[BREWMASTER] 7.X Discussion Thread

[Will]

that only works if the overkill damage you cheese comes IN a single hit, like stormforged spear. If it's something that happens over the course of multiple rapid hits or something, then it won't work.

[bromanbro]

I hate this 7.25 rework. They spent time since 7.0 fixing us, and now they're tossing that out.


Hopefully they listen to feedback this time. I'm not against the idea of a rework completely, but nerfs like this could dump us out of relevancy until the next patch cycle. The current brew system won't work if Stagger % with ISB goes down to 50% to prevent us from hitting 100% right away.

[Tech614]

It would be easy actually.
Change to "you can only stagger up to 100% of your HP per hit, rest goes to health.
Problem solved.
No additional Cap on stagger needed.
HP: 1000
Something does 1000 Damage? -> Stagger
1500? 1000 to stagger, 500 direct damage.
2000? Dead.

Additional fix: Fortifing brew now doubles the amount of damage you can stagger at once.

Then keep actual stagger pool without a cap.

Considering stagger is really the vast majority of any defense a brewmaster has against any physical hit over any other leather wearing dps...

No that's a terrible idea, a mythic 15 tyranical Smashspite could easily hit you for over 6 mil before stagger.

[Deleted]

Maybe instead of changing stagger they should just change purify . I mean the cheassing comes from banked purifing charges . One though would be to change the ammount of stagger that purify brew can clean . Or even more make purify scale with a rotation/thing (or cd) . Dunno just saying

[porubezhnik]

Considering stagger is really the vast majority of any defense a brewmaster has against any physical hit over any other leather wearing dps...

No that's a terrible idea, a mythic 15 tyranical Smashspite could easily hit you for over 6 mil before stagger.

Sure it's terrible, and a cap that can be reached easily too. Bear can absorb damage with ironskin / ursol w/o any cap, why shoud we have the one?

[Inuyaki]

You mean windwalker or a different class? Because judging from the community feedback Brewmaster was atm the only monk spec on the strong side, both healer and dps monks are saying they're in a bad spot... A bit disappointing because windwalker is one of the few melee I find having a nice feel to their rotation.

No problem, because hunter or mage, we need ranged in our raid

btw, is this now the 6th! iteration since MoP? How is that even possible? Why do they change our playstyle every few months because stagger is always the problem every time? They can't be that bad at class design, can they?

[ReD-EyeD]

It would be easy actually.
Change to "you can only stagger up to 100% of your HP per hit, rest goes to health.
Problem solved.
No additional Cap on stagger needed.
HP: 1000
Something does 1000 Damage? -> Stagger
1500? 1000 to stagger, 500 direct damage.
2000? Dead.

Additional fix: Fortifing brew now doubles the amount of damage you can stagger at once.

Then keep actual stagger pool without a cap.

Or you can just design bosses that kill you instantly on specific mechanics instead of doing a shitton of damage.

[Bearygood]

Any tips for the scenario?

[xrtc]

Read some info about it in another thread (will post a link if i find it again).
What i remember:
Takes place in the same location as Mythic Archimonde nether phase (you can fall off the platform).
3 different types of adds and some of them have knockback attacks.
Prophet Velen and another npc join you at the start of the fight.
Velen summons some light spheres from time to time that heal you to 100%
The second npc gets mc'ed or smth like that at the start of the fight

Update 1:

Some more info can be found in the comments here

Update 2:
Here is the post from the other thread i mentioned before

Brewmaster here, tank challenge involves the following:

"The Highlord's Return: Destroy Highlord Kruul permanently"

Prophet Velen and Kor'vas Bloodthorn join your party for this scenario. Kor'vas is captured right away (may be released later into the fight, haven't gotten that far)
You fight on the same platform that you fight Archimonde in if you faced him on Mythic difficulty, you can fall off here.

You first start off by fighting against Inquisitor Variss, who has 48mil HP.
He constantly casts Mindrend at you, which deals about 1mil damage (to me at least).
You get a warning that Variss is casting "Drain Life" at you, which I assume must be interrupted.
Either through killing a certain add in the fight, or as time passes, Velen will drop a light orb that you can pick up to heal for 100% of your HP, releases a shockwave that disorients all enemies for a few seconds, and MIGHT increase their damage taken (no debuff is shown on enemies, no buff is given on myself, just looks like they take more damage).

Adds are introduced throughout the fight, this includes the following, in order of appearance:

Tormenting Eye - casts a green line at you (logs don't show it doing damage) and may knock you off (still testing)
Nether Horror - autoattacks and leaves a bebuff that increases damage taken, can stack.
Smoldering Infernal - autoattacks and casts a frontal cone ability that knocks back if you don't dodge.

That's all I can give right now.

