Sure, there have been the odd quality of life tweaks for Hero Talents it shares with Mistweaver and Windwalker ( Master of Harmony/ Shado-Pan), and even this first 11.1 build features a similar type of change for Paralysis, yet the population of Brewmasters continues to fall. Those that remain grow more upset and some cry out for sweeping changes to occur, or to at least have some historically undertuned talents buffed/reworked. How did the spec get to this point, is this outcry justified, and what could potentially be done to solve it going into the next patch(es)?
Brewmaster, Unchanging
If you have ever tried a Brewmaster Monk in the past seven years of WoW, you are actually already familiar with how it plays. That is to say: having charges of Purifying Brew to reduce Stagger, with those charges gaining cooldown reduction from your damage rotation. Other elements, such as Blackout Kick’s static cooldown, the loop between Keg Smash and Breath of Fire, and a general dislike of Haste have also all been more or less untouched in this entire time. Perhaps the biggest shakeup to the kit came in Shadowlands when Celestial Brew was added, though this too was simply bringing back an older idea from Mists of Pandaria/Warlords of Draenor (Guard).
Beyond basic class design, Brewmasters have also seen their share of repeated ideas in borrowed power from various expansions. You may be familiar with Stormstout’s Last Keg in the Dragonflight talent tree, but how about Memory of Stormstout from Shadowlands or Stormstout’s Last Gasp from Legion? Similarly, Bob and Weave made its debut in Shadowlands, but was originally the Jewel of the Lost Abbey from Legion, and has been unchanged since its release. Or how about Face Palm, aka Shaohao’s Might, aka Face Palm?
Now, Brewmaster is not unusual among specializations in having a playstyle very similar to the last great class design shakeup from Legion. Nor is it unique in having a lot of ideas from Artifact/Azerite nodes or Legiondary/Runecarving Powers get reused among the Dragonflight talent trees. However, seeing this behavior repeat time after time has created an air of stagnancy around the spec, with little to get excited about. If nearly every expansion since Legion has featured a way to gain a second charge of Keg Smash and it is widely used every time, one has to wonder why it was never made baseline. Likewise, this has meant that each time the effect has made an appearance, a chance for a more creative idea was potentially denied by its presence. With so much of the design space filled by returning favorites, you are left with a lot of baggage and, ultimately, limited build variety.
When other specializations seem to receive even slight tweaks every patch, the static nature of Brewmaster Monk can instead come off as settling for good enough or, at worst, neglect.
The War Within: Where Have the Brews Gone?
Coming closer to the present, The War Within’s launch had some promising shakeups for Brewmasters. Not only did 11.0 feature 33 new or revised talents in the Monk class tree, along with 14 in the Brewmaster tree, but also two entire sets of hero talents with 29 new nodes in total. However, despite this, that 7-year-old playstyle still stayed untouched. If anything, an increase in Purifying Brew availability and access to abilities such as Rising Sun Kick or Exploding Keg has had it grow further in complexity. Nevertheless, for those who have enjoyed it, myself included, this created some optimism for what the start of the expansion would be like. As for how things have played out thus far…
A “Default” Raid Tank
Brewmaster Monks have been regarded as a strong progression raid tank from their inception. Look no further than their presence in more world-first endboss kills than any other tank as proof (on top of having more instances of running double-Brew than the rest from MoP onward). Nerub-ar Palace is no exception, with Brewmasters currently being the third-most-prolific tank in Mythic difficulty. Similarly, all three of the world-first guilds brought one to Queen Ansurek. Of course, you may notice that each of these guilds’ only Monk representative on the kill roster was their tank.
Frequently, this state of being the “default” progression tank has come down to one of buffs. With all Monk players providing Mystic Touch, high-end raiding will frequently settle for whichever Monk specialization is best for a given tier. If Windwalker or Mistweaver are performing well (Amir’drassil), and/or a fight features mandatory utility that only certain tanks can provide (Gorefiend’s Grasp/Sigil of Chains on Broodtwister Ovi’nax), then a Brewmaster is often discarded in their favor. This is, of course, a common enough practice among tank players in higher-end guilds, and Brew is still acceptable most of the time anyway. However, a lack of similar spec-specific utility means it is harder to have fights where you need one in the same way you might need a Blessing of Spellwarding. In fact, almost any guild bringing a Monk purely for Mystic Touch wouldn’t notice its absence, given how little of a raid group’s damage dealt is Physical at this point in time.
