A Look Back at Brewmaster Monk in Dragonflight & War Within Wishlist – Editorial

With the sun setting on Dragonflight and The War Within on the horizon, our Brewmaster Monk Writer, Sinzhu, offers a retrospective highlighting Brewmaster’s journey in Dragonflight and shares their hopes for the spec’s next evolution with a War Within Wishlist.

Brewmaster Retrospective & War Within Wishlist

With the end of Dragonflight inching ever-closer, it’s time we take a look back at one of the more underrepresented tanks of the expansion: Brewmasters. With new talents, tier set bonuses, and more regular tuning than usual, Dragonflight has certainly been one of the more varied expansions when it came to class design. In particular, it has also been a time where Brewmaster Monk has been its most complicated, featuring an abundance of keybinds, more build variety to experiment with, and a greater reliance on proper play than ever before to not fall flat on the floor. Among those enjoying it now, it is considered one of the best iterations the spec has seen, yet it has still remained fairly invisible in a lot of “meta” content over the course of the expansion. Let’s explore how these conflicting points came together and see what can be potentially be adjusted going forward into The War Within and beyond.

Forgettable Tale of a Drunken Monk

Overall, Brewmasters have stuck to the same playstyle since Legion when they, along with many other specializations, received major revamps. In the case of Brew, this ancient rework consisted of removing Chi as a resource–all Monks used to have it, not just Windwalker–and having Purifying Brew changed into a charge-based system with your abilities providing cooldown reduction to these charges. Then, the charges would be used to purify a portion of all the damage delayed over time from the Stagger passive, while Mastery: Elusive Brawler would play into the drunken brawler fantasy by allowing you to reliably dodge enemy attacks entirely! Clearly, this revamp of the spec has been considered a success by Blizzard, and it’s certainly shown in Brewmaster’s use across raid content in particular.

For most of its life, Brewmaster Monk has often been thought of as the tank specialization for progression raiding, all the way up to the world-first level, where it has been used in 10 of the previous 16 endboss kills (going from Amirdrassil all the way to Emerald Nightmare when its big rework first took place, including three tiers where double Brewmaster was used). While it may not receive as much attention as other tanks in Mythic+/MDI by comparison, Brew has even shown up in the Arena World Cup and been used to decent effect.

However, as is often the case, its appearances sometimes involved some clever game mechanics that, while not exactly bugs, were probably more like oversights in design at the time. This has ranged from standing next to a wall to continuously trigger Legion’s Obstinate Determination passive, intentionally taking more damage to buff Invoke Niuzao, the Black Ox’s Stomps with the Walk with the Ox Conduit, or even recently combining Weapons of Order’s damage amp with trinkets like Beacon to the Beyond for massive amounts of burst. Yet despite this prevalence across WoW’s history, Brewmaster has consistently remained a tank with among the lowest player population. So what gives?

Brewmaster Monk Gameplay: Piano Lessons

If you’ve ever played Brewmaster in the past four expansions, one of the first things you’ve probably thought to yourself is, “there are how many buttons?!”. Indeed, when you look at it in Dragonflight, there are potentially 42 different abilities to keybind, split into 9 rotational abilities, 12 “cooldowns”, 14 “utilities”, and another 7 that are rarely used or niche; that doesn’t even include possible macros, trinkets, pvp, or other racial abilities! But what if I told you that there was a time when the specialization was so simple, you could place the entire damage rotation in a basic /castsequence macro consisting of Keg Smash, Blackout Strike (this replaced Blackout Kick from Legion to Shadowlands), Breath of Fire, Tiger Palm, and Rushing Jade Wind? Even now, you could probably get away with trying this and at least hit most of what you need to for damage reasonably well–not that you should, of course. Throw in the occasional use of Purifying Brew/Celestial Brew, and you would already be ready to tackle most easy content out there with the ever-potent passive delayed damage from Stagger. Clearly, something’s been happening to afflict the spec with so much more complexity, to the point of maybe even scaring off players entirely.

Where things have quickly blown up over time is in the amount of “baggage” Brewmasters and other Monk specs have received throughout these previous expansions, including some ancient abilities and talents dating back to Mists of Pandaria. Now, in addition to the “core” 5 offensive abilities mentioned in the castsequence earlier, you must also include Rising Sun Kick, Chi Wave, your old Legion Artifact ability Exploding Keg, often 2 Shadowlands Covenant abilities (Weapons of Order, Bonedust Brew), Touch of Death, Invoke Niuzao, the Black Ox, and Summon White Tiger Statue. If you have ever heard an Unholy Death Knight player complain about the number of “setup” abilities they’ve needed to use at the start of a raid encounter before, you probably have an idea of just how long it takes a Brewmaster player right now, and that is before needing to include all the possible defensive tools befitting a tank.

