[LEGION] Brewmaster Discussion

[keqe]

Well, now I'd just like to know how it would have been with some other tank. Because "you have to do everything perfectly and play like a god and it will work" when other tanks just do ordinary stuff doesn't seem like that fun.

But sure if it is truly rewarding the play then I'd like it.

[Inuyaki]

So after my feedback from the HoV lvl2 yesterday, I think I should write feedback on my normal HoV mythic. We ended the lvl2 because 1 dd hat to go and you can't use other people for mythic+ runs.
The mythic run after that was really easy. Mainly (I think) because we had 1 more stun, more dmg and I knew the dangerous stuff. Same problem Saiyoran encountered at last boss. As long as something can do high dmg without you knowing the timing, the class does not work!
Well, if you know there is such a thing, just chain ISB with 100% uptime and let the healer heal you. Which can't be intended. But at least both healer and you get ~200k hps

The class is really hard to rate right now in undergeared content. I didn't play other tanks, but I can't believe they are that squishy.
We especially need raid tests again imo. Right now I feel it is gambling going into progression with a BrM, not knowing if his gear will be enough or not :/

[stross01]

Yeah its just a drinking animation but it can lock your character up a bit and look a little awkward if you really pay attention to it but its pretty brief if you go right into another ability.



I've also been not using a follower as well the entire time and have felt 100% fine with world content because I didn't want to skew my perception of how the world questing felt on Brewmaster. I'm sure there are people who are having trouble, but I'm mass pulling to speed things along and I'm totally fine so I'm curious as to what you think is a problem when it comes to questing in the broken isles.

I feel if Blizzard crapped in some people's mouths, they'd chew it with a smile. Something so minor doesn't mean it's so minor that they shouldn't bother fixing it, it means that it's so minor, it should be fixed already.

The problem comes in two possible forms: you don't have Obstinate Determination or you pull more mobs than can be healed by the single orb. Both can be avoided, but when every other tank can effectively pull unlimited enemies and end the fight in 10-20 seconds with full health and no cd's used, I hope that even you can see the discrepancy. This starts to disappear when you gain that +1 level on them (from not leaving the area after you level, I guess), when you gain 20-30 ilvls in the same zone, or when you're fighting undertuned mobs vs normal vs overtuned. I can't even imagine how many mob abilities have been hitting for 1 to 35 to 50 damage per hit or per second.

I've said it like 100 times by now, but being bound to only Healing Elixirs and only Obstinate Determination is pretty stupid. I'm not sure people appreciate how far apart artifact trait 1-15 are from trait 16-30+.

To Saiyoran and Inuyaki: Try Chi Burst. It does a lot more damage/healing than the tooltip says.

[Julmara]

gonna hope the beta build got a nice buff for us

[Saiyoran]

To Saiyoran and Inuyaki: Try Chi Burst. It does a lot more damage/healing than the tooltip says.

I was running Burst for mine, it seems extremely strong. Between that, Keg Smash, RJW, and BoF, I was pretty much even or beating our dps on AoE, and barely behind on single target (warrior had all AoE talents though so that's probably why).

[Deleted]

gonna hope the beta build got a nice buff for us

I hope that too, but after months with all important feedback ignored i don't have any hopes for a change tbh.

[Leblue]

The problem comes in two possible forms: you don't have Obstinate Determination or you pull more mobs than can be healed by the single orb. Both can be avoided, but when every other tank can effectively pull unlimited enemies and end the fight in 10-20 seconds with full health and no cd's used, I hope that even you can see the discrepancy. This starts to disappear when you gain that +1 level on them (from not leaving the area after you level, I guess), when you gain 20-30 ilvls in the same zone, or when you're fighting undertuned mobs vs normal vs overtuned. I can't even imagine how many mob abilities have been hitting for 1 to 35 to 50 damage per hit or per second.

