Brewmasters nerfs

[Tech614]

Well ok let me rephrase, that's the part that we'll probably feel the most. I do agree it was probably the most needed to bring us in line.

Are you serious? Taking 50% or more upfront damage is the part we will feel the most, not a dumb mechanic that allowed us to cheese shit and trivialize abilities. Having a gutted spec that will be boring to play is another part we will feel the most, not just a dumb oversight that let us cheese abilities.

[Nami69]

Judging from the early iterations of the T18 set bonus it looks like they want us to spam Expel Harm 24/7 to compensate for this nerf haha.. brb rerolling Bear

[dcc626]

Judging from the early iterations of the T18 set bonus it looks like they want us to spam Expel Harm 24/7 to compensate for this nerf haha.. brb rerolling Bear

id be really surprised if the bonuses ended up like that. way too early.

last boss drops class trinkets, on the ptr the brewmaster bonuse makes elusive brew also give us a flat % damage reduction. interesting, but kinda meh.

[Lodion]

So.. thinking on this some more and doing some basic numbers, this may not be the issue I initially thought. Some back of envelope figures:

In 6.1 we have 30% baseline, 10% shuffle, and around 15% from mastery... for me, gear dependent of course.
Total: 45% upfront, 55% over 10 seconds

In 6.2 with the current changes we have 10% baseline, 10% shuffle, and around 15% mastery
Total: 65% upfront, 35% over 10 seconds

Making the upfront change: 45% up to 65%, a 45% increase in frontloaded damage. Sounds bad right? But the stance buff to armour increase (75% up to 125% increased armour) is an effective 66% buff to mitigated damage... before being shuffled.

Percentage wise this would appear to be a ~20% BUFF to our mitigation... or is my lack of coffee hiding something from me?

[Shamanberry]

In 6.2 with the current changes we have 10% baseline, 10% shuffle, and around 15% mastery
Total: 65% upfront, 35% over 10 seconds

Shuffle no longer increases stagger amount. It's just a parry buff.

Also, a X% increase to armor doesn't translate to an X% increase in damage mitigation. The difference is going to be fairly small, despite the large number change.

[dcc626]

So.. thinking on this some more and doing some basic numbers, this may not be the issue I initially thought. Some back of envelope figures:

In 6.1 we have 30% baseline, 10% shuffle, and around 15% from mastery... for me, gear dependent of course.
Total: 45% upfront, 55% over 10 seconds

In 6.2 with the current changes we have 10% baseline, 10% shuffle, and around 15% mastery
Total: 65% upfront, 35% over 10 seconds

Making the upfront change: 45% up to 65%, a 45% increase in frontloaded damage. Sounds bad right? But the stance buff to armour increase is an effective 66% buff to mitigated damage... before being shuffled.

Percentage wise this would appear to be a ~20% BUFF to our mitigation... or is my lack of coffee hiding something from me?

i go from 44.5% damage reduction to 48.5% from armor buff. im thinking its not an overall buff to mitigation

also, with serenity being halved and blackout kick not giving additional shuffle this means serneity ends up being a really short dps cooldown? guess its chiex or bust...

[Lodion]

Shuffle no longer increases stagger amount. It's just a parry buff.

Also, a X% increase to armor doesn't translate to an X% increase in damage mitigation. The difference is going to be fairly small, despite the large number change.

Hang on... no shuffle stagger buff? I didn't see that at all... and it is a huge mechanics change for the class. Thinking these notes are just placeholders and to be ignored.

Yep, totally messed up on armour. As dcc626 said below. My bad. That explains it.

[The Madgod]

So.. thinking on this some more and doing some basic numbers, this may not be the issue I initially thought. Some back of envelope figures:

In 6.1 we have 30% baseline, 10% shuffle, and around 15% from mastery... for me, gear dependent of course.
Total: 45% upfront, 55% over 10 seconds

In 6.2 with the current changes we have 10% baseline, 10% shuffle, and around 15% mastery
Total: 65% upfront, 35% over 10 seconds

Making the upfront change: 45% up to 65%, a 45% increase in frontloaded damage. Sounds bad right? But the stance buff to armour increase (75% up to 125% increased armour) is an effective 66% buff to mitigated damage... before being shuffled.

