[LEGION] Brewmaster Discussion

[gregstafelam]

We still got this:
http://legion.wowhead.com/spell=117952

Thats important, today its useless, but i never thought about testing it on Alpha... I'll give it a try today
Thanks for remembering me that!

[Marhault]

Thats important, today its useless, but i never thought about testing it on Alpha... I'll give it a try today
Thanks for remembering me that!

It's apparently quite a bit buffed for ratios too. From 112% to 700%. May actually work for us.

[Saiyoran]

Been doing dungeons on alpha all day.

The Celestalon playstyle is fucking awful. Every healer I've gotten is getting cancer trying to top me off, every mechanic completely fucks over ox orbs, and Purify honestly still just sucks. Even on fights where I don't get to 60-70% stagger, I'm still just slowly dying with no way to stop the bleeding. The orbs don't spawn frequently enough, can't follow me when I have to move, and on top of that I just die too fucking fast for any of it to matter.

[Deleted]

Been doing dungeons on alpha all day.

The Celestalon playstyle is fucking awful. Every healer I've gotten is getting cancer trying to top me off, every mechanic completely fucks over ox orbs, and Purify honestly still just sucks. Even on fights where I don't get to 60-70% stagger, I'm still just slowly dying with no way to stop the bleeding. The orbs don't spawn frequently enough, can't follow me when I have to move, and on top of that I just die too fucking fast for any of it to matter.

Are you saying that a person at Blizzard can be wrong? Shenanigans.
/sarcasm off

[Saiyoran]

Are you saying that a person at Blizzard can be wrong? Shenanigans.
/sarcasm off

Just the fucking conviction he has that he's right and every single person playing Alpha Brewmaster is wrong leads me to believe he has some kind of social disorder, and not that he's just a complete moron. At least I hope so, only explanation for the ridiculous disparity between Brewmaster play and Celestalon's explanation of how Blizzard thinks Brewmaster play is.

[Ampere]

Been doing dungeons on alpha all day.

The Celestalon playstyle is fucking awful. Every healer I've gotten is getting cancer trying to top me off, every mechanic completely fucks over ox orbs, and Purify honestly still just sucks. Even on fights where I don't get to 60-70% stagger, I'm still just slowly dying with no way to stop the bleeding. The orbs don't spawn frequently enough, can't follow me when I have to move, and on top of that I just die too fucking fast for any of it to matter.

I think it's fundamentally at odds with how dungeons work, constant movement and facing many varying mobs.

Patchwerk raid boss (which they don't make anymore), it might work

[klaghatagh]

It just leads me to think that nobody on the class design team plays Brewmaster at any level that matters and so they're basing it all on some kind of internal simulation or something.

And even if tuning were to fix our issues, I'm not sure I'd even want to play the spec in Legion. Based on gameplay videos and description, it just seems so boring: so much of our kit is passive.

[Evolved]

I just run around in dungeons saying to myself:

I'm a Brewmaster, my stagger is invincible.
I'm a Brewmaster, I can never die.
I'm a Brewmaster, my Ox orbs will sustain me through anything.

That's usually followed up with my death from a 4 mob trash pack in a normal dungeon.

It's actually doable, but it's not what I would call "fun". It feels like I'm doing normal dungeons on hardmode and counting myself lucky that I managed to make it through the whole thing. Healers hate healing me, DPS hate following me around as I pick up orbs or have to roll away to stay alive, but apparently I'm unkillable.

Everything is fine here, ship it.

[v1perz53]

You know, in theory I don't hate the base idea of what Celestaton was describing, and parts of it actually sound fun. But I definitely think aspects of it don't work at all in practice. Fights are not nearly static enough for GotO to work as is. There absolutely needs to be some way to either reposition or just absorb your orbs. On live, when you generate 200 orbs per second, it isn't a big deal, but with the legion design if your vital orb is dropped while the boss is en route to the new position, your only option is gone. Just give a spell (make it on the GCD to make it worse than picking them up normally) that simply repositions your orbs back to around you (obviously eating them would be best, but I could live with a reposition) and it helps quite a bit. Also, the whole "sit at 65% HP" really means we need larger HP pools to sustain it. There needs to be no situation where we can 100-0 in a few seconds or the design of the class doesn't work. I know in some mythic dungeons a trash pack can insta-kill us but that CAN be fixed by tuning, doesn't necessarily mean the mechanics don't work.

