While the absorb increase to Celestial Brew/Celestial Infusion feels welcome, as Brew had very little access to active mitigations to handle tank busters compared to every other tank spec, The 100% increase in cast time severly hinders the fluidity and gameplay loop of the class.
The way the spec plays currently CB/CI is used rotationally much of the time to get a keg smash back when otherwise there is nothing valuable to press in the rotation, with a 1.5min CD this isn’t really viable.
The change severely nerfs our apex talent, losing access to 50% of our guaranteed refreshing drinks and leaves us energy starved having to press other low value abilities that cost energy.
Overall the class felt smooth with a well thought out apex talent that provided a nice gameplay feedback loop that will be destroyed with the increased CD on CB/CI.
The second main issue with 12.1 is the Current design of the 4 set bonus. Playing around a TINY ground targeted set bonus just makes the class feel like a bad BDK or Prot pal. Why cant the empowered keg smashes just apply a DoT to the targets hit? or at the very least increase the size so brew doesn’t have to keep packs in a thimble sized ground ability.
it legitimately feels unplayable now. brew got exactly 1 patch of being decent and now they’ve just arbitrarily ruined the spec for no reason. this isnt some little 10% nudge here or there. they literally cut our defensive CDs and healing in half.
Really does suck….all the other tanks are boring to me BM is the only tank i actually enjoy, hope they buff it when s2 m+ is released on the 18th otherwise im forced to play something i dont enjoy….
Maybe the idea was wanting to make CB/CI more of a defensive choice rather than just sending on CD for our rotation, but if that is how Blizzard wants it to be used, why design and apex talent where CB/CI provides offensive value?
Season 1 Brew felt great to play, and not just because it was strong. The rotation for both hero specs was very smooth/fun. Now there is lots of “dead time” where your choice is to push an extremely sub optimal ability for a small damage boost and become energy starved, or to just stand there and do nothing if you don’t get purifying brew resets.
Really a head scratching change that isn’t beating the “blizzard doesnt play their own game” allegations
Yup quite literally the one change (that wasn’t even documented until they did the final summary a week ago) of doubling the cooldown of CI/CB basically broke BrM this patch.
Big holes in the rotation, less survivability (even though they intended more), way less damage.
I also cannot remember seeing a single player on any forums or in game going “you know what if they made CB / CI actually do a reasonable shield I’d be happy to take double the cooldown” they just wanted it to do a little more to help as a tank buster, it didn’t need to be 150% stronger (even with it being 150% stronger it’s still pretty weak compared to other tank main defensive abilities)
I’d much rather have a slightly buffed version with the season 1 cooldown than a super buffed version with double the cooldown.
I genuinely believe whoever made the CI/CB change is someone not super familiar with monk on the whole. If you treat celestial infusion as a traditional defensive, making it beefier and less frequent makes some sort of sense? But it has other important interactions that impact so many other aspects of how we play. That reads to me as someone making a change using a color-by-numbers approach.
I agree I feel like It’s common sense to take a look at an ability you’re making a drastic change to and think “how does this ability synergize with other aspects of the tool toolkit? Will making this change have significant impacts based on those synergies? What else do we need to adjust if we want to do this change to make it less negatively impacting?”
If they really wanted to double the cool down on celestial infusion / brew, they should have adjusted Apex talents to increase the proc chance on purifying brew to trigger an empty keg and maybe add a small proc chance for it to create a refreshing drink as well. it’s not a perfect solution because I would prefer more control rather than RNG but at least it would’ve been something to try to mitigate the impact.
I feel that the lack of communication during PTR and the complete lack of any notes mentioning it was deliberate.
They had plenty of time to give patch notes, follow up and adjustments based on feedback on PTR because that’s the whole point of PTR.
But by not providing any notes (Developer Notes) then their is noting for us to reply to. I’ll say the twisted logic is, “If no one is commenting on this class changes in the PTR Notes (when there is none) then they must not have any issues.”
Imagine if they just randomly slapped a 15sec CD on BDK’s Death Strike and made no notes until it went live, or deciding to remove Divine Shield from Prot spec only, with no notes. The forums would be on fire and the devs would be on their hands and knees apologizing.
But nope how dare the gutter trash (Brew) be in the spotlight over the scared Paladin.
We all remember when the Paladins shutdown their Discord because of a patch note (how lucky they were given time to see the change and they got their way and Blizzard reversed the upcoming change.
Even now the Devs are completely ignoring feedback from us. F*** WoW Forever and fix the problems that we and other classes are having before dumping out a reskin of vanilla.
And give an actual response to the reason for the change and most importantly the lack of PTR patch notes, the lack of responding to many posts in the PTR forums regarding the undocumented change (rather big change). You’re willing to revert changes for the damn paladins, then do it for us.
The next update notes 9/22 make no mention of brewmaster at all. There has been zero changes. The tier set sucks, the piddly fire damage on this tiny patch of fiery ground from the 4 set bonus is a joke. The change to celestial infusion (no playing brewmaster thought that was a great idea at all) makes gameplay clunky. The devs (if there exists one assigned to brewmaster) insisted celestial infusion be used as an absorb shield rather than a keg smash reset. I find myself using celestial infusion rarely and the rotation feels very dry like I’m watching for gcds and energy to become available rather than playing. The changes make it so I rarely see keg smash resets at all from the apex talent. It’s downright depressing.
They have the data on how the class is performing and how popular it is in raid and m+ and its not good. My disappointment in the spec performance isn’t an outlier. We all feel it during gameplay and we make comments about it on forums and those comments fall on deaf ears so we stop trying …
I’m hoping to keep this Thread going until some attention is brought to it.
As for our Tier Set, our set is actually really good, if you only focus on the flame puddle it seems weak, but our 2pc adding Flamestrike to KS and with 4pc increasing physical by 8% and even that puddle does well for pulls in M+. That extra Fire damage synergizes with our Vital Flame talent.
That being the case I believe is real for the stealth nerf, if retained our original cdr on CI/CB (45sec) we’d have more uptime on KS and Apec procs, that with our set would have been amazing but then BDKs would lose their spotlight; so their only solution was to do what they did.
Very disappointed in the status of brewmaster and receiving no attention to CI changes, not to mention you can parse live data and show brew damage is under all other tanks by 10% in keys. While blood is 20% higher on average than other tanks. Our rotation and survivability don’t feel great at all. Please blizz.