Percentage wise this would appear to be a ~20% BUFF to our mitigation... or is my lack of coffee hiding something from me?

For one thing there's no more 10% from shuffle, so it'd be 75% upfront.

Plus as has been said, the buff to actual armor-based DR is about 5ish%. Rough math says that means our spike damage intake's going to be almost doubled.

Though I'll double check that. Say we take 1,000,000 damage before armor mitigation. We'll use Dcc's numbers for armor and your numbers for stagger.

Pre 6.2

1,000,000*(1-.445) = 555,000

555,000 *(.45) = 249,750

Post 6.2

1,000,000*(1-.485) = 515000

515000*(.75) = 386250

Not as bad as almost double, but that's about 54% more burst damage taken.

[Shieldarm]

Let's put up a couple numbers, just real quick. We'll say right now, you have 20% mastery, and 45% armor. That's 60% stagger, and 45% armor. After patch, we'll adjust those to 30% stagger, and 49% armor. Now, I'm not sure which applies first, but it appears to be the same either way, unless the staggered dot does not get mitigated at all by armor.

We'll assume you get a hit for 100k.

6.1:
100000 * (1-.45) = 55000
55000 * .6 = 33000
55000 * .4 = 22000

So basically, we take 22k up front, then 33k over 10 seconds. Now, after the patch...

6.2:
100000 * (1-.49) = 51000
51000 * .3 = 15300
51000 * .7 = 35700

In this case, we'll take 37500 up front, then 15300 over 10 seconds.

Now, let's assume that the new model, we purge instantly, and take 35700 damage. For the previous one, we take 3300 damage a second. So, 35700 - 22000 = 13700 / 3300 = 4.1515~ seconds of dot to take the same damage we would from an instant purge at new value. If we take 3 seconds to purify that first hit, taking 1530 a second, we instead 40290 damage - 22000 = 18290 / 3300 = 5.54242~ seconds. Then, if it takes us 6 seconds to purify, we'd have to wait 6.933~ seconds to break even. Basically, unless we take 8 seconds to purify damage, point for point, we will take more damage using the new system. And I don't know ANYONE that would wait 8 seconds after taking a big hit to purify, unless they were afk.

Lastly, a quick breakdown, of how much damage we take from the new system, per second of the hit. Damages are a percentage of New Amount / Current Amount

0s = 162.2727% damage
1s = 154.2688% damage
2s = 135.5245% damage
3s = 126.3009% damage
4s = 118.8068% damage
5s = 112.5974% damage
6s = 107.3684% damage
7s = 102.9047% damage
8s = 99.0496% damage
9s = 95.6867% damage
10s = 92.7273% damage

Basically, we're taking a TON more spike damage, for a weaker dot. That doesn't even result in us taking less damage, unless we take absolutely forever to cleanse it. Which, we have no reason to do, since the value of blackout kick thanks to the stagger going away is pretty diminished.

[mvaliz]

YAAAAAY!!!! MYTHIC 5 MAN DUNGEONS! Time to dust off the Brewmaster!!!!

/reads brewmaster changes


......wonder what battle pets I can collect in Tanaan...

[Kalerender]

Even our armor looks lame

[ElDoorO]

So just to be clear, because BrM scales well with gear -- we're going to nerf it. So let's make newer BrM'ers *squishier* that are learning to BrM -- one of the harder tanks to tank with. Sounds like a solid plan.
*checks WoW sub*
13 days left.

Yep, glad I just gave them a month. C'est la vie. Now back to League of Legends and occasionally their Blizzard moba.

[Totaltotemic]

Copy/pasta my post in the BrM sticky.

Okay so I have 3021 armor in my gear which is 36.6% damage reduction against raid bosses (63.4% damage taken).

Bonus armor does not get multiplied by SotSO so I'll take that off and my raw armor is 2048. x * 1.75 = 2048, so raw armor is 1170, that * new 125% modifier = 2633. Adding in my bonus armor again it's 3606 for the new value.

3606 = 40.8% damage reduction (59.2% damage taken) with the 6.2 value. This is effectively a 6.6% damage reduction, and for that we lose 30% Stagger.

The armor buff is a joke. It's a placebo, nothing more.

