[BREWMASTER] 7.X Discussion Thread

[Chuupag]

Alright there seems to be a lot of misinformation going on in this thread primarily surrounding the 45 and 100 talent rows. Here is what they all do and the reasons I take what I take.

The 45 tier basically boils down to Light Brewing vs Black Ox Brew, as Gift of the Mists does not affect our brew generation at all and turns your more toward the DH/DK style of tanking where you take more damage then heal it back. So Light Brewing reduces the cooldown of your Ironskin/Purifying brews and increase the maximum charges whereas Black Ox Brew is basically the old Chi Brew in that it immediately refills your brews and energy.

Using 0 haste as a starting point, Light Brewing makes Iron/Purify a 18 second recharge, Keg Smash a 8 sec, and over a 2 min span you would have 15 Keg Smashes for 60 more seconds of recharge and in that time you would have enough energy for a maximum of 24 Tiger Palms giving 24 more seconds or recharge...but 30% of those will Face Palm with 3/3 giving an additional second, totaling 31. Totaling this all up you would recharge not quite 12 brews over those 2 minutes, and added to the 4 you started with you would net not quite 16 over 2 mins.

Again using 0 haste, Black Ox Brew makes the recharge 21 seconds. You would get the same 15 Kegs and 60 seconds for them. You would get slightly more than 24 Tiger Palms since Black Ox Brew refills your energy in addition to refill your brew, but to figure out the cooldown you need to do a bit of math since Black Ox Brew is itself reduced by Keg and Tiger Palm. With a base cooldown of 90 seconds you are actually going to have it up roughly every 45 seconds. So in that 2 minute window you will get 2 uses, giving you enough energy for ~6 more Tiger Palms since you will never get full use of the energy refunded. Mathing all that out you would get ~10.5 recharges in that time, plus 3 you started with giving you ~13.5 over 2 mins.

So low haste seems pretty cut and dry that Light Brewing is better for brew generation. Let's look at medium haste level at this point. I'll be using the haste I have on my gear so I'm not just making up numbers.

15.34% haste gives Light Brewing 15.6 seconds on your brews. With 6.94 on Keg Smash and 11.53 energy regen, throwing all the above math at it gives a bit over 18 brews.

15.34% haste with Black Ox Brew gives 18.2 seconds on brews. Although at this point you will be getting Black Ox Brew roughly every 40 seconds...so you will get a 3rd hit in right at the end of our 2 min window. This is the kicker...b/c with these numbers Black Ox Brew gives 21 brews over those 2 minutes.

It is worth noting that even 5 seconds previous to the end of our window they were neck and neck, which isn't really surprising and doesn't really tell us anything we didn't already know. That is that ending a fight right as a cooldown came up and was used makes everything look better. This is why Arcane Mages looked so bonkers after a year of HFC...fights were only lasting the length of their cooldowns.

Light Brewing wins at low haste levels. At medium haste levels Black Ox Brew only wins in the time frame shortly after the use of it and they are neck and neck otherwise. From this we can assume that Black Ox Brew scales better with haste simply because itself is reduced from our Keg Smashes and Tiger Palms. But the difference on average will be less than 3 or 4 brews over an entire fight at the expense of an added button or keybind...and the inability to bank an extra charge on tank swaps.

Personally I like the flexibility of having that extra charge for that very reason...tank swaps, so that is why I take Light Brewing.

I wanted to get into the 100 talent row too but this has taken quite a bit of time while I was making/eating dinner. I'll write up something on them later.

[Juliansfist]

There are further steps such as the artifact trait which has the chance to make TP reduce brews CD by 2s as well as BoC which can make KS shave a further 2s from brews CD.

There is a lot of pegging towards haste as the only viable build though which I think is the most misleading information. Alternative builds do work and some of you home brewers out there may find them more effective.

I revisited ED/HT last night and I was surprised by how strong Ed was. I remember the first time I used it and immediately recognised it's overall damage reduction superiority but trying it again last night made me realise that it's more significant than I thought. In fact if you're interested in speed running dungeons than ED and RJW are your best bets. I also suspect a low/minimal haste LB would come out on top of BOB as well as I felt I just wasn't in combat consistently enough to take advantage of brew CD reduction.