EDIT: Apparently, at least for Guardian tanks. If you go stealth in cat mode, and open up on Variss with a stun, he DOESN'T have a Death and Decay pool underneath him. Expect this to get hotfixed at some point.

Update 3:
Copying info from reddit
Source can be found here

INQUISITOR VARISS
Moves slowly
Can be stunned, dazed, and interrupted

Abilities:

• Mind Rend. 4 sec cast. 30 yd range. ~2 million Shadow Damage. Interruptable. Boss chain casts this when doing nothing else. Will not cast if you are out of range.

• Drain Life. 3 sec cast, then channels. Massive leech from target. 20 sec CD. Interruptable.

• Aura of Decay. Aura around boss that applies stacking max health reduction debuff.

Adds:

• Eyes: Cast Inquisitive Stare. Draws an obvious squiggly line towards you (like first boss in Vault of the Wardens.) Face it when it goes off or be knocked back.

• Arcane Minions: Spawn in a pack of four or five. Move fast. Do melee damage enhanced by a stacking debuff called "Psytalons" that amplifies Arcane damage taken. Also have a channeled AoE, Nether Storm, that deals damage around them (stacks per minion). They cast it right after Velen's stun wears off.

• Fel Infernal: Fel Resonation: Aura that radiates fire (like the big infernals in Felsoul Hold) and drains 5% of Infernal health per second. After 20 seconds they respawn. Also casts a shockwave ability called Smash that has a very big knockback.

Friendlies:

• Prophet Velen: Spawns circles of healing that will heal you and stun all enemies for 10 seconds (Holy Ward). Not sure of the CD, but feels like 45 sec.

Strategy Observations:

• Mind Rend must be mitigated, not interrupted. It casts too often, nobody has that many interrupts (you will use one every 20 sec on Drain Life), and standing near the boss kills you. If you don't have enough gear to mitigate Mind Rend, you cannot pass this encounter.

• Standing near the boss is not required to win. Standing near the boss will kill you because of Aura of Decay.

• Drain Life should be interrupted. Boss heals are always bad, and a 20 sec CD means all classes have interrupts available.

[stross01]

Any tips for the scenario?

Yeah: wait until it's fixed.

[xrtc]

Yeah: wait until it's fixed.

And by fixed you mean until you have the gear it was designed for?
Cause they stated many times that only the best geared will be able to complete them on release

[stross01]

And by fixed you mean until you have the gear it was designed for?
Cause they stated many times that only the best geared will be able to complete them on release

880+ ilvl players can beat certain ones (melee).

All but the tank have been beaten already.

Tomb of Sargeras won't be out for another 3-6 months. What do they expect will happen from now until then? There are no gear upgrades to be had, just artifact traits, and the problems with the instance wouldn't be any less problematic with every trait obtained.

[xrtc]

Certain specs have beaten them and as far as i know not a lot either. I don't believe they wanted it to be doable by a large % of the population from day 1. It should be a challenge after all.

[Bearygood]

880+ ilvl players can beat certain ones (melee).

All but the tank have been beaten already.

Tomb of Sargeras won't be out for another 3-6 months. What do they expect will happen from now until then? There are no gear upgrades to be had, just artifact traits, and the problems with the instance wouldn't be any less problematic with every trait obtained.

Tank one has been done by a bear. I know that

[Keylus]

I played a warrior during 7.0/7.1, they are stubborn with the unwanted changes (like the warrior ones in the 7.1.5).
I think they already made a desition to make those changes and they will give ISB and stagger a cap no matter what, the question is how low/high the cap will be. The numbers they give are low (laughable low) so they can change them "with the feedback fo the comunity", my guess is 30 sec on ISB and 250% on stagger

Also, I sell tinfoil hats, cheap

[Marrilaife]

They can't be that bad at class design, can they?

Ask warlocks, they seem to be reworked every expansion or even major patch and they constantly say warlocks are still not fun to play. The only time they maybe were, was when Lei Shen trinket was brokenly OP because no matter the playstyle who doesn't have fun being OP? Similar story with ret palas, they seem to rework them all the time and every time end up with something awkward. So yeah, I don't have much faith in Blizzard's class design and balancing departments.

The biggest issue I see is they created too many tank specs and opened this Pandora box themselves where they struggle hard to keep all the tanks both different and balanced against each other, ending up with massive imbalances and power swings. And yes, we can worry that monks may end up like warriors, who started with ignore pain = perma 90% damage reduction and ended up with ignore pain being barely stronger than a blood shield. Monks don't have that many tuning knobs atm, if they still had guard and powerful self-healing (that isn't limited to "sit in a corner at 35% hp"), they could nerf stagger and buff the other two, or nerf the other two buff stagger etc. but currently stagger is their only point of balance, if they want to nerf stagger they need to rework the spec and add extra tools to deal with incoming damage. Stagger being the only tuning point will mean it makes or breaks the class, either you're unkillable or you're a sack of potatoes that trips over - which was the case on beta and no one wanted to touch monk with a barge pole.

