squishy than the other tanks

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Then why are Vengeance DH’s consistently so much better?

I’ve been asking for a buff to Brewmaster’s Balance for months now, we need more armour and health. Perhaps a buff to stagger outside of raid? Buff Celestial Brew and Healing Sphere generation. We have to take two separate talents to generate healing sphere’s and yet it feels like the spawn rate needs to be doubled (maybe just outside of raid again?).

Our spec tree needs work. We got zero iteration during beta. Ox stance sucks, the fact it’s three points sucks harder. We have a spattering of boring and terrible defensive talents. Feels like since we’re not bad in raid Blizzard just gave up working on the spec.

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Vengeance doesn’t have a stagger mechanic. Also brewmaster has a pet. They also can’t spam vivify their health bar.

Blizz logic why brewmaster can’t get buffs

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“NO PETS ALLOWED!” - tanky tank club

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Ok and VDH has way better utility and a more relevant group buff. On top of being tankier. Vivify spam as in casting in combat? Pretty sure VDH has excellent self healing. The pet is awful and mostly not taken.

Edit: We’re still the only tank that hasn’t timed a +15 btw.

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Has there ever been a mythic+ season where brewmaster was meta