Brewmaster Monk Feedback -- Build 21570 -- 27-Apr

Please feel free to reply to this thread with feedback you have on this specialization in the most recent version of the Legion Alpha.

You'll find class designer notes on this build here.

This thread and subforum are for class feedback. We may not be attentive to other threads on this subject. Please confine discussion in this thread to issues related to this spec only.

Thank you!

04/27/2016 05:57 PMPosted by Kjazetti

I'm really not trying to be difficult here, but I've seen my class slowly fall into uselessness and it would be great if a blue could respond if anything is even in the works. It honestly feels like y'all aren't listening to any feedback.

We've definitely heard the feedback. Brewmasters are currently in a really good looking spot, gameplay-wise. Tuning is yet to come and should improve the usability of a ton of talents.

04/27/2016 06:33 PMPosted by Kariarose

You're able to macro ISB to the three usable abilities and just pound them for 8 minutes until either the boss is dead or we are. Is that intentional?

No; if you can provide any evidence that that is in any way even remotely viable, I'd love to see it. Not using Purifying Brew should be a colossal mistake.

Regarding the comments on interactivity, we've noticed that this seems to go hand in hand with whether you're still trying to treat ISB as an always-up thing or not. So much of the gameplay is tied to intelligently using your abilities right now, and perhaps it's too easy to gloss over that and think that A) Purify was nerfed (it wasn't), B) Purify is less important than ISB (it's not), or C) you should be keeping ISB up in order to survive (you shouldn't).

I'm curious to hear how people who are making use of both ISB and Purify feel.

EDIT: Same with Gift of the Ox. Skilled Brewmasters should be actively managing Gift of the Ox with very similar gameplay to how Expel Harm was used before. What happens when you try that?

EDIT 2: Further example: We're finding skilled Brewmasters are virtually unkillable right now, significantly overpowered.

04/28/2016 12:58 PMPosted by Gryphandor

Then the Brewmaster tank I had in my dungeon had no clue what he was doing because he just kept dying.

Totally possible. That is what is more concerning to us; that even skilled and experienced tanks aren't understanding the significance of their abilities or how to use them. Perhaps it just takes more time for the community to adjust to the new gameplay, in this case. Or perhaps there's a presentation problem in the abilities.

A) Purifying Brew does indeed purify more than it ever has before by a large margin. However, it still doesn't get rid of the immense amount of stagger still left ticking on you. #1 because it only does half of the total, #2 we take more direct hits than before, and #3 EXTREMELY LIMITED CHARGES.

B) If you use Purifying Brew too many times before Black Ox Brew is up again, your ISB falls. When ISB falls, your chances of instantly dying are very high. The options are only as thus: you die to the ridiculous stagger dot on you or you die from the next consecutive melee hit(s) with a Purified, but still immense dot on you.

C) If this was the intention, you've missed the mark. It's an absolute necessity to even have a presence in a group, raid, and sometimes even a solo setting.

Since Gift of the Ox is essentially gone from the game because of its abyssmal proc chance, awful placement, and low healing, it's readily dismissed. When a tiny yellow orb spawns inside of a mob, underneath the over-the-top graphics of every ability, or simply too far away to be picked up, you don't go over and pick it up.

With the loss of literally every person cooldown, I'm curious as to what you guys actually wanted to do by design. What SHOULD we be doing to survive since we don't have Guard, Expel Harm, Elusive Brew, or Ox orbs?

You're maintaining ISB, not Purifying much, dying to Stagger DoT, and getting few Gift of the Ox orbs. Those things are related.

You should be using ISB to maximize how much Purify clears, not solely for the smoothing.

You have a large health pool: use it. If you're above 75% health, using ISB is probably a waste. It's smoothing when you don't need smoothing, and it's reducing the number of GotO orbs that you're creating.

Gift of the Ox is absolutely massive, but it requires actively playing around your health pool to maximize.

We normally prefer to provide the abilities and world and let players determine how they want to play, and decide for themselves what the ‘best’ way for themselves to play is. In this case, we think that maybe just spelling out how we expect it to be played will help you all experience it better, give better feedback, and help identify the points of confusion you had that prevented you from reaching these conclusions. So, without further ado...

Celestalon's Guide to Mastering the Brew
Here’s how I play the new Legion Brewmaster. This is non-talent-specific, talents will be an additional layer on top of this.

Offensive Abilities
These are important because they establish threat, do damage, and give you more usage of your Active Mitigation abilities. They're best used in a priority list, with the key skill differentiator being maximizing Keg Smash usage, and not wasting any Energy while maximizing damage.
1. Always, ALWAYS save enough Energy and GCDs to Keg Smash exactly as it comes off cooldown.
2. Tiger Palm, if you're at risk of capping Energy.
3. Breath of Fire if there are multiple targets.
4. Blackout Kick.
5. Tiger Palm with excess energy, making sure to leave 40 for when Keg Smash comes off CD.

