[LEGION] Brewmaster Discussion

[Leblue]

Some personal changes I'd like to see if for no other reason than it'd be inline with how they've tried to sell the new talent system to us.

T15: Make Chi Wave focus on us for healing and potentially focus on a single mob (outside of it dying and there being other targets) for damage. I think reaffirming this talent as a single target ability would help solidify its place as well as tuning it to be such. Right now Chi Burst pretty much wins in all situations if you use it during trinket procs.

T45: I think for now Light Brewing and Black Ox Brew are in decent places. Light Brewing provides that passive improvement and Black Ox gives you more control as well as overall more resources if you use it for maximum throughput. Secret Ingredients is obviously an outlier here and needs some love. Keg Smash's cooldown is already fairly short so resetting it is going to be a nice surprise at best for a slight gain and an annoyance or worthless at worst because it was about to come off cd anyway even with proper pooling. Give Keg Smash charges, make it proc the next one to be free, something to make it more worth while because it could be a nice playstyle shift to reward proper pooling even further. Right now its competing (badly) as a passive talent a player doesn't need to think about too much when I think Light Brewing fulfills this easily.

Level 60: Ring of Peace needs a change I think. I think just changing it to an aoe silence effect would be a fairly decent ability that would have place in some raids, dungeon content, raids, and pvp. As much as I hate Dave being there, it does make the row something of a choice rather than unanimously one of the two stun talents for the tier. I'm not saying it is a great choice, but it is involved with mob control which does fit the theme of it.

Level 75: I think is mostly alright (for brewmaster) although I would personally show dampen harm a little love and maybe cause each proc of it to last for a few seconds so it gains a little extra value to compete with how strong diffuse magic is. Lower % but in a way more persistent damage reduction (i.e. when it procs you gain the 30% damage reduction for 3 seconds and can't proc it again till this buff is gone). Just something I came up with. Healing Elixirs as it is works okay for the passive "don't want to think about this" talent for the row.

Level 90: With some numbers I think Niuzao will be fine, maybe give him a similar AOE to Xuen so he's a bit nicer for burst dps. If they're cool w/ RJW being a talent you take to fill some GCDs on both single and multi target then I have no problem with it and Special Delivery can certainly work as the passive talent you don't think about.

Level 100: This is the tier that I honestly have the most gripe with out of all of them. There is no extra "feel awesome" button here that one might expect from the final talent tier. All of them are passive and fall fairly flat on their face (warning: subjective opinion here) so far as cool factor. Elusive Dance feels like a consolation prize for an ability that's still fighting to be relevant against Ironskin Brew without being a complete trap. Fortified Mind is a fancy way of saying "your Fortifying Brew is reduced by X amount" with the ability to get less cooldown reduction from not playing optimally. High Tolerance is a flat stagger buff which on top of how high of stagger we get passively, from the artifact, and with ironskin brew is pretty powerful. Ideas? (warning this is pure spitballing).

Tack on a damage reduction based on the level of stagger you clear with purifying brew for elusive dance. Purifying brew right now suffers from having to compete with a very powerful Ironskin Brew and the potential drop times for it are potentially lethal in certain level of content or at least potentially very noticeable for a class with no passive reduction outside of stagger. If the intention is to clear at certain levels of stagger (Medium/High) or even clearing a low stagger right before a hit for a certain sequence or boss ability I think this talent could be there to help and allows better players to maximize it for something far more tangible than a dodge buff you may barely notice.

Fortified Mind I think should be replaced with something. I'm not 100% sure exactly what fits on the row, but something along the lines of a short duration, minute cooldown defensive I think. Something that gives the brewmaster that one extra tool that I've heard some people saying they've been missing with the removal of guard.

High Tolerance could probably stay. This gives you the choice between a cooldown, several smaller but more frequent in the form of purifying, and a consistent stagger increase from High Tolerance (roughly a 20% spike reduction with ISB up).

With all the stuff on Blood DKs I'm curious to see what people say, but it does make me think that they're going around and getting to stuff since they've got so many things to work on and change with all these overhauls.

[Deleted]

To be honest I wish they would re-work Gift of the Ox. Rather than spawn on the floor, the orbs should rotate around us and should be activated to heal. Makes an unreliable heal more reliable & gives us back something reactive. We could even re-use the WWs Chi Orbit animation since all the WWs are hoping that talent dies anyway. If we really wanted to push the boat out we could make the active part deal damage as well...then again we had a skill like that but it didn't survive the purge...

[Ooshraxa]

What tanks value the most is control.
I don't see much control in the current build.

Random orb spawning.
Random heal doubling.