Honestly I don't understand how they think removing 30% Stagger is supposed to work. I could see 10%. I could even see 15%. 20% would be ridiculous. 30% makes BrM basically not viable. Going from 60% Stagger to 30% (I have 20% Mastery) is literally a 75% damage taken increase. That's just absurd and would never work. I mean, it's so bad that it can't possibly go live or BrM would be literally unable to tank Mythic raids. It would be like taking how much worse Druids are than Monks and then making Monks that much worse than Druids and the other tanks.

Don't even get me started on how stupid a 5 second Serenity is. I've been saying since beta that CE needed to be buffed in Shuffle uptime, and instead they nerf Serenity to be totally useless and to never be taken by any player ever. Like why not just increase the cooldown? Ugh.

[Taven]

Copy/pasta my post in the BrM sticky.

Okay so I have 3021 armor in my gear which is 36.6% damage reduction against raid bosses (63.4% damage taken).

Bonus armor does not get multiplied by SotSO so I'll take that off and my raw armor is 2048. x * 1.75 = 2048, so raw armor is 1170, that * new 125% modifier = 2633. Adding in my bonus armor again it's 3606 for the new value.

3606 = 40.8% damage reduction (59.2% damage taken) with the 6.2 value. This is effectively a 6.6% damage reduction, and for that we lose 30% Stagger.

The armor buff is a joke. It's a placebo, nothing more.

Honestly I don't understand how they think removing 30% Stagger is supposed to work. I could see 10%. I could even see 15%. 20% would be ridiculous. 30% makes BrM basically not viable. Going from 60% Stagger to 30% (I have 20% Mastery) is literally a 75% damage taken increase. That's just absurd and would never work. I mean, it's so bad that it can't possibly go live or BrM would be literally unable to tank Mythic raids. It would be like taking how much worse Druids are than Monks and then making Monks that much worse than Druids and the other tanks.

Don't even get me started on how stupid a 5 second Serenity is. I've been saying since beta that CE needed to be buffed in Shuffle uptime, and instead they nerf Serenity to be totally useless and to never be taken by any player ever. Like why not just increase the cooldown? Ugh.

Looking at my Prot/Blood right now. I really hope these changes don't' make it.

[Rewyn]

Looking at my Prot/Blood right now. I really hope these changes don't' make it.

So you can continue to by far and away super op?

When Warlords launched, Protadins were the op ones, when the massive nerf came to them (and boy did it!) it was needed. Now its monks turns. Is it too much? Time will tell.

[Deleted]

Aah the Blizzard balance pendulum... perpetually swinging classes between OP and bearly viable.

Aah good old MMO-C posters definition of "bearly viable" without even playing it.

Two things.

1) Brewmaster is OP at the moment.
2) It is the first PTR build.

[eschatological]

Is it too much? Time will tell.

Except basic math can already tell: yes, it's too much.

No one was arguing BrM wasn't OP. But this is a wild swing in the other direction, and it came at the expense of the core mechanic of our tanking playstyle (shuffle and purifying), which is the even more distressing part. Sure, numbers will be tuned, but the shuffle playstyle is a deliberate design choice, and they absolutely gutted it.

[arcuro]

Aah good old MMO-C posters definition of "bearly viable" without even playing it.

Two things.

1) Brewmaster is OP at the moment.
2) It is the first PTR build.

every good BrM player knew that we are OP right now and a nerf is justified. But from maths alone everyone can tell that a flat out 75% damage increase and on top mechanic nerf are way to much. and we knew also that its the first build, thats why we discuss and figuered out that this nerf is way to hard to go live.. hopefully.

[Seedsworth]

To be fair, I can see why they would maybe drop the base stagger on the stance down, that much would be fine, but to balance that out they kinda need to keep the stagger bonus on shuffle. Or they could go vice versa, have the baseline stagger at 20%-25% ish then remove the stagger off shuffle.

Even with all these changes, personally I think I am going to keep playing brewmaster just to see how it goes, as brewmaster is the most enjoyable for me to tank on.

[Rixarius]

The damage nerfs are a bit strange to me, I hope that doesn't stick.

The Stagger nerfs are pretty brutal... but probably justified.