Defensive Abilities
This will make up the meat of the discussion, as there is a ton of nuance in only a few abilities here. There are several defensive resources important to Brewmasters: Brew Charges (ISB/PB), Health, Ox Orbs, and Stagger. (Energy is the other resource, but that's considered an offensive resource, and is converted into more Brew Charges per above). Each of those resources is important, and should be monitored.

Let's start by talking about Health, as it's likely the most nuanced resource. Obviously, if you run out, you die, but there's so much more going on here. It's actually ideal that you stay somewhat damaged, when you're not in danger. Let’s explore why that’s a safe thing to do, and how it benefits you.

The Brewmaster is especially well suited to staying somewhat damaged, having Stagger to provide constant steady damage, and having Mastery: Elusive Brawler to ensure that it's highly unlikely that you'll take a string of multiple non-avoided attacks in a row. Mastery is not just plain dodge, it's key to recognize the difference; it acts as a fairly reliable form of dodge, when you need it (and not when you don't).

Now for the benefits of staying damaged. Presumably, if you're in much danger as a Brewmaster, you're likely in group content, and are getting some external healing. Consider what form that healing takes. It varies based on the spec of healer(s) with you, but a safe assumption is that there is a mixture of steady healing (such as HoTs) and large direct heals (such as Flash of Light). Healer mana matters in Legion (and we want to make sure that spending mana on tanks is an important part of that), so minimizing how much healing you need is important. If you stay at full health most of the time, and occasionally spike low, that wastes most of the steady healing (HoTs), making them mostly overheal. By staying damaged, the HoTs can do their job.

Secondly, Gift of the Ox provides you with healing spheres, but it procs more often the lower health you are. That means two things: First, it reinforces that you want to let yourself get damaged. Second, it means that you shouldn't pick up the healing spheres when you don't need them, as their healing will reduce the chance of more dropping until you take more damage. Thus, the best way to use Gift of the Ox is to only use them when you get dangerously low on health. That will ensure there is a significant number of them, ready to go whenever you do need them. Also, it's worth noting that the fact that they drop at your left and right (alternating) matters, as it means you can choose to collect only half of them at once, as one side's pile will likely be enough to keep you going; no need to grab both sides if you don't need to.

That brings us to the primary way that you manage your health: Ironskin Brew and Purifying Brew, which share charges. They work best when combined; using a healthy mixture of both is nearly always superior to heavily favoring one or the other. Ironskin Brew provides damage smoothing and increases the effectiveness of Purifying Brew, but does not reduce healing needed. Complimenting that, Purifying Brew removes Staggered damage, but only does much if you've recently used Ironskin Brew.

Ironskin Brew's damage smoothing is element that should dictate when you use it. The above discussion of health showed how beneficial it is to stay in a damaged state, but you also don't want to risk dying. Use ISB when there is risk of dying in the next couple seconds. Mastery will help with that significantly, making it reliable for you to not take a string of several unavoided hits in a row; trust in it. It can be a scary wave to ride, but trust in your toolset to keep you alive, even if you're not at full health. Save ISB for incoming telegraphed spike damage from your enemies, and when you get down to half health (or whatever point you risk dying to a couple more hits). Accept that you're only going to have ISB up some of the time (half of the time is a good starting estimate), and focus on making those ISBs count, covering the most incoming damage, and points when you are most at risk. Don't waste brew charges on ISB when you’re at high health.

If you’re Ironskinning well, you’ll be building up a significant but not overpowering Stagger level. Pay attention to the Stagger bar on your unit frame, and use Purifying Brew to manage it. You have a limited number of Purifying Brews, so you want to maximize how much damage you remove from the picture with each one. Watch for your Stagger to spike up after you take burst damage (which you had Ironskin Brew up for); that’s a good time to Purify, thereby negating a massive chunk of that burst damage. Note that the Stagger bar is equivalent scale to your health bar; seeing a half full Stagger bar means you’re going to take half your health in Stagger damage. It also means that Purifying when you’re at 2/3 Stagger is going to negate a whopping 1/3 of your healthbar in damage; that’s extremely strong compared to other tank rotational heals/absorbs in Legion. One caveat to this is that if you’re at nearly full health, even if you have a large Stagger built up, save your Purifying for later; it would just turn the HoTs on you into overhealing.