Although Brewmaster remains seen as a common progression pick, all too often this is out of comfort or other tanks having a similar “who brings the buff?” issue.
Mythic+ Woes and Community Perception
Most of us have been here before: you try to join 15 different groups in the group finder to fill out your Mythic+ vault slots, only to be met with decline after decline. You would think that for tank players this would be less of a problem.
Despite the difficulties faced by players attempting to join a PUG key group for their weekly 10s (or beyond), Brewmaster is in fact the third-best tank by mythic+ rating in Season 1. While unable to reach the heights of Protection Paladin’s dominance, it is certainly doing better than the “worst” tanks (Blood Death Knight and Vengeance Demon Hunter) over most key levels. Still, it is ultimately up to the leader of the group to decide who they want to invite. If they have had a bad experience with a Brewmaster in a lower key level, or have been told that only tank X is good right now, then they are much more likely to decline something “off-meta”. While this is understandable from that point of view, for a Brewmaster there is rarely, if ever, a time where it is considered the “good” tank for Mythic+. This, coupled with the ease of rerolling to a different class with the aid of Warbound systems in The War Within, continues to gradually smother the spec’s population in what is supposed to be one of the main pillars of endgame content.
Tuning Difficulties
When describing how a Brewmaster works to other players, I often find it best to compare it to the common myth about a cockroach: easily squished, but also capable of surviving a nuclear blast of damage. What I mean by this is that the Brewmaster kit makes it exceptionally durable against single, massive hits from enemies, but having them paired with smaller amounts of consistent damage can become surprisingly tough to handle. This is due to a number of effects spread across passives and talents that have their strength tied to your Stagger level. For example, Gai Plin’s Imperial Brew naturally increases its healing as you cast Purifying Brew against larger amounts of Stagger, and your passive Haste or Mastery from High Tolerance and Training of Niuzao can also more than double in value over time. However, if you aren’t in content that gets you beyond Light Stagger–a Stagger DoT of only 30% or less of your total health–these effects are notably weaker. Even against Mythic Ansurek, spending more than half of the fight at only Light Stagger is common.
With large portions of the defensive kit being based around this expectation of taking at least a certain amount of damage, it is similarly difficult to buff a Brewmaster’s sturdiness. If Purifying Brew’s cooldown is reduced or removes more Stagger per cast, then your average Stagger level goes down even further. If Armor is increased, less damage reaches Stagger in the first place. And, if your Stagger percentage is increased, then enemies will need to deal even larger hits of damage to be threatening to a Brewmaster; damage that becomes increasingly lethal to every other tank specialization. There are many remaining options to change, such as health, defensive cooldown lengths/strength, or any combination thereof, but the point here is that adjusting Brewmaster defensiveness is a very delicate matter.
Not only is there a tuning burden on effects that scale with your Stagger level, but there are also a plethora of modifiers on major abilities in the Brewmaster kit. This results in massive swings of potential damage dealt. For Tiger Palm alone, there are no less than 10 modifiers present at different times, which means that if you want to have a chance at maximizing its damage you need to:
- Dodge an attack to trigger Counterstrike;
- Have 4 stacks of Weapons of Order applied to the target beforehand;
- Triggered Blackout Combo already with Blackout Kick;
- Have won the coinflip to trigger Face Palm;
- Have won the roll to critically strike.
If a DPS player had this amount of randomness in their output, it surely would have been made more consistent entire expansions ago. Instead, a Brewmaster has varying levels of this spread across their damage rotation for most of the core skills. No one wants to learn that a threat rip occurred because a given ability didn’t have enough amplifier hoops jumped through first.
At the same time, attempting to shore up the performance of a less-skilled Brewmaster by buffing an ability’s baseline damage will rapidly snowball through its modifiers. Take Keg Smash, where one extra modifier from the Season 1 2-piece bonus rippled outward into using a talent that had been unselected since its Dragonflight release (Scalding Brew). Considering that the Season 2 4-piece bonus also features a massive 150% buff to Blackout Kick, there’s no sign of the trend slowing down, either. Because of this, any damage buffs the spec receives could rapidly prove far more deadly in the right hands, rather than just the targeted player group.
