Please leave comments below with your feedback regarding Brewmaster in 11.1.
Since we’re not getting any changes to brewmaster besides tier set, heres what I’ve gathered so far.
2pc: Underwhelming, but somewhat useful for M+ where trash packs are the major concern. Obviously, its a bit worse than the passive 3% DR and 20% increased damage on Keg Smash/BoK on the current tier. And by a bit, my math shows it to be roughly 2.5% worse overall.
4pc: Lots of thing wrong with it:
Punishes players with an already unforgiving rotation. Even top brewmasters struggle to hit the 15 CPM of Blackout Kick, so adding even more BoK in the rotation is just a slap in the face to the average player.
Damage proc is consumed on hit, rather than on cast. That means talents like Shadowboxing Treads, which adds a cleave to BoK, will consume the entire buff and make it DPS loss. I’m sure this is a bug, but I don’t have faith that Blizzard will actually fix this before 11.1 hits.
Spammy rotation. Once your Luck of the Draw! proc hits, you’re forced into a BoK-TP-BoK-TP-BoK-TP cycle, eating up a whopping 6 GCD’s. Thats absolutely insane. Its not fun, and its absolutely braindead if you use the BoK-TP macro that most brewmasters have. Basically, you get a proc and you press 1 key for 6 seconds.
Finally, stat distribution. 4 out of the 5 pieces feature haste which is the worst stat for Brewmaster by far. It offers almost zero defensive utility or offensive utility, and is as close to a zero-weight stat as you can have. I get that Mistweaver and Windwalker like haste, but having it on almost every single piece is just flat out embarrassingly bad.
On to other things, regarding the new dungeon:
So much magic damage means Brewmaster gets eaten alive. While Stagger helps for Magic Damage, its nowhere near as effective as other tanks ability to handle magical tankbusters. The mobs that cast Blood bolt for example will hit my Brewmaster for 80% of his HP pool, and the cast time is extremely fast.
All of the tankbusters have very short windup, and do way too much damage even with stagger. Sludge Fist was chunking my HP pool for well over 70% and had a 1.5s cast I believe. This is insanity. Tankbusters should be 2s cast minimum, otherwise you’re enforcing the whole addon requirement to know when the Tankbuster is coming.
Following a season that saw the least happy tank players I can remember and plummeting tank participation by making tank busters casts so short you can barely react was certainly a choice, but I cannot fathom how they thought it was a good one.
Its really bad, made worse by the fact that it gets consumed on hit so its useless in 2+ target situations.
Brewmaster was already struggling, and this new tier set makes it even worse to play. Its not fun spamming blackout kick - tigers palm.
Unless something changes I’m right there with you on shelving brewmaster
Some more updates after further testing:
Our damage compared to other tanks is really low. With the changes to VDH, Prot Pal we’re probably now 3rd DPS overall, while also being the squishiest and having the lowest utility.
Before, tanks had a bit of a balance when they fufilled one or two of the three niches: Sustain/Tankiness, Damage, and Utility.
On live, Prot Pally has decent sustain, #1 damage, #1 utility. You get the picture.
Coming in to the PTR we’re lowest utility, lowest sustain, and mid damage – and for the longest time Brewmaster had one thing going for it, which was its damage.
For example, in the PTR dungeon Yoda has a video of him doing over 7m dps in the first pull, while on my brewmaster the most I can sum up is about 2.4m dps. I’m not a bad brewmaster, multiple 99 parses, top 15 damagewise.
A fix for m+ to bring brewmaster a little closer to the other tanks- make it so that stagger ignores/absorbs/whatever a small fixed amount (not percentage based) of damage on every hit. Tied to mastery and modified by shuffle.
This way it barely has an effect on the huge blows dealt by raid enemies, but works well in the larger pulls of m+.
I agreed there needs to be changes to brewmaster to keep it up with other tanks even live my prot warrior 20 ilvls lower then my main could out dps and out mitigate my brewmaster.
Gonna throw my hat in here and say I love the tier set and would change only to last longer.