We had two 100% controllable tools in the old Brewmaster kit: Guard and Expel harm. Both of these are gone, replaced by randomness.

Random does not a great tank make, IMO.

[arcuro]

gonna dream a little about new brewmaster things.

Skills:

New Mastery: Refreshing Touch (or anyhting else implicating heal, drunken and other monk terms):
Gain 1% Amount of Leech per 1% Mastery. Any overhealing selfheal is granted as shield. Shield size cannot be more than 10-20% of your Max HP (to keep it under control, no need for a next level Guard, tuning thing)

Purifying Brew: clears 50% Stagger, Heals for cleared amount (or less if to OP, its tuning thing).
Elusive Brew: for every Brew you take, generae one stack of Elusive Brew. Max 10 Stacks. Consuming all stacks to gain 30% Dogde for 1 sec per Stack

New Skill: Chugging: 30 Sek CD inhale all nearby Gift of The Ox orbs around 20y

Black out Strike: 3sec CD: Hitting a Target with the Breath of Fire Debuff cuases your Palms to ablaze. Your next BoS deals 30% extra damage as fire damage

BoF cd reduced to 6 sec for better BoS > BoF sync... e.g.: BoF > BoS > Fire BoS > BoF

also gonna take Leblue's idea for KegSmash haveing charges and Secret Incredient giving making next charge free. i like this.

Talents:
Eye of the Tiger: Your tiger Palm gains double from Leech

DH: for the next 5 seconds, every selfhealing will generate a shield aditional to the shield granted by mastery

Speczial Delivery: Will always hit your target

replace Fortify Mind: Drunken Fist: 30sec cd (reduced by Haste) you swipe with your fist. hitting all enemies in front of you and generate 1 stack of Elusive Brew per enemy hit. Can only be used if BoS and BoF are on CD (stolen from the WW 100 Talent )

High Tolerance: your Purify Brew no longer heals you but clears 100% of your Stagger (or if OP, clears 50% + Mastery of your stagger)


Traits:

Dragonfire Brew: add: Also your fire BoS dealing additional damage to any enemy withing 8y (just for the fire fun )
Obsidian Fist: rename to Keg Bump: your BoS has a 5/10/15% chance to generate an GotO Orb
Fortification: rename into Brew of the old Master (or anything high mithical naming monk thing) consuming any Brew or GotO-Orb reducec the CD of Fortify Brew by 2 sec (tuning thing)

Additional: include Elusive Brew into all Traits that have IsB and PB.



so my idea is:
a Mastery with synergy of our crit passive, but only for us (no external healing) to keep it in line
adding self heal mechanics to some skills to boost mastery
adding Dodge again as a Brew and a reliable way to generate Elusive Brew
Synergy bewteen BoS and BoF

giving heal to DH so we have IsB for mainly phisical, DM for high magic, DH for Mastery Build and HE for Brew focused gameplay
since dodge is out of mastery, Elusive Dance can sty to make PB even more interessting
No one need Fortify Brew as a talent so replace with a ChiEx'ish attack to boost Dodge for or Dodge gameplay and last T100 to shift the use of PB
With this, we have to make choices between IsB and PB without the fear to get killed because PB heals with possible Shield or clears all stagger

and some Traits are just Bad. i dont need 5% crit on BoS, so make it usefull for tanks with synergy to our orbs. More BoS more Orbs more heal more chance of Mastery-Shield

with a possible more brew focused build, we can add old T100 fortify Brew into a trait using all brews making it worth a golden dragon



And now we have reliable heal, synergies, mastery, dodge if needed, better talents synergy in traits and are dependend to healers to keep us topped for mastery

mastery shield could be tuned to be less op if there is to musch heal. maybe overheal grants X% Mastery as shield. so 1000 Overheal with 20% Mastery is a 200 shield, stackable of cource

so i thing this will gonna be
1. a Brew-Oriented Haste Build
2. a Healing-Oriented Mastery Build
3. a Healing Oriented Crit Build


soo any opinions? would like to heare someone out.

[bubky]

New Mastery: Refreshing Touch (or anyhting else implicating heal, drunken and other monk terms):
Gain 1% Amount of Leech per 1% Mastery. Any overhealing selfheal is granted as shield. Shield size cannot be more than 10-20% of your Max HP (to keep it under control, no need for a next level Guard, tuning thing)

Purifying Brew: clears 50% Stagger, Heals for cleared amount (or less if to OP, its tuning thing).

A leech/shield mastery seems unlikely at this point since they are enthasising class identity and that seems a bit too much of a dk / dh thing.
Also I dont particularly hate the new dodge one, I mean yeah avoidance isnt the best but since it stacks it makes it more predictable and works with the theoretical choice we should be having with our AM (ie i have 3 stack I can purify cus I know i will dodge the next hit).

