Monks are bad?

[Silverquis]

I got bored playing my alt and went on my monk to lvl it as my secondary class to play for legion. After a while, I've been hearing around that the only good thing about monks is the dps spec and that the tank and heal spec is bad. Confused By the statement, I went around Dalaran questioning ppl about monks.

The responds are not good. Some ppl said that monk tank is the worst of all tank specs (which is refuse to believe) and that only only ppl that play a monk tank either has no idea what they're doing or that person is a tanking master because the spec is hard to play. Some said that the healing spec is the least favored of all because of the tools MW has. As for the dps spec, some ppl didn't really have a problem with WW but some has said not to bring one for a single target fight but for aoe fights only.

I don't want to think any of that is true. Monk is my favorite class behind Shaman and would hate to know that this class is being crapped on because the stuff they say about it is true.

[Mynarjr]

It's not that monks are particularly bad tanks. They are just difficult to play. Even if you play a BrM Monk well, it is far from rewarding for the amount of effort you need to put in. Mistweaver is in a good place atm. I miss the old chi system, however it is doing fairly well without it.

[giniyo]

It's not that monks are particularly bad tanks. They are just difficult to play. Even if you play a BrM Monk well, it is far from rewarding for the amount of effort you need to put in. Mistweaver is in a good place atm. I miss the old chi system, however it is doing fairly well without it.

i dont think its the effort you need, at some point you just cant follow with clearing stagger anymore because you actually run out of your brews and then your red stagger is just being spamhealed

im not sure if ironskin & purifying sharing charges was a good idea.. or however else they could fix it

OT: i rate windwalker an a right now :P left my old dk/warrior times behind and enjoying it, some issues with storm/earth/fire cd but still more than playable and competetive

heal seems alright, tank might need another look at

[Thelxi]

BM's difficulty keeps getting overstated imo. It's not difficult, just complex to get a hang of. Once you figure it out it boils down to juggling your stagger and brew charges. The same goes for MW, it's not an intuitive spec at first glance, but once you understand the tools you have available it's simple stuff just like any other healer.

People don't like it because other tanks are a lot more fun and rewarding. A lot more independent too this expansion. BM relies heavily on healers and has a lower quality of life compared to the other tanks.

Also to the op, both MW and WW are fine. BM is fine too, just not preferred by any monks themselves or raid leaders. Why bring a BM when you can bring a prot.

[Deleted]

OP there's a thread called "Are Brewmasters really this underplayed?" which has done fairly well in articulating some of the issues many of us have with BRM tanking. So no, BRM doesn't belong in the group of being inherent bad (like elemental ) and I'd even say we're overall better off than Blood DK however there's a lot of know-how from both the tank and the healer to make it work properly as we mitigate the least damage of all tanks due to the limited amount of times you can actual purify without losing ISB uptime. Nevertheless it works and could use some mechanical tweaks to become an excellent tank, although I doubt you'll see it rise to fotm tank (even with WoD OPness).

WW is in a pretty good place, much more simple than when we had TeB.

I don't got enough experience with MW but I've heard great things about it in raids and PvP although the recent nerf might affect it slightly.

[Dirdie]

WW imo is just straight up fun and can do anything pretty damn good. Just has a solid well rounded toolkit for both pop and over.

After tanking most of WoD on my brew, and being extremely happy about the play style I have now shelved my BrM spec because I find it terrible to play,

MW I haven't really messed with too much but what I have done it seems to do resoinbly well and is a lot of fun.

[Deleted]

No, they're not. It's just perceived this way by many parts of the playerbase, as they're really rare in cutting edge progression due to some missing stuff - a few reasons were for example mentioned in the finalboss Exorsus interview. But for the other 99.9% of the game, all three specs are fine. Which doesn't mean that they don't have issues, but they're viable for anything.

[Achaikos]

As a mistweaver myself, I can attest to the fact that we can be beastly when you truly understand how the mastery plays into the spec then the throughput, especially in raid, can be enormous.

On the other hand with Brewmasters, ive seen some fantastic ones and some horrible ones. You either get it or you dont.

[Quickpaw]

It's amazing that post like this still show up.

