WoD Brewmaster changes

[Hyve]

I don't think BrM will be that far behind WW. We've not got the large AoE pull vengeance going for us anymore of course, but especially within the first ~2 zones your Heroic (Mythic) Siege of Orgrimmar gear will still meaning you're pushing some mean DPS.

As a side note, what's everyone thinking regarding Breath of Fire? I'm loving the fact that it feels more useful, and with Serenity taking care of our Shuffle needs, we've got more room to use it, but I still don't feel like it's a credible part of our rotation. I'd love it to incorporate some sort of defensive capability, or do more damage, but outside of Dungeons & low-end content I can't imagine it being useful at all once again.

[Rockets]

BoF seems to just be in there naturally as "the aoe chi spender". For single-target we have Jab and BoK, for aoe we get SCK and BoF, and for ranged we get CJL and.... uh, well WW has SFB but that's going away...

The problem of course is that it doesn't give shuffle, but hey now that vengeance is gone, we can do non-terrible dps while not actually tanking anything, and so if you're waiting for your debuff to fall off and there are a bunch of mobs standing around, may as well let shuffle fall off and do some more aoe.

But... if there are a bunch of useful targets in melee range of you, why aren't you tanking anything? Just taking a break while the other tank does all the work?

Honestly they should just change shuffle to be "whenever you spend chi, gain 3s of shuffle per chi spent". Then BoF is automatically a good choice for aoe, they could do things like put chi costs back on the T30 talents, make the CE-2 effect something actually interesting/useful, etc etc. Needs some thought so that the best option isn't just to spend all your chi on PB for purify+3s shuffle, of course, but there's something here.

Won't happen this expansion of course, but maybe for 7.0.

[Hyve]

Why would you ever let Shuffle fall off though? Maybe it's just me, but even if I'm running through a 5 Man Heroic, I like to keep my shuffle up.

I'm mostly talking about where do people think Breath of Fire fits into raiding. Obviously if you've got surplus Chi and you're dealing with Trash then sure, why not, that's the case today as well, but I'm curious to know if there is any use to it at all.

I'd really like to see Breath of Fire add some Shuffle, that'd be fun!

[Rockets]

There isn't any use to it, that's my point. You have to be in a situation where a) letting shuffle fall off isn't a problem (ie. not tanking anything), and b) there are enough targets in range to make it better than BoK. In practice that's never going to happen in any kind of group pve content, because if you are a tank and there are enough targets in range to make it worthwhile, then you should be tanking at least one of the targets.

Yeah, Serenity makes managing shuffle less of a problem, but then if you're tanking something and have spare chi you probably want to spend it on PB to help with the not-dying thing.

[Hyve]

True, but there will be times when you don't need to Purify (Outside of the Tier Bonus, that bonus changes everything) and you've got spare Chi. I'd like to see Breath of Fire be used in AoE situations more in raiding.

Right now, even if I'm Chi capped I just Rushing Jade Wind / Spinning Crane Kick because it's more damage. I'd love to see Breath of Fire worked into the "rotation" more somehow, I'm just curious if there are cases of that already on the Beta.

[Totaltotemic]

The problem with BoF is that Chi Explosion is a thing and supersedes it at very possible moment in which you'd want to use BoF anyways.

Chi Explosion is not as much free Shuffle as Serenity, and does a lot of AoE damage (and more single target damage too). BoF is also trading Shuffle uptime for damage. Chi Explosion does this at a much, much higher rate than BoF does though.

At 4 chi, CE is 445.5% AP damage. If you reduce that down to 2 chi, it's 222.75%. BoF, however, across the initial hit and the DoT only does 122.1% damage. So if you really were in some sort of situation where using BoF was a good idea, you'd just take CE and do double the damage, get 10 seconds of Shuffle (half of the 4x value), and Purify, and have all of it happen instantly instead of over 16 seconds (instead of using 2 BoFs).

BoF's damage alone could be doubled and it still wouldn't even come close to competing with CE's efficiency. You also can't just spam it with Serenity because 60% of the spell's damage is in the DoT. So the only plausible scenario in which you'd ever use BoF is if you wanted AoE damage far more than any kind of survivability and just didn't take CE because...?

[Sard]

It is kind of amusing that of all the spells that could probably have been pruned from BrM, they left Breath of Fire in.

[Pazx]

sorry, i'm not in the beta and i'm just trying to understand the levels 100 talents mainly Serenity, does it give back chi used or something ?

[Totaltotemic]

sorry, i'm not in the beta and i'm just trying to understand the levels 100 talents mainly Serenity, does it give back chi used or something ?

The way that it works is during Serenity you press a button that spends chi, and then you immediately get the chi back. You BoK, and you get 2 chi back. You PB, get one chi back. Guard, get 2 chi back. You can even BoF if for some silly reason that sounds like a good idea and you'd get 2 chi back.

The mechanics of it spending and refunding chi immediately are really just for WW's sake (to generate Tigereye Brew), but for BrM all that really matters is basically "you have infinite chi for 10 seconds" if you have at least 2 going into Serenity. This typically manifests as 10 seconds straight of spamming BoK and PB.

[Pazx]

The way that it works is during Serenity you press a button that spends chi, and then you immediately get the chi back. You BoK, and you get 2 chi back. You PB, get one chi back. Guard, get 2 chi back. You can even BoF if for some silly reason that sounds like a good idea and you'd get 2 chi back.

The mechanics of it spending and refunding chi immediately are really just for WW's sake (to generate Tigereye Brew), but for BrM all that really matters is basically "you have infinite chi for 10 seconds" if you have at least 2 going into Serenity. This typically manifests as 10 seconds straight of spamming BoK and PB.

so at the start of a fight using keg smash>serenity>BoK spam make shuffle effortless?

