An attempt at making a list of Legion-PTR BM monk pros and cons

[Deleted]

Take two. Shorter and including feedback gathered so far.

The below is an attempt at creating a comprehensive list of BM monk strengths and weaknesses as currently observed on the PTR. Before diving into brew-details, first let me say that I am a raid leader and main tank for a guild that's involved in mythic raids. Nothing big, but we clear content while it's relevant. Most of the observations is therefore from the perspective of raids and raid utility. Needless to say, I am lucky enough to have access too legion PTR.

I am also a monk enthusiast. I'm not looking for a cheap excuse to reroll to whichever tank class is considered the strongest. I want to play as BM monk, just as long as it doesn't put the guild's progress in jeopardy.

The good – sadly, this part will be depressingly short:

• The aesthetics, the visuals – from the way our artifact looks, through how it sits on our shoulder and the new animations all the way to the visuals of some new talents (e.g. Invoke Niuzao), everything looks really good. The aesthetics makes you want to play the class.
• The Brew system, i.e. Ironskin and Purifying sharing charges. This can potentially make for some genuinely interesting gameplay and decision making. However, in order to be so, it cannot be automatic (Ironskin cannot be universally better than Purifying) and Ironskin cannot be our only form of Active Mitigation (more on that below).
• Celestial Fortune. Making other players benefit from your statistics is a nice idea, though I'm afraid this may get too strong eventually. More importantly, in order for such approach (“take more damage, but get healed easier), we seem to require a bigger HP pool than we currently have. You don't benefit from Celestial Healing, if you already ran out of HP. Again, more on Celestial Healing below.
• The idea of Gift of the Ox orbs spawning the more often the lower HP you have. Sound concept, but perhaps even it out a bit. The fact that the healing scales off mastery is very nice too.
• Majority of abilities matches the monk theme, lore. They may not work quite well, but the theme is maintained.

The bad – what doesn't feel good.

Not touching on numbers here, more so the general gameplay. Many bullet-points, admittedly of very different importance. The first two points are by far the biggest issues I have at this stage.

• BM monks currently have the same answer to every question. No matter what kind of damage you're about to take (single hard hit, many small hits, physical, magical, bursty, over time), you have exactly one way to react – use Ironskin Brew and hope for the best. If you ever find yourself at low HP and you know a big hit is coming, there's very little you can do about that. To be clear – this has nothing to do with balance, I would consider it an equally big problem even if Ironskin allow would allow me to survive in all circumstances. The gameplay is not very engaging, there are too few decisions to make.
• Our “rotation”. Two separate issues raised here. First of all, it is almost exactly the same as in the first bullet-point - no matter what tanking situation we're at (single target, multiple opponents stacked, few targets apart), the best course of action is to use the same abilities. Add insult to injury, other than using Keg Smash as much as possible, it hardly matters which other abilities we use. There are no buffs nor debuffs to maintain, no procs (unless talented for, but it just happens to be the worst possible option from the talent row). Second of all, many players have raised the issue of the “rotation” being cluncky and awkward. I personally don't necessarily agree with that, I don't think empty GCDs are a bad thing as such plus haste will change this over time. Notwithstanding, our “rotation” severely lacks some flavor, something to make us stay on our toes. At the same time, there are so many passive effects going on in the background, that it is honestly hard to list them all down. Maybe shifting some mechanics from passive to on-use could help.
• There is absolutely no trade-off between playing offensive and defensive. Attacks and defense never share the same resource, they are entirely unrelated. There is no way to sacrifice some of the damage/threat done in favor of reducing damage taken more and vice versa.
• Aoe threat. We are in a very similar situation as guardian druids were prior to Swipe being made spammable. No tools to quickly pick up threat on a pack of adds that just joined the fight in our standard toolkit. One could argue that this is what Summon Black Ox Statue and Rushing Jade Wind are for – and fair enough, with these 2 we have no significant threat problems – but to me personally it feels like being able to get snap threat on mobs is something a tank is meant to do without specing for it. I didn't get the chance to experiment with the Dragonfire Brew artifact trait, perhaps this helps/solves the problem.
• Artifact Abilities:
  - Flaming Keg - while the tooltip doesn't mention this, Flaming Keg actually debuffs the target it hits so that they do 15% less damage for the duration of the DoT. A little awkward to have an artifact trait that similar to what used to be part of standard toolkit in WoD (Dizzying Haze), but at this point we will take any help we can get, so it's ok.
  - Dragonfire Brew – good stuff, should be the first artifact trait activated
  - Brew-Stache – not an effect we will ever trigger on purpose. There are different factors when deciding when to use a brew. Feels passive and irrelevant, I'd say hardly anyone will know it's even happening.
  - Fortification – add an extra defensive value to our biggest, 5 min long cooldown? Is it not strong enough to keep us alive without that? Feels extremely awkward and poor. Yet another passive effect.
• Gift of the Ox. One of the harder aspects to touch on. Let me preface this by saying that I like GotO a lot, I find it entertaining to play with. Now, as it is on PTR I found GotO relatively fine during raid testing – you get a lot of orbs and just as long as you can freely walk over them, they do noticeable healing. However, fast forward to dungeons and it's much less enjoyable. Given the overall high damage taken, it felt like every orb was valuable, hence you'd want to pick it up, hence you'd move the boss around all the time. The latter is probably more of a balance issue than anything else though (damage taken is so high, that you're in panic mode more often than not). The GotO AI though is a whole different story. The orbs land in all sorts of bad stuff often, that seems to include spawning inside walls. Then there's the fact that if you cannot move for whatever reason (think Tyrant Velhari), you're not getting those sweet, free heals. Same deal if you just had to move the boss a good distance to a new location and you can see all those orbs left behind. One popular idea is to give players an ability to summon all the nearby orbs. This sounds nice, but I believe there ought to be a cost – maybe a cooldown in the range of 30 seconds, maybe orbs heal for less if summoned.
• Mastery. First of all, our new mastery gives no defensive benefit against magic attacks, but I guess by now we're used to that. Second of all, it also gives practically no defensive benefit against melee special attacks, as you're not commonly allowed to dodge these. Doesn't really have any wow-effect, but it's just a secondary stat, so so be it.
  One good thing is that GotO healing scaled off our mastery.
• Talents. Lots of good feedback on these already, so I don't want to make this post any longer than it needs to be. One thing though – Invoke Niuzao is very beautiful, but flawed per design – if it can taunt and keep raid boss busy for more than 2 attacks, it's going to be overpowered. If it cannot, it's going to be useless. Perhaps make it be a personal cooldown for the tank with some raid utility (like, for example, rallying Cry).

The ugly.

This next section was originally very long and it involved a very detailed comparison of guardian druid vs brewmaster monk. In course of gathering feedback for the post and discussions it was said that this is perhaps not the most valuable form of expressing feedback. Also, it naturally led to considerations regarding balancing and not design, which is against the purpose of the thread. Because of that I decided to shorten this bit greatly, however a few important points are still to be made.

For simplicity, the below only relates to core tool-set - talents and artifact traits are excluded as they are meant to make classes feel different.

Comparison of PTR BM monk and Guardian druid tool-set
A monk tank has:
Offensively:

• abilities that you will use the very same way no matter what and many people consider the resulting rotation awkward
• if adds are involved in a fight, you're just about required to choose 2 specific talents (Statue and Rushing Jade Wind)

Defensively

• Ironskin Brew, which you want to have up when any type of damage is incoming
• Purifying Brew if you took damage and want to loose staggered damage
• GotO orbs to run over if they are there and if the situation allows for it
• big tank defensive ability (Fortifying Brew) on a 5 min (minus x, if talented) cd
• Zen Med on a 3 minute cooldown, if we are desperately looking for advantages

Any time you know big damage is incoming you want to use Ironskin, no matter what sort of a damaging mechanic it is. If you survived the damage, you are maybe able to pick up some orbs to do some self-healing, if feasible.

