[Monk] Brewmaster feedback - Patch 15589

#1 - March 24, 2012, 11:18 p.m.

The good:

1) the single target rotation feels much smoother.

Keg smash costing 40 rp and generating 2 Chi was spot on. With power strikes the influx of Chi is a LOT better now.

2) Obviously DH having threat modifier made life a lot easier on the aoe front.

3) i noticed that even missing jab/KS you still generate Chi .. that's great

The Bad:

- Procs and general use of skills. It's still all over the place. There's just way too many skills to use.

cooldowns:
Elusive brew
Guard
Purifying brew
Shuffle
Dampen Harm (new .. it's a no brainer for tanks to get this)
Fortifying brew

Skills:
breath of fire
Spinning kick
DH
Keg smash
Tiger palm
Jab
Blackout Kick. I think it's time we start to think about smoothing out the rotation and use of skills.

1) Blackout Kick feels out of place in the brewmaster rotation. I dont think it's a skill we should bother using at all.

Currently on single target i start:
- Jab (generate 2 chi with power strike)
- Keg smash (2 chi .. 4 capped)
- Elusive ale
- Tiger palm
- Tiger palm
- Then it's a mix of Jab, Keg smash on cooldown and tiger palm in between. And cooldowns when needed.

Situation: Using those 3 skills (jab, Keg smash, Tiger palm) in a single target rotation is working. What feels completely out of place is using Blackout Kick as a proc after parry. It has no sinergy whatsoever .. it's just dmg.

Suggestion: Replace Blackout free proc with Tiger Palm free proc.

After a parry, your next tiger palm cost no chi. It fit's in the rotation, it's not a proc that we have to watch closely or change our rotation. Plus it has the sinergy of buffing Guard.

So it would make us actually want to reforge to parry .. because currently, it's 100% irrelevant to have parry because the blackout kick proc is "meh".

It's just not fun to pay attention to a proc (and feel it's wasted when you can't) and change your skill usage while you are trying to use your cooldowns, rounding up mobs, checking the area etc .. it's just not cool.

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2) Aoe rotation is much better now .. but i think we should be able to use Breath of Fire more often.

It feels a little spaced out. While spinning kick gets the job done in between, i feel like we should be using our signature ability on aoe, and not mix matching.

Aoe is currently around:
- Keg smash
- Still need to use some jabs in between (not extremelly happy about but .. ok)
- Refresh DH debuff
- Breath of fire
- Spinning Kick.

Situation: Again i think it's too many skills to achieve the same result. I think Spinning Kick should be scrapped from aoe rotation. But the problem is that if you do that, you'll find that you don't have much to do since Keg smash has a cooldown and Breath of Fire has a really long cooldown.

Suggestion: Scrap Spinning Kick from the brewmaster toolkit, and lower Breath of Fire cd. Just lower it to 6-8 seconds (and balance it's dmg accordingly). It's not a stun, it's a dmging skill .. there's really no need for such a long cooldown.

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3) Cooldowns.

They are not there yet.

- Elusive Ale is simple and efficient.
- Guard with a 30 sec cd, ok.
- Shuffle .. don't like. At all. I think this cd is really weird to use, it FEELS weird to channel something mid combat (it's like casting, after years playing it just feels wrong casting with a mob hitting you). It prevents you from doing other stuff .. it's just not nice atm.
- Purifying Brew .. cd is waay too short. It feels like i have to be spamming this all the time.
- Fortfying Brew .. great ... different cd, has it's place.
- Dampen Harm .. great .. easy to use, intuitive.

Dampen Harm, Fort. Brew, Elusive Brew and Guard all have their places and are easy and intuitive to use. Shuffle and Pur. Brew are not there yet.

- Shuffle:
it's channeled .. i can't stress enough how awkward it feels to use it .. it's just weird. It's also very shady in it's mechanics. Did I absorb a lot of dmg? Can i dodge while using it ? etc etc.

- Puryfying Brew:
Stagger debuff is hard to track. With the default UI it's nearly impossible to take a very quick glance and figure out "is it a good moment to use it?"

You can't tell how much dmg is going unless you mouseover the debuff, check it's dot etc.

Those 2 are really clunky to use atm. They are hard to track .. very hard to estimate how "effective" they are. And with no cooldown, it feels like something you should be using on your rotation, which is quite annoying.

The other 4 cooldowns are extremelly easy to use, they do a great job on "active mitigation". They have simple yet efficient effects, and short CDs. So it's really easy to get used at firing them on demand. You know they are doing their job.

Shuffle and Purifying brew need serious attention.

Ghostcrawler

Game Designer

#22 - March 30, 2012, 5:58 p.m.

Thanks for the feedback, everyone.

Monks are a new class, and we will be iterating on them quite a bit and often we change mechanics a lot faster than we make beta builds. With that in mind, we wanted to clarify our design intent on some of the abilities:

Dizzying Haze -- We increased the threat and lowered the energy. We're not crazy about making it do damage because then it risks competing with other Brewmaster abilities. We really don't want Dizzying Haze used rotationaly on single-targets. We also run into whether or not the ability should break CC if it does damage.

AE tanking -- We agree that monks need a little more ability to cleave.

Missing Jabs -- It isn't intended to lose all Energy on a miss. We will fix that.

Ghostcrawler

Game Designer

#238 - April 7, 2012, 4:49 a.m.

Our intent for Brewmasters is to use Guard, Purifying Brew and Shuffle as reactive and proactive abilities that you want to use to react or prevent damage spikes. We're not there yet with the cooldowns, durations and costs, which are the kinds of numbers we tune constantly after tests and playtests. Mechanically we think the pieces of the puzzle are there, but they don't fit together quite right yet.

We agree that Chi generation is too slow for Brewmasters. Expel Harm is one possible Chi generator. Also keep in mind that there is currently a miss penalty on Energy and Chi that we plan on removing.

We also agree that the Brewmaster procs still need a bit more spice.

Free Tiger Palm is probably too strong. :(

In our current builds, Brewmasters have a big health bonus, currently higher than any other tank. We're actively iterating on tanking numbers for all specs, but we need to consider a lot of different situations (single boss, groups, healers spamming, damage over long periods, different gear levels, etc.)

Kaivax

Community Manager

#386 - April 11, 2012, 7:49 p.m.

A couple of updates for you:

Shuffle -- We're considering a test of removing the channel aspect of Shuffle. We think a channel mitigation ability is cool and different from other tanks, but it's problematic if Shuffle's short cooldown results in you spending all your time channeling it. That said, we might change our minds and make Shuffle a longer cooldown again.
Mastery -- We're thinking about changing mastery to reduce the initial damage taken rather than the stagger periodic (again, if we keep the current design).