Brewmaster in need of utility and talent/celestial rework

[Bleish-kiljaeden]

should have made a new thread instead of renaming

[Yongyong-wyrmrest-accord]

@Taerinn-stormreaver

This is a much better version of overwhelming force

Performance wise maybe, but it made a pretty egregious cycle of needing to have BDB + EK + RJW all up at the same time to get more Resonant Fists procs, which in turned procced BDB/EK, which in turn I believe procced RF more.

I loved the combo personally, but it was a bit much to manage at times compared to other tanks and would be nearly impossible now given how poorly RJW fits into the current rotation.

[Equinox-zuljin]

@Yongyong-wyrmrest-accord

Performance wise maybe, but it made a pretty egregious cycle of needing to have BDB + EK + RJW all up at the same time to get more Resonant Fists procs, which in turned procced BDB/EK, which in turn I believe procced RF more.

resonant fists was nice but yea it just forced you to play RJW in m+ and having that extra bloat would suck rn

[Kinsington-stormrage]

@Yongyong-wyrmrest-accord

how poorly RJW fits into the current rotation

Indeed. I wonder what exactly changed between DF S4 and TWW S1 that made RJW no longer a talent worth running. I was actually playing BRM in these seasons but I took long breaks and forgot.

I tried running RJW for some 12s to see what it was like in terms of damage, it’s alright but idk if the missed globals are making me do less damage. It’s certainly really bad on the side of GCD economy and would honestly have gotten me killed in some keys, or I’d have had to just not press it - at which point Special Delivery is just better, which is the current reasoning.

I personally really liked RJW, it’s one of the coolest abilities in the monk kit imo, along with SCK. I really like spinning. Maybe they should add some defensive benefit to spinning, on top of also buffing the damage it does.

[Taerinn-stormreaver]

@Ageric-alexstrasza

Replace Ox Stance and it’s capstones w/the following;

Imo, Ox stance could just be removed. The whole point of stagger is to handle these big hits and Ox stance just adds more to that but only when a hit is big enough. It’s very weird and doesn’t fit imo.

@Ageric-alexstrasza

Jadefire Stomp: After casting Exploding Keg, cast Jadefire Stomp dealing X dmg to all enemies and X healing to up to 5 allies. Dealing damage to enemies effected by your Jadefire Stomp has a 50% chance to reduce the CD of Exploding Keg and your brews by 1 second. (the Jadefire debuff could last maybe 10/15 seconds idk).

Jadefire stomp could be a choice node with exploding keg or replace it or some kind of ox stomp if we wanted to lean into the ox celestial theme. The purpose of the ability would be big aoe on a cooldown that provides short duration mitigation or avoidance.

Alternatively, I could see jadefire stomp being an upgraded or choice node with breath of fire. Short cooldown that deals direct damage and applies a fire dot. The faeline exploding upward could apply the dot. This dot reduces the damage mobs do to you.

I’m not a fan of exploding keg auto procc’ing jadefire stomp. Then you’d have to worry about which direction you’re facing and it conflicts with being able to use exploding keg at range.

@Ageric-alexstrasza

Reworked Zen Med: When you drop below 20% HP you enter Zen Med for 3 seconds. During this time you can cast Expel Harm and move but not attack. You take 90% less damage and clear your remaining stagger. You also generate 2 Gifts of the Ox.

One of the core designs to brewmaster is that you die slowly. It’s kind of the point of stagger. Although sometimes it doesn’t feel or is that way because of our tuning. But because we should be dying slowly I don’t think brewmaster needs a cheat death like vdh or bdk.

However, zen med needs to go or be redesigned. Brewmaster lacks a group/raid cooldown and imo zen med could fill this role.

@Ageric-alexstrasza

As stated before make Keg Smash radius larger and range doubled so we can effectively pull and establish aggro.

This is a given. When kegsmash can’t even hit every mob it a pack it’s just awful.

@Ageric-alexstrasza

I’d also love to see Spinning Crane get a dmg or at least additional threat modifier to help w/aggro.

I’d like to do away with sck all together. But other parts of our kit would have to be able to fill the gap that sck is currently filling. AoE threat when making a pull and getting threat if extra mobs come into the pull. Resonating or overwhelming force adding aoe to our other abilities could do this if it was tuned properly. Or rushing jade wind if we took it.

Here’s an idea:

Let the damage we take as stagger expel chi from the brewmaster dealing damage to nearby enemies. Functionally it would be like rushing jade wind but passive with busts of aoe happening when we use purifying brew. This damage would cause a high amount of threat.

@Ageric-alexstrasza

Choice node for RoP to aoe silence and disarm.

Blizzard should look at every pack in every dungeon and thing about how a pull will be made and take into consideration both casters and archers. Then based on how they design the dungeons and mobs give tanks the tools for gathering packs.