Also, random aside, but are BrM the absolute only tank whose artifact ability has no impact on survivability at all?

[Marhault]

You know, in theory I don't hate the base idea of what Celestaton was describing, and parts of it actually sound fun. But I definitely think aspects of it don't work at all in practice. Fights are not nearly static enough for GotO to work as is. There absolutely needs to be some way to either reposition or just absorb your orbs. On live, when you generate 200 orbs per second, it isn't a big deal, but with the legion design if your vital orb is dropped while the boss is en route to the new position, your only option is gone. Just give a spell (make it on the GCD to make it worse than picking them up normally) that simply repositions your orbs back to around you (obviously eating them would be best) and it helps quite a bit. Also, the whole "sit at 65% HP" really means we need larger HP pools to sustain it. There needs to be no situation where we can 100-0 in a few seconds or the design of the class doesn't work. I know in some mythic dungeons a trash pack can insta-kill us but that CAN be fixed by tuning, doesn't necessarily mean the mechanics don't work.

Also, random aside, but are BrM the absolute only tank whose artifact ability has no impact on survivability at all?

The Artifact ability reduces the damage of the targets by 15% for the duration of the debuff. The tooltip is just terrible about this information though.

[klaghatagh]

What they could do is give us a spell that heals us for a moderate amount. Put it on a cooldown large enough to prevent us from spamming it, but that gives us some control over our self-healing and not leave us reliant on double RNG: that an orb spawns when we need it, and is in a place where we can get it.

They could call it "Remove Danger" or "Extrude Pain" or "Dislodge Impairment".

[DisposableHero]

Replace Chi Wave with a form of expel harm and give it a suction effect for GotOx orbs?

I see this suggestion a lot, but I think a more effective means of doing this is to have gift of the ox be a stacking buff on the monk created the same way it is now, and expel harm as a healing spell that consumes a stack to heal. I'd like this because you could then create other things to do with ox stacks that would give you tradeoffs in your rotation, for example:

Elusive Brew - consumes a stack to prevent mastery from resetting on dodge for 5 seconds
have Breath of Fire consume stacks to deal additional damage so you have an option to consume the stacks offensively with maybe a smaller defensive benefit like dragonfire brew, or have an ability to consume stacks to empower the damage of breath of fire and blackout strike for a short duration. Something that lets you trade defense for offense when it is called for.

[Evolved]

No, the Brewmaster artifact has a pretty big impact on survival. There are 3 traits for Ox orbs alone. Dark Side of the Moon is great for reducing melee hits.

Honestly part of the survival issues in dungeons is partly due to not having maxed artifacts in them like you do in raid testing. What it doesn't change, is the fact that other classes are having an easier time in dungeons with the same levels of artifacts. If it takes a fully maxed artifact for Brewmaster to compete, then there are issues.

[stae60]

I see this suggestion a lot, but I think a more effective means of doing this is to have gift of the ox be a stacking buff on the monk created the same way it is now, and expel harm as a healing spell that consumes a stack to heal. I'd like this because you could then create other things to do with ox stacks that would give you tradeoffs in your rotation, for example:

Elusive Brew - consumes a stack to prevent mastery from resetting on dodge for 5 seconds
have Breath of Fire consume stacks to deal additional damage so you have an option to consume the stacks offensively with maybe a smaller defensive benefit like dragonfire brew, or have an ability to consume stacks to empower the damage of breath of fire and blackout strike for a short duration. Something that lets you trade defense for offense when it is called for.

You... I like you. That would actually give us control and be fun. At least more fun that what is currently implemented.