A druid tank has
Offenisvely:

• a choice between spending resource on offense/threat (Mangle) or pooling it for defense (AM, self-healing)
• chance to proc a free resource builder use
• build Thrash stacks and either maintain them or spend them on Pulverize, depending on talent/gameplay choice)
• dot targets with Moonfire for both damage and bonus rage, if talented; absolutely not obligatory

Defensively

• Active Mitigation (Ironfur) against physical attacks, this AM stacks with itself
• Active Mitigation (Mark of Ursol) against magic attacks
• very strong damage reduction ability (Survival Instinct) with 2 charges and fairly long cooldown
• on-demand self-healing over time Frenzied Regeneration), with 2 charges
• big tank defensive ability on a 45 sec cooldown (there's no stopping you from keeping this up for roughly 25% of any encounter

In my opinion, this comparison says a lot. The monk uses the same tools no matter what - ISB->PB if you can afford it, pick GotO if you have any and situation allows. The druid gets to choose which type of damage to mitigate (magical vs physical or even both if he preemptively saved up some rage), the physical mitigation can also be "stacked up with itself" for even greater reduction. If that is still not enough, he can use his yet another absorption. After that he gets to heal himself on demand.

This results in the monk feeling much less proactive. Instead of engaging gameplay that rewards skillful use of abilities you take all the damage head on using your one and only tool to reduce it, you sometimes clear Stagger and then you hope that the boss runs out of HP before the healers run out of mana.

Summary

So yeah, that's about it. So much for making a short post. I'm not sure if it's a sound idea or not, but let me just list few potential changes, additions that could help solve some BM problems:

Top priority – personal opinion, but without these fixed, the class will be hard to bare with. Again, none of this is about balance - we are not talking about whether what we have on PTR let's us stay alive, it's about whether we have fun doing so!

• Add a new offensive ability (more entertaining rotation) that gives a buff/debuff to track and maintain; or stacks of something to manage. Anything to counter the boredom of hitting the same buttons waiting for Keg Smash to be ready.
• Add a whole new layer of defense. Just one random idea out of many – a Dampen Harm'esque effect on a 30 sec cooldown; something to click when we know big hit is coming. Another idea is to create different varieties of Purifying Brew - one that will remove 100% stagger, another that will remove less than that but also heal, many options possible.
• In general, make less abilities and effects passive, give us some buttons we are excited to push depending on the situation.

Important – not game breaking, but changes would be very welcomed

• fix the issues with GotO highlighted above. This is not about it being a bad design idea, it can be really enjoyable, but needs some work.
• add a trade-off between playing more offensively and defensively, right now there is virtually none, even when it comes to statistics.
• make it so that out mastery is effective not only against melee hits. Our PTR mastery and Celestial Fortune could easily be swapped around – make it so that our mastery gives a healing taken increase and make it so that we get a stacking dodge buff of a fixed value. This way mastery becomes more universal.

Other – various level of importance, from idea to quality of life improvements

• fix AoE threat, so probably make Rushing Jade Wind baseline (yes, we do fine tanking many targets with RJW and Statue, but that's 2 talents, so ought to be optional).
• A blue post recently stated that it's ok to have a simple basic tool-set (“rotation”), which can then be made more complex with talents. Should your goal be to make Rushing Jade Wind our rotational filler – which is not a good idea, I seem to recall blue posters stating aoe abilities in single target rotation are not good design – give us a glyph to remove its green, blurry visuals (ok now and then, irritating in the long run)
• a short-term, strong buff to Celestial Healing is also a very interesting potential talent or self-standing tank cooldown.
• Invoke Niuzao is very beautiful but needs some attention. Maybe remove the possibility of it taunting strong opponents, but make him buff the tank and/or raid.
  
  

The original post

The good – sadly, this part will be depressingly short:

• The aesthetics, the visuals – from the way our artifact looks, through how it sits on our shoulder and the new animations all the way to the visuals of some new talents (e.g. Invoke Niuzao), everything looks really good. The aesthetics makes you want to play the class.
• The Brew system, i.e. Ironskin and Purifying sharing charges. This can potentially make for some genuinely interesting gameplay and decision making. However, in order to be so, it cannot be automatic (Ironskin cannot be universally better than Purifying) and Ironskin cannot be our only form of Active Mitigation (more on that below).
• Celestial Fortune. Making other players benefit from your statistics is a nice idea, though I'm afraid this may get too strong eventually. More importantly, in order for such approach (“take more damage, but get healed easier), we seem to require a bigger HP pool than we currently have. You don't benefit from Celestial Healing, if you already ran out of HP. Again, more on Celestial Healing below.
• The idea of Gift of the Ox orbs spawning the more often the lower HP you have. Sound concept, but perhaps even it out a bit. The fact that the healing scales off mastery is very nice too.
• Majority of abilities matches the monk theme, lore. They may not work quite well, but the theme is maintained.

The bad – what doesn't feel good.
Not touching on numbers here, more so the general gameplay. Many bullet-points, admittedly of very different importance. The first and third points are by far the biggest issues I have at this stage.