You do realize a lot of this statement literally comes down to tuning issues both on mob sides (not doing enough damage or doing too much) and other tanks (prot pally and guardian druids being effectively gods relative to other tanks). That said, questing content isn't meant to be difficult but I'm still 100% unsure where you get this notion that questing on Brewmaster is awful or hard to do without dying because prior to ever getting OD I was 100% completely and totally fine and rarely even used Healing Elixirs (which I'd always run while questing before Legion anyway) to keep myself alive unless I did something really stupid like standing in rare mob aoes.

The leveling/gearing thing. This might sound crazy, but I'm going to wager that with the new "scaling" levels that most people don't find much reason to leave a zone outside of your super min/maxing power levelers and they clear out a zone before moving onto the next one. I mean that might not be the norm, but I'm willing to bet a large percentage does this and hell it may be intended to feel like you outlevel/outgear the mobs as you move through the zone and improve. I'm not sure what you're looking for in the questing experience other than "can you complete it and is it better than being miserable". Even then like with healers you'd probably just want to do dps anyway and I wouldn't be surprised if some players who play tanks feel like they need to change to dps as well.

The animation lock has been reported and whether they fix it or not is up to them seeing it as a priority over the other things I'm sure they have to fix. Is it annoying? Yes. Will it break gameplay for some people? Yes. Do I personally think its this huge thing that completely ruins it right up there with dumping hot feces into my mouth and chewing it? No. We have no way of knowing what their priority queue is or all the weird potential things that animation and its coding are linked to. If they don't fix it, then keep putting feedback on it.

[Leblue]

Pretty sure this is a troll but I'll bite.

There is so much useless feedback in here.

I'm curious of what feedback you find less than useful as its pretty hard to make geniunely useless feedback outside of just going "this game sucks" or "this game is great" which are too general to really be terribly useful outside of trying to downplay the game or say that you enjoy it. More specific examples would probably go a long way.

If you want to be limited in mythic dungeons by your skill level rather than your class choice, be able to perform miracles when shit goes down in groups, be viable in competitive raiding and be rewarded for your skilled play with rewarding results; playing BrM is not for you. Pick another tank.

We still don't know how things will proceed with final tunings and any other changes. I think its still way too early to even say anything at all. All tanks got squished down in power to varying degrees that'll probably be brought closer to parity come actual launch and from there even about a month in when raids launch. If you want to talk playstyles then you could probably start pointing in direction, but viability isn't going to be something you can hard and fast determine till the content is actually available because they could literally buff us to be passively amazing if they really wanted to and make it an entirely moot point. I'm sure with using Fortifying Brew you could play hero for a brief period as well kind of like you can now, but the overall strength and ability to will be toned down because of the stated goals of weakening the overall strength of tanks.

Some dudes in here are saying BrM is fine because it feels fun or interesting to play and forgetting that other tanking classes exist. BrM is not the best performing tank in literally any situation in beta at the moment.

I don't think most of us are forgetting other tank classes exist. In fact, if you go to other tank class threads there're similar complaints in one shape or another. You'll have some who enjoy the spec, some who greatly dislike the way the spec has gone, and everything inbetween. While it may be true Brewmasters aren't the best at anything at the moment, that's mostly irrelevant until final tuning happens and we see where all the chips fall.

Because you enjoy killing elites while questing doesn't mean Brewmaster is fine. Saying Healing Elixir is a big heal and feels nice to use is useless feedback. That shit distracts from serious discussion relating to the viability of the spec in serious environments.

That's feedback that in the end affects more of the playerbase than raiding or pvp will ever affect to be 100% honest. While I myself and many others have more vested interest in it being better off in other areas of the game, pointing out how the spec feels in other forms of content isn't bad or useless unless they're just generalizing it to the point you can't pull anything useful.

An example: "Brewmasters feel great against world elites".
Well why do they feel great? That tells us little.