Here’s a TLDR summary of how to best use these abilities:
1. If you’re at full or near full (>80%ish) health, save your brew charges, don’t use any. Obviously, use one on the pull since it’d just be wasted otherwise, but that’s it. Don’t pick up Gift of the Ox healing spheres.
2. If you’re damaged, but not in danger (probably 40-80% health, depending on the content), you’re in the sweet spot. Try to err as low as you can feel comfortable here. Use an Ironskin here or there, but don’t try to maintain it. Keep a spare brew charge or two in reserve for when you get dangerously low. Purify if you get over 40-50% Stagger. Still don’t pick up the healing spheres (some will expire and heal you automatically, that’s fine).
3. When you’re dangerously damaged (30-50%), don’t panic. Hit Ironskin for sure. Grab some healing spheres. If still dangerously low, grab the others and keep grabbing them as they spawn (which should be happening fairly frequently). Use Purify with a bit lower priority here; only Purify if you’re over 50-60% Stagger.
4. If you’re even lower than that, now it’s time to start panicking. Use Fortifying Brew if you run out of Ironskins. Keep gobbling up the healing spheres. If things are really dire, Roll away from the mobs to buy a few more seconds.

Conclusion
In summary, don’t panic. Let your health get moderately low. Maximize the effects of all your tools. Mix Ironskin and Purifying Brew fairly evenly. Don’t try to keep Ironskin up the whole time; only use it when you’re in already damaged. Have fun!

Hope this helped. Feedback about how this feels to play would be great, and what parts of this didn’t seem intuitive or confusing. Thanks!

04/28/2016 05:33 PMPosted by Felstone

04/28/2016 05:21 PMPosted by Celestalon

Secondly, Gift of the Ox provides you with healing spheres, but it procs more often the lower health you are.

You're not listening, Gift of the Ox is not acceptable reactive healing ability as we are not able to activate it via movement during most boss encounters.

Jerking left and right to pickup orbs only serves to put the target (boss) out of positioning and pissing off all of your DPS. Name one other tank class that has this issue, it's solely unique to BrM and if this is your only response to the issue i feel sorry for the community moving forward.

It is not necessary to move the boss to pick up Gift of the Ox healing spheres. ANY movement in the right direction will pick them up. If you're moving the boss, you're moving too far.

And yes, I've seen bugs in Legion in a few places where they can't be picked up; we'll get those fixed.

By the way, nothing has changed about their placement from live, for the conspiracy theorists.

04/28/2016 05:28 PMPosted by Arcádia

Why would you pick a tank that has to gamble and risk that much with his health on progression over any other tank that does not have to do that?

Every tank gambles with their life when tanking. Brewmasters do it in a different way. By having so much control over their survival, it's in their hands to play to their situation and healers.

04/28/2016 05:54 PMPosted by Peachpies

From a healer perspective that is not a very fun tank to have in a group. I am a healer, I want to heal people not stand around and wait to see if the tank is going to pick up some orbs or not. And if they don't pick up some orbs than it is probably too late to do anything so I have to heal them regardless.

From a healer perspective, you should keep healing, but know that there's an implicit Deep Healing mechanic on Brewmasters. They still need your healing, it's just not quite as dire for them to be at medium health as it might be for other tanks.

I'd add that we know full well that this sort of design would not work in the live Warlords world, where spikiness is the only threat to tanks, and if you're not at full health, you're about to die.

That is not the Legion world. Legion is very different.

04/28/2016 06:10 PMPosted by Totallite

I'm going to ignore everyone else in the thread for the moment and point out a problem with Gift of the Ox.

People are seeing fewer orbs than they should if they use ISB because of the way the proc formula works.

(0.75 * Damage / MaxHealth) * (3 - 2 * HealthPercentAfterDamage)

Damage is the full damage of the hit, before absorbs, before Stagger. HealthPercentAfterDamage is with stagger taken into account, but not other absorbs. Mitigation does reduce Damage. In your example, Damage would be 100k.

Okay, so mitigation reduces Damage, and HealthPercentAfterDamage. Stagger reduces HealthpercentAfterDamage. However, GotO does not proc off of the Stagger DoT, so what happens is this:

Player 1 is at 100% health and does not use ISB. They generate X orbs over the next 10 seconds.

Player 2 is also at 100% health and DOES use ISB, but does not Purify. Both players take the same amount of damage over the next 10 seconds, however Player 2 gets less than X orbs because each individual melee swing is lower, yet their health is getting reduced all the same because Stagger is ticking.

What happens here is that, if you are trying to play like a good tank and smooth your damage all of the time, you get fewer orbs EVEN IF you maintain the same health level. Naturally, this means that many good players will see far fewer orbs than someone that knows the "secret" to playing BrM.

Change the HealthPercentAfterDamage variable to just Current Health and retune it a little. You already have Damage/Max Health representing the size of the hit, so the delta in health is already being counted and it doesn't need to be counted again.

