Since our previous set of changes to Brann with maintenance earlier this week, we’ve continued to dig into his performance in different situations, and addressed several issues that needed attention. With hotfixes that have all gone live over the last day or so, we’ve now made the following improvements:
Delves
Brann Bronzebeard
Tank Brann now receives 13% reduced damage overall.
Tank Brann now receives 5% reduced damage while using his shotgun.
Tank Brann now receives 20% increased healing while using his shotgun.
Tank Brann maximum health increased by 10%.
The following spells now have a special internal cooldown for Electro-Charged Weapons stacks when healing Tank Brann.
Soothing Mists
Ultimate Penitence
Penance
Eternal Flame
Nourish
Rejuvenation
Riptide
Atonement
Ancient Teachings
All versions of Brann now take 50% reduced damage from AoE damage.
Fixed a bug where Healer Brann’s damage taken was not being reduced as expected.
Developers’ notes: Bottom line here is that Season 2 Healer Brann now has a reduction of damage taken that is similar to Season 1 Healer Brann.
Healer and Damage Brann’s Aspect of the Turtle cooldown reduced to 2 minutes (was 3 minutes).
Healer and Damage Brann’s The Bronzebeard Spirit self-heal cooldown reduced to 20 seconds (was 30 seconds).
Healer and Damage Brann’s Emergency Supplies self-heal effect increased to 30% of Brann’s health (was 15%).
An issue causing Tank Brann’s level to not properly increase beyond 50 has been resolved.
A particularly nasty trio of Hobgoblins appearing in Delves is now a duo of Hobgoblins. The other one went for a swim.
As always, thank you for your feedback on this and all concerns. We’ll keep monitoring and playtesting and working on it.
Hopefully this goes some way to balancing back the fun with tank Brann. As a healer, I really do agree that the nerf needed to happen - I managed to clear a T11 in one go without deaths at i621 last week, 37 item levels below what is recommended. However, the nerf went too far in my opinion. I did a single T8 after the weekly reset and was constantly on the edge of losing Brann if an extra mob wandered into the pack we’re fighting. We wiped twice, each fight took forever, and it was so dull I lost all motivation to do another delve since then.
Can you please make Brann’s healing potions a lot more visible. Maybe a purple highlight/outline similar to lootables, and increase their size? Something to make them stand out.
Being an old man in my early 30s with eyesight getting worse by the reset, and being slightly colourblind, makes them a nightmare to find.
While I personally was fine withthe last adjustment, I think this should alleviate or at least smooth out a lot of the pain points some people still have, esp the 50% ae dmg reduce and the healer bugfix
Thanks for giving us an incentive to run delves again, but then again this entire week is wasted because SEASONAL JOURNEY PROGRESS IS BUGGED so there is no reason at all to go waste your time and keys knowing chests will not provide points. Bountiful runs accumulate over time so you can instead catch up in the future using alts.
Next week is delve bonus event and I am hopeful that at least someone will catch up on the bug with two days remaining before it expires, as is usual practice with these things. Customer support won’t even acknowledge it, saying THEY AREN’T AWARE OF ANY ISSUES after you explain in detail everything that is wrong with the game.
It’s such an obvious case of timegating, for absolutely no reason at all.
Back to topic; after some tank Brann testing as healer, it is still significantly slower than player taking on tank or damage dealer role. The AI is also incredibly stupid.
To compete with other two playstyles Brann’s max stack nerf needs to be reverted back to x20 from current x12. Even if the stacked buff was stacking faster, decaying slower or simply permanently active, the player would still take longer to clear a delve than as tank or dps.
Playing higher level delves as DPS is incredibly frustrating even with healer Brann by your side and the experience of being a tank yourself is very similar, except your health does not drop below 90% and it takes forever to kill a single pack of mobs.
This just sucks because there is very little advance mechanic and once again the only challenge is in the numbers. Once you are geared enough, you can just close your eyes.
It’s also “great” that disc and mistweaver are finally able to properly heal Brann with damage into healing conversion, but then again Blizzard isn’t even aware that these two specs on average deal almost twice the damage of other 5 healer specializations, while healing at near 100% efficiency at the same time.
Druids for example, deciding to deal damage impacts your healing numbers, and you were already 50% weaker when it comes to damage than mw and disc to begin with. Account for moderately low cat form uptime and see how pathetic the class actually is. The % modifier for damage taken on the follower does not help, it just cuts into your overall dmg output even harder because you are expected to keep him alive and hard cast heals to keep Brann’s damage buff stacks active.