Better Example: "Brewmasters feel like they're sturdy enough with Ironskin Brew to be able to float around 35% or at least hang on until Healing Elixirs comes back up to sustain themselves in harder world content".
There we identify what makes them feel stronger, what's causing that feeling, and then from there the devs can say "well we do/don't want this to happen" and can go from there. I'm not saying everyone all the time is making the most fantastic feedback ever, but there's a good bit of decent feedback to be found if you don't let a bias get in the way of it.

Brewmasters could have the tanking capabilities of an arcane mage and guys in here would be giving feedback on whether or not pressing Chi Burst felt rewarding enough to warrant a 30 second cooldown. Get real bros.

While its important to make sure the feedback that the spec feels like paper or feels too sturdy or whatever you feel out there, giving feedback on individual abilities isn't a bad thing either. There's more than one piece of the spec that makes it how it is and we want as much to go into as possible. I want all my buttons to feel good to press and I'm all for saying X, Y, and Z buttons feel great to press, but L, M, and O feel weak and like they have little impact. Pointing out mechanical problems is good as well, but we also need to be wary of pointing out things that could very well be tuning until raid testing or later in the beta when we get close to launch and numbers are going to be closer than to what we'll see.

[Inuyaki]

No changes? Except that Niuzao one?

[Saiyoran]

No changes? Except that Niuzao one?

Expel got a damage buff lol

Edit: Anyone tried Niuzao yet? I haven't been on since the build. How is he?

[Inuyaki]

Expel got a damage buff lol

Only a tooltip fix, it was always 10%, Celestalon even said that in his blue post when he tols us EH is coming back

[Leblue]

Niuzao pulsing aoe damage puts him back at being a reskinned Xuen which is fine for me imo, it was something he was certainly missing in his previous incarnation.

I'm just ready for some raid testing so we can finally see how things are panning out and hopefully they can start getting tuning done and we have more real life experience to base how things feel right now. Mythic dungeons are obviously a good source of "things that hit hard" but its still not a heroic or mythic raid boss and there weren't that many bosses tested while BrM was even available iirc.

[Ampere]

Only a tooltip fix, it was always 10%, Celestalon even said that in his blue post when he tols us EH is coming back

Correct. It was already 10%

This is from a run I did 20 days ago

[Tinary]

Considers how brewmaster at the moment feels I could only say that in my opinion, it works great, I dont mind the high risk play but mythic raiders/skilled players are not the only ones playing it. Being low and not noticing timers/incoming huge hits are really annoying on brewmaster at the moment because all our def cooldowns are made so that we have to use them before the hit, not after or during. This could be easily fixed/improved by adding a thing like Purgatory or that paladin skill they had, avengers sthing, that if an attack kills you, you get certain amount of health/shield. For example:

Celestial avoidance: If a damaging attack brings you below 10% of health, you gain an absorbsion shield, worth of 10%/7% of your max health for 6 seconds, cant occure more than once every 2 min. (animation could be like Niuzao shrug or sthing)

Or we could have a little shield/def cd added into artifact trait instead of that 15% dodge after brew. Something like:

Blessing of Niuzao: Sacrifice one of your healing orbs to gain an absorb shield worth of 7%/10% of your max health for 6 seconds. 1.5m cd. (Stagger would ignore the shield and still damage you instead of just chewing trough the shield.)

This would end the problems of brewmasters dying cause of the risky plays. So far, it feels like playing a brew means you gotta risk it to get the bizkit style of play but while you risk it, you aint getting a freaking bizkit, you just die, horribly, painfully, sadly and tbh, while we die, other tanks just laugh. I dont mind that, since we laughed at them most of the WoD but still, would be nice to actually get a reward feeling for this playstyle. I am not asking to give us back guard in pve, it was too OP but a lil cooldown to let us play would be nice. I dont want to depends on the healer all the time. I am a brewmaster monk, I am agile, swift and elusive or well, I should be. Atleast make it so, that I could live few seconds without a pocket healer. The passive and Active damage reduction do not fill the cap for me. Well, problem could be just me also but it still feels really weird to see a healer running after you all the time when you move to avoid shit and she panics when you move a step out of her range. Tho, I dont see a problem doing that with any other tank class at the moment since they can either heal or use damage redu on the run while we, um, yeah, expel harm and then just wither away.