50% purify needs to diaf. If its doing too much they should just lower stagger levels and give us mitigation to make up. They need to lower it anyway to remove the option to get over 100%. To me changing stagger from our mastery made sense because stacking it to high levels was dumb. But then they just flat out gave us 80% to start with.

New Skill: Chugging: 30 Sek CD inhale all nearby Gift of The Ox orbs around 20y

This I like, although a way to aoe grab orbs is a long running suggestion for brm (and obnoxiously DH got this for soul fragments already after years of brm asking for it) . The spec needs a way to gain hp in reaction to spikes, and GotO needs to be more reliable. I also like the fact that its a new button which is why I dont like purify having a tacked on heal. They seem to be counting ability numbers, which leads to too many tacked on effects (extra dodge when you use your 5min cd oh lordy). We need more options when things go bad not for existing options (on a shared resource) to do more things.

I like GotO alot more as an oh shit cd, although im not actually sure it needs a time based one (30sec). The longer you go without pressing it the more orbs you get so the stronger it becomes.

[v1perz53]

I think my biggest problems with the Brewmaster right now mostly stem from the toolkit. To me, I think any tank can be made to work if it at least has a reasonable ability for both proactive and reactive ability. On Live, Brewmaster has great reactive ability (forget set bonuses) with Guard and Expel Harm. If your HP does drop, you have these great options to react to it and survive. The current playstyle with them seems to have gotten a little muddled, but overall the idea was solid, two buttons that you have that you can chose to make a large impact reactively.

The biggest issue to me in Legion is the absolute lack of reactive abilities. Gift of the Ox is a perfectly solid heal, but you simply have no control over it. The orb may or may not be up, it may or may not be in a position you can get to, you may be moving when one spawns and grab it when you are at 98% HP. It is just not controllable enough. Compare to DH soul fragments which are part RNG, but they also have abilities to automatically generate them when needed as well as make use of them without having to move. Something similar would, in my eyes, help quite a bit, just a singular guaranteed method to spawn a gift orb on a CD or with some other restriction. Even so at that point we only have one reactive ability, but it beats none.

Another issue is how they have Ironskin vs. Purify. Because of Ironskin and Purify sharing resources, even in a world where Purify was good, it is still an odd decision. By using Purify, you are reducing damage you are currently taking, but because you didn't Ironskin you will be taking more immediate damage from the next damage sources. In addition, Ironskin doesn't prevent any damage at all. It ends up being very awkward. There are plenty of styles of tanking that would have worked on a shared resource, but this specific choice I think is the most awkward of all of them. I guess it could end up being passable if the numbers were tweaked, but until melee hit damage approaches the frequency and damage of stagger DoT tick, it is hard to justify Purifying and becoming vulnerable to more of an up front burst.

The feel of BrM just ends up feeling more passive to me than other tanks. You hope your AM smooths damage enough that the healer can overcome it. You hope that an ox orb spawns useably so that you can grab it when you need. You just do your normal DPS rotation and as a byproduct your AM CD gets lower. It isn't an active choice, you would be doing that DPS rotation anyway. You blackout strike which you would do anyway and get mitigation. Same with BoF. Everything is very passive, and it is so much the opposite of how playing BrM feels on live that it bothers me a lot, I started playing the class because I liked how active it was and how everything was building towards a goal.

I'm sure a ton of this has already been said, but I guess I just had to mention it since it has been bothering me the more I see it lately.

[Deleted]

Raid testing Mythic Ursoc. All Artifact Nodes are unlocked. Item level 869. Tanking with Brewmaster and Guardian.

https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports/4Pf2hq9XtLvkQAWD/

Second boss is apparently going to be Nethendra https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports/L24TQdtjxF8ARDmW/

Eeew, Breath of Fire can miss on Nethendra if you're too far from the boss

- - - Updated - - -

Testing's over, gonna go through my logs a bit. Most obvious annoyance was the travel time on Keg Smash, made it really hard to pull and pick up ranged mobs. Had to pre-cast it on 1-2 on pull which is annoying by itself plus the latency on PTR and not having DBM.

The hitbox on Nethendra was really weird, some aoe abilities like Breath of Fire and RJW don't always hit the boss herself despite being in melee range. The Dragonfire Brew artifact node doesn't apply its damage reduction if you hit nothing.

Swift as a Coursing River was... a bit underwhelming. The other nodes are pretty much passive, so while they might have been useful they didn't really impact my gameplay nor is it representative since we're using arbitrary gear with inflated secondary stat distributions.

