Brewmaster’s mitigation toolkit is changing going into Shadowlands. We covered the high-level changes we knew about in our previous post, but now we have numbers and details from Alpha to know how it works in much greater detail. At a high level, our new mitigation toolkit breaks down into three main pieces.
Mitigation Buttons
Two key pieces of our existing kit remain in Shadowlands: Stagger and Purifying Brew. Functionally, these remain very similar to their Battle for Azeroth incarntions—with two major exceptions. First, we no longer have Ironskin Brew. It is replaced by the return of Shuffle, which is granted by casting Keg Smash, Blackout Kick, and SCK. Importantly: the amount of Shuffle granted by these abilities is high enough to have 100% uptime on the buff with our current rotation.
Second, Stagger now only affects Physical damage, leaving Magic damage totally un-Staggered. Thankfully, we have a new toy to deal with this limitation.
Celestial Brew
Celestial Brew grants a large absorb for 8 seconds on a 30 second cooldown (reduced by talents). Note that as of this writing, CB does not benefit from the cooldown reduction tied to abilities like Keg Smash. However, given the name change from Guard, this may be a bug.
Unlike Ironskin Brew, Celestial Brew does not share charges with Purifying Brew. If it ultimately does benefit from Brew cooldown reduction, we will get 2 Purifies per Celestial. Otherwise, we are looking at 3-4 per Celestial. This is particularly relevant because Purifying Brew casts now grant Purified Chi, a 40% increase to the next Celestial Brew cast that stacks up to 10 times. Purifying at Light grants 1 stack, while Moderate and Heavy Stagger grant 2 and 3 stacks, respectively. At this time, the buff is bugged and is not consumed by Celestial Brew, giving a permanent 400% increase at 10 stacks. A full 10 stack cast is very potent—so we are reasonably confident that this is a bug.
Putting it Together
Taken as a whole, we can get a fairly complete picture of the mitigation playstyle Brewmasters can expect on the current Alpha build. On a single-target fight, you’ll maintain Shuffle by performing your rotation. Keg Smash grants 5 seconds per cast and Blackout Kick grants 3 seconds, which results in 11 seconds of Shuffle for every 8 seconds of your rotation. This is basically our current situation, minus the extra button presses for Ironskin Brew.
As a byproduct of maintaining Shuffle, we’ll reduce the cooldown of our brews by about 40%. This gives about one Purifying Brew every 9 seconds in combat without any talents or haste bonuses. For context: we currently Purify roughly once every 20-25 seconds—less than half of the current Alpha rate.
If Celestial Brew has its cooldown reduced as well, we will be able to cast it roughly every 18 seconds—once every 2 Purifies, giving it an 80% increased absorb on most casts. If it does not, then we will have it once every 3-4 Purifies and 120-160% increased effectiveness per cast.
The intention seems to be for us to play around Purified Chi, stacking it up to get HUGE shields from Celestial Brew. However, that isn’t how the kit really fits together right now. Ultimately, we expect our gameplay loop will look something like this:
- On pull, Keg Smash the boss to activate Shuffle before you are hit.
- Use Celestial Brew on cooldown, unless there is a large magic nuke coming within the next 30 seconds.
- Use Purifying Brew more-or-less on cooldown.
- Repeat ad nauseam.
Thoughts & Feedback
This is obviously not ideal. We are looking at a mitigation model that—despite our positive first impressions—is actually simpler than what we have right now. To quote #brew-lounge regular Tokaine:
So there’s not even a skill floor? There’s a skill basement, with an elevator down into it?
Yes, Tokaine. Yes.
The root cause of the problem seems two-fold. First—and most important—the cooldown on Purifying Brew is simply too low. Our cooldown at 0% haste (with brew cooldown reduction) is about 9 seconds. Add in haste and talents like Light Brewing, and we rapidly reach the point that trying to Purify well becomes irrelevant—sitting on a charge will simply waste it. Then you add the unfortunate detail that each Purify makes every other Purify worse for about 10 seconds, and we’ve arrived at a point where picking and choosing when to cast Purifying Brew largely irrelevant. Further, at this point adding additional casts via Haste, talents, and the like becomes heavily devalued. With minimal Haste and reasonable Mastery, the cooldown will be so low and melee attacks so infrequent that we will be able to Purify every other melee hit—making talents that reduce its cooldown functionally worthless.