[stross01]

You do realize a lot of this statement literally comes down to tuning issues both on mob sides (not doing enough damage or doing too much) and other tanks (prot pally and guardian druids being effectively gods relative to other tanks). That said, questing content isn't meant to be difficult but I'm still 100% unsure where you get this notion that questing on Brewmaster is awful or hard to do without dying because prior to ever getting OD I was 100% completely and totally fine and rarely even used Healing Elixirs (which I'd always run while questing before Legion anyway) to keep myself alive unless I did something really stupid like standing in rare mob aoes.

The leveling/gearing thing. This might sound crazy, but I'm going to wager that with the new "scaling" levels that most people don't find much reason to leave a zone outside of your super min/maxing power levelers and they clear out a zone before moving onto the next one. I mean that might not be the norm, but I'm willing to bet a large percentage does this and hell it may be intended to feel like you outlevel/outgear the mobs as you move through the zone and improve. I'm not sure what you're looking for in the questing experience other than "can you complete it and is it better than being miserable". Even then like with healers you'd probably just want to do dps anyway and I wouldn't be surprised if some players who play tanks feel like they need to change to dps as well.

The animation lock has been reported and whether they fix it or not is up to them seeing it as a priority over the other things I'm sure they have to fix. Is it annoying? Yes. Will it break gameplay for some people? Yes. Do I personally think its this huge thing that completely ruins it right up there with dumping hot feces into my mouth and chewing it? No. We have no way of knowing what their priority queue is or all the weird potential things that animation and its coding are linked to. If they don't fix it, then keep putting feedback on it.

If every tank can perform better than you in every regard, your first thought is "they must be gods" and not "we must be trash"?

If you don't use Li Li or go the direction of Obstinate Determination, you're going to have a bad leveling time as your healing is very, very, VERY close to 0. Spamming Effuse 30 times between fights or carrying a bag of food is unacceptable when every other spec ends every other fight at 100% hp and mana, no matter what artifact line they choose to follow.

I've been posting about the animations since the literal first hour of the first day.

- - - Updated - - -

This would end the problems of brewmasters dying cause of the risky plays. So far, it feels like playing a brew means you gotta risk it to get the bizkit style of play but while you risk it, you aint getting a freaking bizkit, you just die, horribly, painfully, sadly and tbh, while we die, other tanks just laugh. I dont mind that, since we laughed at them most of the WoD but still, would be nice to actually get a reward feeling for this playstyle. I am not asking to give us back guard in pve, it was too OP but a lil cooldown to let us play would be nice. I dont want to depends on the healer all the time. I am a brewmaster monk, I am agile, swift and elusive or well, I should be. Atleast make it so, that I could live few seconds without a pocket healer. The passive and Active damage reduction do not fill the cap for me. Well, problem could be just me also but it still feels really weird to see a healer running after you all the time when you move to avoid shit and she panics when you move a step out of her range. Tho, I dont see a problem doing that with any other tank class at the moment since they can either heal or use damage redu on the run while we, um, yeah, expel harm and then just wither away.

I've found that healers will immediately panic when a brewmaster hits 20-40%, as logic would imply that they should heal us as soon as possible, maybe even neglecting dps to do so. Except that this is our standard operation.

There's no advantage to playing at 100% peak efficiency. It doesn't provide you any benefit over any other tank and you're about as far from the smoothest tank as you can possibly get. Your hp is going down by about 10% every half second during normal raid combat and the boss hits you for 30-60% every 2 seconds. No other tank takes this kind of incoming damage.