I'm quite disappointed with Gift of the Ox considering we had maxed artifact powers. On Ursoc we were moving around so much that I was just randomly picking them up since both tanks take constant damage (tank swap every 10 sec), assuming that we hadn't already moved away from my orbs. On nethendra they didn't really cover for any serious burst damage.

Healing Elixirs right now is just.... Its overheal ranged from 35% to 70% on the fights tonight and its overall throughput is really lackluster. It's good for soloing when it double-dips with Celestial Fortune but other than that it's pretty much a dead talent. We had all healers die at one point during the fight and neither HE nor Gifts were really reliable enough to keep me sustained inbetween melee hits for any reasonable amount of time.

---

What I'm noticing though is that there's a large melee hit variance on (some Heroic and) Mythic bosses right now. This can cause really unpredictable damage spikes on our stagger amount and if we weren't swimming in brew charges it would be really hard to react and clear this other than being absurdly blanketed by external healing (health range is still too high for gifts to spawn and react with). I find that Guardians and especially Demon Hunters have a much easier time with this.


One example:
Guardian https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports...ht=7&source=10
Brewmaster https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports...ght=7&source=9


Might also just be me derping though but it seemed too consistent an issue not to analyze.

[Leblue]

Thanks for the logs and feedback. I'll peruse them when I get some time tomorrow. Curious to see what others say.

[stross01]

Raid testing Mythic Ursoc. All Artifact Nodes are unlocked. Item level 869. Tanking with Brewmaster and Guardian.

https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports/4Pf2hq9XtLvkQAWD/

Second boss is apparently going to be Nethendra https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports/L24TQdtjxF8ARDmW/

Eeew, Breath of Fire can miss on Nethendra if you're too far from the boss

Why was your apm so low? Ironskin Brew is 100% uptime with Black Ox Brew right now.

Also, the Guardian's mitigation abilities went almost completely untouched. Really skews performance comparisons.

[Deleted]

FeelsBadMan when brewmasters are not highest amount of casts

[stross01]

FeelsBadMan when brewmasters are not highest amount of casts

I think it's the player in those logs, not the spec.

[Deleted]

Why was your apm so low? Ironskin Brew is 100% uptime with Black Ox Brew right now.

Also, the Guardian's mitigation abilities went almost completely untouched. Really skews performance comparisons.

There was downtime on the boss on Nethendra and lots of movement on Ursoc. Keep in mind guys that this is primarily raid testing while tinkering with new class builds; APM really wasn't my top concern when you're figuring out how to test all boss mechanics.

[Shamanberry]

Nythendra had fairly low tank damage. It's entirely possible that the druid almost never used his AM simply because he was never dropping below 75% health until close to the end, so it didn't feel necessary.

Also worth noting that most of the "high APM" of Brewmasters in current content is due to the way Gift of the Ox works. Look at your actual casts, and probably 50% of them are the various forms of GotO. Legion has far fewer orbs spawning, and thus, it appears to reduce the APM. However, if you look at actual active skills that require button presses, there's very little difference.

[stross01]

Nythendra had fairly low tank damage. It's entirely possible that the druid almost never used his AM simply because he was never dropping below 75% health until close to the end, so it didn't feel necessary.

Also worth noting that most of the "high APM" of Brewmasters in current content is due to the way Gift of the Ox works. Look at your actual casts, and probably 50% of them are the various forms of GotO. Legion has far fewer orbs spawning, and thus, it appears to reduce the APM. However, if you look at actual active skills that require button presses, there's very little difference.

The fight linked shows him 75%+ a lot of the time, but the other attempts, he's dipping to half or lower.

And, yes, I know about Gift of the Ox padding, but at no point should you ever be below 60 apm, on live or alpha, without huge amounts of fight RP or something. Alpha brm yields a lot more apm than live right now.

[Evolved]

In a game where you're restricted by GCD, why are you spazzing about wildly inaccurate, fake "APM" on logs? This isn't SC2.

It's a shame that the healing output is so abysmal now. Ox orbs are still useless part of the time and relying on healing elixirs (if you even talent it) to be your only other "save" feels so bad. I've mostly been testing DH and a bit of Druid/Monk, but there's very little that I enjoy about Monk on alpha right now.

[Deleted]

It's a shame that the healing output is so abysmal now. Ox orbs are still useless part of the time and relying on healing elixirs (if you even talent it) to be your only other "save" feels so bad. I've mostly been testing DH and a bit of Druid/Monk, but there's very little that I enjoy about Monk on alpha right now.