A Tool for Everything
On the other hand, if you’ve been looking for a tank with an answer to nearly any threat that comes your way, Brewmaster Monks have long been a stellar choice in this department. With access to a Poison/Disease dispel through Detox, snare/root removal with Tiger’s Lust, single-target and AoE crowd control via Paralysis and Leg Sweep, four defensive cooldowns for both Magic and Physical damage (Dampen Harm, Fortifying Brew, Diffuse Magic, Zen Meditation), and enough mobility to make even a Demon Hunter jealous with Roll and Transcendence, Brewmasters can truly be masters of the battlefield. Of course, I also just mentioned another 10 abilities for you to find keybinds for…and you can start to see how it might be time to begin figuring out how to grow a third hand, or at the very least, invest in a good MMO mouse.

Despite having access to so many in-game choices, you’ll also need to consider what third-party tools you may need to fully play as a Brewmaster. Take your Stagger passive, for example. Within the default UI, there is a bar present underneath your character frame to view your Staggered damage as a percentage of your maximum health. However, this bar only tracks up to 100%, despite the actual “cap” on Stagger being 1000%! Even though you won’t ever reach Stagger levels close to that cap, you will still regularly go over 100% Stagger in more difficult content such as Heroic and Mythic raids or higher keystone levels. This makes the use of WeakAuras to watch the core passive of your entire specialization effectively mandatory outside of easy content, and adds another spike on the learning curve of being a Brewmaster.

Dragonflight’s New Brewmaster Talent Trees

Coming into WoW’s ninth expansion, the massive amount of former effects and abilities Brewmaster Monks have gotten to try out over the past seven years finally had their chance to come together in the new talent trees of Dragonflight, featuring its old Legion Artifact ability (Exploding Keg), Azerite Armor traits (Training of Niuzao), Shadowlands Powers (Weapons of Order, Stormstout’s Last Keg, Shadowboxing Treads), and even a few ideas from the former talent system mixed in with some new ones (Celerity, Resonant Fists). Really, these trees have been a bit of a “greatest hits” of Brew’s history with all the fan-favorites on display and contain a surprising amount of potential build variety as well. With that being said, there are some definite winners and losers among the new system, alongside some later additions throughout the patches of Dragonflight worth addressing.

The Winners

Among the many talents to choose from, there are a few options that have stood out over Dragonflight as being “Monk-defining” and are tools I would consider hard to go back to playing without:

• Rising Sun Kick has finally become a class-wide talented ability rather than one for just Mistweavers and Windwalkers. Considering this ability has no cost, a low cooldown, and hits like a truck, it is a welcome addition to the Brewmaster kit.
• You may now talent multiple defensive cooldowns rather than needing to know which is better for what you are doing ahead of time. In particular, you may have both Dampen Harm and Diffuse Magic simultaneously.
• In addition to the formerly-Windwalker-exclusive Windwalking aura, there is now also Close to Heart and Generous Pour to provide a large 8% healing increase or 4% increased Avoidance to allies around you, and can even have all three of these active at once.
• Blackout Combo has made its triumphant return as a versatile talent that can give you more damage or defense as necessary, all based on what you choose to combo. In particular, you may once again go for Tiger Palms capable of hitting for 12 times more than its base amount by stacking various multipliers to its damage.

While there are certainly more than just these examples, they stand as a testament to Dragonflight’s goal of blending old and new effects in their talents while still keeping some of that “cool” factor.

The Losers

Of course, with 100 talent nodes available between both trees, it’s no surprise that there have been a few “duds” in Dragonflight for Brewmasters as well. Be it through poor tuning or overlapping design with better choices, there are a number of options still present in the trees where I’m left wondering why they need to exist at all:

• Soothing Mist and talents related to it or Vivify make up 6 of the talent nodes on the Monk Class tree, including one of the three capstones, yet they are exclusively taken by Mistweaver players due to having no way to incorporate them into your gameplay as a Brewmaster.
• Once a staple of the Brewmaster utility kit, Summon Black Ox Statue has become a capstone talent of the class tree, and frequently requires an additional 3 talent points to be spent in order to pick it up. Due to how many more impactful nodes need to be grabbed instead, this ability has effectively been forgotten, alongside the former Brewmaster ability of Clash in the specialization tree.