[Chuupag]

Alright back for more. The level 100 talents have gotten a lot of back and forth discussion...much of it not that constructive. Straw man arguments and how a talent 'feels' are not very good information when we are trying to mathematically determine which of the choices is better.

High Tolerance and Elusive Brawler are basically mirror opposites of each other. One lets you stagger more and gives you haste based on your stagger color, the other lets you purify harder and gives you a bit of dodge and damage done again based on your color of stagger when you purify for 6 seconds. The caveat there is of course the sticking point. So for 6 seconds after you purify you get either 5, 10, or 15% dodge and a damage buff of the same magnitude. Harken back to when bears were the worst tank in the game for 5 straight tiers. Can anyone tell me why they were the worst tank? Because they relied on dodge, and relying on a chance to not get smacked in the face is never a good place to be. 6 seconds is also a very small time frame in terms of white attack swings. A dual wield boss might hit you 4 times and a slower boss twice in those 6 seconds. Even if you purified off a red stagger you are only getting 15% more dodge for those 6 seconds. Even factoring in our mastery you will probably only dodge 1 more of those swings against a DW boss...and probably not even 1 of the slower boss. For this reason the dodge aspect of Elusive Brawler is pretty crap, and you are really only taking the talent for more stagger purified off and maybe the damage boost for 6 seconds...maybe.

High Tolerance on the other hand is basically a free 5% haste buff as long as you have taken damage in the last 10 seconds. And it gets better as you have higher stagger, with 10% at yellow and 15% at red. This is where you will be spending the majority of your time against raid bosses, in the yellow and red categories. Let's just low ball it and say High Tolerance is a 10% haste buff in addition to damage smoothing from 10% more staggered damage. Base stagger is 35%, High Tolerance gives another 10, and Ironskin gives you 40 more for a total of 85% of the physical damage(magic is halved) you take is taken instead of 10 seconds ticking every .5 seconds. This is a healer's wet dream. It's all slow and steady, no spikes. Healers can use their slow efficient heals on you and don't freak out when you just hover around 50-60% health for most of the time because they know you basically can't be spiked to death.

Blackout Combo throws a bit of complexity into your rotation. The only defensive benefits to note are Breath of Fire's cooldown being reduced by 6 seconds, which if done every time you can achieve almost full coverage of Hot Blooded in addition to being a small damage increase, Keg Smash reducing brews by an additional 2 seconds turning it to 6, and Ironskin Brew pausing stagger ticks for 3 seconds. Purfying gives you an extra stack of our mastery...which seems pretty meh, and Tiger Palm is just a damage increase.

Hot Blooded seems to be the clear favorite here. 6% damage reduction as long as the burning is on the target. But realistically we already had 53% uptime on this, and going from 53% to 89% uptime is only a change from an average of 3.18 overall DR to 5.34. A two-thirds gain yes...but we're arguing over ~2% more DR over an entire encounter, fairly negligible.

Extra seconds on brews from Keg Smash seems the next big thing. With an average amount of haste you are going to get about 8 Keg Smashes a minute, maybe creeping up to 9 at high levels. 2 extra seconds on each of those would amount to 1 extra brew charge a minute. That's it. It's worth noting that the extra ~10% haste from High Tolerance would have given you almost 1 more Keg Smash in that time for 4 seconds or recharge, in addition to reducing the rate of recharge itself. The gain is not quite a full brew charge. For the sake of argument and devolving into a wall of math let's just call it a half of a brew charge. Over 2 minutes Blackout Combo would net you 1 more brew charge than High Tolerance would have.

The final defensive perk is delaying stagger for 3 seconds after using an Ironskin Brew charge. This seems to be a very very niche ability. If you pause your stagger for 3 seconds what are you really gaining? Maybe your healers get a small window to catch up...but if the damage was enough that you thought you needed to pause it you could have just used that brew charge to purify in the first place. The argument that you could conceivably pump more damage into the stagger dot during that pause then purify a large amount is a non-argument because you are only going to get 1 or in fringe cases 2 white attacks done to you in those 3 seconds, or 1 special attack which you could have just purified off anyway. Any gaming in this situation is going to be negligible.

So given the complexity of Blackout Combo, the general thought is that the benefits must be huge. Careful analysis shows this not to be the case. At best you gain 2% overall damage reduction, maybe 1 more brew charge every 2 minutes, and a small amount of additional damage from Tiger Palm and increased uptime on Breath of Fire dot over taking the passive High Tolerance.