This should result in the proper amount of orbs being seen for good players, which will make them safer when they drop low, which should ease the feeling of dying whenever they don't have ISB up.

Kind of. Right problem, different solution. We're going to err in the player's favor here, and make HealthPercentAfterDamage based on the same Damage amount as the left part of the equation is (ie, the full damage of the hit, before absorbs, before stagger, instead of after stagger).

OLD: (0.75 * Damage / MaxHealth) * (3 - 2 * (CurrentHealth - (Damage - Stagger)) / MaxHealth)
NEW: (0.75 * Damage / MaxHealth) * (3 - 2 * (CurrentHealth - Damage) / MaxHealth)

That will ensure that ISB doesn't reduce the chance to generate an orb on any given attack (but still will on the next attack by virtue of being higher health).

04/28/2016 07:21 PMPosted by Delritha

04/28/2016 07:14 PMPosted by Celestalon

Kind of. Right problem, different solution. We're going to err in the player's favor here, and make HealthPercentAfterDamage based on the same Damage amount as the left part of the equation is (ie, the full damage of the hit, before absorbs, before stagger, instead of after stagger).

OLD: (0.75 * Damage / MaxHealth) * (3 - 2 * (CurrentHealth - (Damage - Stagger)) / MaxHealth)
NEW: (0.75 * Damage / MaxHealth) * (3 - 2 * (CurrentHealth - Damage) / MaxHealth)

That will ensure that ISB doesn't reduce the chance to generate an orb on any given attack (but still will on the next attack by virtue of being higher health).

Is that before damage reduction? meaning the RAW un-mitigated damage?

No, neither of those are before armor or any other actual DR effect. It's just before Stagger/Absorbs.

04/28/2016 07:33 PMPosted by Kariarose

Also, out of almost 1,000 Ox orbs, none of them proc'd Celestial Fortune.

Also, they disperse after a short time, ranging from 21 seconds to 28 seconds. If you're greater than a 8ish yards away from them when they do, they will not heal you.

Gift of the Ox + Celestial Fortune fixed for next build.

They last 30sec, always.

My post was about how I suggest you play Brewmaster, not healers.

I didn't say that healers should let you sit at low health; that's putting words in my mouth. Healers should generally heal you the same as any other tank, just with the knowledge that it's safer to use more efficient heals. For example, a healer may typically keep a HoT rolling, and use lots of normal Heals while you're above 80%, and switch to Flash Heal if you drop below that. With a Brewmaster, they can probably stick to normal Heals for longer, switching to Flashes only at 60% or something. That's an over-simplified picture of things, but that's the general idea. It doesn't mean to stop healing them.

You also shouldn't try to take more damage. Stagger is a very powerful mechanic, and it lets you choose when you take damage, and when you don't (or rather, take way way less). The whole point of this is to minimize damage, and take that damage at opportune times (when you're not in danger).

Thanks for the constructive discussion on this, it's been great.

We think it's fairly intuitive and works well, that you have limited brew charges, and so want to use them when in danger and not when not in danger. However, the further amplification of that through Gift of the Ox is a little too much of a stretch for people to notice (buried in the Gift of the Ox tooltip) and play around.

We also agree with many of the discussed issues that the healing spheres in general pose.

We have the following further revisions planned:

• Gift of the Ox will now drop healing spheres more consistently*, but will no longer drop them more frequently when you are at low health, baseline.
• Secret Ingredients has been replaced with a new talent, Gift of the Mists: Passive. Gift of the Ox has an up to 100% increased chance to trigger, based on your missing health.
• Expel Harm has returned for Brewmasters:
  
• Expel Harm
• Instant, 15 Energy
• Draw in the positive chi of all Healing Spheres within 30 yards, and expel negative chi, damaging the nearest enemy for 10% of the amount healed.

Let us know how this feels when you get a chance to try it in the next build. Thanks!

* Theorycrafter info: It's no longer a random chance, under the hood. When you are hit, it increments a counter by (DamageTakenBeforeAbsorbsOrStagger / MaxHealth). It now drops an orb whenever that reaches 1.0, and decrements it by 1.0. The tooltip still says ‘chance’, to keep it understandable. Gift of the Mists multiplies that counter increment by (2 - (HealthBeforeDamage - DamageTakenBeforeAbsorbsOrStagger) / MaxHealth); ie, a simple linear 0-100% increase based on missing health, counting the hit as a full hit.

04/29/2016 07:27 PMPosted by Amp

I would also suggest a UI display for how many orbs are within 30 yards. This could be shown on the Expel Harm tooltip.

It will be. The count of Healing Spheres (with Greater Healing Spheres from the artifact counting as 2) will be shown on the Expel Harm button. When there are no Healing Spheres, the button will be disabled.