It Begins! The Brewmaster Feedback Marathon!

Hello friends! I've finally gotten access to Legion's beta which means I've finally been able to start testing the Brewmaster! What I am hoping to do is have several posts of feedback targeted at specific aspects of play. The list i have thus far (in no particular order) is as follows:

• Game Feell
• Leveling / solo content
• Talents / Abilities
• Normal Dungeons
• Heroic Dungeons
• Mythic+ Dungeons
• Raids (if Blizzard continues testing and I am lucky).

Before I begin I want to again plug my Beta Brewmaster Talents Survey. If you've played Brewmaster on the Beta, please do me a huge favor and fill it out. I'm collecting data to try and see what players pick and more importantly, why, to potentially get some more context on talent choices. I'm hoping to use that data for my Talents post

Today I wanted to talk about play feel and how Brewmaster holds up in solo content. To get right into it, when I say "play feel", what do I mean by that? It is essentially a slight alliteration to game feel, a concept of game design which is one of the most vague things you have to think about. In essence, it's basically about whether the game feels fun and engaging to play. So to talk about play feel is essentially answering the question of "Do Brewmasters feel good to play?"

And overall I think they do. I haven't used RJW all that much, but even so I definitely overestimated the downtime you have as a Brewmaster. The spec still feels fairly fast and you still need to manage multiple things in your core priority/rotation (In this case, active mitigation, energy spenders and cooldowns, rather than active mitigation, energy spenders and chi spenders). The animations are very nice and I've found myself just watching my character move as I use my abilities. Flaming Keg, as far as feel goes, is awesome. You throw it down and it just EXPLODES in a crescendo of beer and fire. If tuned correctly, that's going to be an awesome button to press.

My active mitigation, as far as how I use it, feels fairly good too. What I've largely been doing is using ISB when I feel like I need the extra defense (similar to how I use Guard in live), and then using purifies if that stagger DoT is getting a bit excessive. I feel more attentive towards stagger than on live, which i think is a good thing. Expel Harm makes Gift of the Ox feel much nicer and I really appreciate its return. Overall, though the spec has changed fairly substantially, I personally still enjoy it. So far, I haven't felt like I needed something else than what my kit has to offer in order to deal with incoming damage... but I do want to stress that I've pretty much only done world content. I could very well be in need of something greater when I get into challenging content.



Speaking of, world content on the Legion Brewmaster is fairly smooth. Damage dealt feels good and while you won't sit at 100% health all the time you shouldn't really feel like you're in danger provided you are using self-healing talents, which I personally think are mandatory for solo content. There are people who are saying that they can't play at all without Obstinate Determination, but once I got used to everything (which took a couple hours, be fair) I was doing perfectly fine without it. Even in the dungeons I've done, it hasn't been necessary.

Overall there's not much in the way of feedback that I think I can truly give as far as the above is concerned. The spec is enjoyable to play and level, at least to me. It's got a good feel and a vibrancy to it that is very encouraging. I'm still leveling right now but I can't wait till I hit 110 so I can do even more advanced testing. If Brewmaster maintains its feel into harder difficulty content, I will be very happy with how the spec will play come launch.

Thanks again for reading friends! As usual, feel free to talk to me here or on twitter if you want to discuss Brewmaster stuff or just anything really. Like I said above, this is going to be a bit of a marathon so expect quite a few updates over the next week or two.

Cheers!
~ The Brewing Scribe