Beyond these key examples of failings in the Monk class tree especially, the Brewmaster specialization tree suffers from having too many talents trying to solve a similar issue in the name of offering “choice”. Why settle for a 30% chance to improve the damage reduction on Breath of Fire with Celestial Flames when you can do it on-demand with Blackout Combo? Likewise, why should you take Graceful Exit on your way to Improved Purifying Brew and Gai Plin’s Imperial Brew when the much more impactful Zen Meditation and Celestial Brew are already on the way? It is clear that the Brewmaster tree could stand to see some of these options either pruned, replaced, or revamped with their pathing if there is to be much more freedom of choice.

The Late-Bloomers

Although it was not groundbreaking enough to be considered a true “rework” in the same vein as what Protection Paladin or Vengeance Demon Hunter received, Brewmasters did see some updates to their talent trees throughout Dragonflight, which included access to five new talents: Dance of the Wind, Yu’lon’s Grace, Spirit of the Ox, Press the Advantage, and Song of Chi-Ji, in addition to a few nodes turning into one-point investments. For the most part, these new talents have proven both popular and successful, and have also helped promote more passive options to reduce the button burden.

Now, if you don’t need access to Diffuse Magic’s temporary 60% magic damage reduction, you can just take Yu’lon’s Grace instead and receive broad mitigation against all magic damage. Likewise, if you want to further reduce your keybinds, why not remove Tiger Palm as a filler ability and use Press the Advantage instead? Best of all, these newer talents (with the exception of Song of Chi-Ji) have been used across all types of content and have been tuned well enough to remain close choices with their “active” counterparts! On the whole, this trend reflects what I consider the strongest aspect of Dragonflight’s talents regarding Brewmasters in that they have largely allowed players to customize the playstyle based on how active or passive they wish to be.

Dragonflight Brewmaster Utility, What Can You Do?

Now, something you may notice is how many great tools are available in the Monk class tree, rather than the Brewmaster spec tree. This is not a coincidence, and is frankly an issue that often befalls Monk players: what can this Monk specialization do instead of what can a Monk do? If you are a Brewmaster Monk, you can:

If you are a Windwalker Monk, you can…do all of this as well (though “speedtaunting” might be a bit more messy). And if you are a Mistweaver, you can still do all of this while also bringing Life Cocoon and Revival! With this in mind, what does specifically Brewmaster bring over the other Monk specializations? At the moment, only Clash, a talented ability that works as a more limited form of Death Grip. It does apply a unique AoE root effect that does not get broken from dealing damage to the target, however. Unfortunately, this ability is also located on an offshoot of the specialization tree whose point cannot be justified. This has resulted in not only perhaps the biggest problem of Brewmasters, but also all Monks in Dragonflight. For many, it is no longer about what the specs can do, but rather which is currently tuned to be the best as your one “Monk” representative. In Amirdrassil, this was Mistweaver. In Aberrus, it was Brewmaster, and in Vault of the Incarnates, it was Windwalker.

Now I must stress that at no point in Dragonflight have any of the Monk specs been “bad” in the sense that you couldn’t achieve Cutting Edge, Hall of Fame, or even Keystone Hero with any of them. Nor is this problem unique to only Brewmaster Monks–just ask a Guardian Druid. Rather, this lack of a “special sauce” has resulted in the three Monk specs being fairly interchangeable among the highest end of players. Over time, this can further lower the overall Class population when it doesn’t look like there’s much representation happening beyond just one spec. A tank player seeing only Mistweaver Monks in Amirdrassil probably isn’t going to decide on playing Brewmaster, they’ll just go play a tank that is being seen there instead. If you are a die-hard Monk player, you’ve likely already gone through this rollercoaster ride before, but that doesn’t mean it should keep occurring.

Looking Into The War Within

So, where should Brewmaster Monks go from here? Coming into The War Within and the greater Worldsoul Saga, it is clear that Blizzard has some further iterating to do on Brew, and it will likely involve some amount of streamlining. All the same, it is a tough project to take on, as the spec’s complexity may be what acts as its biggest charm to those still playing it even now in Dragonflight. As such, for the points listed below I have tried to think in terms of what would be useful compromises between these two types of player that both want to enjoy playing Brew.

