I still want Ironskin brew

Ironskin Brew is one of my favorite monk abilities. Chugging two or three bottles of brew before a pull and plenty more mid combat is so thematic and fun and kinda hilarious, and in Shadowlands Ironskin Brew is being replaced by Celestial Brew, which will have one charge, 25 second cooldown, and just grants an absorb shield based on stagger. Is anyone else bothered by this? Not only does it remove the gameplay mechanic of the shared brew charge management between Purifying and Ironskin brew, but you’re also not chugging tons of brew all the time like a brewmaster should. I love Ironskin Brew and want it to remain in the game, does anybody else feel the same way?

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That doesn’t make sense at all. Ironskin is one of the things I enjoy about this class and the main reason I wanted to try it out. Even thought about boosting this toon. It’s iconic to chug a brew and then blow a bunch of fire on people. I mean look at the movie Forbidden kingdom. I mean Jackie Chan… come on now!. Now, I don’t know if I want to boost the character or not…

edit: did they give any reason for the change?

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It’s so mindless though. We always have enough charges to keep it up 100% of the time. I like that they are pretty much making it baseline and giving us something we actually have to think about before using.

Only issue I have with Celestial Brew is that it’s on the GCD, they need to take it off.

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I may be speaking out of my place here since i main WW, but as someone who BrMs on occasion, not having ISB is gonna feel weird. That said, i know very little of what blizzard is doing with BrM in SL, so I don’t have an accurate read of the spec.

Celestial Brew sounds interesting, but it’s odd that it only has one charge.

As long as the stagger is higher base, I very much like having this absorb instead. I find it annoying to just drink to increase stagger and find this a very welcoming change.

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Yep, it needs off the GCD.

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If only there were some kind of talent feature in the game to let players choose what they want to use in their rotation instead of developers arbitrarily adding and removing key spec features.

I’m in the “ISB Sucks” crowd and greatly prefer the pre-Legion BrM.
But I also respect people that want to keep it.

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ISB feels terrible, part of what makes Brewmaster so lame to play. I prefer WoD BM.

Hate how spammy Brewmaster is for such tiny reward. Spamming a buff to keep perma buff on just reminds me of blessing/totem upkeep from vanilla.

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Deos is dead-on, here.

I think pressing ISB sucks, and the Special Delivery talent is the only reason it doesn’t feel like a complete waste of my time. I also think it could be a talent choice, the same way Havoc DH has a talent that removes the filler spell.

(rewrites third paragraph full of dev complaints 5x, gives up, and deletes it)

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im actually super excited about the changes for BRM, i think they are great changes and are very much welcomed…

having a huge absorb will help us a lot with magic damage, with is currently our Achilles heel.

more concerned about the 25% reduction in dps across the board on all monk specs and 35% reduced stagger for brm in SL

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As someone here has stated, its mindless, its a button that we have to keep up 100% of the time anyway, think of it as hitting a button to auto-attack…

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I am less concerned about that then Ion and devs stating that monks in general are overpowerered for their role and all specs can expect a 35-45% nerf in shadowlands across the board.

Well BrM is in a great spot, theres no denying the power they have if they keep the 400% of your hp as a bubble, thats just insane - an now they are pretty damn good.

Mistweaver needs work - as it is now, revival does nothing, renewing mist does nothing and mainly used as a hot filler to push vivify. Mistweavers were good then players found a way to fistweave and blizzard said ‘no no, dont do that’.

Windwalkers are getting some good things in SL, choosing from ST talents to AOE is a plus, touch of death getting looked at, having to choose what playstyle with hit combo. Getting Xuen baseline is huge. Blizz needs to work on the top talents and the defensive talents for sure. Remember damage is not tuned so none of us know how hard stuff is going to hit. With the tuning aside, M+ monks need an immunity to be wanted or better defensive - bring good karma back to where it was.

ISB is literally the only ability that keeps me away from BrM. I want to main one so badly, but constantly spamming and tunneling / tracking a buff that feels like it should just be baked into the spec feels very clunky and counter intuitive.

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Heyo – I make an effort on WW and MW, but similar to you, I really don’t like pressing ISB at all. Luckily, I only use tank spec for messing around with elites in WQs (if WW can’t handle it) and the occasional Heroic for fun. I don’t have ISB on my bars. Instead, I have an outrageously lazy macro entitled “Lazy” with this in it:

#showtooltip Keg Smash
/castsequence reset=2 ironskin brew, nothing
/cast [nomod] keg smash

Since I want to hit Keg Smash on CD, I can kinda just mash it a bit and it keeps the buff up without spending a button or thinking too hard about it. This puts you squarely in the “please don’t tank a raid or M+” range, but if you’re just screwing around, it is pretty pleasant.

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I hate Ironskin Brew, because it makes the base amount of stagger seem pointless as a mechanic (why have 50%-60% stagger as a base amount when you make everything about needing 85%-90% stagger, which requires Ironskin Brew spam?). I’d rather have the choice between Ironskin and Purifying be meaningful with less charges maybe than to just spam it, so that the base amount of stagger actually does something for our spec. Even if it ends up feeling similar to other tank specs, with the damage reducer and the tank buster survivor spells.

I actually don’t like ISB at all and cant wait for the SL changes. I haven’t Mained my Monk in a long time and im actually considering going back to BrM because of this change. I actually really like that ISB is being backed into the rotation more or less and we are getting a huge shield instead. if anything my only real issue with Brm is the fact that most of our aoe is tied to cooldown abilities making random kite mobs or unexpected pulls a little more messy sometimes if that stuff is no off CD

While i am all for baking stagger into shuffle (and therefore the rotation), ISB use doesnt have to entirely go away. There’s another mechanic most monks don’t play with that would be super appropriate for a rendition of ISB. Pausing stagger.

Theoretically…
ISB shares charges with Purifying Brew, but instead now pauses stagger damage based on current level of stagger. ~6.5 seconds at low/no stagger, ~5 seconds at medium stagger, and ~3.5 seconds at heavy stagger, each use overriding/overwriting previous applications of ISB.

ISB now works as a setup tool to be paired with purifying brew. Pause the stagger to fill the bar up into the next category and set up an extra charge for your celestial brew, all while giving your healers a short duration pause to damage inflow and reducing the overall damage you’re taking (since you’re maximizing the value of each purify you do spend) numbers might need some tweaking, and it would probably work best on the same 3 charge system we have, but i would be curious what the dev team could come up with.

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I’m really worried SL monk is just going to be boooooring. I’d honestly really like Chi and Chi Explosion back. I enjoyed that in WoD.

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