• BM monks currently have the same answer to every question. No matter what kind of damage you're about to take (single hard hit, many small hits, physical, magical, bursty, over time), you have exactly one way to react – use Ironskin Brew and hope for the best. If you ever find yourself at low HP and you know a big hit is coming, there's nothing you can do about that. To be clear – this has nothing to do with balance, I would consider it an equally big problem even if Ironskin allow would allow me to survive in all circumstances. The gameplay is currently not engaging at all, there are hardly any decisions to be made when it comes to BM tanking
• There is absolutely no trade-off between playing offensive and defensive. Attacks and defense never share the same resource, they are entirely unrelated. As an indirect consequence, it is possible to play well and not be able to get Active Mitigation up for when a mechanic requires it – you Ironskin your way through incoming damage, big hit is coming, but you just happen not to have Ironskin charge available. I know this is not the case for guardian druids and protection warriors, as you can pool some rage in preparation for such situation. I believe same goes for remaining tank classes.
• Our “rotation”. Two separate issues raised here. First of all, it is almost exactly the same as in the first bullet-point - no matter what tanking situation we're at (single target, multiple opponents stacked, few targets apart), the best course of action is to use the same abilities. Add insult to injury, other than using Keg Smash as much as possible, it hardly matters which other abilities we use. There are no buffs nor debuffs to maintain, no procs (unless talented for, but it just happens to be the worst possible option from the talent row). Second of all, many players have raised the issue of the “rotation” being cluncky and awkward. I personally don't necessarily agree with that, I don't think empty GCDs are a bad thing as such plus haste will change this over time. Notwithstanding, our “rotation” severely lacks some flavor, something to make us stay on our toes. At the same time, there are so many passive effects going on in the background, that it is honestly hard to list them all down. Maybe shifting some mechanics from passive to on-use could help.
• Aoe threat. We are in a very similar situation as guardian druids were prior to Swipe being made spammable. No tools to quickly pick up threat on a pack of adds that just joined the fight in our standard toolkit. One could argue that this is what Summon Black Ox Statue and Rushing Jade Wind are for – and fair enough, with these 2 we have no significant threat problems – but to me personally it feels like being able to get snap threat on mobs is something a tank is meant to do without specing for it.
• Artifact Abilities:
  - Flaming Keg - while the tooltip doesn't mention this, Flaming Keg actually debuffs the target it hits so that they do 15% less damage for the duration of the DoT. A little awkward to have an artifact trait that similar to what used to be part of standard toolkit in WoD (Dizzying Haze), but at this point we will take any help we can get, so it's ok.
  - Brew-Stache – not an effect we will ever trigger on purpose. There are different factors when deciding when to use a brew. Feels passive and irrelevant, I'd say hardly anyone will know it's even happening.
  - Fortification – add an extra defensive value to our biggest, 5 min long cooldown? Is it not strong enough to keep us alive without that? Feels extremely awkward and poor. Yet another passive effect.
  - Dragonfire Brew – good stuff, should be the first artifact trait activated
• Gift of the Ox. One of the harder aspects to touch on. Let me preface this by saying that I like GotO a lot, I find it entertaining to play with. Now, as it is on PTR I found GotO relatively fine during raid testing – you get a lot of orbs and just as long as you can freely walk over them, they do noticeable healing. However, fast forward to dungeons and it's much less enjoyable. Given the overall high damage taken, it felt like every orb was valuable, hence you'd want to pick it up, hence you'd move the boss around all the time. The latter is probably more of a balance issue than anything else though (damage taken is so high, that you're in panic mode more often than not). The GotO AI though is a whole different story. The orbs land in all sorts of bad stuff often, that seems to include spawning inside walls. Then there's the fact that if you cannot move for whatever reason (think Tyrant Velhari), you're not getting those sweet, free heals. Same deal if you just had to move the boss a good distance to a new location and you can see all those orbs left behind. One popular idea is to give players an ability to summon all the nearby orbs. This sounds nice, but I believe there ought to be a cost – maybe a cooldown in the range of 30 seconds, maybe orbs heal for less if summoned.
• Mastery. This got surprisingly little attention so far. First of all, our new mastery gives no defensive benefit against magic attacks, but I guess by now we're used to that. Second of all, it also gives practically no defensive benefit against melee special attacks, as you're not commonly allowed to dodge these. Third of all, it feels extremely “behind the scene” - something is gong on there, you took less damage than you otherwise would over the course of an encounter, but you don't “feel” the mastery at all. Your HP pool doesn't grow, you don't see those nice blocks more often. That's probably more of a personal taste, but I lack the “oh wow, this extra mastery I recently got just totally saved me” sensation. One good thing is that GotO healing scaled off our mastery. Let's get back to Celestial Fortune for a moment here. I would believe that our PTR mastery and Celestial Fortune could easily be swapped around – make it so that our mastery gives a healing taken increase and make it so that we get a stacking dodge buff of a fixed value. This way mastery becomes more universal (good against everything) and you can feel it's working – that HP bar get refilled faster. Admittedly, that's perhaps not very monk ish way to go though.
• Talents. Lots of good feedback on these already, so I don't want to make this post any longer than it needs to be. One thing though – Invoke Niuzao is very beautiful, but flawed per design – if it can taunt and keep raid boss busy for more than 2 attacks, it's going to be overpowered. If it cannot, it's going to be useless. Perhaps make it be a personal cooldown for the tank with some raid utility (like, for example, rallying Cry).
• Breath of Fire. With all the ability pruning, it feels awkward to see this ability still present. Similarly, with so few buttons left to press, this one doesn't seem exciting nor intuitive to use. To be quite honest, even looking at logs extensively, I still don't really know if I'm meant to use it against a single target or not. Lacks fun element.

This whole next section is mostly about balance or lack of it, so I'm not sure if it is already the right time to address those issues. Curious about opinions on that.
Also, in the process of writing this part I realized I didn't really know how to interpret some bits and pieces of the logs - I specifically marked that towards the end of that part. Very interested to hear some clarification on that.

The ugly.
At first I meant not to touch on balance issues at all, but in course of writing the post I realized it wouldn't be complete without few notes on just that.

As stated at the start, before BM monks were added to PTR I have tried some guardian druid. Below some basic maths highlighting some of the tank issues I have observed. Admittedly, the data pool is extremely narrow, however the findings are in line with how it felt in game, therefore I decided to add this. I'm not entirely sure if the numbers are from mythic or mythic+ lvl 3, but in any case, there are from the same difficulty level. I compare a best pull on Hymdal, first boss in Halls of Valor, as BM monk with a kill scored as a guardian druid. The kill on druid took 1:46, while the wipe as a monk took a little longer, therefore for both characters I'm looking at the first 1:46 of the fight. It's by no means perfect play on either of the characters, but it's the same player, so somewhat reliable basis for comparison.

Pardon the format of the links

Druid log:
www [dot] warcraftlogs [dot] com/reports/tbJ8GTfK6ZzLRqy1/#fight=15&type=damage-taken&start=3347678&end=3454013&source=76

Monk log:
www [dot] warcraftlogs [dot] com/reports/tbJ8GTfK6ZzLRqy1/#fight=6&type=damage-taken&source=13&start=1350694&end=1457561

Health pool:
Druid: 3.1m (as scaled to ilvl 845)
Monk: 1.9m (as scaled to ilvl 845)

For those who may not know, guardian druid mastery is about extra HP, so this is not (just) a scaling issue.

Average melee hit:
Druid: 260k
Monk: 451k (I believe this is pre-stagger value, else the logs make no sense)

Average melee hit as percentage of health pool (as scaled to ilvl 845):
Druid: 11,9%
Monk: 23,7%

Miss chance (aka dodge) on melee hit:
Druid: 14%
Monk: 35,2%

Average Horn of Valor hit:
Druid: 598k
Monk: 567;

Average Horn of Valor hit as percentage of health pool (as scaled to ilvl 845):
Druid: 19,3%
Monk: 29,8%

I must admit I thought this would look even more one-sided in favor of the druid. Still – as a druid you get hit by melee attack to Horn of Valor to melee and you loose an average of 45% hp (and you end up with a DoT decreasing healing taken). As a monk you take the same combo and loose an average of 77% hp. And this is exactly how it feels – as a druid you bounce around 50% hp, as a monk it's in the red zone, around 25%.

This part here requires some looking into. I'm not sure how to interpret the value of average melee hit – is it pre- or post-stagger? If the log shows an average melee hit of 451k, is that the total amount of damage, part of which is then applied over time as stagger or is that the initial hit?

As an interesting point of reference, over such a short sample (1:46) Celestial Fortune gives 2.5m healing, GotO 1.8m.

That's numbers, tuning is yet to come, so it's not a big deal. The problem, however, is how different it feels to play a BM monk versus a guardian druid.

While I found comparing Guardian druid and BM monk very informative, if at times depressing, I realize there's a lot of non-BM-specific information following. I personally believe this is just the kind of feedback Blizzard keeps asking for (i.e. not "this is bad because I don't like it", but instead specific elements of the gameplay that seem missing or wrong). Again, curious to hear if people think this is something that might be interesting for them or not so much.

