Brewmaster Feedback: Talents

Hello friends! As promised, today I'm going to talk about talents. There's a lot here, so get strapped in. This is going to be a doozy.

Talents are in an alright place, I feel. Most of them I'm fairly happy with. I've had a chance to play with pretty much all the talents, so I'm pretty confident in my findings. I'm using this post as a combination of answering the question of "What talents should I pick?" as well as providing feedback on the various talents and talent tiers for any Blizzard devs who are sneaking a peek. This'll be a big post, so I'm going to have a table of contents to make it a bit easier to navigate.

Table of Contents

Level 15
Level 30
Level 45
Level 60
Level 75
Level 90
Level 100

Level 15

The healing tier and the movement tier have switched places this expansion. The Level 15 talent row has the return of Chi Burst and Chi Wave, with the new Eye of the Tiger, a passive talent which deals damage over time to an enemy and heals you over time when you hit them with Tiger Palm. Overall, it's a relatively weak but constant stream of healing, so it'd be a decent enough talent for newer players who are just starting out. Probably best for world content. As would Chi Wave, as it still has the problem of being atrocious for reliable self-healing in a group environment, as its liable to go and heal someone else rather than you. I've never really liked Chi Wave for group content because of this, though it would still be good to pick up for solo content. Overall I'm confident in Chi Burst being the go-to for group content.

Also its animation is freaking gorgeous, so yeah. Sold.

Level 30

As mentioned, Level 30 now provides us our movement options. Only this time, we've seen something rather interesting. Momentum has now merged with Chi Torpedo (though Chi Torpedo has dropped its damage/healing). More or less the decision remains the same. Chi Torpedo is great for endurance-running where you have to move fast and far for a long time, with Tiger's Lust being the go-to for more snap movement speed as well as group utility. If you don't feel like you can manage Tiger's Lust, Celerity is there as an easier to manage snap-movement talent.

Level 45

This tier's brand new. I like to think of Level 45 as the active mitigation tier, where you can choose how you wish to boost your regularly used defensive abilities. Light Brewing reduces the cooldown of Ironskin and Purifying Brew as well as granting a fourth charge. Black Ox Brew fully recharges our energy and brew charges. Gift of the Mists is a bit complicated. Here's the formula:

• TalentedOrbChance = BaseOrbChance * (1 + 0.6 * (1 - (HealthBeforeDamage - DamageTakenBeforeAbosorbsOrStagger) / MaxHealth))

To bring some context to that, Gift of the Ox orbs now spawn when you take 100% of your max health in damage. What Gift of the Mists does is makes it so that any numbers going to that total will get a multiplier depending on what your health is at after the hit. Essentially, it means more Gift of the Ox orbs that you can scoop up physically or via Expel Harm.

So this is a bit complicated. My general testing (and player surveying) finds that Light Brewing is really your go-to for dealing with harder content. Your self healing becomes a bit less trustworthy at a certain point, so you need to talent into Light Brewing or Black Ox Brew to get more actual damage mitigation and burst reduction in the form of your brews. Gift of the Mists might see use in encounters which may require a bit more independence from tanks, where healers aren't able to babysit them, but that's a very hypothetical and in my opinion unlikely occurrence. Black Ox Brew is a strong contender if you're in a situation where you need to predictably use more brews in a short period of time than you are allotted. With everything Brewmasters need to manage in regards to brews, using Black Ox Brew for throughput is extremely difficult. If you're up for that challenge, the rewards are very promising however.

Level 60

The level 60 talents are still about add control. But we get someone new! Dave, our statue, is now a talent alongside Ring of Peace and Leg Sweep. Out of all the talent tiers that I surveyed for, this is the one with the biggest discrepancy of choice. The survey asked players which talents they used (multiple answers were allowed). A dominating 92.6% of those surveyed said they chose Leg Sweep. 40.7% of those surveyed said they use Dave, the Black Ox Statue. Only 3.7% of players surveyed used Ring of Peace.

Ring of Peace has had a slight change in design with Legion. Instead of incapacitating enemies around the target of the spell and incapacitating enemies who cast a spell while in the ring, it now throws enemies out of the ring if they use a harmful spell or ability. The problem I have with this talent is that its design has clearly been changed to a tool that is intended to assist in peeling enemies off of the squishier members of your party, yet it isn't effective at that role.

It firstly feels as though it should have been an Honor Talent, as enemy players are far more likely to proc its effects than NPC's, for whom auto-attacking is much more frequent and relatively more dangerous to your squishies. So already, it's arguably a nerf compared to its previous incarnation, and it's competing with two of the most valued Brewmaster CC abilities that they possess. Secondly, while it has superior range to your Keg Smash, because it generates zero threat it doesn't even really peel enemies off the ally for that long and so you're better off crossing the distance with your very high Brewmaster mobility via Roll or any of the other ways we have to move rather quickly to just Keg Smash and taunt the enemies off your ally. Furthermore, it actually makes doing that harder as if there's multiple enemies engaged on an opponent (and the knockback is actually procced), it kicks them away from the center of the ring, and thus means there's a serious potential for your Keg Smash to not actually immediately land on all the enemies harassing your friend. Using Ring of Peace has an actual potential to impede your capacity to peel off of allies. I suppose you could also use it on yourself as a means of getting an enemy away from you so you could rest a bit, but you also have Roll which does similar and doesn't take up a talent slot and is less likely to make melee freak out and reposition as heavily. Honestly, I was never really much a fan of it anyway compared to the other options in previous expansions. I'm a bit sad that it's continuing that pattern in Legion.

