Are Brewmasters Really This Underplayed?

[Blur4stuff]

If someone hit me with a stick that had a mini-keg of beer on the end it would probably hurt.

[Tygerman]

Plenty of good ideas in this thread so far, nice to see.
I mentioned before that I'd like the base purify amount of Purifying Brew to be more, but never considered having that and ISB use separate charges, which would be awesome.

The artifact ability could use some tweaking as well. If I had it my way, I'd rather have it be a 100% purify that you could use every 40 seconds, would be more useful than dodging one melee attack. What was mentioned before was instead have it cause you to dodge X number of attacks, which would be more useful as well. The damage from the ability is nice though.

I hope that the most recent changes BrM got won't be the last ones for a while. Still need just a bit of a push in the right direction.

[Deleted]

Plenty of good ideas in this thread so far, nice to see.
I mentioned before that I'd like the base purify amount of Purifying Brew to be more, but never considered having that and ISB use separate charges, which would be awesome.

The artifact ability could use some tweaking as well. If I had it my way, I'd rather have it be a 100% purify that you could use every 40 seconds, would be more useful than dodging one melee attack. What was mentioned before was instead have it cause you to dodge X number of attacks, which would be more useful as well. The damage from the ability is nice though.

I hope that the most recent changes BrM got won't be the last ones for a while. Still need just a bit of a push in the right direction.

Personally I'm fine with the artifact ability...I would like it to have a lower CD, but I wouldn't go as far as to say it definitely needed one.

I still don't agree with calls to make PB clear 100% or give it its own CD. I agree it needs to be reworked but I still think a system where it scaled based on stagger would be better (i.e. g=50%, y=62.5%, r=75%).

Dampen Harm could possibly be reworked into a purify related CD as it seems completely redundant now that we work around a 100% ISB up-time. Possibly make it a purify related CD if only to give us a way out of the stupid 'stagger trap' where stagger is out of control and the only way out is to chain PB...which we don't have charges for.

I'd also like some for of raid/group utility (even if its only minor) but I don't see it happening.

[AetherMcLoud]

Yes, the 2nd skin, pvp skin, hidden skin, and the future unlock skins are all fantastic looking and feature excellent designs/animations. I'm sorry you don't appreciate good looking weapons, so that's your loss really.

On top of that it's the only weapon that's wielded over the shoulder while in fighting stance, which makes it so awesome.
The artifact ability is fine IMHO but it's cooldown is a bit too long. 45 Sec cooldown would be fine I think, it's not really powerful, just a useful range aoe pull or "take a bit less damage over 3 seconds". Or keep it's cooldown and at least make it a brew.

I think the class is fine as a tank, though it REALLY could need SOMETHING for other party or raid members, like every other tank has
* Warrior: leech aura, intercept
* Paladin: BoP, offheals, damage cooldown talent, lay on hands, some more I forget
* Druid: Battlerez, aoe movement speed shout, something else?
* DK: Battlerez, Gorefiend's grasp, dunno if something else
* DH: Sigil of Chains (i.e. Gorefind's grasp sigil)

DH's are on the low end of utility too but a 1 minute cooldown gorefiend's grasp (aoe deathgrip to location basically) can still be really useful in a lot of mythic dungeon and/or raid situations.

But monks don't even have that. All can can do is take smooth damage. If nothing else I'd take a battlerez over no utility.

*I'd really love for the PVP Guard talent to be baseline or a PVE talent.* Absorbing some damage on 45 seconds cooldown for us and a friendly player would be nice utility and would give us something to press in oh shit situations when all brews are on cooldown.

[melzas]

BrM used to be my main tanking character, but new gameplay is really too different from what I liked about BrM. Blackout Strike feels so out of place with that basic special attack animation, no more self healing, tossing brew gone... It just lost it's charm for me, maybe I will give it another try, but being underdog spec in terms of performance on top of boring design and loss of class identity made me pass on my monk this expansion.

[Deleted]

Personally I'm fine with the artifact ability...I would like it to have a lower CD, but I wouldn't go as far as to say it definitely needed one.

I still don't agree with calls to make PB clear 100% or give it its own CD. I agree it needs to be reworked but I still think a system where it scaled based on stagger would be better (i.e. g=50%, y=62.5%, r=75%).

Dampen Harm could possibly be reworked into a purify related CD as it seems completely redundant now that we work around a 100% ISB up-time. Possibly make it a purify related CD if only to give us a way out of the stupid 'stagger trap' where stagger is out of control and the only way out is to chain PB...which we don't have charges for.

I'd also like some for of raid/group utility (even if its only minor) but I don't see it happening.