For these reasons I take High Tolerance. I feel Brewmaster in this current iteration is complex enough that I don't feel like playing the min/max game of Blackout Combo making my decision making even more nuanced and complex. I'm already watching my priority list, health/stagger bars, energy, mastery stacks, brew recharge times, in addition to any mechanics I have to deal with.

- - - Updated - - -

There are further steps such as the artifact trait which has the chance to make TP reduce brews CD by 2s as well as BoC which can make KS shave a further 2s from brews CD.

Already taken into account in post #801

There is a lot of pegging towards haste as the only viable build though which I think is the most misleading information. Alternative builds do work and some of you home brewers out there may find them more effective.

Prove otherwise then. We're not just making shit up here.

I revisited ED/HT last night and I was surprised by how strong Ed was. I remember the first time I used it and immediately recognised it's overall damage reduction superiority but trying it again last night made me realise that it's more significant than I thought. In fact if you're interested in speed running dungeons than ED and RJW are your best bets. I also suspect a low/minimal haste LB would come out on top of BOB as well as I felt I just wasn't in combat consistently enough to take advantage of brew CD reduction.

Elusive dance is garbage. See above for post on 100 talents.

[ScharfAsATack]

I would be so lost without this thread.

[Radio]

Elusive dance is garbage. See above for post on 100 talents.

You skimmed over the extra purified damage and focused almost entirely on the dodge in your analysis. Why did you spend all of your napkin math effort on a side effect?

[Chuupag]

You skimmed over the extra purified damage and focused almost entirely on the dodge in your analysis. Why did you spend all of your napkin math effort on a side effect?

The extra purified is also garbage. Clearing 65% of your stagger vs 50% is not a big difference. It seems like a big deal but it falls into the category of the healers loving stagger so who cares. Putting 10% more damage on the stagger itself then clearing 50% of it vs 10% more to the face but clearing 65% is such a tiny difference as to not even matter.

[Juliansfist]

The strength of ED is not about the dodge/damage buff it's about the extra damage purified. Given you are not going to die for x y z reasons you then look at either doing more damage or being less of a mana sponge. ED is really great at being less of a sponge and ED is really good at that. The additional benefit is that with after purifying your incoming damage is going to be less overall your survivability improves and to a greater extent than HT would (unless you're at the risk of being 1 shot/being killed in a couple of seconds).

HT is really a safety net and I believe the consensus is that it's an unnecessary safety net with current content. Hence ED and BoC are the recommended talents.

If you think purging 65% of your staggered damage instead of 50% than you're underestimating how much damage is being staggered particularly if you are maintaining a high uptime of ISB.

[foodai]

Snip

I love you dude.

[Chuupag]

The strength of ED is not about the dodge/damage buff it's about the extra damage purified. Given you are not going to die for x y z reasons you then look at either doing more damage or being less of a mana sponge. ED is really great at being less of a sponge and ED is really good at that. The additional benefit is that with after purifying your incoming damage is going to be less overall your survivability improves and to a greater extent than HT would (unless you're at the risk of being 1 shot/being killed in a couple of seconds).

HT is really a safety net and I believe the consensus is that it's an unnecessary safety net with current content. Hence ED and BoC are the recommended talents.

If you think purging 65% of your staggered damage instead of 50% than you're underestimating how much damage is being staggered particularly if you are maintaining a high uptime of ISB.

Can we stop just repeating stuff without thinking about it critically? I'll give you math if you promise to think about things?

Say you have 50% stagger exactly with Elusive Brawler. You Purify and go down to 17.5% b/c you cleared 32.5%. Great. Now if you had had High Tolerance you would have had a stagger of 56.6% with that exact same damage intake. You Purify and clear 28.3% and are now at 28.3%. So in the end you cleared a small bit more...4% more of your maximum health.

But wait Magog! You still have that big 28.3% stagger ticking away on you while I'm only sitting on a 17.5% stagger. Well yes...but your health is also a bit lower than mine b/c you took more up front damage to get to your 50% stagger than I did to get to my 56.6%. You took 16% of your health to your face while I only took 10%. Say the damage intake stopped right there. You ended up taking 16 plus 17.5 for a total of 33.5 and I took 10 and 28.3 for a total of 38.3. So I took 5% more damage...but I was also much easier to heal since everything was smooth and I didn't spike nearly as hard as you did.

