Mistweaver and Windwalker were not good, so by default Brewmaster is taken. They do really well on Mythic Queen because of two things:
Feast is a physical tankbuster that hits really hard. Brewmaster excels at physical tankbusters.
Feast places a healing absorb on the tank that must be healed off. Brewmasters are unique in that they take double healing from all sources based on their crit chance through Celestial Fortune.
Ring of Peace is also good for the adds that spawn, plus monk mobility is good for grabbing far essences.
But really it was one mechanic that was almost tailor made for Brewmaster
Almost everyone I know who has played Brewmaster said they really like the class but they don’t like how weak and dependent they feel on the healer.
Since Legion basically. Theyve only really removed skills and pruned things since the Legion rework – and now it functions basically like a watered down version of itself.
Progression and raid has never been challenging content for tanks: Rarely will a boss wipe be because a tank screwed up and most tanks can survive a tankbuster without any mitigation cooldown at all. Mistweaver and Windwalker are actually very good this tier as well.
I will agree with this. Ive met a lot of Brewmaster alts who will try to do the same thing that a Prot Paladin or VDH does by pulling everything and then they just fall over. It takes a lot of finesse to do Brewmaster well, and a large portion of your survivability and overall tankiness is tied to how well you can do the rotation to keep your brew CDR rolling, purifying often, and healing yourself up after big spikes.
Finally, just to show how complicated Brewmaster can be – Here is the opener for Brewmaster. Blackout Kick buffs tigers palm and Keg Smash so you have to hit it every 4th gcd. Weapons of Order only applies the debuff on Keg Smash and Rising Sun kick. Breath of Fire does no damage but gives you Charred Passions that buffs Blackout Kick significantly. Also note that you Tiger’s Palm at all target counts, which is just silliness honestly. I can’t think of any other class that has such a long opener besides maybe a Disc priest during ramp.
Equinox Weapons of Order opener
Keg Smash
Breath of Fire
Blackout Kick
Weapons of Order
Rising Sun Kick
Tiger Palm
Blackout Kick
Tiger Palm
Keg Smash x2
Blackout Kick
Tiger Palm
Breath of Fire
Celestial Brew (If playing Master of Harmony hero talent)
I dunno, whenever I’m not doing M+ stuff with my guildies it’s with another friend who mains brew/monk and they seem to do just fine to me. I’ve played with them long enough to see them finish trash packs and bosses solo in both DF and TWW after the rest of us died for whatever reason, usually a bad healer.
Monk is the red-headed step-child class. Any time it starts to do something well and draw attention to itself, it gets bullied and stuffed in a locker or forced to do the scut work.
Alright, it’s been a week to gather internal data Blizz, you can act on it now. Just because our other specs are heavily represented in RWF doesn’t mean you should ignore brewmaster.
My buddy who loves Tanking M+ and goes for at least 3K each Season on multiple Alts just dropped his Brew as his Main this Season for his DH after a week.
He said it was after doing a Key on his DH that he had just done on his Brew and even though the Monk is 15 iLevels higher he had much easier time with Vengeance and did far more damage.
Brewmaster, and maybe all tanks, need better Open World applications. Right now the tanks with self-healing are dominant.
General world players are the vast majority. You want adoption, you need to appeal to us. And I think its just logical that self-healing tanks are going to fare better in general. Open World or not.
There is no excuse for this total lack of attention from Blizz. Revert our beta nerfs and actually put 10 minutes of effort into our talent tree which, as of now, is an abomination.
It isn’t what’s popular or healthy solution or not, it’s what the guy in charge of balance is playing. Remember DF S2 bear and S3/S4 DH tank? Or how quick prot pal was buffed in TWW S1?
They deliberately allow a spec to be completly OP for entire season or in the case of DF DH, a whole year while letting brewmaster to rot at the bottom of the pile.
Alpha/beta often has brewmaster really strong and the tank content creators get all excited.
Then they nerf monk for live or make a different tank stupidly strong.
We have good strengths balanced by weaknesses. If another tank has all strengths and no weaknesses (high dps, high tankiness, high utility) then often the other 5 might as well be chopped liver.
I’m gunna be real, I don’t see Brewmaster ever being anything but niche unless they either giga-overtune it, or change it into something unrecognizable.
Stagger is just too difficult of a mechanic to balance against other tank mitigations.
TBH I think this is specifically why brewmasters are typically underwhelming.
The other 5 tanks are all similar enough that if one tank is the best, everything else is typically going to be good enough design-wise, so anything else is merely a tuning issue.
Like Prot Paladins are the best tank now and there isn’t any mechanic that a Prot Paladin can handle that no other tank can’t handle. Not having Prot Paladins level of control doesn’t mean that Bears can’t handle the same content, it just means they’re not as good at it, y’know?
But Stagger is a completely unique ability that is very difficult to balance around and I think Blizzard are traumatized by MoP Brewmaster.
Usually though we have some reward for our risk. Not even getting that right now
Talent tree could use a entire redo.
Cds are bleh.
Didn’t stick to the pre-tww plan for all tanks (self sustain tanks are back to self sustaining. Monks lost self sustain and didn’t gain enough durability)
But I think Blizzard are much happier when literally any other tank is meta because they’re all largely interchangeable. Cause you can change Pal for DK for Warrior for Druid for DH. Sure they all play slightly differently, but fundamentally they do the same thing.
But Monks are a different because of Stagger. It’s just a fundamentally different tanking gameplay loop compared to everything else.
I don’t think the community minds it as much, because leveling and gearing tanks is so easy, it’s fine if the other 5 are basically interchangable.
Stagger isn’t the issue, though. Shaving off 70% of the damage with Stagger is no different from a Guardian Druid shaving off 70% of the damage with stacked Ironfur.
Except that Stagger is weaker because you still take the damage.
It isn’t the existence of Stagger that’s made Brewmaster bottom of the barrel for self-healing.
It isn’t the existence of Stagger that has Brewmaster as the only tank with zero utility in their tanking talent tree.
It isn’t the existence of Stagger that makes Celestial Brew have a 45 second cooldown and Ignore Pain have a 1 second cooldown, even though they’re the same spell.
It isn’t the existence of Stagger that has a worthless Brewmaster tree in general. You could make the top 4 rows baseline, freeing up 8 or 9 talent points, and it wouldn’t even matter because there’s nothing in the talent tree worth taking. Give most specs 8 or 9 additional points and they’ll find cool things they normally have to give up. Give a Brewmaster 8 or 9 talent points and they shrug.
None of this is because of Stagger.
It’s just because Blizzard doesn’t give a crap. They have their favorites, that they spend huge amounts of time on every expansion, and then the rest of the classes can just sit in the corner.