Comparison of PTR BM monk and Guardian druid tool-set
A monk tank has:
Offensively:

• abilities that you will use the very same way no matter what and many people consider the resulting rotation awkward
• if adds are involved in a fight, you're just about required to choose 2 specific talents (Statue and Rushing Jade Wind)

Defensively

• Ironskin Brew, which you want to have up when damage is incoming
• Purifying Brew if you took damage and want to loose stagger damage, however Ironskin is more important to keep up almost always
• GotO orbs to run over if they are there and if the situation allows for it
• next-to-meaningless (very weak) healing ability through lvl 15 talent
• big tank defensive ability (Fortifying Brew) on a 5 min (minus x, if talented) cd
• lvl 75 talents
• Zen Med on a 3 minute cooldown, if we are desperately looking for advantages
• starting artifact trait acting as a small cooldown

Any time you know big damage is incoming you want to use Ironskin, no matter what sort of a damaging mechanic it is. If you're afraid you will die, once every 1.5 minute or less often you can use a talent or big cooldown. If you survived the damage, you are maybe able to pick up some orbs to do some self-healing, if you're lucky.

A druid tank has
Offenisvely:

• a choice between spending resource on offense/threat (Mangle) or pooling it for defense (AM, self-healing)
• chance to proc a free resource builder use
• build Thrash stacks and either maintain them or spend them on Pulverize, depending on talent/gameplay choice)
• dot targets with Moonfire for both damage and bonus rage, if talented; absolutely not obligatory

Defensively

• Active Mitigation (Ironfur) against physical attacks, this AM stacks with itself
• Active Mitigation (Mark of Ursol) against magic attacks
• very strong damage reduction ability (Survival Instinct) with 2 charges and fairly long cooldown
• on-demand self-healing over time Frenzied Regeneration), with 2 charges
• big tank defensive ability on a 45 sec cooldown (there's no stopping you from keeping this up for roughly 25% of any encounter
• another big tank defensive ability available through talents
• starting artifact trait acting as yet another cooldown

In my opinion, this comparison speaks for itself. A druid has tools for almost every situation. The monk has one tool no matter what.

But enough with the druid talk already (they might be - and I think are - just overpowered this build), I mean, if I'm so fascinated with a druid I should just play one, right? Maybe I just got bored with BM monk, I don't want to play it, but I'm just lieing to myself about it? Well no, that's not really it, so let's compare PTR and live, WoD, BM monks. Specifically, let's look at the available “lines of defense”.

Should the consensus be that Guardian druid talk has no place in BM monk feedback, the below next section sure is fine. Right?

Comparison of PTR BM monk and live-WoD BM monk tool-set
Live, WoD:

• keep Shuffle up at all times while tanking, so in effect you need to choose whether to use Purifying Brew or Blackout Kick
• build and spend Elusive Brew stacks when high melee damage is expected
• use Purifying Brew liberally, whenever it seems appropriate
• Guard when any sort of big damage is incoming or just not to sit on 2 charges. Guard has a whole minimage to it, with bonus armor, mastery and resolve all affecting it's strength
• Expel Harm when self healing is required, spammable at low HP. With T18 four-set and Guard effect on Expel Harm, you can game Guard even further
• GotO orbs if even more healing is needed
• big tank defensive ability (Fortifying Brew) on a 3 min cd
• lvl 75 talents
• Zen Med on a 3 minute cd, if we are desperately looking for advantages

PTR, Legion:

• Ironskin Brew any time you expect to take damage
• Purifying Brew, but not really, because maintaining Ironskin is a better choice 9 out of 10 cases
• GotO if available and feasible
• big tank defensive ability (Fortifying Brew) on a 5 min (minus x, if talented) cooldown
• lvl 75 talents
• Zen Med on a 3 minute cd , if we are desperately looking for advantages

In comparison PTR BM monk feels gutted, pruned and most important, not cool to play.


Summary
So yeah, that's about it. So much for making a short post. I'm not sure if it's a sound idea or not, but let me just list few potential changes, additions that could help solve some BM problems:

Top priority – personal opinion, but without these fixed, the class will be hard to bare with

• Add a new offensive ability (more entertaining rotation) that gives a buff/debuff to track and maintain; or stacks of something to manage. Anything to counter the boredom of hitting the same buttons waiting for Keg Smash to be ready.
• Add a whole new layer of defense. Just one random idea out of many – a Dampen Harm'esque effect on a 30 sec cooldown; something to click when we know big hit is coming.
• In general, make less abilities and effects passive, give us some buttons we are excited to push depending on the situation.

Important – not game breaking, but changes would be very welcomed

• fix the issues with GotO highlighted above. This is not about it being a bad design idea, it can be really enjoyable, but needs some work.
• add a trade-off between playing more offensively and defensively, right now there is virtually none, even when it comes to statistics.
• fix AoE threat, so probably make Rushing Jade Wind baseline (yes, we do fine tanking many targets with RJW and Statue, but that's 2 talents, so ought to be optional).

Other – various level of importance, from idea to quality of life improvements

• A blue post recently stated that it's ok to have a simple basic tool-set (“rotation”), which can then be made more complex with talents. Should your goal be to make Rushing Jade Wind our rotational filler – which is not a good idea, I seem to recall blue posters stating aoe abilities in single target rotation are not good design – give us a glyph to remove its green, blurry visuals (ok now and then, irritating in the long run)
• Make us feel we have a mastery designed for tanking. Not talking about the maths behind it, but give it at least some wow-effect. One idea is to make Celestial Healing scale of mastery instead of crit and turn current PTR mastery into a passive
• a short-term, strong buff to Celestial Healing is also a very interesting potential talent or self-standing tank cooldown.
• Invoke Niuzao is very beautiful but needs some attention. Maybe remove the possibility of it taunting strong opponents, but make him buff the tank and/or raid.
• while I don't want to address balancing issue here, the difference in HP pool between various tanking classes when scaled up to the same ilvl is alarming

If anyone wants to discuss, suggest something ask anything about PTR BM monks or just chat-monks, feel free to add me to RealID at Lamme#2288

edit: I wanted to reserve the post below for changelog, but apparently I don't know how to do that. Oh well.

[Deleted]

Could you do one for WW pls

[Deleted]

So much for keeping it on-topic

I don't feel in the position to comment on WW in equal depth, I don't have the expertise for that. However, what I can say is that WW feels way better designed and more thought-through than BM. Personal opinion of course.

[Deleted]

As far as I know Flaming keg actually has a 15% damage reduction debuff on anything that gets hit? So it's actually a defensive cd?

[Deleted]

Not that I know of, just checked on PTR and it doesn't seem to apply any debuff.

[Shamanberry]

It's not mentioned anywhere in the tooltip, but if you check the debuff, it does reduce damage affected creatures do to you by 15%.

It looks like the latest patch broke the tooltip, but the effect is still there:
http://legion.wowhead.com/spell=214326/flaming-keg

[Saverem]

It's not mentioned anywhere in the tooltip, but if you check the debuff, it does reduce damage affected creatures do to you by 15%.

It looks like the latest patch broke the tooltip, but the effect is still there:
http://legion.wowhead.com/spell=214326/flaming-keg

Otherwise, it would make ZERO sense to have a weak ass AoE on over a 1m CD.

[Deleted]

Updated the part about Flaming Keg.

It appears that quite a lot people viewed this thread, but few commented. I will take the liberty to assume that there aren't any significant issues people would disagree on.

Would any US person be kind enough to put the original post at the official class feedback forum? It would be appreciated.

[The Madgod]

So I figured that I'd probably just be best at tackling everything in order. Some stuff I agree with, some stuff I think requires clarification, some stuff I disagree with. But that's the name of the game, innit.