[DisposableHero]

Monk tanks are in a much better spot in abstract that most people's experience (especially their healers) would dictate. Brewmasters are now, as they have been in their previous incarnations easy to damage but very hard to kill. Brewmasters while having relatively low self healing and low overall mitigation generally will always have the longest independent TTL (time to live) of any tank. What that means for healers is that they can almost always heal efficiently when dealing with a brewmaster because stagger ensures that while healing will be required, emergency healing will almost never be required, and efficient tools can be used.

There are two very serious problems with this interaction. One, its highly unintuitive for healers. The health bar on every other tank serves as an easily read barometer for danger, but it largely isn't that for Brewmasters. Two, the information that makes for a good barometer for danger for a Brewmaster is not readily available in the UI and doesn't provide relevant information at a glance. You have to understand the workings of Brewmaster intricately and have a view of health bar, stagger bar, energy bar, IsB buff duration, available brew charges, and available ox orbs to really get a full picture of how much danger a Brewmaster is actually in. First, it is not possible for a healer to have all the information readily visible on their UI, only a fraction of it. Second, this information isn't really required to understand the danger level for any other tank. Third, even if you had all the information at your disposal its a several item checkdown to really determine the level of danger, while for everyone else "low health = danger" holds pretty true. Fourth, it is not a reasonable expectation for healers to have all these extra ui elements at their disposal just to deal with one tank's class mechanics.

What this means is healers use "low health = danger" as their danger barometer and stagger as a mechanic becomes a waste of time, because what it is supposed to do is provide time for healers to heal efficiently, and take advantage of mechanics like celestial fortune to keep the tank relatively safe with a minimal investment. This model worked fantastically in MoP and WoD because Brewmasters did basically all of their own healing, so the UI elements were largely visible to the player in charge of sustain, and the mechanical understanding was there intuitively for most players. In fact it is a lot of what made Brewmaster enjoyable, having a long checkdown of outs for any difficult situation. It felt like kung fu, selecting the right mitigation or recovery tool for the damage and having to balance them across a long raid encounter. Now with Brewmaster, another player has to manage the recovery and your job is to manage the smoothing, where before the smoothing was automatic and you managed the recovery.

The real problems with Brewmaster in addition to the above have little to do with performance and a lot to do with mechanical awkwardness. The rotation is clunky as hell. I hate that word but it fits here. Most tanks have a cooldown managed offensive rotation and a resource managed defensive rotation. Prot warriors and paladins for example have a series of non-colliding cooldowns and resets managing their offense and generating resources while using those resources for defenses. Brewmasters have a cooldown interaction rotation but it has built in collisions between Keg Smash, Blackout Strike, Rushing Jade Wind, and Breath of Fire (because for some reason keg smash being a 6 second base cooldown and BoF being affected by haste would be too OP, despite making everything line up perfectly) which makes it feel awkward. You are also managing a resource bar in energy that is constant refilling, with Tiger Palm, which you have to manage a resource cap and a resource floorr(i.e. the energy to maintain keg smash and the energy to use expel harm in an emergency). Finally all of this is managing a secondary shared cooldown resource in brew charges which are critical to your defense and despite needing to be timed for defensive purposes need to also be consumed at a reasonable rate to prevent resource overflow. It takes considerably more attention than other tanks rotations and it doesn't output substantially stronger results.

[AetherMcLoud]

WW is one of the best dps right now, MW is one of the best healers right now, and anyone who says Brewmaster is a worse tank than DH or DK is out of their minds.

[Ozzyorcborne]

Sadly i haven't seen any brewmasters at all since legion launched when im dpsing in dungeons. When im tanking im really happy to see mistweavers as their healing is pretty damn good. Windwalkers are insane dps wise which has sort of made to curious to try them but im locked into the BRM artifact quest at the moment.The odd part is that i DO see brewmasters in dalaran. Most of them with the hidden skin for Fuzhan so im not sure if theyre tanking dungeons or pvping.

[Tiphess]

Monk heal is op

i'm always first at healing, guild or pug groups

either everyone i got with suck, or im good

now i dont want to look like im bragging but i think if i outperform everyone it means the class might have something to do with it

[Tygerman]

I play my brewmaster a ton, but I main a Prot Warrior. I've mentioned this before in the post titled "Are Brewmasters really this underplayed". At the moment, there's not much reason to bring a brewmaster when you can bring a warrior, druid, pally, etc. You put in more work for less than ideal results.

