Quo Vadis Brewmaster? A look into the Brewmaster design

Classes Monk
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There is something I have to get off my chest. But before I do I have to clarify that I do not hate on the game, I just want to point out major flaws I see in the current design of the Brewmaster.
The current Brewmaster iteration makes me wanna cry. My distaste for this spec is reaching unhealthy levels. This is the first time at a Boss that I just wanted the raid night to be over … and that’s coming from a guy who had way to many wipes on KJ and Argus mythic progression. Anyway in the following Post I want to explain why I am convinced that the design for the Brewmaster simply doesn’t work. Heads up, I am not a native speaker so pardon some mistakes I might make. I also won’t talk too much about azerite traits since we already know Blizzard is going to change the system with 8.2, so there is no need to beat a dead horse.

But let’s start with something positive. I like that Blizzard managed to find some use for every Tank specc by now. Brewmaster is the safe pick when you want to start a progression fight and like to see if you can swap him out for more dmg. You bring a Paladin for the unique Utility, DK for grips, Warrior for the MDI, DH for the memes and a Druid for the bench.
The gameplay is smooth, I rarely come to a point where I can’t press a button.
Now that we have the good stuff out of the way, let’s start with the issues.

  1. Abilities:
    Let’s start with the abilities. Right now there are exactly 2 spells that you feel like having an impact on your gameplay and those 2 are Keg Smash and Iron Skin Brew (ISB). The other ones do not count;
  • Breath of Fire is heavily undertuned (in regards to your other abilities), a button you can press ones every 15 sec, which does between ~4.5% (single target) and 7.5% (on aoe) of your overall-dps (+ a neglect able damage reduction) simply does not cut it. It’s just a button you press just for the sake of it.
  • Blackout Strike is overloaded with dmg (~20-25% of your single target dmg), to the point where your gameplay starts to resolve around it’s cooldown. Hold up a minute that sounds quite nice right? Well yes and no. You see outside of the dmg it doesn’t offer much, sure you get a stack of elusive brawler but in aoe fights those stacks are unreliable at best and on single target fight you actually want to get hit so you have the right amount of stagger (later more about this). The high dmg component also makes the other spells less impactful, but then again if you would just lower the dmg number of Blackout Strike, it would become completely obsolete.
  • Tigerpalm is just there so you don’t cap energy. That’s it, regarding the brew generation I will come back to this later.
    -Rushing Jade Wind (RJW) is technically a Talent but let’s be honest it has become a baseline Spell for all Brewmaster. RJW does dmg and nothing else, it increases the amount of button mashing. Im not saying button mashing is a bad design, I actually like high pace gameplay, but I want at least some thought put behind the buttons I am going to press. RJW is lacking in this regard it just helps to get to your next Blackout Strike. You could argue it helps in dungeons with threat and dmg, but your threat generation is frontloaded into Keg Smash, while rjw only helps out as a secondary tool. The threat it generates is too low to keep the aggro from decent dps players.
    Overall the abilities are missing interactions with each other and the high dmg component from Blackout strike makes the other spells less potent, this is amplified by the high amount of auto attack dmg (~17% on single target) generated.

  1. Energy:
    Energy does not matter in the slightest. You generate enough energy by default, so you don’t have to think about it. Furthermore you don’t even have a reason to spend energy in the first place since Blackout Strike is way more potent than all the energy based spells (with the exception of a 3 orb Expel Harm). But if you don’t have to think about your resources, what’s the point of having them? Why is there no energy builder? That is the reason why other energy classes actually have to think at least a bit about their management, they have a secondary component tagged on to manipulate the energy bar. If blizzard would remove energy by tomorrow, it wouldn’t make a difference gameplay wise. And If you can make this assessment as Developer you might want to ask yourself if the system in place is doing the right thing.