To start us off, as far as PB and ISB go... I think you're actually a bit off base on that one. http://brewingmastery.blogspot.com/2...fAnalysis.html

I think what you're feeling is that problem of not sensing when PB is useful. Mathematically, it is inevitable that you would get to a point where PB is better to use to limit burst than ISB. Not factoring in dodge or special attacks, it's in the ballpark of 5-9 seconds after initiating combat, so it'd be longer in-game but it's there, 100%. Again, the issue is that right now it takes more time to get to a point where you'd feel a difference when pressing the button over using ISB. And for the record, the feeling of just using ISB to answer everything is in fact a balancing problem. ISB's value is weighted more heavily than PB's. It's balancing that affects gameplay.



I'm going to be frank on some of the pruning... it's honestly a good thing. Brewmasters were notorious for having a very high skill floor in order to play at a minimum level (read: heroic dungeons pre-buff). Reducing complexity for that is a good thing. There's some questions on whether some things should have been cut but I think that's far more specific to what abilities are necessary rather than just having a bigger kit. You have to realize that with ISB we might take a lot of damage but it's very smoothed out. You're looking at 75% shuffle with ISB active and no other talents or benefits. That's about as high as we could get when we had Shuffle and FB active in previous expansions. That simple utility, which works on magic attacks now too, is very powerful if tuned correctly. Because of that, I think there's a potential argument that we don't need as much in our kit to answer damage. Again, potential argument. You could argue that's up in the air right now.



As far as our regular rotation... really, the only loss of situationally-appropriate abilities is SCK. We never had any others that were regularly beneficial compared to other choices. BoF was something that most Brewmasters didn't even have on their bars unless they were doing higher end dungeons and that was purely for the disorient effect. You are also ignoring the artifact when it comes to other buttons being useful. That being said I would make the argument that an artifact shouldn't be what is required to make a spec feel good. It should augment what's already good. Perhaps shunting some of the artifact perks into the base play would help, but I think to an extent it's just artificial difficulty rather than something you have to manage dynamically, which is where true engagement comes from. I think this is where you'd get your ISB / PB relationships and where a lot of focus needs to be to ensure that feels good.



I am confident that AoE threat is a balancing issue with our overall damage dealt. Once that's cleared up it should be better with KS.



I'm not touching GotO because I've probably more or less have written an entire essay on the subject and I'm not really inclined to talk about it further until I can really go more in-depth with it haha. Overall those findings just reaffirm my suspicions.



I think your mastery argument's a bit weird because at least in my view, its design is supposed to be a passive benefit to our damage dynamic. It's intentionally supposed to be behind the scenes. Our dynamic is mainly that we have no passive mitigation and all our defense is structured around delaying damage via stagger. This leads to us being, in theory, low spike, high damage taken tanks. More reliable dodge, more effective heals, and more opportunities to purify while maintaining ISB are all the benefits of our secondary stats and all of them more or less pertain to reducing our overall effective damage taken. That's my personal take on it and while I don't think it's necessarily a perfect way to look at the spec I think it's fairly accurate. The issue then becomes ensuring the balance of it so that is a thing. But ultimately you know, you made the point that it's a personal thing and I can respect that.



Talents are another topic I've written and read essays worth on so not touching that either haha.



I can guarantee you that BoF is useful pretty much any time with the Artifact trait which makes it into a defensive ability. On a purely offensive note I believe it doesn't provide the DoT unless the KS debuff is on target so it's damage-wise only useful on AoE packs or on single target if it's off cooldown and there's no other button that has a higher priority to press. I STRONGLY disagree with it being removed because that ability is a staple of the Warcraft Brewmaster ever since Warcraft 3. It's such a core ability to our fantasy that removing it in favor of ensuring it's an awesome ability would be criminal.



I'm also pretty confident that 451k number you threw out there is pre-stagger. Assuming ISB was active for it and that was the amount of damage we took after stagger... the pre-stagger hit would be 1.8 million damage. So unless druids can mitigate over 85% of a hit... that damage is pre-stagger.

Which would mean that at least from that hit, you're only taking about 112k damage upfront, which would be from your numbers 5.9% of the monk's total health. The rest of that 23.7% damage would be over the next 10 seconds. Admittedly I'm only looking at the raw math and not the logs, but I'm again pretty confident in that. Mythic raid boss AA's are supposed to be about 750k pre-stagger.

Overall I don't like the idea of seeing what other specs have. You can really easily find yourself in a "Grass is greener" place and become off-base on what the true issue is: Can Brewmasters effectively handle all the various situations that they are put into, to the degree the current tanking paradigm demands? Do the tools they have suffice? Looking across specs is great if say, you want to know what to play... but to say it's a good idea to do so to determine whether the toolkit is sufficient is not really looking in the right area, i think.

As for the loss of our kit from Warlords to Legion... we lost two big things and one thing switched from an active that was bursty to a passive that was smooth. Elusive Brew effectively became our mastery... more dodge, more reliably. But passive. Guard and Expel Harm were removed. I think Guard was too overpowered to really be much use in PvE because of how difficult it would be to balance so I can see why it was relegated to PvP where it might be a bit easier to manage. I think that EH could return and it'd be nice. I've literally written a small essay on PB and its place in Legion so I still disagree with your ultimate assessment but I think that it reaffirms some of the mechanical balancing issues that have happened as a result of some changes.


Overall I'd like to see improvements mainly in our artifact and talents. There could be some more diverity, some more stuff that's a bit more relevant to core play. I'd like to see the return of a filler ability and see energy consumption be slowed down. I foresee a lot of messy stuff down the line as we get more haste. But I'm going to be doing something like this on my own at some point in the future. Thanks for sharing mate.

[Deleted]

Talking about feedback and comparing classes (yes I know you said not to compare, but this is something that's been bothering me for a while now).

Am I the only one who is unhappy about the Diffuse and especially Zen Med nerfs? I understand we can't have 2 90% 'immunities'. But paladins got to keep their Bubble, un-nerfed. They have a talent that makes it aoe taunt while it's up (or something like that), which takes away the whole downside of using it in a fight (and it was easy enough to bubble-taunt anyways). Why did they keep their 'immunity' and we had to lose ours which is even way more clunky in use. It just feels so unfair to me.
/rant

[Xiaojin]

I'm not unhappy about those nerfs by themselves. But considering that we got those nerfs, lost Expel Harm and Guard, and GotO seems to be even worse than it is on live (on live you at least get a decent amount of healing if you are actually able to move around somewhat freely), we simply lost too much. That makes me unhappy. Especially since it seems like the first thing I would have removed if I was in charge (-> GotO) is the one thing that is intended to stay around and keep us alive.

[stross01]

Also, I agree with you in the pruning department. Going from the most keys to the least keys is a pretty awful feeling.

[Deleted]

Thanks a lot for your feedback Madgod, this is exactly what I was hoping for. I can already see that I will need to alter the first post a whole lot, but before I get to do that, I'd like to discuss some more. Out of curiosity - do you have access to PTR?

On ISB and PB. I'm familiar with the mathematics, but I believe it's a case of a statistical model not really reflecting the reality. Don't get me wrong, I don't question that math itself, it's more about practical application. I recognize the value of PB as per the model, but at the same time what kills tanks is damage spikes rather than constant, high damage. This would mean BM will in fact work very well, because we're just that - no spikes, high constant damage. However, with the current PTR balance, all that is shadowed by the fact that hard hitting abilities put us in a very real risk of getting on hit. As such, the whole stagger game looses its relevance. Maybe it is then just a balancing, not design issue, but for the time being I believe my point still stands - ISB vs PB game could be entertaining, however as it is now its implementation makes it feel very automatic - you don't really think about the value of Stagger in the next 9 seconds, because you're forced to blow what tools you have to stay alive that long.
It does get more interesting when tank swaps are involved so that we can bank some brew stacks.

edit: one more thing you addressed - "no point comparing to other classes, the relevant question is whether we have the tools to deal with what damage is incoming, even if with a smaller set of tools". I for one disagree - I would not be satisfied if I only had one damage to press to stay alive, even if it worked in all circumstances. I'd like it if a good tank could anticipate or react to damage taken in an appropriate manner, that makes for an entertaining gameplay for me. But that is actually a very interesting point you raised.