[Evolved]

Also, does the Brewmaster artifact annoy the shit out of anyone else? The kegs are constantly bouncing around every time you move. It's like they have the physics engine cranked up to 9000 and they flop everywhere, all the time.

[v1perz53]

No, the Brewmaster artifact has a pretty big impact on survival. There are 3 traits for Ox orbs alone. Dark Side of the Moon is great for reducing melee hits.

Honestly part of the survival issues in dungeons is partly due to not having maxed artifacts in them like you do in raid testing. What it doesn't change, is the fact that other classes are having an easier time in dungeons with the same levels of artifacts. If it takes a fully maxed artifact for Brewmaster to compete, then there are issues.

No I only meant Flaming Keg specifically, obviously the traits have plenty of benefits. The 15% reduction in damage done aspect is missing from tooltips so it looked like it was just an AoE damage ability on a long cooldown. Still not super interesting versus something like Rage of the Sleeper, but what can you do.

I see this suggestion a lot, but I think a more effective means of doing this is to have gift of the ox be a stacking buff on the monk created the same way it is now, and expel harm as a healing spell that consumes a stack to heal. I'd like this because you could then create other things to do with ox stacks that would give you tradeoffs in your rotation, for example:

I quite like this suggestion actually, though for whatever reason they really seem to be tied to the idea of orbs being physical things that we have to pick up. Maybe our constant strafing left and right to pick them up makes us seem more drunk... Which is pretty much the only reason I settled on an ability to reposition the orbs around you, maybe on 5 sec CD? Because they seem to love those physically existing orbs so much I don't see that aspect changing as much as I would love it to.

[DisposableHero]

I quite like this suggestion actually, though for whatever reason they really seem to be tied to the idea of orbs being physical things that we have to pick up. Maybe our constant strafing left and right to pick them up makes us seem more drunk... Which is pretty much the only reason I settled on an ability to reposition the orbs around you, maybe on 5 sec CD? Because they seem to love those physically existing orbs so much I don't see that aspect changing as much as I would love it to.

I think it started way back when with the class fantasy and finding ways to get that stumbling around drunk feel, but at this point, their attachment to the physical orbs is pure hubris. They are invested in them. Significant amounts of code have been written, debugged, and published for the spawning and collecting of orbs. Art assets exist for the orb spawns. Money and time has been invested in making this mechanic a thing and they aren't really willing to discard that because it means admitting they got behind a really bad idea.

[Blur4stuff]

Orbs would be perfectly fine if they give monks the demon hunter treatment. Give monks a way to pull in an orb. When i'm on DH tank pulling in soul fragments I keep thinking, "Where the fuck was this on my Monk for the past few years?".

[gregstafelam]

No I only meant Flaming Keg specifically, obviously the traits have plenty of benefits. The 15% reduction in damage done aspect is missing from tooltips so it looked like it was just an AoE damage ability on a long cooldown. Still not super interesting versus something like Rage of the Sleeper, but what can you do.



I quite like this suggestion actually, though for whatever reason they really seem to be tied to the idea of orbs being physical things that we have to pick up. Maybe our constant strafing left and right to pick them up makes us seem more drunk... Which is pretty much the only reason I settled on an ability to reposition the orbs around you, maybe on 5 sec CD? Because they seem to love those physically existing orbs so much I don't see that aspect changing as much as I would love it to.

Yea thats probably the point, the class "fantasy" of we looking retarded dancing in front of the boss while no one other than the monk BM can see the small healing spheres (not even the monk BM can see it very well atm...)

[Pucek]

I'm not a hardcore BrM, just a casual player, but what I see here and on official forums concerns me greatly, mostly because staying below 100% hp is not intuitive and not always an option. What about an ability that would let you lower your hp and spawn orbs next to you on demand. Something like:

Vomit/Puke/Throw up - 3 stacks - 10 sec recharge - Throw up 10% of your hp and spawn 3 gifts of the ox around you. This ability cannot bring you lower than 70%(or whatever "sweet spot") of your max hp.

Tbh. this idea is half-joke so don't take it too seriously.