Second, the design of Celestial Brew is pulling in multiple competing directions. Brew cooldown reduction asks you to cast Brews as often as possible to maximize the reduced cooldown. In contrast, Purified Chi asks you to play in a style mimicking Upwelling: sit on your hands with Celestial off cooldown while you stack up the bonus effect. A playstyle that is among the most unappealing in World of Warcraft‘s history, I might add. This is compounded by Purifying Brew‘s sharp diminishing returns: getting more brews won’t get you many more stacks of Purified Chi.
Further, in the absence of threatening Magic nukes Celestial Brew is most efficient when cast on cooldown—a fact that asks us to ignore Purified Chi entirely. Of course, this playstyle is made possible by Stagger, which simultaneously makes it challenging to fully consume a stacked Celestial Brew and allows us to largely ignore non-throughput problems. The latter has serious ramifications for gameplay, as it allows us to turn all (Physical) problems into throughput questions and take the most efficient solution. On the other hand, in the presence of heavy Magic damage—where Celestial Brew is our only hope—it is also much harder to stack up Purified Chi to mitigate the damage. It’s a mess.
Wrapping Up
On the whole, the new mitigation kit is functional in the sense that it will work. From a raw numbers perspective, it will probably be pretty good. However, it has a number of gameplay problems that result in a simplistic, repetitive gameplay loop. If we could make a single change at this point in the Alpha, it would be to increase the cooldown of Purifying Brew—though further changes will likely be necessary to arrive at a compelling mitigation model.
Please, if you have acces to alpha, and alhpa forums write this there so we can have hope that they will fix our class.
Interesting that you feel this way. I’ve heard from most streams of alpha that everyone is enjoying the new Brewmaster. I haven’t had a chance to play it but it looks like an improvement to me.
Seems to me that our two active mitigation options should share the same resource. That way we can sit on Celestial Brew, empowering it for when we need it without wasting that resource because we can spend it on Purify instead. OR we can use Celestial Brew repeatedly for high magic damage situations, soloing, or otherwise when too little damage is Staggered to bother Purifying.
Frankly, I miss Chi, and fail to see why it was removed. I don’t think players sucked at Brewmaster because Chi was overcomplicated, but because there wasn’t a Stagger meter.
i mean, what is it about chi that you liked that makes you want it back? people keep asking for it, while paladins complain that they got holy power back.
I haven’t seen many protadins complaining about holy power.
Chasing chi spending abilities was fun in that using them was always impactful – it was your reward for playing correctly. Remember, Guard cost chi, and was very potent. In an ideal design, you wouldn’t have 100% uptime, so that it could continue to be potent without being game breaking. Chi explosion was another engaging chi spender – since it stacked additional effects per chi spent, you had to think about/choose whether you wanted a hard hitting single target ability, an AoE, or wait for max chi to combine those effects with a stagger purification. I found it particularly nice because unlike Blackout Combo (also applauded for making a player think/choose), I only had to remember what changed with one ability vs. tracking changes on multiple abilities on the fly. Simply put, without Chi, we’re a dumbed down rogue without the fun dps buttons.
Reading your Wrapping Up section, I wonder if the problem of how many charges we have also plays in and how much we get in general from there. If I’m reading you right, a change could come like this:
– Purifying Brew has a CD only based on Haste baseline with two charges.
– Light Brewing could then passively apply the CD shortening from Keg and Blackout. So we would still be getting a safety net from the talent for more overall purifies, but having only two charges at a time would make it more important when to purify instead of being able to potentially spam it.
– Black Ox Brew would have to be changed, but that could maybe be a one minute 100% purify and bringing Celestial Brew back off CD.
So you can either have faster brew production or a spare one as a choice on the talent row with maybe two Celestial Brews quickly together. I doubt this is a perfect idea, but feels like a possible one.