On Pruning. I don't mind pruning per se and I'm not crazy about having very many buttons to push. What I do miss on PTR is the interaction between what abilities we had. To name a few examples, on live we have chi to manage (bank up to Purify vs spend on extending Shuffle, if not anything else), we have EH reducing Guard cd plus the low-health EH spam mechanic, we have the "requirement" of 3 targets at least for RJW/SCK. Moves and counter moves. I see very little of that on PTR.
I also fully agree Guard as we know it had to go, enjoyable as it was to game.

On AoE threat. It's not a great concern, surely not top of the list. It's mostly that the current implementation is the mirror image of what other class (guardian druid) first got. And that was considered not enough, by both players and developers. At least we get to fix it through talents.

On mastery. I think I will take back what I wrote. I still don't quite fancy the new core mechanic of the mastery, but the arguments about it "feeling" wrong is out of place. Still not happy that it doesn't affect magic attacks at all, but again, we're used to that. I wouldn't agree that WoD Elusive Brew is equal to Legion mastery. Even ignoring the mechanical differences, it's a passive vs on-demand contrast. But as I clearly stated - I dislike the general idea of turning many abilities and talents into passive effects, so that may be more of a personal thing.

On artifacts. You touched on few different aspects, but I will relate to all of them at once. Only after reading your post I understood what the Dragonfire Brew trait actually does, so I now agree - Breath of Fire does make sense and it does make the rotation a bit more alive. I didn't mention artifact traits in the sections about rotation because I misunderstood how both of the non-passive traits work, so that's on me.

As for the numbers and logs, I think you're right, but I feel confused. If this is how the logs present monk damage taken, then that creates a number of different questions for me .I will need to look into it further.

Where could I read your essays on talents and GotO?

As for the structure of my post (namely whether it makes sense to compare different tanking classes) I'm leaning to your point of view - it was a good mental exercise for me, but it's probably just asking for the entire feedback to get discarded.

[The Madgod]

Thanks a lot for your feedback Madgod, this is exactly what I was hoping for. I can already see that I will need to alter the first post a whole lot, but before I get to do that, I'd like to discuss some more. Out of curiosity - do you have access to PTR?

Sadly not yet! I'm hoping that I'll be able to get in pretty soon though, Blizzard willing. A lot of my work this cycle has been through observation of streams, analysis of abilities, and the creation of models and general toolkits for the community.

On ISB and PB. I'm familiar with the mathematics, but I believe it's a case of a statistical model not really reflecting the reality. Don't get me wrong, I don't question that math itself, it's more about practical application. I recognize the value of PB as per the model, but at the same time what kills tanks is damage spikes rather than constant, high damage. This would mean BM will in fact work very well, because we're just that - no spikes, high constant damage. However, with the current PTR balance, all that is shadowed by the fact that hard hitting abilities put us in a very real risk of getting on hit. As such, the whole stagger game looses its relevance. Maybe it is then just a balancing, not design issue, but for the time being I believe my point still stands - ISB vs PB game could be entertaining, however as it is now its implementation makes it feel very automatic.
It does get more interesting when tank swaps are involved so that we can bank some brew stacks.

Well I mean thing is there that the model I chose to compare ISB and PB was in fact using burst damage as its metric. It's damage taken over a strict period of time, which'd be burst. My biggest guess on some stuff is really balance. I'd like to see the PB changes reverted and if we're too strong because of PB, other things happen to mess with it. If you read my post I think there's potential for weird balance problems to surface with overall DTPS when you go further into a fight with how it functions now. Y'know, when you learn about development and design... the funny thing is that balance does change design, or at the very least, changes gameplay. I don't think that PB and ISB are inherently flawed from a design perspective, I think it's largely Blizzard trying to find a way to balance Brewmasters, when they've in some ways really limited themselves to how they can relatively simply tune the spec.

On Pruning. I don't mind pruning per se and I'm not crazy about having very many buttons to push. What I do miss on PTR is the interaction between what abilities we had. To name a few examples, on live we have chi to manage (bank up to Purify vs spend on extending Shuffle, if not anything else), we have EH reducing Guard cd plus the low-health EH spam mechanic, we have the "requirement" of 3 targets at least for RJW/SCK. Moves and counter moves. I see very little of that on PTR.
I also fully agree Guard as we know it had to go, enjoyable as it was to game.

I made this point a long time ago but the core gameplay loop really hasn't changed that much with the removal of chi. What we have right now would essentially be the same thing if ISB and PB just cost more chi. There's still the relationship of energy spenders enabling chi spenders / brews. And realistically there's nothing inherently stopping Blizzard from creating another set bonus that creates another relationship like EH and Guard today. I think it's a bit weird to say that's a thing when it's purely a temporary piece of gameplay onset by our set bonus. Largely our core gameplay in Warlords is just the energy spender to chi spender relationship, the chi spender relationship of purifying and shuffle, and then a couple other more or less separate active mitigation tools. I think that a lot of the feeling of removal of chi was that it probably felt a bit cleaner, despite not really changing the gameplay loop. My guess is that it's something that people will just get used to.

On mastery. I think I will take back what I wrote. I still don't quite fancy the new core mechanic of the mastery, but the arguments about it "feeling" wrong is out of place. Still not happy that it doesn't affect magic attacks at all, but again, we're used to that. I wouldn't agree that WoD Elusive Brew is equal to Legion mastery. Even ignoring the mechanical differences, it's a passive vs on-demand contrast. But as I clearly stated - I dislike the general idea of turning many abilities and talents into passive effects, so that may be more of a personal thing.

That's fair enough.

On artifacts. You touched on few different aspects, but I will relate to all of them at once. Only after reading your post I understood what the Dragonfire Brew trait actually does, so I now agree - Breath of Fire does make sense and it does make the rotation a bit more alive. I didn't mention artifact traits in the sections about rotation because I misunderstood how both of the non-passive traits work, so that's on me.

Yeah looking at artifact traits is weird because on one hand they are a part of the complete package but on the other hand again I think that they shouldn't be the thing to make specs interesting this go around. It should make a good spec great, not an okay spec good.

As for the numbers and logs, I think you're right, but I feel confused. If this is how the logs present monk damage taken, then that creates a number of different questions for me .I will need to look into it further.

I want to say this has always been a weird thing with Brewmaster logs.

Where could I read your essays on talents and GotO?

A lot of it's just rants and discussions I've had with some people on the monk Discord, not anything properly codified. Like I said, it's essays worth, so I've just talked about a lot haha.

As for the structure of my post (namely whether it makes sense to compare different tanking classes) I'm leaning to your point of view - it was a good mental exercise for me, but it's probably just asking for the entire feedback to get discarded.

Yeah I mean, a while back I made a post about how to give good feedback (which was actually signal boosted by Celestalon) and I talked a lot about what mindset one should be in to properly give good feedback. And one of the more contentious points was that you kinda can't look at even the old version of the spec and use that as a basis for feedback. For one thing, it makes it very easy to be swayed by anchoring bias, which essentially means that you aren't looking at the new thing objectively because you're too focused on how it's different from the old version without thinking about any of the other changes that have happened in the game and how everything's supposed to work. For another, it lends itself to not being good feedback from just a fundamental point of view.

