Brewmaster just feels phoned in from a design standpoint. Mechanically it has good things going for it, but it lacks that special something that makes them “fun.”
I miss the, “clash” ability. It added a fun to use ability with a good sound effect and animation.
Yeah, I know “nostalgia.” But MoP brewmaster felt more engaging and fun to play that whatever they’ve done recently.
I kinda like it. Reasons to go for stats due to how they interact is more fun than just stacking vers or mastery.
This is definitely true.
The top is things that would be baseline for the other 5 tanks. Everyone else gets their active mitigation baseline or in class tree, why am I talenting into shuffle, purify and orbs?
Middle of the tree lets you spend 4 talent points to get a weak defensive CD and then buff it to be still pretty weak. 1 for niuzao, 2 for 0.5sec cdr per activation, 1 for a scaling dps boost. There’s also a capstone talent that makes your other CD summon niuzao too.
Compare that to prot paladin who spends 1 talent on goak and 1 talent to give both 1sec cdr per target hit by avengers shield and a free proc of goak while low every 45sec. There’s also a capstone that gives cdr for goak and wings every time you cast a holy power move.
5 talents for a crap defensive VS 3 talents for an amazing defensive.
The bottom of monks tree is pretty meh too. You can get away without having any capstones or you can take one for more dps.
Someone also pointed out that other tanks get cdr talents that scale based on enemy count.
Monk should have anvil & stave but they made it purposefully not get stronger with more targets. I think it scales so whether it’s 5 targets or 1, you get the same cdr on brews.
We do get talents that give more mastery and haste at different levels of stagger, but then there can be times where you don’t want to purify because you’ll get weaker and you’re not taking enough dmg to be at risk of death.
Also, low level content has you in light stagger so you feel like you’re missing part of your game play loop - high level content just has you in permanent heavy stagger. Idk, I wish there was more variance.
They want crit to contribute to defense for tanks (iirc most of the tanks get parry from it). I don’t know if Celestial Fortune is strong enough for Brew to stack crit, but surely they could nerf it if it’s way better than the other secondaries.
They could buff a couple CDs (especially Fortifying Brew CD way too long) but I’d be more interested in buffs on aoe damage abilities and stronger Expel Harm.
Crit is important, yeah. They did nerf celestial fortune from 80% to 70% in tww, I think. They said tanks were too self sufficient in DF so they nerfed all 6 even though monks take more dmg and need more external heals than everyone else.
Though haste is largely ignored completely. Mastery got nerfed and only sometimes desirable in m+ but pretty meh for raiding.
If we didn’t have celestial fortune then it would probably just be stack vers and yolo the rest of the stats, idk.
Thank you.
I’m used to the amount of buttons and brewmaster does have a comparable amount to prot paladin. So I dont find this to be an issue but I can understand it is a problem in general even though I don’t experience it.
There are dead give aways like black out kick(bok) and rising sun kick(RSK). Brewmaster could lose rsk and have bok on a shorter cooldown and than retune damage to be the same without rsk.
The same could be with fort brew, zed med, diffuse magic, and dampen harm. Give us two major defensive cooldowns with smaller cooldowns. Let them both work for all damage.
Shuffle is also another ability or aspect of brewmaster that could just be made baseline imo.
I’m not against a rework. But if they did rework brewmaster I’d like to see stagger stay.
I would like to see stagger stay but if Blizzard cant or wont balance it and us properly I would rather keep what makes us unique with a high skill ceiling.
That said, there is no excuse for Blizzard to not fix our talent tree at the least. And give me back Avert Harm. I just want some raid utility.
Isn’t a big issue with this tank is that you can’t tank heavy burst damage very well?
I mean it has mobility with roll at least.
Tankbusters are no issue for Brew. The problem is the death by a thousand cuts that trash mobs do coupled with the fact that our self-sustain is garbage with all of Blizz’s nerfs.
The self sustain is a joke, getting a ‘juiced’ celestial brew that just immediately gets removed by one mob cast in a key is peak brewmaster gameplay.
Brewmaster always sucked. I left guild because they used that and it was wipe for no reason cause healer spend too much time focusing on it.
Celestial Brew has been there from the start in MoP. It was just called “Guard” back then.
I like all the Brewmaster buttons. I don’t like that I’m basically GCD locked with short duration buffs that need to be maintained (Charred Passions, Breath of Fire, Weapons of Order, Purified Chi.) This is especially noticeable with the new tier set when you can get back-to-back Luck of the Draw procs and you now have to make a choice between maintaining Charred Passions/Weapons of Order debuff stacks or blackout kick. Theoretically, you could hit 17 CPM of Blackout Kick but these buffs make that impossible to do.
We still have Clash as a talent. I like it, but its not worth the keybind or the talent point at the moment.