As of right now RoP to silence could go a long way for this but would also be great defensively during a pull as well.

@Ageric-alexstrasza

Gift of the Ox HoT heal based on the amount it heals

Gift of the ox giving a hot could be good but it also isn’t very reactive. I’d prefer if it just healed but any over healing became an absorb ideally or a hot.

Absorbs are really good for us because they almost never go to waste because of stagger.

[Taerinn-stormreaver]

That’s just because it gave aoe spells quadratic scaling. I’m okay prioritizing aoe in aoe situations. Though I didn’t use it much.

More importantly it was a 360 aoe and not a frontal like overwhelming force.

[Equinox-zuljin]

@Taerinn-stormreaver

I’d like to do away with sck all together. But other parts of our kit would have to be able to fill the gap that sck is currently filling. AoE threat when making a pull and getting threat if extra mobs come into the pull. Resonating or overwhelming force adding aoe to our other abilities could do this if it was tuned properly. Or rushing jade wind if we took it.

i think crane kick is fine, it feels pretty awkward that one of our top damage spells in aoe is tiger palm, if you want an aoe threat generator that isn’t crane kick dizzying haze existed before and was great at generating threat

[Ageric-alexstrasza]

@Taerinn-stormreaver

Gift of the ox giving a hot could be good but it also isn’t very reactive. I’d prefer if it just healed but any over healing became an absorb ideally or a hot.

Absorbs are really good for us because they almost never go to waste because of stagger.

I’m not sure how/what you mean by it not being reactive but yeah the overhealing going into an absorb would also be nice. That kind of incentivizes you to use it close to full HP though which I don’t think makes much sense for a heal…at that point just buff CB more I’d say. The idea was to give us more sustain.

@Taerinn-stormreaver

One of the core designs to brewmaster is that you die slowly. It’s kind of the point of stagger. Although sometimes it doesn’t feel or is that way because of our tuning. But because we should be dying slowly I don’t think brewmaster needs a cheat death like vdh or bdk.

I don’t see why this means we shouldn’t have a cheat but to each their own! Part of why I thought it would be nice as a cheat is so we don’t keep adding button bloat to Brew but making it an actual useable CD would be nice too. Just do something with it pls Blizz xD. It being a raid wide CD somehow is also a cool idea. Maybe similar to the Pres Evoker skill where you heal for a ton of health and over healing get converted into a party/raid-wide shield. Idk just throwin’ out random ideas.

@Taerinn-stormreaver

I’m not a fan of exploding keg auto procc’ing jadefire stomp. Then you’d have to worry about which direction you’re facing and it conflicts with being able to use exploding keg at range.

Fair point. Instead how about after you Exploding Keg the skill turns into Jadefire Stomp so then you can manually use w/out adding more buttons and still have the same effect! And you can still use it from range and such.

[Kinsington-stormrage]

@Equinox-zuljin

dizzying haze

I lowkey feel it could make a comeback as an off-GCD 3s slow effect with like a 30 second cooldown, big threat generation and Breath of Fire enabler. Or leaves a puddle in the floor or so.

Tossing kegs like that was peak brewmaster fantasy tbh

[Brewa-hyjal]

@Jaenerys-moon-guard

Also, bring back Keg of the Heavens as a capstone: Keg Smash deals 50% additional damage, heals you for 66% of damage dealt, and grants 66% of damage dealt as maximum health for 10 sec, stacking up to 10 times.

And then they’ll nerf Keg Smash by 50%.

This is what they keep doing to us.

Q: Why is Spinning Crane Kick weak?
A: Because they nerfed it 20% during Aberrus.
Q: Why did they nerf Spinning Crane Kick during Aberrus?
A: Because our Aberrus tier set increased Spinning Crane Kick damage by up to 25%.

I wish they’d just nuke the tier set bonus. At least that way the nerf doesn’t stick with us after the tier ends.

[Taerinn-stormreaver]

@Equinox-zuljin

i think crane kick is fine

You use it to pick up threat on pull and then never again despite its poor tuning because other spells are lacking so much. If they just fixed other spells like keg smash or something new then it wouldn’t have any purpose.

@Ageric-alexstrasza

I’m not sure how/what you mean by it not being reactive

Heals over time take time to have an effect. They aren’t bursty is what I mean.

@Ageric-alexstrasza

That kind of incentivizes you to use it close to full HP though which I don’t think makes much sense for a heal

It would mean that you get the same value using it at high health and low health with the added bonus of being able to give yourself more effective health before a spike of damage.

This would be an argue against turning over heals into an absorb because if it did we might feel the need to have to hit several GCDs before a big damage event.