That 5% is not to say that Elusive brawler gives 5% DR compared to High Tolerance. Just that in that specific scenario I took 5% more while being much less of a mana sponge b/c you spiked harder. Now take into account the free 10% haste from High tolerance and compare it to the...basically nothing of Elusive Brawler.

[Xahz]

Can we stop just repeating stuff without thinking about it critically? I'll give you math if you promise to think about things?

You took 16% of your health to your face while I only took 10%. Say the damage intake stopped right there. You ended up taking 16 plus 17.5 for a total of 33.5 and I took 10 and 28.3 for a total of 38.3. So I took 5% more damage

Yea you're definitely in a position to be mocking people when you think that it's only a 5% difference going from 33.5% damage taken to 38.3% damage taken. Didn't bother reading the rest of your posts since there's zero chance your math is correct after a comment like that.

Edit: Just kidding. Let's address this stupid comment.

The extra purified is also garbage. Clearing 65% of your stagger vs 50% is not a big difference. It seems like a big deal but it falls into the category of the healers loving stagger so who cares. Putting 10% more damage on the stagger itself then clearing 50% of it vs 10% more to the face but clearing 65% is such a tiny difference as to not even matter.

If you took 100 damage, with HT you would take 15 direct damage and stagger 85 of it. Then, you would purify 50% of that 85 for a combined total of 57.5 damage taken. If you took ED, you would take 25 direct damage and stagger 75 of it. Then, you would purify 65% of that 75 for a combined total of 51.25 damage taken. That works out to about a 10.9% decrease in damage taken. No one with two functioning brain cells would ever claim that that is a "tiny difference".

Along with the 10-15% dodge buff for purifying, ED is a massive increase in survivability. It might not be better than HT depending on the situation, but calling is "garbage" is dumb as hell.

[sdre]

I enjoy the discussion going back and forth but is it okay if we stop being SO negative about each other's math or decision making?

Let's agree to disagree and I know it's not a perfect world but can we at least try to be calm and collected about the math and explaination about the talents and skills?

I think this is the ONLY discussion thread that i refresh every hour or so, so that i can go back home from work to look at toon and to see what can be optimized.

This thread and everyone commenting and giving feedback is my only hope for this class that has been pruned to the abyss.

We have only each other to back each other up to play this class. Let's support and give constructive feedback and analysis without it becoming 4chan or something worse.

Thanks everyone for trying to make BRM WORK!

[Xequecal]

His post about Light Brewing vs. BoB is also incredibly wrong, as he counts the "initial brews" as part of the total brews available over 2 mins, but fails to realize that BoB starts off cool down, and as such if you get aBoB every 45 sec, you get three of them in a 2 minute period, not two.

[Deleted]

Can someone help me out determining if/when I should be using the "pause stagger" part of BoC?
It was mentioned quite rightly by Magog it uses the same brew charge as purifying, with an awkward GCD before it. With that in mind, what is the niche use?
I can perhaps see it being more useful if you chain stagger pauses back to back (e.g. BoS, ISB, Whatever, BoS, ISB, Whatever...), with the intention to deal with a longer period of high incoming damage, using the free spaces for keg smash and TP to generate a brew charge for purifying brew. One example might be Dia Darkwhisper from Hellfire High Council with the barrage of attacks she does.

[Chuupag]

At work now so posting on the phone is bad...but let me briefly address the previous few posts.

The comment about ED vs HT; I'm apparently not going to change some people's minds about total damage taken vs spike damage. Taking 66% more face damage or taking 10% more damage overall is a no brainer to me. My numbers were using total health percentage...but some people want to argue semantics instead of actually thinking critically so I'll leave it at this: healers love stagger, healers hate spike. If you spike they react with fast expensive heals and waste mana on you.

This, however, is not even taking into account the 10% FREE haste you get from taking HT that you trade the almost negligible 6 second dodge buff for, which again may net you 1 additional dodge if the stars align. That haste reduces that additional damage taken between the two to a much smaller number as you will gain a few brew charges over the course of the fight with which you could purify more.