Good feedback not only points out what's wrong, but why it's wrong and when it's wrong. Saying "Well you got rid of Expel Harm and I don't like that" isn't good feedback. Making the point that what healing we do have right now is unreliable (because of issues of high movement fights, issues of orbs spawning in fire, etc), so perhaps moving back to EH because it was a consistent, reliable, useful and engaging healing tool is better feedback. The latter isn't about Blizzard changing the old version. The latter is about analyzing what is there NOW, based on the current state and paradigms of the game, whether it suffices or feels good, and offering an alternative that was reliable and did work in the past that has potential to translate well into the current game. It exemplifies a mindset focused on the present and the issues there, rather than the fact that any change happened at all.

And the big problem there is that a lot of people see looking back to be a good mindset because it worked at the time or was largely fine at the time. But the problem there is... things changed. And frankly, reverting it back to that point would set the game back months. It's just not a feasible thing that happens. It's not only better for feedback to look at the present... it's ultimately more practical. And unfortunately, if someone's thinking "well if we say enough that we want the old version, it'll come back"... they're kinda fooling themselves. It's this mindset that's ignorant of the fact that... it's not just the class that's changed. It's everything, the balancing of Warlords doesn't inherently apply to Legion so ultimately they wouldn't even get the same thing back, it would ultimately have to be rebalanced, reconfigured in order to be a functioning piece of the new expansion. To some extent, looking across classes for kits is in a similar vein, though I think less extreme. I wouldn't say that all of this makes your feedback liable to be thrown out, but I think it's difficult for the devs to take it and say "Okay so what's the problem here? Not enough buttons? What do these buttons need to do? Do they need more healing? Can we not just buff GotO? Like, what's the issue here?"

When I made that post, someone responded to me saying that it was really awesome for them because beforehand they thought that in order to give good feedback, they needed a Bachelor's degree in game design. The funny thing is, I'm studying game design but what makes good feedback is ultimately your soft skills in communication. Understanding what people get out of what you're saying and being able to expressly communicate what the issues are. Devs are looking at feedback and trying to find what's not working and why, so they have a clear picture of what the problems are and what to improve. Because of how all the abilities in WoW are multifaceted in some way (even something simple like TP has how much damage it deals, how much it costs, and how much it reduces our CD's), being unspecific in feedback means that Blizzard has to guess as to what you're actually trying to communicate on what the problem is. So I applaud you sir for stepping back and looking at your work. That's something I know Blizzard would appreciate. And I apologize for getting a bit ranty there... it's something that's a pretty big deal right now.

[Evolved]

I'm going to be frank on some of the pruning... it's honestly a good thing. Brewmasters were notorious for having a very high skill floor in order to play at a minimum level (read: heroic dungeons pre-buff). Reducing complexity for that is a good thing. There's some questions on whether some things should have been cut but I think that's far more specific to what abilities are necessary rather than just having a bigger kit. You have to realize that with ISB we might take a lot of damage but it's very smoothed out. You're looking at 75% shuffle with ISB active and no other talents or benefits. That's about as high as we could get when we had Shuffle and FB active in previous expansions. That simple utility, which works on magic attacks now too, is very powerful if tuned correctly. Because of that, I think there's a potential argument that we don't need as much in our kit to answer damage. Again, potential argument. You could argue that's up in the air right now.

The problem with that sentiment is that in the quest to "reduce complexity" they funneled 100% of the survivability into 1-2 buttons, which isn't really different than an EB/Guard dynamic, while being significantly less flexible when it comes to playing the class. Keep 100% ISB up or you're bad/dead isn't compelling gameplay, it's atrocious. Those players who had a hard time hitting Guard and EB occasionally aren't going to find hitting ISB any easier. I deal with many people in game design, and if I asked any one of them how you would go about closing the gap in your skill floor/ceiling on a "tank", the first thing that 95% of them would say would be to increase the base mitigation so that even if you're playing badly (not pressing the incredibly complex sequence of 1-2 buttons), you're not going to immediately die. Anyone with basic reasoning skills would likely come to the same conclusion. Is that what Blizzard has done with Brewmaster? No, they decided to go the other way and make a single button practically mandatory to press every X number of seconds. They helped somewhat when they did what many of us were suggesting when the class was announced, and redistributed some stagger from ISB back into the base value, but base mitigation will likely need to be increased or the stagger ratio pushed even further into passive stagger amounts if they want "bad" players to not get crushed for not pressing ISB. Look at it this way; Shuffle was gimped so that people who had a hard time keeping it up 100% of the time weren't getting their junk kicked in, now we want to make 100% ISB uptime the new Shuffle? How does that make any sense?

Our dynamic is mainly that we have no passive mitigation and all our defense is structured around delaying damage via stagger. This leads to us being, in theory, low spike, high damage taken tanks.

The problem with that theory, is that for it to work, after staggered you've off whatever %, you need to be getting hit for comparable values as the other tanks. Just looking at the logs that Alph posted the other day, which aren't definitive and likely had some mistakes, you'll see his BrM getting melee'd significantly harder than his Druid co-tank. For Nyth, average melee hit on Monk, 1.1 million with a high of over 1.5m. Druid had an average of 600k with a max of barely 1m. Reducing a "spike" doesn't mean much if your spike is so much higher to begin with. There are similar issues on live, but there we have the ability to compensate with other tools like Guard/EH, etc. and we no longer have those. So you don't have ISB up, you just took a huge 1.3m melee into your base 35% stagger, what do you do to compensate? If you compare to something like Kilrogg and missing EB; you just got a stack of Shred Armor, what do you do to compensate? ISB and pray isn't "fun" or "less difficult", it's frustrating.

For a skill floor that is supposed to be "easier", it's far more difficult to level as a BrM on Alpha before getting leveled up a bit and some artifact stuff done, than it ever was in WoD (I leveled 3 on live). Since stagger doesn't actually change the amount of damage you take, and your self recovery is abysmal, it really shows up when doing solo and 5 man content. Part of it had to do with damage being so low and taking longer to kill things. I've gone through many of the same zones on Alpha with 3 different of my potential tanks for Legion (Guardian/DH/BrM). I can pull a pack with my Monk and go from 100% to dead and spawn a single Ox orb the entire time, the only recourse being trying to kite and spam a nearly useless Effuse (complete crap as BrM btw), while waiting for Healing Elixirs cooldown. Pull the very same pack on a DH and never drop below 80%. The difference is quite apparent while questing or doing 5 man content, it's very disappointing and beyond frustrating.

Overall I don't like the idea of seeing what other specs have. You can really easily find yourself in a "Grass is greener" place and become off-base on what the true issue is: Can Brewmasters effectively handle all the various situations that they are put into, to the degree the current tanking paradigm demands? Do the tools they have suffice? Looking across specs is great if say, you want to know what to play... but to say it's a good idea to do so to determine whether the toolkit is sufficient is not really looking in the right area, i think.

Of course it's acceptable to compare tanks, just like it's acceptable to compare any other class/role. It's called being practical. Classes are essentially "competing" for the same job, comparing which ones make the job more difficult should be expected. You then judge for yourself whether your desire to play the class justifies the handicap you're placing on your group/raid/playstyle goals. You could do HFC with 5 Holy Priests or gold CM's with a MW, that doesn't mean they would be your first choice when trying to down the content.