Hope for the Future
With all of this context in mind, where should the Brewmaster specialization go in 11.1 and beyond? If it hasn’t been stressed enough, the core gameplay does work. There’s something to be said about not trying to fix what isn’t broken, and the specialization continues to remain consistently viable, even if it is rarely the best. Likewise, by this point all core abilities in the rotation have a purpose that make it hard to prune or combine them together.
However, it is clear that there is still a substantial gap in performance between the best and the worst Brewmasters. On top of this, community perception has only worsened the opinions players have of Brewmasters in casual content. Further still, the myriad of multipliers on each ability means that even a tiny buff can spiral out of control. As a result, any changes in the short-term would have to be exceptionally surgical, with larger plans made to likely be set in motion in 11.2 or possibly even 12.0. With that in mind, the following would be what I consider the highest priorities for changes that could potentially be done on the 11.1 PTR.
Quality of Life
While every incidental change Brewmasters have received since The War Within’s launch falls into this category already, there is more that could be done. Fortunately, the threat modifier has been recently hotfixed to address on-pull issues in particular. Even so, all too often Brewmasters are encouraged to not utilize their first Keg Smash until enemies have been sufficiently grouped together, as the small AoE and range may cause it to miss some of them. When this happens, it’s fairly common for an overzealous DPS player to hit the enemy with their AoE instead and immediately gain threat, despite the best efforts of the tank. With Keg Smash and Breath of Fire being the only reliable AoE in the kit–Spinning Crane Kick is almost exclusively used for grouping at this time and there is no room in the rotation for Rushing Jade Wind–these two abilities need to become more reliable at hitting loosely-grouped enemies.
Address Forgotten Talents/Passives
The War Within’s launch may have featured seven new talents in the Brewmaster tree, but at this time 3-4 of them have remained essentially dead-on-arrival. In addition, there are still 4-5 other talent nodes that have similarly languished in obscurity since their Dragonflight debut (Celestial Flames, Fluidity of Motion, Walk with the Ox, Improved Invoke Niuzao, the Black Ox, and even arguably Press the Advantage). To have just received a talent rework in this expansion launch, but still have nearly 20% of the total spec talents be essentially unusable, has only further contributed to the feeling of being forgotten that more Brewmasters are experiencing. Then there is Mystic Touch, whose value hasn’t been modified since its release in Battle for Azeroth despite a reduction in Physical damage dealt by every class over time. In other words, there is a lot of room to do something.
Now, not all of these talents can be easily addressed in tuning. It would be incredibly difficult to make Fluidity of Motion an appealing choice given how much worse the core rotation would feel with a 3-second Blackout Kick, for example. However, adjusting the strength of Mystic Touch in comparison to other mandatory buffs would already go a long way in potentially shifting player opinions of how useful a Monk’s presence can be.
Reduce Modifier Strength to Increase Baseline Effects
This adjustment would be much more involved from a tuning point of view if it were to be done by the start of Season 2; especially so with a number of talents existing purely as modifiers to begin with. All the same, a large part of the offensive skill gap between good and bad Brewmasters comes from many of its damage modifiers being so massive in the first place. Between Counterstrike, Face Palm, and Blackout Combo (three talents often ignored by defensive-minded or newer players), you already have three modifiers of +100% to Tiger Palm alone. Perhaps it would be more helpful, instead, to reduce their size somewhat in exchange for buffing the baseline damage of Tiger Palm, assisting players that aren’t yet comfortable enough defensively to fit these talent points in.
It is not only modifiers in damage that could be looked at with this mindset, either. While the values would have to be handled even more carefully, similar practices can be done for baseline Stagger, Shuffle, and Armor/Health (Brewmaster’s Balance) in an attempt to shift more damage into the Stagger pool and improve the value of Purifying or Celestial Brew. Of course, this can potentially backfire instead, further harming players who aren’t properly using Purifying Brew. Still, there ought to be a solution that can increase the amount of time players spend in Moderate or Heavy Stagger to buff the many talents rewarding you for doing so. The tricky part is getting there without dying, especially in trivial or solo content.
What would you like to see changed or improved on Brewmasters in 11.1 and beyond? I’m sure Blizzard (and myself) would love to know! Feel free to add your own discussion in the comments below or on the official forums.
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