I've cleared normal EN on my brewmaster but only after clearing it with my guild a couple of times on my Warrior, and I honestly felt like I was being carried. On the fights that you actually take damage from (Ursoc), you really notice how much brewmaster suffers. There comes a point when you can only do so much and you run out of brews, then your stagger gets so high that you slowly get withered down to death. That doesn't mean they're not viable, just not ideal, but this is due to their mechanics as a tank.

Most of the brewmaster threads have different solutions/ideas of how to make the spec play better, but the overall consensus is that Purifying Brew needs to be changed, mainly it needs to purify more damage. This is because as stated before, its really disheartening to purify a red stagger only to be left with still having a red stagger.

I play all 3 specs of the monk as well and can definitely say that they're all a ton of fun to play, Mistweaver especially. Windwalker and MW alike both perform nicely, not judging from my own performance but guildies as well. Brewmasters not so much.

Still love all the specs though, and I'm going to continue playing Brewmaster with the hopes that they get some tweaks shortly before or after 7.1.

[Will]

BM will be far stronger once we get our tier set. One of the set bonuses makes Tiger Palm reduce brews by a further 1s (this includes BoxB) which is a big deal as it will chop 3-4 seconds off the CD of each ISB/PB
...Assuming it makes it live

I also think an undervalued trait to upgrade is Face Palm which each extra rank gives Tiger Palm a 10% chance to reduce Brews by a further 1s, so if you had 6/6 Face Palm, you'd have a 60% chance for Tiger Palm to reduce by 2s (or 3s when we get the tier set) although this trait is arguably inferior to the BoF one (which becomes extremely powerful in conjunction with the legendary that lets Keg Smash reset BoF's CD, thus enabling 100% uptime on the enemy damage reduction component of the trait)

[ehxy]

I just talked to everyone in general chat in dalaran and stormwind.

Mistwavers are in the top 3 best healers.

Brewmaster is a lot of work and only good and experienced players can play it while others mostly screw it up.

Windwalkers are one of the top burst aoe damage dealers in the game.

No idea who you talked to but you're wrong because I just asked 5 minutes ago so my information is more up to date. i could pull out the percentile logs sorted by 1 class representation per rank but that'd be just too damn logical.

Nice try though I think this is actually a subtle tactic to make the general pop and whatever blizz person to think monks need a buff.

[Jaigar]

I offspec'd a Halls of Valor 8 tonight as BrM (Necrotic, Raging), and it went alright. I was getting trucked incredibly hard sometimes, and a power strike from a raging champion gave me 3 mil stagger in 1 hit. Sitting at 19% haste, BoC, I had to delay my brews until 80%+ to not run out. Had fun with it still.

[Deleted]

They are all either really good or decent. The only thing I dont like about BRM is that we are very dependant on healers. Like blood DKs, holy pala and DH can heal quite a lot which is fun in HCs where for an example the whole party dies on the worm boss in Eye of Aszhara with all adds up blood DK and pala can solo that pretty much but monks will go down fast pretty fast.

Low healing overall so when you do WQs and do big pulls it aint fun compared to other tanks. Its minor shit like that which doesnt make it fun for me. Then Id like purify to remove 100% of stagger.

Its not really a bad thing but more more fun on other tanks when you can do shit like that, and the artifact tree is lackluster imo. Its fun to be mobile and all that but it feels like something is missing compared to before imo.

[cqwrteur]

It's not that monks are particularly bad tanks. They are just difficult to play. Even if you play a BrM Monk well, it is far from rewarding for the amount of effort you need to put in. Mistweaver is in a good place atm. I miss the old chi system, however it is doing fairly well without it.

People always confuse concepts between "difficult to play" and "underpowered". When they say some spec is difficult to play, it always means it is underpowered since no real evidence to prove it is difficult.

- - - Updated - - -

Idk about the other specs, but I've never heard that MW was bad in Legion. They're excellent at everything - PvP, Raids, Dungeons, Mythics.

I only agree MW is good in rated bg. I don't think MW is not bad. The removal of fistweaving left this spec with zero utility and no reason to bring one in other environment.

Windwalker? Well, one spec dps class is always not very strong because they can't handle the risk of fluctuating performance by patches.

[Thra]

zero utility and no reason to bring one in other environment.

Ugh. This argument grinds my gears. What utility do other healers bring, especially in regards to the removal of fistweaving? The only spec that can heal through damage is now Disc. So this means that druid/pala/sham/hpriest also bring no utility?

Define utility?