Consolidating Abilities

Perhaps two of the most frequent questions asked by players who are newer to the specialization are “what buttons can I macro together?” and “do I have to keybind everything?” Sadly, the answers to both of those questions right now are “None, really,” and “Basically yes, except for Soothing Mist”. However, it’s clear that there needs to be some amount of keybind reduction for Brewmasters. It likely does not need to be a lot, given that most of the main rotational abilities do something unique to distinguish themselves, but there are surely at least a couple of abilities that could possibly be removed entirely, such as Chi Wave or Crackling Jade Lightning. Both of these abilities serve the same general purpose of acting as a means to pull a distant target rather than be regularly used in the often-gcd-locked rotation. It is hard to justify needing both apart from Chi Wave being a required talent point to reach the much more useful Close to Heart aura.

Beyond this small paring down of the low-cooldown abilities, Brewmasters are sorely in need of a reduction in its weaker, longer cooldowns as well. At the moment, for a Brewmaster player in Amirdrassil, there are 5 offensive cooldowns to press at the start of an encounter, all of which are on the global cooldown, and two of which feature a targeting reticle. This is entirely too much setup, particularly when a few of these “big” cooldowns will only add up to less than 5% of your total damage in the end! Taking the concept into Mythic+, you would think it’s smart to use some of these big cooldowns at the start of a large pull, but if you do, your threat would stand no chance. Instead, in both raid and Mythic+ you’re left having to gradually make use of all these different “damage” cooldowns over 30 seconds or more, not knowing which are the best ones in the first place! To that end, it would make sense to combine the functionalities of some of these cooldowns. Better still, it would be a great way to make use of a theme that has already popped up twice in Dragonflight’s Brewmaster Monk talent trees that I refer to as “build-a-button”.

What this concept of “build-a-button” means is that within the talent trees, you may have an ability early on (such as Fortifying Brew), but then include additional talent nodes that interact with this ability and provide extra effects when it is used (Ironshell Brew, Expeditious Fortification, and Fortifying Brew: Determination). This can even work with passive effects such as Press the Advantage, which inherits all of your talents that interact with Tiger Palm, including Counterstrike, Face Palm, and even Blackout Combo.

Given that this can be done with both passive and active abilities, why not incorporate some of the redundant Brewmaster Monk effects into a similar “build-a-button” style? Instead of having both Summon White Tiger Statue and Invoke Niuzao, the Black Ox, why not have a talent that allows Niuzao and the other celestials to passively deal even more AoE damage while active? This could even be stretched into more rotational abilities, such as Rushing Jade Wind being used as a talent to replace Spinning Crane Kick, giving it a small Energy cost and passive Shuffle generation while dealing damage. With the help of an opt-in system of talents like this, Brewmasters could cut back on some keybinds while still keeping many of their individually small benefits.

Better Feedback for Performance (In-Game and Out)

This desire is one that contains benefits for both a more casual player as well as those that may be more interested in the theorycrafting side of things. In essence, currently as a Brewmaster it can often feel like what you are doing doesn’t have much of an impact on your own performance. No matter how well you press Purifying Brew to reduce your Stagger, your health pool continues to dwindle without the help of outside healing. Likewise, no matter how good you are at hitting Blackout Kick on cooldown, your overall damage from doing so is probably going to only be as relevant as getting an extra critical strike with an on-use trinket dealing raw damage. While some of this is doomed to be a natural extension of being a tank player that shouldn’t exceed the damage of a DPS or the healing of a healer, there could also be more feedback within the UI to address when you are doing things correctly.

As an example of what I mean, consider that two of the player-favorite set bonuses since their return in Shadowlands have been Keg of the Heavens and Charred Dreams (the Sepulcher of the First ones and Amirdrassil effects). A key theme to these set bonuses is the inclusion of additional, noticeable self-healing. With Keg of the Heavens, you could visibly see your maximum HP shoot up by hundreds of thousands, and with Charred Dreams, you can watch your HP immediately be topped off with every cast of Exploding Keg in AoE. This sort of flashy behavior feels good, even if it may not always be as directly strong as something more silent like the Gai Plin’s Imperial Brew talent healing you for a small amount with every cast of Purifying Brew. Brewmasters needing some outside healing help is inevitable unless you want to make them into immortals with Stagger, but this does not mean they need to always feel helpless about it too.