With this in mind, you see how tank Brann favors certain specs and how much faster they can go.
CS only are aware of issues if it’s been noted as a bug by QA/devs and QA/devs can only investigate if it’s a bug if people report it ingame. If you’ve done that, it’s just a question of waiting I’m afraid
It’s no longer just about complaining or reporting the bugs, but the overall negative player experience they result in after being ignored for so long. CS incompetence could be overlooked but when the devs claim in their support article that EVERYTHING IS WORKING FINE AND NO ISSUES that’s a big red flag right there.
If there is something preventing further progress which we may not know about, please share the information or design intent with us. There is obviously something more at play aside from the all existing limitations in place which players are more than aware of. No user who has reported the bug has reached WEEKLY CAP ON ACTIVITY.
How hard is for them to admit that the bar is simply not moving forward?
Have been running no more than 4 bountifuls a day (haven’t played alts) and everything has been working perfectly fine for the first week of the season. Somehow after this Wednesday, Journey points are no longer being awarded.
Is there a hidden cap? Are the simply missing from chests? Which is it? We’ll be running in circles for one more week until someone sticks their head out of the sand and admits mistake.
There were identical problems during season 1 so it is very likely that someone had simply copy pasted all of the bugged code before hotfixes ever got applied the first time around.
Not anywhere close to the bountiful delves cap. ~17k/42k points at the end of week 1, now after 4 days into week 2, my progress has not budged forward, at all. If everything were working as intended, I’d have 30k+ by next Wednesday doing the same number of runs and consuming as many Keys as the week before.
The billion dollar company which can afford to pay QA ran all the adjustments through rigorous testing until they hit the sweet spot and found gameplay extremely enjoyable and overall difficulty very inclusive.
Take their word for it, they have no reasons for being dishonest.
It’s so comical to witness how they didn’t even catch the most obvious glaring issue relating to tank Brann with two flavor of the month healers.
As someone who had played a lot of delves during first season I was hoping for some diversity this time around. Running as healer is unplayable and going in as damage dealer is an exercise in frustration because a lot of stuff results in one shot due to ridiculous scaling.
It’s only been one week and enthusiasm is already gone. The mobs are just reskins, storylines are uninteresting and facerolling as tank is simply not fun anymore, but is still easiest and most efficient route to success. I have to say that around ilvl 640 I clear delves faster than with pre-nerf tank Brann on a healer. Only the final boss takes little longer to kill but there’s literally never any risk of dying, unless you maybe walk off a cliff into the abyss below.
My conclusion is that while delves may have been interesting and fresh for the first season, it’s no longer the case after seeing all of the new goblin scenarios once. Someone in charge of the content had seriously OVERESTIMATED the amount of content and replayability which they are able to provide.
They’re already dull, boring and full of damage sponges with no interesting mechanics. Grouping up with other people does not make this any more interesting because gameplay feels very superficial and flat in comparison to regular dungeons, not to mention how these mini bosses inside of a delve can take up to 5 minutes to kill with max player scaling.
The weird thing is they’re sensible in a group of 4, then you go to 5 and every miniboss becomes a 4-minute fight. Summoning the Underpin with friends, my 3-minute CDs came round twice.
Really boring, ngl.
Respectfully, I’m glad you’re listening and reacting, when you’re posting numbers like 50%, 60% buffs and nerfs… it’s very hard for us to believe there is any playtesting going on. It feels like delves are in alpha state right now, some days I love them, some days I skip them because they are terrible and tomorrow’s build will make them better.
The enormous nerf hammer that swung last week was absurd. If it was warranted, then delves must have gone live in an untested state because surely nobody would have tested delves in all roles and not realised Brann was so insanely strong as a tank. If it wasn’t warranted, then the changes weren’t tested because they were excessive.
I think it behoves Blizzard to actually allocate resources to playtesting things before they go live, rather than scrambling around making enormous changes in the live environment and letting players generate data. At the very least, make better use of PTR.
This actually makes me sad. For me that group was a fun challenge. The only problem with it was that if Brann could find a way to get hit by two of the charges and get deleted (I always have the third one on lockdown); then he would,
I came into this thread hoping to see some improvements to his ai and behaviour, but once again it appears that improving these is not an option so Blizz are just going to reduce the problem mobs and reduce the damage Brann takes. So for now he is going to continue face tanking mobs in deadly ground effects whilst living longer and holding up the middle finger to melee dps.