  2. Stagger:
    Now let’s take a look at the most iconic mechanic Brewmasters have. Stagger in itself is a nice idea, yet it has one mayor flaw… it’s a balancing must be a nightmare. It’s either useless or broken. The sad thing about it is, since the pruning happened, it’s the only dial Blizzard can work with for defensive purposes. Health, Armor and Mastery are a nice to have but it’s the stagger where the magic happens. This leads me into the next section…

  3. Brews:
    Since the baseline stagger is too low to let you survive harder hitting bosses, you have to press ISB and hey you can actually see and feel the difference the ability does. The issue is that now you have to make the brew generation very generous for mainly 2 reasons:

  • (1) The 1st reason is that even weaker/unexperienced player have to be able to get at least a 95% uptime otherwise they could not play the spec in a team environment, since they would die from the low baseline stagger. But you can’t increase the baseline stagger since what would be the point of having ISB in that case?
  • (2) The 2nd reason for a generous Brew generation lies within Purifying Brew. Since it is a Spell in the Spellbook there has to be some use for it. Since it’s sharing its cooldown with ISB you need to generate more than 100% ISB uptime to just make the player even consider casting it. But if the brewgeneration becomes this high, it takes away the thinking process of managing a resource. At this point it has become an equivalent to energy. It’s just there for the sake of it, not because you have to make decisions around it. Furthermore it devalues Tigerpalm and Keg Smash even further since their Generation Component becomes close to being obsolete.
    Now it would be unfair to look at those pieces only in a vacuum and yes the result you get is a very fluid gameplay. But you trade the flow for engagement; you will very rarely have to change your rotation or even pay attention to the screen. But maybe the Talents might safe it, since that’s what talents are supposed to be now, smoothing out the gameplay and bring in some change of pace, right?
  1. Talents:
  • The 1st row only has 1 and a half dead talents, which isn’t too bad, but my question is, why is there still Chi Wave? The random bouncing doesn’t help the sustaining yourself reliably, so why isn’t Zen Sphere back in the game? This leaves you with Eye of the Tiger as default pick.
  • The 2nd row is actually great, I have no complains with this one. Every Talent has it’s niece and it can make huge differences in certain fights (Tiger’s Lust on Jaina; Celerity on Blockade when you are on soaking duty)
  • The 3rd row Spitfire is memebuild for pvp and that’s it. The dmg per gcd is less than a Blackout Strike Black, so you won’t press it even if it proccs. Ox Brew is in a vacuum a great talent it even surpasses the default pick in the row. Yet the default pick is already generating enough brews in conjunction with Keg Smash. Furthermore if you take a raid setting into account when you can’t always hit the boss Black Ox Brew loses potential and since the energy isn’t a problem there is no real reason to pick it (Yes you can pick it and some people prefer it over Light Brewing, but it still is based on the current energy and brew generation not a gamechanging talent).
  • The 4th and 5th row are fine. They add a 2nd layer of cc and defensive abilities to your kit. Nothing that adresses the stale rotation or the overarching issue with energy and brew generation.
  • The 6th row has 2 dead talents, Special Delivery and Dave. Both are suffering from the same issue. RJW is just a must pick. First off, it fills the empty spaces in the rotation you have to wait for Blackout Strike to come off the 3 sec cd, second of all the energy not being an issue takes rjw into consideration. You can’t sustain multiple Tigerpalms in a row to fill in the gaps between the Blackout Strikes with the current energy generation. So if you take RJW out, you trade away the smoothness of your gameplay for a 3 minute cd and that is no fun.
  • The 7th row is heavily flawed, but the easiest to fix (nerf High Tolerance or buff Blackout Combo). Guard does nothing that I couldn’t do with Blackout Combo instead. Blackout Combo is something nice, why it is still not baseline boggles my mind, yet here it has to compete with High Tolerance, a talent which outperforms Blackout Combo in both regards dmg and defense. High tolerance enhances all the other problems. The haste factor makes it so that your auto attacks and dealing more dmg, which in return makes your other abilities, feel unrewarding to press. It also discourages you to use Purifying Brew which in return amplifies the abundance of brews which begs the question of why you should have them in the first place, since there is no thought you have to put behind them.
    The last part goes out to azirite. You already know how they are, the just buff up your stats in the best case make you annoyed by for dropping into moderate stagger (looking at you Staggering Strikes) in the worst case can.
    Alright I’m done. As you can see abilities that are supposedly trying to weave into each other are more or less blocking the gameplay from feeling rewarding. The gameplay just happens without you the player thinking about it. One solution I would like to propose is to bring back chi for the Brewmaster so you can add some complexity back into his kit and make him feel rewarding to play again.

Thanks for reading this post (now go and reward yourself, you deserve it). I hope I could convert some of the frustration, from some of the Brewmasters out there, into words. At least I am feeling better now after writing this post. Looking forward to feedback and some good discussions.