Well in an overall sense the BRM artifact needs some tweaking. The ability itself is quite useful but the CD-defensive capability ratio is questionable. Its for melee-only similar to prot warriors and shares the same dps in regards to its CD. However where prot warriors artifact ability is interesting is how it also interacts with other abilities/traits, our does not but we're invulnerable in 3 secs against melees.

On that note, while the artifact ability is fine the golden traits are not. They are the most atrocious tanking traits in the game and for some reason BRM is the only tank with a major CD tied to a golden trait. Ideally we want to strive to get these traits and look forward to them and thus BRM progression-wise feels you're not rewarded for the effort. The fact that we barely have any self-sustainability before we acquire OB is messed up.

As such I won't even bother finishing the BRM artifact (stopping after KS range trait) because those AP are better off spent on either WW or MW.
*Another thing that is discouraging is how its not easy for the newer players and others to measure your performance due to the actual damage mitigation through PB.

[NoiseTank13]

Tbh it's not that brewmasters are underplayed. Monks are underplayed in general. Blizz just did not manage to sell the class to the significant majority of the playerbase. You got them facing against blood dks (best solo class, hero class that is well represented), vengeance dhs (a lot of people do seem to have made the switch to dh), and finally protection warriors, guardian druids and protection paladins; always decently represented classes and with a massive amount of hype from beta especially for the first two about how OP their tanking specs were. And then you have BrM, the spec noone could even seem to understand how to play in beta that they needed a blue to give us a guide and for which noone had a good thing to say during beta.

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You match resto druids perfectly.

You also had to level a monk from scratch, 1-90(100-110) and even with the awesome XP buffs, I don't blame people from fizzling out leveling them.

[Snackwiches]

No idea what is going on with class design in this expansion. They're slowing spreading around utility back into the game but... only to select classes?

Seriously, who the fuck is making these classes? This expansion is great EXCEPT for the fucking awful class design. How many years of bullshit, daily hotfixes, etc, does it take for Blizzard to realize they need to shit can a few of these people?

[-Gr-]

[Bar Crawl]

Your Fortifying brew now effects up to 2 allies for half the effectiveness. and fortifying brew cd is reduced by 30 sec.

[On the Wagon]

When you use purifying brew twice within 10 seconds, the second purifying brew will be 100% more effective.

[ambident]

This situation is exacerbated by the fact that the monk class fantasy just hasn't really caught on in the community. People just don't want to play monks. Face it, if you're a new player looking to tank, are you going to choose the roly poly bouncing monk, or literally any other class that has a much more aggressive and cool fantasy? It's true, some people like them, but I think it's something that's just not that compelling to the inner kid in a lot of us who wants to play something cool.

You can really tell this by looking at the different difficulty levels when monks were OP back in BRF. In higher levels, performance matters more, so people drift to the outperforming specs. As you go lower, people play the classes they like. In BRF monks were the most played tank spec in mythic. In heroic, they were a distant third. In normal, they were 4th, ahead of only druids which were in a really bad place at the time.

In HFC, when monks were middle of the pack, they were easily the least played tank spec in every difficulty. People only played monks over the last two expansions because they were very good. When they were average, they were very infrequently played.

Now that they're bad, they're basically MIA, and that's also a problem because no one knows how to play with a monk because no one ever plays with them.

huh?

nobody is surprised that they are the least played, that is perfectly fine and even expected given the class distributions. people are more concerned about the disparity between populations of the different tanks.

being the sixth most played tank, slightly behind the fifth, which is slightly behind the fourth...etc

is _not_ the same as:

being the sixth most played tank, and being 1/5 as likely to be seen as the next least played tank and 1/10 as likely to be seen as the most played tank.

The latter is not really acceptable.

[herminatores]

Most of the time when I join a HC or get invited into a mythic on my BrM, 1st word I get from ppl in group is "WTF its a 1st brewmaster I see this expansion" so yeah a little bit underplayed :P

[Invisibelf]

The Golden Traits need to have a bit of a boost, and I'd be fine with them. For example Dragonfire Brew seems like it could be cool, and combo well with Hot Blooded, but it doesn't. It neither refreshes the debuff on the enemy, nor does anything, but piddly damage.

Why not allow it to refresh the damage reduction of the fire breath? Or why not let each breath add 2% more damage to the total so that if you land all 3 breaths it's a 10% reduction for the debuffs duration?

Brew-stache it's just...I don't like it at all. Why not let it allow you to stagger spells at 2/3 of your normal rate (since you stagger at half currently).

Fortification isn't terrible, but I wouldn't mind if it was changed to also granted you a charge, or two of your brews when you activate it.