In addition to in-game performance feedback, another key improvement to Brewmasters going forward would be better combat log integration. For the moment, Stagger is only shown as a player absorbing damage and then receiving ticks of a DoT. At no time can you tell on a log how much Stagger is present, nor can you know how much damage was removed with a cast of Purifying Brew. Thanks to some very clever math, these bits of information have been reverse-engineered over on the Brewmaster end of WoW Analyzer, but it would be far easier to have proper, robust Stagger support in combat logging to begin with. This would make things much easier for any players that would like to see how they or other Brewmasters are doing outside of the game.

Hero Talent Desires
Until the official Alpha for The War Within releases, it is unlikely that we’ll be learning much about the upcoming Hero Talents for Brewmasters. After all, with Monk being one of the less popular classes, there is less incentive to provide any teasers for which of the three trees (Mastery of Harmony, Shado-Pan, and Conduit of the Celestials) each Monk specialization will be receiving. With that being said, there are still elements to speculate on and hope for based on these names alone.

Of the three, Shado-Pan seems the most likely tree to solidly be for Brewmasters and Windwalkers. Given that the Shado-Pan Monks are the group most focused on martial combat versus a supporting role, it seems like a natural fit for these talents to really emphasize your damage-dealing potential as a tank. As such, I would like to see these talents emphasize the kicks and punches available to both specs, namely Blackout Kick, Tiger Palm, and Rising Sun Kick. This may be tricky though, since Blackout Combo already handles a lot of this playstyle with a single talent point. If possible, I would really love to then see some options that help strengthen the uniquely Brewmaster parts of the Monk fantasy: throwing things at enemies and setting them on fire. Who says the Shado-Pan have to fight fair, after all?

Master of Harmony is perhaps the next most-likely Brewmaster Hero Talent tree, possibly overlapping with Mistweavers. After all, the offensive and defensive nature of your abilities, along with the interactions of Staggerand Purifying Brew, represent a clever balancing act. If you focus too much on one aspect of your toolkit, you’re likely to neglect another. As such, I expect this talent tree to likely emphasize the dual-nature found in our current Brewmaster abilities, and hopefully add some new effects. Given that Mistweavers already have an entire playstyle of dealing damage to provide healing, why not lean into that fantasy more for us Brews as well? With Expel Harm essentially acting as a discount version of Death Strike already, I believe it would be very rewarding to incentivize players to really learn their rotation and gain more self-sustainability as a result.

Finally, Conduit of the Celestials is perhaps the least likely Hero Talent tree to involve Brewmasters. Although Invoke Niuzao, the Black Ox (or Angry Dave, as he is fondly called by many Brew players) has had moments of being incredibly flashy on the damage meter, it has more often than not been a forgettable, subpar cooldown. By comparison, Invoke Xuen, the White Tiger and Invoke Yu’lon, the Jade Serpent have been major staples of the Windwalker and Mistweaver toolkits for multiple expansions. It seems only natural for them to receive talents further emphasizing the long-standing connection to their chosen celestials. That is not to say that Brewmasters couldn’t receive more talents involving Niuzao, however. Personally speaking though, every time “Angry Dave” has been relevant has also involved doing awful things as a tank, including intentionally turning around or sitting down to force your character to be hit and take more damage. I would rather not see a return to this sort of gameplay.

Conclusion

Overall, Dragonflight has been an expansion of Blizzard throwing everything at the wall about Brewmasters that players said they liked in earlier days and seeing what would stick. Among the many, many abilities and passives, there have certainly been a few that it has been great to see return, and even a few new welcome surprises. However, this experiment with the specialization has come at the cost of Brewmasters being both more complex than ever before and also not standing out in unique group utility compared to their Mistweaver and Windwalker brothers in arms. While there is certainly room for improvement, I also believe in some ways Brew has become more fun than ever, and it will be interesting to see what elements Blizzard will wish to carry forward, discard, or keep improving on as we begin to see the start of The War Within and greater Worldsoul Saga later this year.

About the Author

Hey there, I’m Sinzhu (Sin, not Shin). I’ve been a Brewmaster Monk player for the past nine years and help with moderating the Monk class Discord while also contributing to the Peak of Serenity site. Currently, you can find me raiding with <grr woof woof bark> on US-Kil’jaeden.

Feel free to come to me with any questions, comments, or concerns you may have about Brewmasters!