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Its easy enough to say: I stopped tanking because we lost kegs, a lot of them.
Explosive Keg (though its function was only high on demand damage)
2nd Keg Smash (because it was high on demand damage)
random extra Keg Smashes (because it was overpowered)

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I tried to play my monk and battled through selecting a main between monk and DH and I finally decided to pick the DH because it is simply way more fun.
Until I stopped playing HotS my favorite character was Chen. I also liked Brewmaster hero in Warcraft 3 and in custom maps such as Enfo quite a lot.
Monk class has felt as a disapointment in WoW from Legion to BfA. Didn’t played it in MoP and WoD so I can’t atest for the gameplay back then. I mained monk in 7.1.5 - 7.3 and it felt a bit more enjoyable than it is now, despite not being how I felt the class should be, the reason why I did not ended the expansion with monk as a main.

My main issues with monks are:

  • brewmaster stagger mechanic, like you mentioned; Though I think that brewmaster should have a gameplay where you drink to reduce damage taken and increase dodge;
  • storm, earth and fire is only available for windwalker; i think it would have been awesome for every spec to control one of the forms (earth-tank, fire-dps, lightning-heal) with a set of abilities for every spec while the cooldown is active and clones act like they do now;
  • windwalker’s mastery is bad IMO, it locks you in a very specific rotation no matter the situation;
  • windwalker’s self healing is a joke, for a hybrid class with a healing class, comparing to others;
  • tiger palm not using the fist weapon annoys me on a big level; I don’t understand the change to Jab->Tiger Palm;
  • didn’t touched mistweaver since 8.0 because of the new gameplay; I think it’s horrible because I am forced to cast soothing mists and then cast other spells to be effective, the changed to vivify also grinds my gear;

Overall, for me, monk is not fun in terms of gameplay. I want to play it everytime I see a monk, but then I remember how DH is so much fun comparing to it.

I know it’s good and tickles the right spot for a lot of players but just like Macmellon I wanted to take it of my chest.

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This is not even bad. Bad is essence font in every way its working.

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I actually disagree on a couple of points and the reason for this is that I am a) a healer who tanks for guildies (so no excessive experience in cutting edge content) and b) since I play it only on occasion I can have a more casual way of looking at the BrM monk.

My first impression after reading your post is that you belong to the better players, most likely a very small percentage of the playerbase. Hold on, I am not saying that your view is disregardable because of this but I think looking at the whole picture is equally important.
(Btw. I did not get the comment on “I want to get hit” in terms of Blackout Strike yet, can you elaborate on this? (I am simply curious))

So here is what I am disagreeing on from my casual tank view:

  1. Energy consumption: So I am sometimes running into energy issues (but this is simply a thing about being able to press something like a second later). Even though, if I think about someone who already has to think about stagger, threat, cds, ways to kite and the other tank stuff I would say that having to manage your energy as well like a rogue or windwalker does would need a reward for doing this like it is for rage management with warriors. Otherwise I would think that everyone below a certain level of game knowledge and experience would simply not play BrM because they would simply be overwhelmed by having to manage too much at the same time.
  2. Brews: I am mostly tanking Mythic+ dungeons around 10-12 therefore I am not required to totally fine tune my brew usage. Even though I am running into situtations where I am quite short on brews (e.g. in bigger trash pulls / mobs with high attack numbers (casters)) because the amount of cleansing I have to do after my CDs are running out becomes a struggle sometimes. Now, this is of course as well a point where an experienced tank / experienced group simply controls the fight better and therefore the scenario might not be as much of a problem. However, I tend to struggle sometimes if the situation becomes hectic to keep up mitigation, clean stagger, be aware of the surroundings, keep JWS up and do the normal rotation and not to try to panic cleanse stagger because of big incoming damage (simply because I lack the exercise I guess). My point is that you cannot expect an average or even slightly above average BrM to mitigate everything by kiting / positioning which is sometimes the only option left.
  3. Talent row 1: I disagree here and argue that at least for m+ chi burst is probably the better pick, especially if you play in skittish weeks. I agree on Chi Wave though, I am not sure about which use case they planned for this talent in its current state. I would also say that talent row 3 and 7 could arguably provide min-max picks for certain conditions in M+ scenarios depending on the expected incoming dmg on the tank and the requirements of the dungeon e.g. in terms of the timer or specific key elements.