The mastery also needs to be changed. Perhaps instead of losing all your stacks on a dodge you lose half, or 2/3 of them?

I'd also like to see the Artifact ability changed to lower the cool down on it, or increase the time they miss attacks for to something like 5 seconds.

Zen Meditation just needs to be reworked. Allow it to be channeled while moving, and drop the cool down to 3 minutes. Or change it to allow it instead to completely stagger the next magical ability cast on you with no channeling, or anything like that. Just a CD you pop for big magic damage every 5 minutes. Every orb you heal with expel harm reduces the cool down by 5 seconds, or something.

[AetherMcLoud]

Yeah...I've had a lot of issues picking a tank class this expansion (Have all but Warrior at 110) and when I make lists of what I like about each tank, I just don't know what to say about Monk.

Paladin: Absurd amounts of utility. Can't say enough about all the absurd utility. Great cooldowns, sometimes bordering on absurd. Strong ranged pull options. Thematic elements that I like.

Death Knight: Crazy self-healing and self-sufficiency. Awesome for soloing anything. (I'm a big fan of soloing stuff) Awesome positioning/pulling abilities in Grip/Grasp. Battle rez utility. Again, some thematic elements that I also like.

Druid: Extremely solid. Good variety of powerful and versatile cooldowns. Great ranged and AE pickup abilities. Utility in Battle Rez and group speed buff.

Demon Hunter: Didn't play this one that much. Fairly mobile with leaps. Ok utility with Chains I suppose. Doesn't stand out in my mind as much as the previous ones.

Then there's Monk. Um...takes "smooth" damage I guess? Has one "ok" cooldown and some other stuff that's garbage? Roll is cool? If it weren't for the fact that I like WW and that I kinda like the thematic elements of the class, I don't know why I'd ever bother with Monk. I just can't see anything that jumps out at me as, "Yeah, Brewmaster does THAT!" (And yet for some reason I keep gravitating toward it. I guess I just kinda want to stick with the "black sheep" maybe? Dunno.)

If I could take the WW playstyle and attach it to ANY other tank, I probably would.

Monk is by far the most fun and "tanky" tank to play though. As someone who played all tanks in WoW's history, Brewmaster right now is by far the most involving tank out of all current tank specs.

[caervek]

Most of the DPS and Tank Monks I know have rerolled to DH, I guess there's quite a bit of fantasy overlap between the two as both are leather melee classes.

[Wardley]

My 'main' tank prior to MoP was a DK. I then switched to Monk because I liked the mobility of the class and got fed up with the plodding that DK's did.

I also liked the keg-tossing Dizzying Haze which made it so easy to pickup packs and also all the ability weaving you had to do to keep the various buffs up on you.

Now I've switched to DH as my main tank - has the same (or better) mobility, has a 'ranged' debuff with their Sigils and also you've got buff weaving on them as well. Basically - everything that they removed from the Brewmaster

[Deleted]

Most of the time when I join a HC or get invited into a mythic on my BrM, 1st word I get from ppl in group is "WTF its a 1st brewmaster I see this expansion" so yeah a little bit underplayed :P

This! So true, nearly every pug is like shocked but also at my ilvl...guess they find it odd people are playing monk let alone BrM as a main

[Holofernes]

for me the main problem with monk tanks in dungeon is their freaking stagger. u cant ever sit down to drink, because they wont stop droping in health like crazy. tanking mobs and stuff is no problem, one of my guilds tank is brm, but walking from one pack to another with a monk tank is annoying as fuck for healers.

[AetherMcLoud]

Most of the DPS and Tank Monks I know have rerolled to DH, I guess there's quite a bit of fantasy overlap between the two as both are leather melee classes.

There is absolutely NO fantasy overlap between Monks and Demon Hunters...

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for me the main problem with monk tanks in dungeon is their freaking stagger. u cant ever sit down to drink, because they wont stop droping in health like crazy. tanking mobs and stuff is no problem, one of my guilds tank is brm, but walking from one pack to another with a monk tank is annoying as fuck for healers.

Stagger drops 2 seconds after combat ends...

[Deleted]

There is absolutely NO fantasy overlap between Monks and Demon Hunters...

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Stagger drops 2 seconds after combat ends...

QFT. Was previously a hindrance at best. I top myself between pulls longer after stagger has dropped.

[Nahela]

A lot of the people that played Monks got alienated between WoD and Legion changes. A lot of WWs dropped during WoD, even more for Legion. Every MW I know changed classes with the Legion changes (but I've seen a resurgence in new people picking up the spec). BMs for a while just simply didn't bring anything new to the table, without being near the top of the food chain, other tank classes are just more intuitive to play.