To the point on BoB starting off cooldown, mea culpa. This however just reinforces my overarching point that cooldown always look better right after they are used. Pick a different time table or three and you will still find the same conclusions I made above. Low haste between cooldown light brewing wins. Medium haste between cooldown they about tie. Medium haste right after you use a cooldown the cooldown obviously wins. Who remembers trashing dps on meters when a fight ended exactly after xuen disappeared. *raises hand*

This also doesn't take in account the added perk of have 4 charges coming into a tank swap vs 3. You would then make the argument that you could just save BoB for the tank swap...but then you run into the trap of losing total effectiveness because you sat on your cooldown and very well maybe have gotten more charges overall with light brewing in that case.

[999DaZa]

Can someone help me out determining if/when I should be using the "pause stagger" part of BoC?
It was mentioned quite rightly by Magog it uses the same brew charge as purifying, with an awkward GCD before it. With that in mind, what is the niche use?
I can perhaps see it being more useful if you chain stagger pauses back to back (e.g. BoS, ISB, Whatever, BoS, ISB, Whatever...), with the intention to deal with a longer period of high incoming damage, using the free spaces for keg smash and TP to generate a brew charge for purifying brew. One example might be Dia Darkwhisper from Hellfire High Council with the barrage of attacks she does.

The Ideal time to use this mechanic would be at higher levels of stagger and during high damages phases as you mentioned. So Ideally if you could pause stagger then wait 3 secs to purify you would get the most out of it. So in essence you will need two charges of brew to do this effectively. From my limited calculations you can increase the amount you purify up to 25% and probably more depending on situation.

I also compared this to HT in terms of how much more damage it purifies and you can effectively purify 11.31% more with ISB BoC at higher levels of stagger. I only did this calculation on the assumption you pause ONLY once before you purify. If you constantly paused then purified you would obviously have a much larger % of damage purified compared to HT.

Here is the spreadsheet that you can look at if you want to see where I get my calculations from: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets...it?usp=sharing


Edit:
I also added calculations for: Amount purified with running with ED and compared it to HT. The results show a flat 14.075% increase in damage purified from ED compared to HT.

[Deleted]

Thank you for all the helpful input.

[Deleted]

Alright there seems to be a lot of misinformation going on in this thread primarily surrounding the 45 and 100 talent rows. Here is what they all do and the reasons I take what I take.

The 45 tier basically boils down to Light Brewing vs Black Ox Brew, as Gift of the Mists does not affect our brew generation at all and turns your more toward the DH/DK style of tanking where you take more damage then heal it back. So Light Brewing reduces the cooldown of your Ironskin/Purifying brews and increase the maximum charges whereas Black Ox Brew is basically the old Chi Brew in that it immediately refills your brews and energy.

Using 0 haste as a starting point, Light Brewing makes Iron/Purify a 18 second recharge, Keg Smash a 8 sec, and over a 2 min span you would have 15 Keg Smashes for 60 more seconds of recharge and in that time you would have enough energy for a maximum of 24 Tiger Palms giving 24 more seconds or recharge...but 30% of those will Face Palm with 3/3 giving an additional second, totaling 31. Totaling this all up you would recharge not quite 12 brews over those 2 minutes, and added to the 4 you started with you would net not quite 16 over 2 mins.

Again using 0 haste, Black Ox Brew makes the recharge 21 seconds. You would get the same 15 Kegs and 60 seconds for them. You would get slightly more than 24 Tiger Palms since Black Ox Brew refills your energy in addition to refill your brew, but to figure out the cooldown you need to do a bit of math since Black Ox Brew is itself reduced by Keg and Tiger Palm. With a base cooldown of 90 seconds you are actually going to have it up roughly every 45 seconds. So in that 2 minute window you will get 2 uses, giving you enough energy for ~6 more Tiger Palms since you will never get full use of the energy refunded. Mathing all that out you would get ~10.5 recharges in that time, plus 3 you started with giving you ~13.5 over 2 mins.

Someone already pointed out that you forgot to mention that BoB starts off cooldown for another 3 charges but the funny part is, that is one of the small mistakes you made. Since the fight is not always exactly 2 min, but varying you should consider 45sec over 2 min as 2,6 uses (or 3.6 if you count the fresh CD in the beginning) Even if you stop right berfore gaining a charge, you still need to consider the one in the beginning resulting in more uses than you anticipated.

