The big difference between brewmaster and blood dk that I have experienced has been the level of focus on blood dk. Blood is all about landing good death strikes and not capping RP by death striking when your RP is almost full. Every button you press, every talent you pick is about being able to use death strike well. They make death strikes bigger, make death strike cost less RP, generate RP to cast death strike, reduce the damage you take when low health so you can death strike etc etc.
Monks are focused on stagger but not to the same level that dk is focused on death strike. Also, monk has a number of redundancies.
For example, purifying brew and expel harm. Wouldn’t it be cool if expel harm, instead of healing, reduced your stagger level and did damage based on the amount of stagger reduced?
Brew cooldown reduction from TP and KS, these abilities are incentivized anyways for good damage just remove the cooldown reduction from these abilities and make CB and PB
have just a shorter cooldown. It’s also not a good design to want to push SCK but to know that it’s going to hurt you defensively.
To make a long story short, monk just doesn’t feel like it has the same focus or flow. My hope is going forward these can be addressed. However, I do love the tool kit of monk over bdk. It can certainly pull off things bdk can not.
I’ll speak up as someone who really enjoys Brew for Mythic Raiding, M+ and extremely high level PVP.
Brew requires a lot more knowledge than other tank specs. Other tank specs have one dimensional goals in every aspect, while Brewmaster requires us to really pay attention to what we should be doing. If we use brews at the wrong time, we can die. If we take too much damage, it doesn’t matter how much we absorb through stagger, we can die. If we waste our mobility or ring of peace, we can die.
Brewmaster is hands down the highest skillcap tank spec in the game. And I’ve played everyone (except DH because boring). Brewmaster, atleast in past expacs has been the reason I didn’t quit monk, because I found it so much more enjoyable to play. You can seperate extremely good and bad ones from each other.
And no, EH shouldn’t reduce stagger. it already does damage based on your healing. If that creature ability gets buffed it’ll completely change the dynamic for brew and need us to be reworked in more areas.
TP has no CD, it’s just a ridiculous amount of energy for your pool. Brewmaster should never struggle with getting its brews back up due to playing double keg + TP. And if you’re kyrian, bonus points for CDs there. And I have 0 issue putting in SCK globals, 99% of the time you can put the game into a script and know where and when you need x brew. Raiding is the easiest area for this.
Brew requires extreme focus, which is why no one really picks it up. Most players are introduced to Warrior, Pala, Blood & Guardian early, which are simply easier to understand because you passively take less damage. Brew requires you to understand a lot more than just tank and spank.
No joke, is this why all the brews on PoS come off as extremely smug jerks? I can barely stand 5 minutes in the theory crafting section before I need oxygen and real human beings.
Yeah I’m only in that disc so I can talk to Talby sometimes.
Idk why people don’t understand that Brew is the least “tanky” spec and requires more thought and prethought than others. So when people are told that the spec is played at a much higher skillcap relative to the others, they think we just got egos.
Not sure why people don’t grasp that different specs need different objectives
As an example:
Healing sphere, expel harm and purify all do the same thing.
Sure that complexity gets you more depth of game play but other tanks have as much depth with less complexity because they have a better focus on their design.
You could cut a lot away from BrM and it would still feel the same imo.
Hmmm, I’m not super experienced with Brewmaster, but I’m playing around with it more and I don’t agree here. There’s synergy between these abilities, but they’re not the same. Expel harm works with healing sphere, but doesn’t affect your stagger. Purify reduces your stagger and empowers your celestial brew, but doesn’t affect your health (directly).
I personally like the flow of the defensive usage, even though I’m still learning.