@Ageric-alexstrasza

The idea was to give us more sustain.

Reducing the over heal from GotO does increase our sustain.

@Ageric-alexstrasza

I don’t see why this means we shouldn’t have a cheat but to each their own!

It’s the reason why vdh and bdk have cheats deaths not the reason we dont. There’s a small but important distinction there.

[Equinox-zuljin]

@Taerinn-stormreaver

You use it to pick up threat on pull and then never again despite its poor tuning because other spells are lacking so much. If they just fixed other spells like keg smash or something new then it wouldn’t have any purpose.

You use it this way due to it being nerfed multiple times, it was our primary AoE filler before. Making Tiger Palm our AoE and Single Target filler is super awkward and contributes to our poor threat

[Dirusalso-aegwynn]

Honestly they could add some nodes for exploding keg to give it some of the features of dizzying haze. Extra charge, lower cool down etc.

An interaction between haze/keg with SCK and BoF to make them far more powerful in air could be interesting.

[Kinsington-stormrage]

oh man… the implications that they’ll come to nerf Blackout Kick in the near future are sweat inducing

---

I honestly think we don’t need a cheat death either to be honest. Would be nice sure but honestly I don’t feel like we really need it. We need stuff elsewhere though for sure. The fact that playing without EoD works for some is honestly proof that it’s no big deal

Finding out that we have 1/4 of the armor that a BDK does was eye opening to be honest. I know they wear plate, but 40k vs 160k is massive. I think if we had like 60k-70k we would perform on par with others against trash

Maybe increase armor based on stagger level? Or have mastery also increase armor?

I get the impression we’re supposed to be splitting the difference between low armor and having high dodge (particularly with mastery), but it just means that small adds like the rats in motherlode truck us big time and we don’t really care about the big hits, which we would rather be taking anyways due to stagger.

I think having our mastery scale with stagger level would be cool too, I think Training of Niuzhao adds a dimension to BRM that we should be leaning on.

I like to think there’s someone at Blizzard reading this thread, at least sporadically. It’d be nice to get it referenced (even if indirectly) in an update later.

On the topic of Ox Stance, I think it’s a cool talent too but honestly it’s probably limiting our design and unnecessary. I feel like the reason why we have such bad defensives on long cooldowns is because Ox Stance is expected. I’ve recently gotten my second tank trinket (Chromebustible Suit) and it feels like I’m playing a more complete class when I actually have CDs to rotate through. I’d rather lose Ox Stance and gain at least one more defensive on a 2 minute ish cooldown.

They could even make Weapons of Order stacks also reduce the damage you take from mobs. Perhaps as a choice node with Chi Surge.

I have the impression that Niuzao is expected to be a defensive cooldown too, which it doesn’t even come close to. Has it ever?

[Brewa-hyjal]

I think people need to get over this notion that stagger is somehow good.

Or even mitigation.

It’s neither.

The number of times I see people parrot “but Monks have a smoother damage intake than other tanks” is ridiculous, when we yo-yo like nobody’s business while other tanks don’t even need healing.

People are living ten years in the past. The game has changed. Monks haven’t.

[Equinox-zuljin]

yea stagger hasnt been that potent since BFA season 3, BFA season 4 it carried cause of 130% vers ontop of it but the post season 3 nerfs were massive hits to stagger

[Floweret-stormreaver]

@Brewa-hyjal

I think people need to get over this notion that stagger is somehow good.

Or even mitigation.

Stagger isn’t mitigation but it enables our mitigation – purifying brew.

And stagger is great.

[Brewa-hyjal]

If Purifying Brew had a 1 second cooldown, Stagger would be on par with Ironfur.

[Ageric-alexstrasza]

@Taerinn-stormreaver

It’s the reason why vdh and bdk have cheats deaths not the reason we dont. There’s a small but important distinction there.

I think it’s kinda up to your preference. I don’t know why you’re so against us having a cheat death. It’s not like it makes the spec worse. I understand your argument but Prot War is very sturdy as well and it has a cheat. Prot Pally has 1 and a half cheats, etc.

We can agree to disagree but I still don’t see a compelling reason as to why stagger/the way Brew mitigates dmg = we shouldn’t have a cheat death. But again to each their own!

@Taerinn-stormreaver

Heals over time take time to have an effect. They aren’t bursty is what I mean.

Ahh okay gotcha!

[Alletrat-frostmourne]

Abilities like this generally need a limiting factor, Purifying brew has a cooldown and Ironfur has a rage cost. The key difference is Druid gains more rage on trash, giving greater access to Ironfur. Incarnation amplifies this by reducing Ironfur’s cost, boosting rage generation, and providing near-infinite healing.

These kinds of advantages highlight what Brewmaster lacks, trash related perks!