So i have just hit 70 on my brewmaster, I have already leveled a paladin, warrior and demonhunter to 70 and tried a couple of Mythic dungeons on all these characters. I had noticed the survivability of most tanks was relatively comparable. I could do very similar pulls on all 3 tanks. On my brewmaster i was trying the same pulls and flopped over very quickly.
And this is because brewmaster has very weak self-healing. They have their celestial brew that provides a shield for a couple seconds, and healing elixer is an option. Most of their other sources of healing rely on damage taken, like Gift of the Ox or Gai Plin’s Imperial Brew. My experience is that these things heal for a much smaller portion than sources of healing other tanks have that rely on damage taken. For brewmaster these things together combine for maybe 25-35% healing for damage taken. Death knight’s have Death Strike healing for about 60-70% of damage taken and a warrior’s Ignore pain gives an absorb shield for 50% of damage taken.
Their other major source of healing comes from healing taken, Celestial fortune, which Adds extra healing effectiveness based on their critical strike. Meaning you will rely a lot on both your critical strike and your healer. After you have just reached 70 and dont have optimal stats you feel worse with low critical strike in addition to already being more reliant on healers.
Now i havent got great gear yet and did not pay attention to secondary stats yet, So i cant tell if things will be better once you get higher crit, but from my experience I can already tell that it feels much worse when you just hit 70 on brewmaster monk, than any other tank. I would also love to hear what other people’s experiences have been with brewmaster monk.
I really hope to see brewmaster being able to heal for a much bigger portion of the damage they took, or increase the amount of damage brewmasters are able to mitigate.
This is the first expansion i’m playing a brewmaster and love how the class plays, lots of buttons, very busy rotation.
I’m decently geared now and did not have much of a problem in m0 but that might actually be a result of farming the cobalt assembly ring as it is literally 2nd in my healing done close to celestial fortune.
I agree though that compared to other tanks our self healing seems pretty weak.
I don’t expect us to get dk level self healing but the 25% from Gai Plin’s Imperial Brew feel underwhelming even when in high stagger. This talent should probably be baseline and the healing should be a 7 second HoT so that it retains some value when preemtively purifying at full health. I propose in its stead a talent that doubles this healing but makes it instant, forcing more precise purify timings to get the most out of the healing.
Other than that maybe gift of the ox could be looked at, pressing expell harm at 10% hp and not getting a decent heal because it either didn’t crit or because there were no healing spheres to suck up feels bad.
I think that is because Brewmasters were originally designed with stagger helping you out to smoothening out the damage we are taking. In previous expansions this was always working fine, and the trade-off was that Brewmasters were always healer reliant by design (minus the last two seasons of Shadowlands).
The problem I found now in dungeons currently is that there are a lot of damage sources that do not get reduced by your stagger. Most of the packs have a variety of attacks that either ignore your stagger, or they are magic damage, and I think that is why Brewmaster feel kind of squishy right now.
Weak self-healing would not be an issue if we could rely on stagger, but since we have no fallback we have to rely more on defensives. That said I feel that our self-healing will gradually grow stronger once we get more critical strike and versatility.
Thus far I have been able to pull 3 packs in m0 without much problem, at 4+ packs that’s where it gets intense for me. I personally haven’t been struggling, but the changes are concerning.
You didn’t mention expel harm? Take all the expel harm talents in the class tree and it does a lot of healing. Be nice if they gave vivify a lil buff too, those instant vivifys should be solid but its so weak since the base changes to everyones hp they made for healers.
I’m desperately hoping for a fix but looks like im going to have to reroll for my mythic plus group or be kicked out.
It’s so disappointing this was not fixed in beta. This spec is not ready for a release like this. People are crying out left right and centre. Then they’ll do some tiny changes that make it barely worth but at least playable just in time for when people have got up their prot warriors.
im sure that if they where to get rid of the change they made to spining crankick that makes it skoop up and swolow all your chi orbs we would have a much better time with self sustain being abel to stor up are orbs for that big inpactful expel harm heal when you need it. your have to forgive my spelling