Honestly, an idea I’d kinda like to see is for Purifying Brew to be cooldown reduction for Celestial Brew rather then strength, and the strength of Celestial Brew’s shield to be based on your current stagger at time of use. You could make a fairly compelling gameplay loop, IMO, out of something like that. Make the question be “do you need a larger shield or a sooner one?”.
As for how specifically to make that work? I’d change it so that Purifying Brew removes 1/3/5 seconds off the Cooldown of Celestial Brew, based on the level of stagger when cast. Then Celestial Brew gains a 50/100/200% multiplier based on the level of stagger when cast.
Together, this would force players to decide if purifying their heavy stagger and removing the last few seconds from the Celestial Brew cooldown is worth losing 100+% on the absorb, and being the best brewmaster would be about threading that line accurately.
I actually am really excited about this. It seems more in line with what drew me to Brewmaster back in MoP. I don’t necessarily dislike the current setup, but I honestly think I’ll prefer this one. I’m bummed you guys aren’t thrilled with it. Hopefully they can tweak it to find some kind of middle ground and make everyone happy? 😀
i really feel like the overall gameplay of brm could be improved if they brought back chi, especially now because these changes are making brm feel more like its mop/wod rendition.
Archchair developer’s position, so take it with a grain of salt, but in addition to a longer CD, purification brew would benefit from a competing spender, preferably one that lets you build up stagger meter so you get bigger individual purifies and thereby more charges for your celestial brew.
Baking ISB into shuffle seems fine since I’m not mindlessly spamming a button anymore, but replacing it with nothing leaves it just as devoid of engagement as it currently is.
Having stagger paused for a duration (would have to scale down with the level of stagger you have) or until a value is reached (stagger paused until it would have done X% of your maximum health to you in damage, say 10-15%) would be interesting (but possibly not rewarding enough as opposed to just purifying twice). I love the purifying brew-celestial brew synergy, but it feels like we’re missing a ‘front end’ step.
What if they replaced ISB with a very short duration DPS steroid that shared charges with Purifying Brew, to help put some choice in to the rotation? Other tanks get choices between DPS and Surviability, why not monk?
And while we’re at it can we make Healing Elixir a brew and increase its cool down to compensate for the reductions it would get from KS
Man, Monks seem really ignored in Shadowlands, and we are getting very close to a release date. I worry we won’t have enough time to actually make any real changes to rotation, function & concept.
It feels silly, but an example of this is the new Blackout Kick animation, and how they’ve taken our weapons further away from us. I really dislike this, and hope we could get it back (perhaps through a Glyph?).
I’ve been playing Alpha for the past few days and I am really liking the changes, the changes on brews make tanking much more reactive, rather than proactive. In general its been nice to have to actively press buttons to see results rather that have a passive up time on something that benefits in the long run.
Beta, not Alpha….sorry 😀
What do you think of recent changes? Celestial Brew cd up from 30 sec to 1 min and also reduced attack power value for the mitigation. Purifying Brew also changed from 15 to 20 sec. On the other hand Shuffle mitigationg goes from 75% to 100% stagger. Thoughts?
So, a couple things:
1. I think the Purifying Brew change is great. Definitely the right direction there.
2. The Celestial Brew nerf is a LOT at once, and a LOT to pair with other nerfs and hotfixes. We’re still looking okay on beta, but honestly at this point I’m concerned about the power level of tanks on the whole, if that makes sense?
3. The Shuffle “buff” is not actually a buff. The tooltip changed, but the Shuffle tooltip (and the ISB tooltip on live) are actually complete nonsense. Stagger w/ Shuffle up is now about 3% lower than it was last reset.
What do you think about a non-traditional approach to our talents in beta? Mainly Blackout Combo instead of High Tolerance. When paired with the Double Keg Smash lego you can reduce the CD to Celestial pretty significantly. Would it be worth it for higher M+ keys; as well as, high dmg raid fights?
Probably not. If you want CB CDR, I’d rather do necrolord+High Tolerance.
in my testing bonedust brew and exploding keg do not reduce the CD of CB