The only problem is the absolute lack of changes from Blizzard basically telling everyone they don’t care about the spec by changing nothing. Looking at the only change which was laughably to remove a pvp talent and zero positive changes for a new patch while it remains in the literally bottom tier of both PvE and PvP.
I think it can be safe to say that without something blizzard is gonna get their motto about listening throw back at them. Listen to all the feedback and tune the spec to make it better please.
Did they acknowledge somewhere that they are looking at retooling BRM, which is why there is a lack of changes for 11.1?
I enjoy BRM, but as long as prot pally is so good, why in earth pickup a BrM for 12+ keys. It’s impossible to pug past 12+ at this point. The new tier set we are going to be incredibly energy starved going forward. And why can’t they make keg smash a MUCH bigger hit box?
Yes! Keg smash is more like beer can smash right now.
Here is another easy one. Make windwalking baseline for all monks.
Change mystic touch to something worthwhile.
The ox pet needs to be looked at.
Ox stance. This ability is clear as mud. I kinda get it but I’ve searched plenty of forms on this ability and one thing is clear… It’s not clear. “A charge is consumed to increase your level of stagger” Ok! By how much? Do I need to run tests to figure that out?
Tier set is very good just has a few issues. Fortifying Brew procs don’t stack so if you get 2 procs of fort brew in a row you just waste the old one which is a pretty big oversite imo. Other issues are just bugs (both blackout kick stacks being consumed in aoe, chi cocoon talent not being proc’d w/ fort brew)
Ox Stance is just weird I think, it’s passive is so niche and ends up not being as much dr as you’d expect. even in giga high keys (18+) it is not noticeable vs giant hits vs just playing high tolerance. It’s spot in the tree also kinda sucks, capstoning it vs having it higher up so you can actually play it vs it competing with other stronger nodes
Niuzao itself needs hard reworked, it’s just straight up bad.
Brewmaster rotation is definitely pretty unforgiving especially in a stressful situation you end up losing a lot more than you’d expect. At least this season in m+ you end up losing out on dps playing for 15 CPM on BoK in aoe cause of how potent energy spending is for dps overall. I’ve recently been focusing on getting more around the 12.5-13 range and it’s felt quite good compared to playing for 15 CPM.
Next season it’s less stressful to get 15 CPM in aoe (more now cause of tier) due to no RNG procs on keg to interrupt your rotational flow, it feels much better at least to me. I do agree that the rotation needs dumbing down a little especially if you want to increase the population of the spec, as well as removing the high variance of tiger palm since that is also a deterrent for people
When even WoWhead writers are giving in depth critiques, it certainly appears that Brewmaster has been severely neglected along with Windwalker, in terms of not receiving equal or comparable development time, to their detriment and to the benefit of other classes such as Mage, Shaman, Paladin etc.
h ttps://www.wowhead.com/news/brewmaster-monk-in-the-war-within-reviewed-guide-writer-feedback-361877
Pretty much everything about Monk needs an update. Visuals, Playstyle, Attacks, Abilities; all of it.
Monk’s fine in raids. Not amazing, it doesn’t really do anything special right now, but it’s okay. It gets the job done.
It’s not in good shape in dungeons. The difference in damage intake between Monk and literally any other tank is hilarious. It feels like I’m tanking as Arms.
The recent “2% damage increase if using a 2h” was pretty funny, gotta admit.
Yes, it gets the job done but not very exciting. I’m currently debating on which tank I’m going with. I have all 3 leather tanks same ilvl. I keep holding out to see if something will change with Brewmaster and it’s not even about making Brewmaster OP it’s more about adding some flavor to the spec, some utility and receiving some form of communication from Blizzard regarding the spec as whole.
“The spec is fine” pretty sure being the lowest played tank spec and the lowest changes means they are giving us the starcraft heros of the storm treatment
The variance of tiger palm is awful. Hits like a truck or wet noodle. Also yes, the free keg smash proc is nice but it messes with the rotation and then I find myself capping energy.