I do agree that we need something “fun”. Or at the very least, a return to one of the niches we used to have – either “4th dps” or great mob control, mobility, etc. Currently were outclassed in utility, mob control, dps, and even mobility by several other tanks and we’re last in everything besides maybe mobility – but paladin horse is definitely strong enough to break the meme of “wheelchair paladins”
For what its worth, High Tolerance gives most of its haste at green/low stagger. Same with Training of Nizuao.
Celestial Fortune is the primary reason for stacking crit. Its very impactful and often your highest healing “ability” despite being entirely passive. The problem is that it takes control out of your hands and gives it to the healer – if they don’t know what it takes to heal a brewmaster you will feel very squishy – whereas a healer who keeps maintenance heals on you will make you feel much tankier, but still not as tanky as a prot paladin, prot war, VDH, bear or DK.
This is a large part of the problem. They blanket nerfed every tank instead of paying attention to the fact that Brewmaster was already in the “TWW” paradigm of tanks needing healers. They need to revert the Spirit of the Ox, Celestial Brew, Elixir of Determination, and Celestial Fortune nerfs that were, frankly, unwarranted.
I think the bigger problem is that Prot Paladin isn’t really GCD locked whereas Brewmaster definitely is. You can dump Shield of the Righteous oGCD and make sure you’re not capping Judgement/Blessed Hammer just fine. Brewmaster on the other hand has to juggle 5 rotational GCD abilities with <8s cooldowns and additionally defensives on the GCD like Celestial Brew, and our major offensive CD Weapons of Order being on the GCD (Which, from what I can recall, is one of the ONLY tank offensive cooldown that is on the GCD)
In general, tankbusters aren’t a problem for any tank. Most tanks can live through tankbusters without a CD these days as long as they’re topped. When you drop sub 60% you’re in danger. Brewmaster has a benefit where you could take a tankbuster at 60% and still live without a cooldown… possibly… but you’ll be very low.
It must have been a very bad brewmaster because raids are one place where Brewmaster does okay – mostly because they can dodge basically every single boss auto attack by doing their rotation properly.
No this isn’t a -bad- brewmaster. It’s the class that is bad. Even in M+ of TWW S1 now it’s ok you can clearly it’s underperforming. I won’t put up with tinfoil hat. I’m not one of those desperate enough player to invite the first tank I see.
What’s funny is they got a rework during beta, and people are still not using the new stuff they got because it’s so bad. Blizzard barely plays the game to start with, do you know how unlikely it is for them to play brewmaster if they ever get around to play the game? They’re literally making decisions on an excel spreadsheet just looking at numbers and being like “woah, 80% stagger sounds really strong” and have no idea how anything works in parctice. This class is doomed, I’ve been playing it for years and many times mained it while it was atrocious (like S1 TWW) but I just can’t deal with this anymore there’s no point. I feel scammed whenever I log on it.
I mean, in M+ we’re underperforming in all metrics. In raids – and this is true in general for almost all tanks – survivability should not be a major issue unless you screw things up. Last tier there was one boss that would eat Brewmasters alive (Rashanan) but i’ve not yet seen a boss with the same mechanic that ignored stagger as mitigation.
I think that having 4 tanks now that don’t require a healer exacerbates the problem with Brewmaster and really highlights the self sustain problem we have.
My fellow gamer in Christ you must not give up on Monk. Hold the line and keep the faith.
Also remember when they thought that pre-nerf elixir of determination was too strong lol? God give us that back pls.
Monk is still around, just WW for now since blizz didn’t forget their existence somehow.
Ok but you’re playing retail. It’s not classic where you can get away being the meme flavor. (Lolret) It’s retail Monk your trying to defend. Where everyone else in your group die from one or two slap in end game.
So take unavoidable damage plus tank that constantly takes damage thanks to a dumb staggering mechanic. Which I know can take brew but you know not every one plays on the same skill ceiling.
And you get a risky situation. On top of already not knowing who you play with most the time. The risk isn’t worth it.
If you take Blackout Combo, which you normally do, then there definitely is a rotation/priority.
I’m sorry if it came across as me trying to defend monk. I’ll admit I don’t raid mythic and focus mostly on M+. I don’t feel like monk is in a good spot (especially since we’re also lowest dps in M+ and raid, bring little/no utility, and take more healer attention than other tanks)
And for bringing up skill ceiling, I think this is another issue that brewmaster has: Our skill floor is higher than the skill ceiling of some tanks – which leads to Brewmaster players feeling cheated because they will play near robotically perfectly, get 99 or even 100 parses and still be below damage to other tanks playing at 70%, but then we also don’t bring anything to the group thats useful and are actually a detriment to the group because a healer has to use several GCD’s on us even when the group is taking a lot of damage.