Disclaimer / Foreward; The following contains opinions, and some hopefully constructive malding. I know the talent trees very much a work in progress until launch but still. To give a perspective on my Brewmaster worldview I’m usually a +15 Keystone Goblin so this is where a lot of this comes from.
With that out of the way; We’ve got the Bad, the Good, and… something.
The Bad;
-Breath of Fire isn’t baseline to brew despite being a mainstay since its inception? In addition it only reduces damage if you have Celestial Flames / Blackout Combo. It feels very strange. There’s a few other things like the entire jumble of talents in the mid tier towards the left where it feels like a lot of our core defensive toolkit is all in talents, and this is just more of a personal gripe on tanks having their CD’s in the talent tree instead of being baseline to make room for more interesting things, but that’s another TED Talk
-The Fact that Brew is not getting to keep its tier bonuses as a talent (mainly the 4pc) is outright criminal. The tier set unleashed this class to a whole new level and this feels like an absolute gutpunch. Suggest removing exploding keg, putting Stormstout’s in its place and having it lead to a capstone where SSLK is that is the 4pc bonus.
-Weird placements and breadcrumb/ribbon talents that don’t feel like they do much. It feels like we’re gonna be forced into some kind of weird Blackout Combo / Shadowboxing build (not a fan personally)
-Weapons of the Order should have both of its follow-up talents merged into one. It’s not a great cooldown on its own and the CDR + free Ox are what really made it shine- not to mention it’s completely worthless without SSLK… another capstone that we’re very hard pressed to obtain both as well as… well what seems like a lot of the core of Monk.
-Exploding Keg. Completely useless 1min CD. Why?
Again, I know this is still in development but these are the kind of gripes I have about BrM. It feels like we’d have to really stretch to keep some of the core abilities and are forced to pick lackluster ribbon talents to get to what we need. But to keep this from being all naysaying I’ll move on to…
The Good;
-Stormstout’s Last Keg- I said earlier my thoughts on where I’d like this but being entirely honest I’m glad it’s still a thing and anyone that’s ever played brew with this legendary is probably also glad it exists going forward.
-Stagger management talents all look fairly fun, if a little on the conservative side currently. I’m actually really excited to play with these and see which ones work well, but adding more to probably the best mitigation in the game is a thumbs up in my book. Being able to more actively manage it without adding a jank playstyle is certainly appreciated and smoothing out damage a little more is never bad. The mastery version of High Tolerance’s haste buff is also neat and will again lead to more passive mitigation that requires no input from the player. Never a bad thing for tanks.
There’s not really a whole lot to improve on with Brew from current in my honest opinion. It has a very neat tanking style and purifying stagger to lead into big celestial brews feels very nice. The extra stagger additions seem like they’ll be pretty solid, especially all the passive shuffle stagger reduction in conjunction with Celestial Brew upgrade. Again stating how criminal/gut-punch it feels to lose the 4pc tier bonus when other tanks are keeping theirs, it makes a lot of good happen.
The Weird;
With the more… constructive thoughts out now to just kind of enjoy bits and pieces that stand out to me, some good some not as but appreciating none-the-less.
-Breath of Fire upgrades look rather spicy. Scalding Brew is literally just potency conduit we always set and forget so whatever, but the talents afterwards? Charred Passions is just a legendary that’s not terrible, in fact a quite good one for a lot of shadowlands, but Dragonfire brew looks like it’s going to be extremely fun to play with, especially in more tank punishing combat- take the hits, dish out the fiery pain in return!
-Clash. Uhh… well, clash sure do be clash. I feel like it’s going to be more of an afterthought pick because Brew seems like it’s going to be really stretched for talent points overall and this is a very easy cut. Doesn’t ribbon to anything, always been a jank button but one I can still love despite the jank. Can certainly count the amount of times RoP is on CD and I use it to rip something out of sanguine pools so not a bad button by any means imo… just probably never going to make the cut.
-Shocking Blow fits solidly in the weird for me. CJL is one of those buttons that generally didn’t have a whole lot of use personally, especially since almost anytime I’d want to push it Chi Wave was there. It feels like there’s a lot of Brew talents that are stacking on Blackout Kick when I’d rather have more things piling on to Keg Smash or Brews since it’s a BREWmaster… not a blackoutkickMaster.
-Talent placements just feel kind of janky and piled in to odd spots. I keep coming back to this point but it really does just feel sort of weird overall. Nothing seems to ribbon in to each other super well and no matter how I try and cut it, it always feels like I have to give up some tool that’s in current Brew’s arsenal that always feels bad to give up. From messing around with it, it feels like there’s going to be a few different flavors of brew which isn’t bad, but lacking these sorts of tools and such I can’t quite say it feels good either. To take a stab in the dark at what kinda BrM we might see if this does go live is… shuffle brew, No BoF Spinny-brew, and then something slightly approaching the current style of it in current but having lost just those little bits that really push it over the edge into a very nice-feeling territory.
Those are my general thoughts, so if you’ve made it this far into the TED Talk, I applaud you. Looking forward to what’s to come, pls don’t gut the Brewbois Blizz.