Maybe they need to do something with purify, the idea you purify only when you have spare charges from ironskin created this whole mess they're worried about now "and what if you off-tank and have too many charges banked?", people were laughed at when they asked maybe decouple purify from ironskin, but that could be 1 way of direction of tweaks, to make sure there's more consistency in accessibility of purify no matter the fight type. Also maybe purify should do something more than just clear half your stagger, to give more incentives to use it or more occasions when it's beneficial to use it except just after cheesing a death hit.

[Deleted]

Next round of Shit from Celestalon:

Alright, second round is on me as well, Brewmasters. Now that the weekend is over, we've had a chance to discuss all the great feedback you all have provided so far. Here's what we're thinking:

(Note that the below changes likely won't make it into the first PTR build.)

Stagger Cap
As I said, the goal of this was cheese-prevention, not intended to impact normal gameplay. A Stagger cap of 100%*HP has a lot of value to us due to it functioning intuitively within the UI. We had hoped that the amount we need to buff HP/Armor would be reasonable in order to make that work, but looking at the numbers and your feedback, we don't think there's enough room there. Therefore, we're now leaning toward a 200%*HP cap, and that just won't be visible in the UI (but then, neither is the cap of Guardian Spirit and the like).

Active Mitigation Duration Cap
There has been a ton of useful feedback about this topic. Being able to carry over a ton of banked Active Mitigation (and Ironskin Brew absolutely is AM in context) from tank swaps and low damage phases is extremely powerful, and contributes to imbalance between tanks. But we're also sympathetic to how it adds an additional complication that you need to keep in your mental space. We think that just loosening the restriction up a bit so that the window you can safely press Ironskin Brew in is much wider will satisfy that, so we're going to try a cap of 3x Duration instead of 2x. And to clarify, calling this "base duration" was inaccurate; I meant the duration of a single cast of Ironskin Brew, including traits (so 3x Duration would be 24sec with 4/4 of that trait).

Magic DR
We've talked about having armor and potentially HP as tuning knobs to use. We also have the % of Stagger that applies to Magic to use. All of the changes we're discussing in this thread are for mechanical and playstyle reasons, and then tuning is a separate (but big and important) issue. Just to set expectations, Brewmasters with Mystic Vitality are currently seen as extremely strong against Magic damage, sometimes overpowered. Guardian Druids are also overpowered against Magic damage, and that will be adjusted as well.

Thanks, and keep the feedback coming!

He basically took nothing from Feedback. Like back in Beta. I see dark times coming for us.

[brt2pp]

look ... you can talk shit all you want but from the wording, and previous experiences with nerfs i judge that brewmasters WILL be the worst tanks going to ToS, nerfing such a fundamental concept of a spec can never not end terribly, and it will, if they are really going to cap stagger at 2x your health, that is way to low for every single nighthold boss, and i doubt that will change in tomb, and the worst part is, this will only change who will cheese mechanics, and while you, brewmasters, will struggle to survive basic boss mechanics, paladins and warriors will be laughing and cruising through them

[Geodude07]

look ... you can talk shit all you want but from the wording, and previous experiences with nerfs i judge that brewmasters WILL be the worst tanks going to ToS, nerfing such a fundamental concept of a spec can never not end terribly, and it will, if they are really going to cap stagger at 2x your health, that is way to low for every single nighthold boss, and i doubt that will change in tomb, and the worst part is, this will only change who will cheese mechanics, and while you, brewmasters, will struggle to survive basic boss mechanics, paladins and warriors will be laughing and cruising through them

It's almost like totally changing a specs design at the drop of the hat is a terrible idea. Especially if you replace a functioning mechanic with arbitrary numbers you think look better and don't really aim to improve the spec in any real way.

[Dakiri]

Well some of that is at least better than what was said originally. I wonder if we will still get the changes to increase max health/armor and the change to the trait to give us increased purify %. The 200% stagger cap is going to suck, and we're going to require addons to play well even more than we already do.

Pretty weird that our spec is going to have some many disjointed pieces now. Half the spec, including the legendary bracers, revolves around generating brews, and now we're all screwed up there. The new gold trait/Special Delivery pushes us to spend brew charges as much as possible, and now are in total opposition to the way the spec is supposed to work. Things like High Tolerance and the legendary stagger ring become pretty rough with the stagger cap. The legendary chest becomes a meme when there's a talent that does basically the same thing. This is what happens when you rework a spec mid expansion.

Also pretty annoying that the 2 biggest concerns they seem to have is that we 1) stagger too much damage and 2) have too much ISB uptime. Meanwhile, those are the 2 and 4 set bonuses. So we were already going to lose some effectiveness in those areas when ToS gets released. It has all the makings of a typical overnerf.