I am aware that I am talking a lot about m+ here compared to your more raid driven scenario. What I want to do with that is adding the discussion point about the main (competitive) points of PvE instead of focusing on raids only. When I read your post I had the impression that what you want to have is a more complex and more rewarding BrM which I fully support.

However, there has to be a certain safety net if anyhow possible otherwise the BrM would become probably overpowered in the hands of the best players and too hard for beginners. I think Blizzards idea of the game is to make every specialisation playable for everyone on a basic level so that scenario will not happen. So I guess pushing around weight between the abilities of the BrM to give each action more impact while maintaining the current level is probably the best thing to take and discuss from your post.

1 Like
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Chi wave & Special Delivery are handy in pvp.

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First of, thank you for your detailed answer, was a good read to get more informations from other perspectives.

To answer you question reageding Blackout Strike:
You always want to have a (low) Heavy Stagger, since thats the point you get the most haste bonus from High Tolerance (15%), which in return gives you a higher dps output. The Stagger dmg in itself is at that point not to threatening and can get healed easily. Thats why on bosses, who have a lot of spells queued together, the generated Elusvie Brawler Stacks will let you dodge the 1st Auto Atack by default which in return does not give you any dmg towards your stagger bar and it stays empty with you not getting the haste boni from High Tolerance.

Regarding the talents:
Yes you are right when it comes to Chi Burst in m+ dungeons, and looking back at my post it’s not fair calling it half dead, so you sir are right and I will stand corrected.
When I argued in row 3, I said that it’s viable to pick Black Ox Brew and some people prefer it over Light Brewing, but the Point I wanted to drive home is, that even you take it, it does not change the interaction on how you are using or thinking about your brews. Row 7 I flat out disagree, High Tolerance is THE dominat pick in both damage and defense.

Your Argument boils down to “the class has to able to forgive mistakes, so less experienced Player are able to play it”. I have no Problem with that. If you want to strike a balance between having enough brews so ISB is up 100%, but still have enough brews to use Purifiying, the only solution I can see is not let those Brews share the same cooldown.
Make it so that you have a steady ISB generation tied to your rotation and seperate slower Purifing Brew generation, so you have to make the choice when you need to purify.

Ofcause there are people out there with better ideas than I have and it’s not easy to make a class tailored towards everyone, but man I just want to think about the buttons im pressing again

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By seperating the brews, you could remove ISB or need to change it to never cover 100% but getting into line with other defensive skills of all other tanks.
This would just make it even stronger, making brewmaster even more “progressive tank, then swap for more dps or utility”.
If stagger is to stay, high tolerance needs to dissappear (because obvious reasons) and blackout combo needs to be baseline, so the whole talent row (and everything else manipulating stagger) will be the same for every tank.
Furthermore stagger mustnt be connected to dps output in any way or should encourage playing around low stagger for better dps (because this will cause a tradeof between better purify or better dps).

I would prefer swapping stagger as is with ignore pain as warriors have (and call it guard ;)) That makes it avoid or shield for mitigation, using energy to create shield or dps when shield is not required.

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I play bm only casually, since I was a main healer, currently in the process of changing to a rogue for something different.

I tank some 10-12s for some guildies when we dont have other tanks around just to boost ppl or get their weeklies done at the last moment.

As for bm rotation i enjoy it. I would like to see rushing jade wind baseline, it just makes the rotation nice and smooth. The other 2 talents feel really bad. But since its the best choice anyway, im fine with it.

I prefer to have 100% uptime on active mitigation actually. Something that bm and guardian druids have. Except i find druid very dull to play ofc they also just give that nice and easy to heal feeling.
Now i cant speak of most of the other tanks since we have 2 guardian druids in the guild and i have 0 experience healing a prot warrior.
What I feel about blood dk, dh and prot pally is though that they just spike a lot instead of just losing health in a predictible way which is just more “scary” to deal with.

I like the stagger playstyle but i really miss wod brewmaster. I actually prefer selfhealing tanks.
I played some blood dk end of legion antorus and some keys mostly when they felt pretty much invincible. And similar for bm in wod in hfc. Only tanked it on heroic again ofc.

I definietly like the idea of separating the 2 brews.
What I usually miss is just some selfsustain without a healer around. Some extra healing. I had trouble doing keys before where our healer just…well kill themselves and then im pretty much dead.