Again, panic tanking and panic healing aren't only around, they're the MO for the 5th expansion in a row.

Niuzao pulsing aoe damage puts him back at being a reskinned Xuen which is fine for me imo, it was something he was certainly missing in his previous incarnation.

Stomp is currently not working at all. It's hard to judge his usefulness right now.

[Leblue]

If every tank can perform better than you in every regard, your first thought is "they must be gods" and not "we must be trash"?

If you don't use Li Li or go the direction of Obstinate Determination, you're going to have a bad leveling time as your healing is very, very, VERY close to 0. Spamming Effuse 30 times between fights or carrying a bag of food is unacceptable when every other spec ends every other fight at 100% hp and mana, no matter what artifact line they choose to follow.

I'm going to say again, I just recently got OD and I've never ever used a follower ever while leveling and I never ever felt like I needed to stop and eat outside of the initial artifact scenario. I'm at 108 mass pulling like I've done since 100 when I just got my artifact. At this point though, its literally one anecdote against another so unless there's some grievous and very objectively testable thing that absolutely murders us while literally every single spec in the game gets a free pass I don't think there's a problem here. The only possible point I would make on questing is make sure you have healing elixirs because it goes a really long way and use your Chi Wave/Chi Burst talent if you don't have Eye of the tiger. Healing Elixirs has always been great for solo content anyway.

I've found that healers will immediately panic when a brewmaster hits 20-40%, as logic would imply that they should heal us as soon as possible, maybe even neglecting dps to do so. Except that this is our standard operation.

There's no advantage to playing at 100% peak efficiency. It doesn't provide you any benefit over any other tank and you're about as far from the smoothest tank as you can possibly get. Your hp is going down by about 10% every half second during normal raid combat and the boss hits you for 30-60% every 2 seconds. No other tank takes this kind of incoming damage.

Again, panic tanking and panic healing aren't only around, they're the MO for the 5th expansion in a row.

The panic healing aspect of harder content is what has me concerned for the overall viability of Brewmaster in more difficult raid content during initial release of a tier before everyone gets a good amount of gear. That said, I still think its a bit early to slot Brewmaster comfortably in the slot that Guardian druids inhabited during BRF. I am concerned for the sanity of healers though trying to judge if you're "okay" at 40 ~ 60% or about to get crushed. If its difficult/not worth it to top off other tanks or with the combined power of multiple healers it happens for all tanks regardless then I'll probably be less worried. Need raid testing stat pl0x.

Stomp is currently not working at all. It's hard to judge his usefulness right now.

I'm just glad they changed it to have some aoe so I'm not too worried about it being fixed later since it was just implemented. Should just be a quick bug report from a bunch of us about it not working and it'll (hopefully) be golden.

[stross01]

You can test raid mobs now. There are many all over the world.

Go.

There's no need to guess or assume. You can actively compare yourself to other tanks with similar ilvl.

The difference between Brm and every other tank now is like 10 times the difference between Guardian and everyone else in BRF.

You can literally die in two melee hits without ISB. If you purify a full red stagger bar, you'll be back at max in a single hit, except this time you won't have another purify. The other tanks have armor bonuses, every single one. We do not. Our avoidance isn't as high as the mastery leads you to believe. The other tanks take 200k+ less up front damage and don't have to worry about any stagger. The other tanks take less over damage per second than we take in strictly stagger damage.

[Saiyoran]

Doing 2 world bosses last night I didn't have any issues. Didn't watch the other tanks but I'm kind of over the whole "sky is falling" thing.

[Muddler]

Doing 2 world bosses last night I didn't have any issues. Didn't watch the other tanks but I'm kind of over the whole "sky is falling" thing.

Same. Tired of the agenda certain individuals push on here and literally espouse anecdotal hyperbole when actual beta testers I know have legitimate and thoughtful critiques through video and logs. But whatever.

[Khorm]

Brewmaster has the best rotation of any tank. Tuning is something that will come.