[Legion] BrM - Passive:Active Ratio

[thesmall001]

This isn't a thread about BrM performance right now. We're all aware of the problems. I personally think BrM will be fine so long as you don't mind playing a high skill-cap class. What I'm trying to achieve is to gauge how you all feel about Passive and Active Mitigation and what ratio is needed have fun.

BrMs are quite special in that they have tons of both Passive and Active Mitigation that tie-in cyclically.

Active:

Gift of the Ox
Master Kite Tank (Warriors kiss our calloused feet)
Level 15 Talents (Let's say assume EotT for a small HoT per target to counter Stagger damage)
[2]Healing Elixir (15% Max HP / 30s)
[2]Dampen Harm (30% TDR, up to 3 burst windows)
[2]Diffuse Magic (60% MDR/ 6s)
Stagger/Purify/ISB (Variable, up to 60% of all damage in a window)
[1]Black Ox Brew (A free Brew, sometimes an on-demand combo Purify)
Fortifying Brew + ISB + artefact traits (Stagger to 100% for 7.5s + 20% TDR for 15s + 25% [Undiminished!] Dodge for 20 seconds!)

Passive-ish:

Dragon Fire Brew (8% TDR / 8s on BoF)
Dark Side of the Moon (-15% Melee swing after Blackout Strike, not technically "passive" but you'll hit it on CD)
[3]Elusive Dancer (Up to 15% [Undiminished!] Dodge)
[3]Fortified Mind (Aprx. ~90s or ~33% CDR on Fortifying Mind, depending on based rotation)
[3]High Tolerance (5% bonus to base Stagger)
Brew-stache (15% [Undiminished!] Dodge /2.5)
[1] Light Brewing or Secret Ingredients (Passive buffs to Brews)
Artefact buffs to Gift of the Ox (Roughly +70%)
Obstinate Determination (Extra Gift of the Ox at 35%)

Passive:

Celestial Fortune (Crit % = +% to Healing Taken)
Mastery: Elusive Brawler (Base +8% [Undiminished!] Dodge, stacking)

A phenomenal amount of our "passive" toughness and healing is baked into our active gameplay but look at all of those tuning knobs! (Who says WoW is getting less complex?! Send them our way...) Between OD and Healing Elixirs AND banking Horbs, we should never fall below 35%. The problem we're having is that so much hinges on active mechanics that, when you fail to calculatedly execute your rotation, you lose all of that passive defence. We excel at sustaining in that 35-50% HP mid-range, as Celestalon pointed out today, I'm wondering if maybe we're too good at that and can afford to swap some reactive gameplay for some passive defence when we need it most.

One thing that seems out of place is Mastery: Elusive Brawler. The passive bad-luck prevention means that, every 3-6 auto attacks, the value of Purifying drops off a bit as our Stagger passively regulates. It's reliable but not particularly useful when our active tools already make us effective at this. We also have a LOT of undiminished % Dodge procs, since Mastery's value scales inversely with how OFTEN we Dodge it's worth less when we need it more, when we pop our CDs in burst situations, where we can't really afford to wait for it to stack up.

In other words 16/24/30% Dodge doesn't help much at 90% HP but we could really do with:

16% Dodge to help neutralize our Stagger at 50%.
OR
24% to buy us time to bring ourselves back to that sweet spot through re-active or pro-active choices (to help Healers get us back up) at 35%.
OR
32% when we're in the danger zone sub 35% which should only happen when we're out of tools to manage it.

Meanwhile, Orb Dancing to keep us in this "effective" range is the sort of gaming they want to differentiate the Pro's and the Joe's. As such, we want to reliably see a number of orbs proportional to the amount of Stagger we've accumulated so dropping an orb for every few Melee hits we take in a row (which will lead to a high "standard" Stagger pool) would be useful to mitigate sustained damage at any HP %.

You can probably see where I'm going with this. If we swap the mechanics that trigger Mastery and Gift of the Ox then we create the same gameplay but with the prominence of Active and Passive mitigation reversed. This keeps the high skill cap but reduces the potency of reaching that cap whilst helping less skilled Brewmasters survive whilst they learn to utilize their tools better.

Tl;dr - Dodge is the sort of thing you either want urgently or don't really care about. Making the amount we gain scale with % HP jumps out at me as the best way to reinforce the gameplay they're looking to create without making it so punishing when you make mistakes. Gift Orbs, meanwhile, add an extra active element to our "emergency situation" handling which is probably one more active component than the average BrM needs to still have fun when it all hits the fan.

That's probably the nudge needed to reconcile our mechanical balance with our difficulty balance.

- - - Updated - - -

The intuition was strong with this one, he said to himself. Look what happens when you provide feedback in reasonable and constructive ways, friends.