Were I to pick a winner for this tier, it would be Leg Sweep. Dave will have his day in raid encounters with adds I'm sure, but in dungeons and world content the utility and power of Leg Sweep is too much for Dave to see much use.

Level 75

Level 75 is still the tier of defensive cooldowns and not much has changed aside from numbers. Well, except for Healing Elixirs becoming an actual cooldown and REALLY awesome. It's now got 2 charges with a 30 second recharge time and heals for 15% of your health, same as before. If you have a charge available and hit 35% health, it's automatically cast. It's served me exceptionally well in world content and dungeons thus far. Enough that as mentioned in the last post, I feel like it almost deserves to be a baseline ability.It fills this hole that we have so well and its been so useful that I'm a little worried getting into harder content we'll miss having it, despite having a stronger cooldown for bigger bursts than it can handle. I think the change has definitely boosted this tier's decision factor and while it's still largely the same (Dampen Harm for physical burst damage, Diffuse Magic for magic burst), Healing Elixirs takes the cake in solo content and so far up to Normal dungeons.

Level 90

I actually really like the level 90 talents. Each either has a notable effect on our priority or is very iconic of our class fantasy. Rushing Jade Wind is now free to cast, though with a cooldown. The cooldown is actually reduced via haste, which is cool. Xuen is no more. Instead, we have his buddy Niuzao, who is more or less functionally the same. Lastly, we have the new Special Delivery, which has a 30% chance to fling a keg into the air, dealing 900% attack power damage as AoE on a nearby enemy whenever you use Ironskin or Purifying Brew. While last I checked this was bugged and wasn't dealing damage, it's actually a really cool ability and no longer seems to suffer from "Starfall Syndrome" like it did back in the Alpha. Basically, the way I feel this tier goes is RJW is an amazing talent if you want a filler for the priority, which has slowed down compared to Live. Niuzao is still an excellent choice for when you need more burst damage, and SD is a good passive option for those who don't want to further complicate the priority, or for those who may feel that they have too much haste for RJW to be used regularly enough, since I would say that SD scales with haste much more smoothly than RJW does, as it doesn't need to compete with more important GCD's.

Level 100

I think this tier is my biggest concern. It just seems such an anti-climactic row. In just the previous tier, you have RJW, a twister on a short cooldown that can be used as a filler, changing gameplay, Niuzao, our patron Celestial, and Special Delivery, which while it doesn't change gameplay is a cool display of beer-based AoE damage, a staple of the spec's fantasy. In the 100 tier, you have Elusive Dance, which grants 5, 10, or 15% dodge depending on whether you purify at low, medium, or high stagger (which stacks). There is Fortified Mind, which reduces the cooldown of our Fortifying Brew as if it was ISB or PB, and then High Tolerance which increases our stagger by 5%. Elusive Dance as far as fantasy goes is cool, but it's really passive and it doesn't make any real emergent gameplay. Neither does Fortified mind (the Fort Brew talent) or HT. All three are passive defensive bonuses in some respect. The tier as a whole feels very tame and at least to me reminds me more of the old glyph system rather than talents.

The diversity of choice also feels rather poor for that tier as well. Stacking dodge on purifies is nice but you aren't going to get a significant amount unless you're purifying a lot of damage in a short time and if you're purifying a lot of damage, you're taking a lot of damage. That dodge I feel like wouldn't do very much because A) it comes in after the spike and thus can only help with maybe preventing another if the spike was melee damage and B) it's RNG so even if you get 30% dodge (which is very high for this talent), that's still a 55% chance (barring additional dodge aside from 15% base) that dodge isn't going to help you out. As tanks, our job is to be as consistent as possible when dealing with burst damage and thus dodge is not our friend. For this particular case, I could only see this talent being useful if there are regular points in an encounter where you get bursted down from bug bites... points where dodge's RNG can be smoothed out via many occurrences. Even if numerically it would provide better damage reduction, most tanks will pick one of the other two talents simply because they provide more consistency, which is what really saves our butts. Fortified Mind however is another iffy talent which relies very heavily on an encounter-to-encounter basis. Namely, because it in practice will roughly halve the CD of Fort Brew, it's only useful on an encounter where you'd need Fort Brew more than once every 5 minutes after exhausting Zen Meditation and Dampen Harm / Diffuse Magic. Which might happen, to be fair. Still, it's another one that on paper seems very niche. Which leaves the 5% stagger.

Honestly I wish something broke this tier up a bit. On the monk discord earlier, I had a brain fart and mixed up Special Delivery with Fortified Mind, thinking the former was on the 100 tier. Thinking about it for a bit, I wish it was. It would make that tier much more interesting in its choices, giving players the chance to trade defense for damage if they so choose. I realize that's something Blizzard has said they don't really want to do much this expansion, but I honestly think say, switching Elusive Dance or Fortified Mind for Special Delivery would be a very interesting two talent tiers. You could get defense in both, you could get damage in both, but it really makes those tiers very custom to the player and their desired playstyle, driving them further away from the "pick based on encounter" feel that they somewhat have (with the 100 tier having a stronger feel of this).


That's all for talents. Thanks for reading! Hopefully the next blog post will be about Heroic dungeons and my thoughts on Brewmasters there, as well as tanking World Bosses. If you want to discuss this post, feel free to jump onto ChiBurst!

See you next time,
~ The Brewing Scribe