Midnight Brew Alpha Feedback

Classes Monk
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Hello fellow gamers and Blizz! I have not had a chance to play alpha myself but I have watched a lot of streams/videos and wanted to chime in. Apologies if there’s another thread for Brew already, but I didn’t see one. If I remember I’ll update this as alpha/beta progress.

This post is up to date as of Oct 24th 2025

The Good

  • New Exploding Keg talents look v fun and seem impactful/good
  • The choice between stagger absorb or healing for fire/nature dmg is cool. Seems like Shado-Pan will go a more physical route and MoH will maybe lean into more of a self-sustain fire build. Obv depends on tuning but I really like this from both an RP and gameplay perspective
  • Overall the tree pathing is MUCH better
  • 10yd increase to Keg Smash OMG. Finally!! Not to be annoying but idk why this has to be on a talent and isn’t just baseline but I’ll take it xD

The Meh

  • Apex talent is a cool idea and animation is pog however idk if it healing is enough. I think it healing allies is fine but I’m worried it won’t be enough healing to be meaningful (similar to our MoH S3 tier set). Also it probably needs to have some sort of DR effect for the Brewmaster themselves. Nothing huge just like 5-10%. Lastly, our tier 2 apex talents only increasing phys dam doesn’t make sense with a lot of talents pushing you into a fire build in our spec tree

The Bad

  • Niuzao Capstones are bad. Mighty Stomp continues to be a dead point as it’s a CC tied to a 2min CD and just feels clunky to use. Heart of the Ox is fine I guess but feels v underwhelming. A Capstone just increasing our mastery by 5-10%? That’s it?
  • Diffuse Magic and Dampen need to return. I understand you want to prune buttons and make things more consolidated but you’re also removing skill expression and player agency despite stating this wouldn’t happen. We already have choice nodes that allow ppl to cut down on buttons if they want. Please just buff the passive options so they are more competitive so players who want more control at the cost of another button to manage have that choice. Stuff like this is what is making Midnight feel VERY suspect to a lot of players.
  • Not sure if the #s are correct but as of rn it seems like the CDR talent for Fort Brew is only 30sec…this needs to go back to 2min. Having to play 6min Fort Brew always feels terrible as it’s not a super great defensive already.

That’s all for now! Thank you for your continued support of the game Blizz. The biggest thing for me is losing the choice to have an on demand mitigation button feels v bad, and losing two of them makes it even worse. From an over-arching game design perspective, it really worries me seeing this happen when you already have a solution in place. This is what choice nodes are for. Please lean into that more and make the passive options better and don’t just gut certain abilities that remove player agency. As a tank I want to be able to control my damage intake and you removing that is not fun.

Update as of 10/24/2025

Now that we’ve seen some more talents for Shado-Pan and MoH I wanted to give some more feedback!

MoH

  • I think the new talents are good and will feel very fun to play around. I like that we have essentially complete control over how many Harmonic Surges we get now since it’s just tied to CB/CI and Keg Smash.
  • Zenith is a cool talent but the PTA version kinda needs some help…since we are stuck at 6 stacks of potential energy PTA loses an insane amount of value. Maybe this would be too strong but using a potential energy stack every auto w/PTA could be a fix or when we have PTA talented we either have no cap or we have like a 15 stack cap for potential energy. I would like PTA to be a viable choice for players but as it stands rn it’s unplayable versus Blackout Combo