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Ehh you are not actually forced to cast soothing mist all the time you know?
Mws only cast soothing mist for instant enveloping mist and when you have to spamheal a single target which means an env mist and multiple vivifys to keep someone up.
Otherwise you hardcast vivify like in legion because its more effective when you heal different targets every time with it.
Current vivify is a lot better than the awful legion version. Renewing mist should be out anyway, thats no different than legion and since it jumps to damaged targets, you pretty much always get the cleave heal out of it instead of the randomness it was in legion where it felt bad to cast a vivify outside the procs. So thats everything you just said why you hate mw is out the window my friend.

Sure if you dont like the playstyle otherwise then dont play it. Just dont hate it for all the wrong reasons. Legion MW was actually an abomination.

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Everyone has different tastes, I enjoyed Legion mistweaver build I played.
I would argue that because soothing mists has such a huge synergy with enveloping mists and vivify, while vivify has with renewing mists, that MW monks aren’t played the way devs intended them to be played, but I know I am on the other side of the community’s perception of MW.

There aren’t wrong reasons to dislike a class or spec because it isn’t fun for a person. Anyone is free to play monk class, I don’t hate anyone if he does, so don’t take my post on a personal level.

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I’ve only started leveling a Monk as of a few days ago. I already M+ with PWar & PPal, so my original plan to level as Brewmaster became less appealing. I have an RSham for healing (when I don’t want to tank), but that is more of a raid-healer than Mythic healer right now, so I decided I’d level as Mistweaver in the end.

It’s actually relatively enjoyable. Granted, I can’t comment about max-level (yet), but thus far it’s pretty simple but with a few factors to keep you on your toes, whereas RSham is a case of “Is this cooled? Y/N”, “Does Joe Soap need healing? Y/N”, Insta-to-Relevant Heal button 1 or 2, give or take some HRains or CHeals.

Jade Statue + SM on Tank. Envelope if burst inc, or SM+Vivi spam if consistent damage.

Throw out some insta-mists during AoE situations + EFont and hardcast Vivi’s (keeps Statue on tank), otherwise SM+Vivi’s if desperate. Insta-mists rotate to damaged people, re-apply if required. Awaken during mega-oh-noes and/or hella lot of debuffs applied.

Everyone fine and dandy? Cool. Time to go kick mobs in the face.

I heal a DH on my RSham and yes, there are times it gets a bit too chaotic-spiky - other times he’ll heal about as much as I do and I don’t have to do anything. Paladin, however, is a different story - or should be if they’re any good.

The problem with PPally right now is that they’re very easy to play badly (and without much room for a gap between good and bad ones). The other issue is that they’ll happily allow themselves to sit on 50% if they’re any good because there’s no real point using HoProtector otherwise (their self-heal). Until they get to that point they should be maintaining SoProtector and leave just one for backup/emergency (peppered with above heal), meaning they shouldn’t be taking much damage at all and when they do, they should be the ones to heal it back whenever we’re not discussing consistent burst or tank-busters.

I spend more time healing other players on my PPal than I do myself because half the time I don’t need to thanks to the azerite absorb traits, decent mitigations, defensive CD’s and, of course, mastery. A bad Paladin probably doesn’t even remember that they need to stand in Consec to reduce damage (outside of SoP), probably spams their heals when they’re healthy, doesn’t rotate defensives, probably doesn’t support the group, doesn’t avail of wing-crit heal, probably doesn’t have shield-lob absorbs and, as such, can be very easily prone to just spiking up and down during chaos.

Of the two tanks I M+ with, PPal is my go-to when I want a more relaxing dungeon. Its only downside is atrocious DPS outside of AoE. Whenever I want a bit more bang for my buck, I bring PWar and just Thunderclap to victory. It is less ‘spiky’ simply because any War generating rage will throw meaty absorbs for you to track on healing bars, has decent mobility, brings good damage (which typically means shorter fights, which typically means less healing required), AoE CC in a pinch and plenty of melee mitigation (hard and soft), melee damage being about 70% of what any tank will take.

With Brewmaster (the few times I tried it), even with full uptime on brews and trying to be mindful of stagger, my health felt spiky, I felt like I had less aggro-grab in a pinch, and just didn’t feel in any way comfortable even in basic dungeons - but that could have been plain and simple inexperience.

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