There are scenarios when they turn out pretty well. I remember back when we were testing Cenarius I could swagger around all day on demand to pick them up as much as I wanted. But lately they have been very unpredictable and quite rare and even when I do pick them up I can barely notice the healing even relatively compared to my passive stagger intake.

I don't know if this is an unintended bug with one of the Artifact nodes or maybe they overnerfed or skewed the proc algorithm but in order for the Ox healing to be useful it would need to be a lot more predictable. Perhaps even so far as procing below 90% hp or having static placements where they proc and just have the healing amount scale with your hp at the time you pick them up (or damage in the last X seconds).


As for the other things, I've been grabbing a few random logs from that night's testing on health movement, especially brewmasters and it was mostly the same. Maybe it's specific to these bosses and we have nothing to worry about.

With the passive-oriented nature of our current setup though I'd still like to compare damage intake and spikes (ie. DTPS and TMI, god I miss Theck ) with other tanks. Does anybody know how stable the legion-dev SimC branch is for Brewmasters?

[Evolved]

Yeah, while I hate the entire concept as a whole, it's the rarity and unpredictable nature of them that bothers me the most. Sometimes I can have 3 on the ground, other times I can be near death and haven't spawned a single one in close to a minute. I would say you have to plan around them not being there, but it's not like you have any other healing to fall back on.

According to the logs you posted, your TMI was universally higher than the druid. Would probably need to find logs from other tanks to do any kind of current comparisons. I don't know how accurate the SimC stuff is for Legion.

[stross01]

In a game where you're restricted by GCD, why are you spazzing about wildly inaccurate, fake "APM" on logs? This isn't SC2.

It's a shame that the healing output is so abysmal now. Ox orbs are still useless part of the time and relying on healing elixirs (if you even talent it) to be your only other "save" feels so bad. I've mostly been testing DH and a bit of Druid/Monk, but there's very little that I enjoy about Monk on alpha right now.

I don't give a squirt of piss about "wildly inaccurate, fake 'APM'". What made you think that I did? If you aren't at least 60 apm on live, you're lazy/bad. There are never dead globals. However, Gift of the Ox probably shouldn't be totally discounted in terms of adding to APM. If you're intentionally using them to heal vs letting them expire, then you're better than the latter for using the former.

The new ox orb being our only real source of healing just puts incredible emphasis on picking them up. Hopefully you can see them through mandatory-Rushing Jade Wind's green sheet on the ground, a mob's leg, 15 yds away inside a mob's leg, hidden behind a mob, under warlock spell effects, inside another tank, etc.

Also, lol "spazzing". It's nice to be back in the 70's.

[Inuyaki]

I don't give a squirt of piss about "wildly inaccurate, fake 'APM'". What made you think that I did? If you aren't at least 60 apm on live, you're lazy/bad. There are never dead globals.

This is just not true...
First, you can't have MORE than 60apm if you exclude GotO and PB. So with Serenity you could have a little bit more.
Second, most bosses have downtimes.

HFA has downtimes between waves, I doubt you press much while running away @IronReaver or when you are stunned @Kormrok or he is in the pool, Council is a little bit more active, maybe. Kilrogg has no downtimes, there you are right. Gorefiend has downtimes while phasing in and out of stomach, Iskar you have to run out of camp, Soc is pretty active for the one tank, Zakuun has no apm while being in other phase.
I actually have no clue about other bosses in mythic, because I stopped raiding 7 months ago... but in hc at least Manno and Archi have downtimes for tanks.

[stross01]

This is just not true...
First, you can't have MORE than 60apm if you exclude GotO and PB. So with Serenity you could have a little bit more.
Second, most bosses have downtimes.

HFA has downtimes between waves, I doubt you press much while running away @IronReaver or when you are stunned @Kormrok or he is in the pool, Council is a little bit more active, maybe. Kilrogg has no downtimes, there you are right. Gorefiend has downtimes while phasing in and out of stomach, Iskar you have to run out of camp, Soc is pretty active for the one tank, Zakuun has no apm while being in other phase.
I actually have no clue about other bosses in mythic, because I stopped raiding 7 months ago... but in hc at least Manno and Archi have downtimes for tanks.

And, yes, I know about Gift of the Ox padding, but at no point should you ever be below 60 apm, on live or alpha, without huge amounts of fight RP or something. Alpha brm yields a lot more apm than live right now.

That's why I included this line that got conveniently left out of the previous quotes.

Guard, Elusive Brew, Purifying Brew, Fortifying Brew, potions, trinkets, engineering items, and Provoke aren't on the gcd. You can have more than 60 apm.

If one is 58.9 apm, with 38 of their 112 ability uses being off the global, with minimal time off of the boss, it's pretty clear that they're under-performing.