[The Madgod]

The problem with that sentiment is that in the quest to "reduce complexity" they funneled 100% of the survivability into 1-2 buttons, which isn't really different than an EB/Guard dynamic, while being significantly less flexible when it comes to playing the class. Keep 100% ISB up or you're bad/dead isn't compelling gameplay, it's atrocious. Those players who had a hard time hitting Guard and EB occasionally aren't going to find hitting ISB any easier. I deal with many people in game design, and if I asked any one of them how you would go about closing the gap in your skill floor/ceiling on a "tank", the first thing that 95% of them would say would be to increase the base mitigation so that even if you're playing badly (not pressing the incredibly complex sequence of 1-2 buttons), you're not going to immediately die. Anyone with basic reasoning skills would likely come to the same conclusion. Is that what Blizzard has done with Brewmaster? No, they decided to go the other way and make a single button practically mandatory to press every X number of seconds. They helped somewhat when they did what many of us were suggesting when the class was announced, and redistributed some stagger from ISB back into the base value, but base mitigation will likely need to be increased or the stagger ratio pushed even further into passive stagger amounts if they want "bad" players to not get crushed for not pressing ISB. Look at it this way; Shuffle was gimped so that people who had a hard time keeping it up 100% of the time weren't getting their junk kicked in, now we want to make 100% ISB uptime the new Shuffle? How does that make any sense?

If you're making the argument that I'm defending all the specific actions that Blizzard has done in the pruning, you're in left field mate. That's all I'm going to say. I'm not interested in discourse with someone who made assumptions on what I said because it's just going to be impossible to realign the discussion to where both parties understand what the other is saying. I don't necessarily disagree with what you said, but it's not about what I said. To make that point, where do I say that the significant amount of stagger shunted into ISB is good for reducing the skill floor? Where do I say that all the buttons being lost is a good thing? The answer to both is that they don't exist. Your whole quote is essentially a response to something that isn't there.

Of course it's acceptable to compare tanks, just like it's acceptable to compare any other class/role. It's called being practical. Classes are essentially "competing" for the same job, comparing which ones make the job more difficult should be expected. You then judge for yourself whether your desire to play the class justifies the handicap you're placing on your group/raid/playstyle goals. You could do HFC with 5 Holy Priests or gold CM's with a MW, that doesn't mean they would be your first choice when trying to down the content.

You're essentially repeating the argument I made before, which is that it's great to look at for what class you want to play.

Here's the problem. What does that do for the devs and how does it give them the feedback necessary to properly improve Brewmasters? The answer is that it doesn't. At all. Saying that other specs have other tools is great but it's worthless for feedback. The question is whether or not the spec needs those tools and you don't need to look at any other class to answer that. If a spec is taking too much damage you can buff it. If its having an exceedingly hard time with a certain type of damage, you can give it a tool to answer that. If a tool it has isn't sufficient for its job, you can buff or change that tool. None of these design decisions require looking across the fence.

This is an attitude which just fails at delivering any significant information to the devs while at the same time just making the community saltier than it already is. That's why I have a problem with it and that's why it shouldn't be an acceptable form of feedback. Because for the purposes that this thread is for... it has no bearing, no significance, and no clarity that it brings to the discussion. None that would be better than simply ignoring it and focusing on the issues at hand.

And ultimately, I'm not going to derail this thread any more by ranting on what is and isn't proper feedback because I've said it way too much this cycle haha. Seriously, it just boils down to understanding what devs need to hear. That's honestly the long and short of it and what they need to hear is whether Brewmaster and its abilities and capacity to handle various situations is good. Not whether Brewmaster is good compared to other tanks. Not right now. It's not in a place where inter-spec balance should be on the table in any significant measure. You made the point that its really hard to even just level as a Brewmaster right now. That's very clearly something that you don't need to look at other specs to work on.

[Xiaojin]

Not sure if this is the right thread for this kind of discussion, but what if the stagger from IsB actually became passive and we instead get 2-3 PB-like buttons all with slightly different functionality but a shared resource? E.g., one purifies your stagger completely, another one purifies only a certain % of your stagger but also heals/shields you, a third one purifies only a certain % as well, but grants you dodge, armor or plain damage reduction for a short amount of time (also: your AM flag). Of course our brew generation would have to be lowered significantly. But right now with 100% uptime on IsB while actively tanking being mandatory, IsB sounds boring and like something that might give brewmasters a bad reputation due to a somewhat high skill floor.

[The Madgod]

I'd be for that honestly. I was planning a bit of a marathon of feedback once I was able to get my hands on the spec and one of the big things i was thinking about was the potential for ISB to be a bit too similar to shuffle. There's a lot of things that go into skill floors and I think reducing our AM principally down to one core mechanic would help that but the onus is still that you gotta maintain this buff. There's still some better things that could be done though, i think.

[Deleted]

As for comparing different classes and the value of such feedback - after some consideration, I don't think I quite agree with you Madgod, I believe at this stage of the development process such feedback can be valuable. Let me try to explain why.

If we were in a situation where Legion is already released, classes have their tool-sets completed and that is extremely unlikely to change, all that is left to do is balancing. And then, I agree, comparing different classes doesn't help very much - it is entirely possible that class A has 5 tools and struggles while class B has 1 tool and manages just fine.

However at this point, in alpha, tools are being toyed with, added and removed. I think it's in fact very important to say that the sentiment from playing a PTR BM monk right now is that it is, regardless of how effective of a tank you are, it's just not entertaining. I made that very clear in my first post - it's not about IBS being strong or weak, it's about it not making for engaging gameplay. The suggestion made few posts above, about a flat stagger amount, but different types of Purifying Brew is one way to go about it, but my main thought at this point is to express this - ISB/PB in its curent PTR incarnation don't feel interesting to play with. Regardless of balance.

[The Madgod]

As for comparing different classes and the value of such feedback - after some consideration, I don't think I quite agree with you Madgod, I believe at this stage of the development process such feedback can be valuable. Let me try to explain why.

If we were in a situation where Legion is already released, classes have their tool-sets completed and that is extremely unlikely to change, all that is left to do is balancing. And then, I agree, comparing different classes doesn't help very much - it is entirely possible that class A has 5 tools and struggles while class B has 1 tool and manages just fine.

However at this point, in alpha, tools are being toyed with, added and removed. I think it's in fact very important to say that the sentiment from playing a PTR BM monk right now is that it is, regardless of how effective of a tank you are, it's just not entertaining. I made that very clear in my first post - it's not about IBS being strong or weak, it's about it not making for engaging gameplay. The suggestion made few posts above, about a flat stagger amount, but different types of Purifying Brew is one way to go about it, but my main thought at this point is to express this - ISB/PB in its curent PTR incarnation don't feel interesting to play with. Regardless of balance.

The problem is that nothing you said requires one to look at any of the other specs at all to make those judgment calls. You can do all of that purely by looking soley at Brewmasters and Brewmasters alone.

Mentioning any other specs, really, when discussing issues of a specific spec, is just white noise. This response just reaffirms that. The only way mentioning another spec would even work out in my mind would be to point to a specific mechanic which might help... but that's very different from comparing specs and their overall kits. It's looking for a solution to a specific problem of the spec in question, which means focus is still only really on that spec alone.

Frankly the only real time it's appropriate is when actually talking balancing and that's just to say "Well, this spec is better than the other because of numbers." You're not comparing kits, you're comparing potency of kits. If the alpha is still in a place where tools of a spec need to be modified, you're nowhere close to that point.