But now comes the funny part which makes the whole discussion about BoB vs LB kind of obsolete. You forgot to mention that BoB grants 3 Charges of ISB/PB when used. So after all it would not grant 10.5 brews in 2 min, but instead 10.5 + 2.5 * 2.6 + 3 from start = 20 giving you much more than LB.
So even without the 3 Brews from BoB you considered them "kind of equal" but the Brews are like the biggest part of BoB and you completly left them out.

On top of that LB does actually scale better with haste since brew gain scales better than linear, while BoB scales exactly linear.

There are also some things in the lvl 100 Talents that i do not agree with, but i will leave that for now since i am planning to do a post on that myself today or tomorrow. that might be even more mathy and i will probably make it in a google drive document and only post the results here, with the math in a link


Edit: Oh and more haste also means shorter CD on BoB so at 15% haste its not 45 seconds anymore

[999DaZa]

As I see there is some dispute still over light brewing and BoB, I'll try shed some light on the current dilemma.
I am going to use the wowhead spreadsheet for brew generation as I have checked all their calculations very closely and I have not seen any errors. That said I will use the following assumptions:
-When running HT have a 100% stagger up-time (i.e will have 15% haste more from HT always)
-Have 30% haste as a standard stat between HT and BoB.
-Duration of 5 minutes

Using the above assumptions the following is observed:
Light Brewing with HT- will generate 47.59 charges (15% haste included in this calculation) and BoB with BoC will generate 68.39 charges.
BoB with HT with 100% up-time we get 69 charges. Light brewing with BoC will generate 54.77 charges.

Even with 100% up-time on HT we only get a small marginal benefit with running with HT on BoB compared to BoC. Thus BoC has better brew generation on average considering the fact you will not constantly be at 100% stagger level during the whole fight.

Here is the link to just the Brew generating spreadsheet for those who want to see how I get to these results: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets...it?usp=sharing

I will state this: All the information I give above is not to tell you which talents to pick but only to inform you of the benefits of each talent choice. Everyone has different play-styles and preferences that must be respected.

[Chuupag]

Someone already pointed out that you forgot to mention that BoB starts off cooldown for another 3 charges but the funny part is, that is one of the small mistakes you made. Since the fight is not always exactly 2 min, but varying you should consider 45sec over 2 min as 2,6 uses (or 3.6 if you count the fresh CD in the beginning) Even if you stop right berfore gaining a charge, you still need to consider the one in the beginning resulting in more uses than you anticipated.

But now comes the funny part which makes the whole discussion about BoB vs LB kind of obsolete. You forgot to mention that BoB grants 3 Charges of ISB/PB when used. So after all it would not grant 10.5 brews in 2 min, but instead 10.5 + 2.5 * 2.6 + 3 from start = 20 giving you much more than LB.
So even without the 3 Brews from BoB you considered them "kind of equal" but the Brews are like the biggest part of BoB and you completly left them out.

On top of that LB does actually scale better with haste since brew gain scales better than linear, while BoB scales exactly linear.

There are also some things in the lvl 100 Talents that i do not agree with, but i will leave that for now since i am planning to do a post on that myself today or tomorrow. that might be even more mathy and i will probably make it in a google drive document and only post the results here, with the math in a link


Edit: Oh and more haste also means shorter CD on BoB so at 15% haste its not 45 seconds anymore

I will concede that whole post on the 45 talents atm. Again at work so can't really dive deep into anything. But your point on BoB only scaling linearly is wrong. It is also a brew so it double dips with haste. The base cd of BoB is 90 seconds. 15% haste got it down to 45 or 50 seconds depending on how tight your rotation was. 50% reduction on just 15% haste.

[keqe]

I will concede that whole post on the 45 talents atm. Again at work so can't really dive deep into anything. But your point on BoB only scaling linearly is wrong. It is also a brew so it double dips with haste. The base cd of BoB is 90 seconds. 15% haste got it down to 45 or 50 seconds depending on how tight your rotation was. 50% reduction on just 15% haste.

But barely anything of that 50% was from haste itself. Unlike Ironskin/Purifying brew the CD itself isn't reduced by haste, only from abilities. Thus it doesn't "double dip" like IsB and PB which get CD reduced by haste and also benefit from more KS and TP.