Shado-Pan

  • Overall I don’t like the direction Shado-Pan has gone. Not only do I think the SFX for Flurry Strikes will get VERY old very fast since it’s on every keg smash now, I just don’t think it’s going to be fun. I think the fluctuation in the # of charges you will expel during each Flurry Strikes will become annoying for players who want to min max and is just clunky. Are supposed to just do our normal rotation and have a ton of baby Flurry Strikes? Or are we supposed to use as many skills as possible in-between to “game” it a bit for big bursts? I definitely gotta play with it but on paper I don’t think it’s going to feel fluid
  • Weapons of the Wall seems out of place. I talk about this a little more down below but is it supposed to just be a big energy dump window during Niuzao? Since our Flurry Strikes are off of our Keg Smash now and not energy spent this talent doesn’t feel like it belongs. Having two different ways to proc Flurry Strikes but one of them only working every 90sec just seems like an oversight but maybe I’m just thinking about it too much?
  • Personally I’m not a fan of locking Shado-Pan into using Niuzao. Now I’m not a fan of Niuzao anyways but any Hero Talent forcing you into a capstone talent is bad design IMO. Anytime we are forced to take a talent deep in our tree to make our Hero Talent even function is just weird. Templar Prot Pal had the same issue, it takes away a lot of your choices. I also don’t like that Niuzao leads to a lot of degen gameplay where you kinda spam your Purifies for damage. I’d personally rather see Niuzao be a super strong defensive (and not require so much investment to get) and the damage component of him be from our hero talent.
  • The capstone for Shado-Pan is just meh now. It doesn’t impact our gameplay, it doesn’t change how we think about our build or playstyle or anything. It’s just we summon a random dude who punches for a bit and then goes away. Pretty lack luster and boring. Going back to what I said about Niuzao, what if our capstone gave us a huge amount of haste so we could really abuse Weapons of the Wall for an insane amount of Flurry Strikes? That at least interacts with our kit and changes how we play every 90sec, similar to how Shado-Pan is on live.
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I agree with everything you said.

Defensives: I thought blizzard made a big mistake in removing diffuse magic and dampen harm without even improving the options we have passively. I would suggest reversing the nerf of yulon grace, allowing it to go up to 20% again and dance of the wind should grant a passive reduction of 10% damage, to compensate for the loss of the dampen. I understand that they increased the shuffle to 120%, but I don’t know if this will really supply the loss of the defensive CDs agency.

Fire build: I think it’s very cool thematically to bring these fire damage skills to the monk and I would simply solve the problem in the apex talent by putting that in addition to increasing the physical damage it also increases the fire damage you cause by 10%, this should be a good help and solve the uselessness of this talent to build fire.

Niuzao: the changes to niuzao in tww were considerably good. However, in tww he is not our main offensive CD, leaving this role for Weapon of order, with the loss of this CD, niuzao becomes our main offensive CD along with explosive barrel. The blizzard should take Niuzao’s life and leave him only for the time. The talent of increasing mastery is cool, but honestly, I needed more. Blizzard should put that when you drink your beers you reduce the niuzao CD by x seconds, in addition to the increase in mastery when it is invoked. The improved Niuzao has an interesting premise of giving more utility to the monk, but it would be interesting if niuzado played at least twice up or that when using the skill she throws up and interrupts the targets for 5 seconds.

Statue of Niuzao: I don’t understand why the blizzard didn’t do anything with Niuzao’s effigy, the statue is still terrible. I think blizzars should change so that it is passive like the windwalker and when invoked increases its aggro generation by x%. Or alternatively, bring more utility to the group, increase the statue’s CD and put that it grants a damage reduction to all allies within the statue’s effect area.

1 Like
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Why remove Rising Sun Kick instead of integrating it into Blackout Combo for AOE damage? A lot of players complained about “bloat” but truth is they are going to run Fire Breath and RJW, otherwise there will be an energy starvation. This is the same reason why Bob and Weave is rarely taken over Black Ox Brew - we run dry and need to replenish Energy bar to keep up using our abilities.

Last but not least: is anyone ever going to take Press the Advantage over Blackout Combo? :clown_face:

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xD yaaaaa PTA needs some serious love before it’s pickable over Blackout combo hahaha

I personally don’t mind losing RSK (on paper) as I always found that button to be very boring to press as it only does dmg. However, I would’ve liked to have seen Blizz give it more than take it away. It could’ve given us a healing orb or interacted with stagger somehow/given us brew CDR

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Bro, you literally do a backflip kick, zero Fs given. Thats how you do damage with style! Trully wish blackout combo also buffed it

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Isn’t 3200% attack power over 8 seconds a lot of healing? Like a lot of healing, especially on 3 people? I don’t know how often celestial brew is actually up during combat, but I’d imagine every like 25 sec or less, depending on talents?

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I mean yes the animation is cool but the skill just does dmg, kinda boring imo xD

It’s hard to tell rn cuz of the stat squish! I’m worried it will either be inconsequential or it will be way too much and then get nerfed but we’ll have to wait and see