[Totaltotemic]

so at the start of a fight using keg smash>serenity>BoK spam make shuffle effortless?

Basically, yeah.

You get 60 seconds of Shuffle coming out of that, which means that for 60 seconds you can feel free to Purify twice every 6 seconds instead of using BoK (or basically twice every 8 seconds.. forever).

Despite what it may seem, it's actually harder to play like that than it is normally. Without Serenity, you know you're probably going to BoK every time you Keg Smash at the very least. There's a very good chance that if you have chi and have enough Shuffle, there's already something to Purify.

With Serenity, you can (and should) PB so often that there are times where you get lucky and just don't get hit for 4-5 seconds (with EB I typically have ~70% avoidance in beta gear) and have to hold PB for when you do actually take a swing. It's a lot harder to play perfectly when you can purify 100% of Stagger damage across a fight than it is when you just PB whenever you can because chi is so tight.

- - - Updated - - -

Well that's certainly an interesting method of damage tuning. They lowered basically every single ability for both BrM and WW by 5% and then buffed Tiger Strikes... uh... why? Literally the only thing that accomplishes is make multistrike and haste very, very slightly more valuable.

[Hyve]

I noticed that as well, and was disappointed. I didn't at all feel like our damage needed that much of a tweak, maybe a minor one here or there. But to compensate with a buff to Tiger Strikes ... ?

That's stupid. Mulistrike is annoying as it is anyway, because the orbs do literally no Healing, and the value of Haste has probably grown what, 0.5% or something silly like that off of this buff?

[Totaltotemic]

Yeah, I mean the way the numbers work out damage isn't really different at all. They didn't touch AA damage or any of the talents except for RJW, so overall it's like a 3% damage nerf with more uptime on a 25% multistrike buff. It's like the intent wasn't to change damage at all, but to make Tiger Strikes more consistent or something? I don't know, it just seems weird. These numbers are such small changes that I'm having trouble figuring out why someone would bother making those changes.

[Hyve]

Yeah, it all feels a little odd right now. Nothing has changed overall of course because the value of these changes is so minuscule, but I don't know why they even bothered to waste their time doing it.

I mean the 1% increase is just so small even in the longest boss fights it'll make no comparable difference, or even a numerical difference really. And taking ~3% damage overall from us, what does that achieve?

Edit:

Okay, so been playing between two sets of Enchants. Versatility & Mastery. Personally, I'm finding Mastery is coming out on top and I think the maths is there to support it as well. Versatility is a great tertiary stat, but because of how rare it is on gear, it doesn't stack anywhere near as much as Mastery does and the way it stacks it doesn't even account for the same amount of damage reduction or damage increase.

I tested just simply on the Dungeon Tank Dummy at the moment, but with Versatility it was a little bit more tricky to keep myself up. It wasn't hard, but simple enough, whereas with the Mastery set it was no issue at all, as long as I kept my Stagger under control.

I always ran it with Healing Elixirs & Zen Sphere and both were pretty good. Zen Sphere didn't heal for quite so much as I had hoped, but my Healing Elixir out-healed my Guard, and was comparable to my Gift of the Ox, which I was using all of them as often as I could.

I was also running the Multistrike enchants on my weapon, to get more GotO orbs, and I saw a small difference in self-healing from them which was nice.

I also managed to find a really nice Resolve Tracking WeakAura: http://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/...solve-WeakAura

[Ulfhedinn]

It is kind of amusing that of all the spells that could probably have been pruned from BrM, they left Breath of Fire in.

I think they have a problem with breath of fire. Its cool, fun and not needed... and they added a talent that made it always pointless instead of pointless most of the time.

[Juliansfist]

Perhaps BoF could provide a shuffle-like magic stagger buff to add in some flavour and purpose to the ability; whilst also being a step in the right direction for magic mitigation.

Note: Even if it functioned like shuffle as in being a timer building buff it wouldn't be necessary to maintain it constantly; although by having that cumulative buff building mechanic it would be suitable for extreme magic damage focused fights like Lei Shi if they ever appeared again.

[The Madgod]

I was also running the Multistrike enchants on my weapon, to get more GotO orbs, and I saw a small difference in self-healing from them which was nice.

Have you compared that with the armor and mastery weapon enchants yet?

EDIT: as well, has anyone tested the relative DPS gain of each of the different stats? I think it's been done before but that was a good bit ago, I'd like to see some more recent numbers.

[Promdates]

The spell changes affect dual wield only. It's just taking the modifier for DW from "0.898882" to "0.857143". The modifier for 2h is still 1. It's to bring dw damage more in line with 2h damage, essentially to probably make 2h the more attractive of the two options for us considering 2h is already taking less damage and having a lower TMI.

[Ampere]

It is kind of amusing that of all the spells that could probably have been pruned from BrM, they left Breath of Fire in.

Which would be such a shame, given how cool the animation is!

They could just give it the "Ultimatum" treatment to Breath of Fire just like Heroic Strike for Prot Warriors. Have free procs of Breath of Fire from Spinning Crane Kick/Rushing Jade Wind hits (or whatever). It could even be a really small proc rate just something to justify using the ability.

[Promdates]

Versatility is a great tertiary stat, but because of how rare it is on gear, it doesn't stack anywhere near as much as Mastery does and the way it stacks it doesn't even account for the same amount of damage reduction or damage increase.

Versatility is a secondary stat, and isn't that rare on gear. http://wod.wowhead.com/items?filter=...1;crv=0:0;gb=1