Hello friends! In light of Legion coming just around the corner, and with the ever increasing number of people asking questions, I thought it'd be cool to make a FAQ list for anyone interested in playing a Brewmaster once August 30th hits! Without further ado, let's get into it!
Showing posts with label stagger. Show all posts
Showing posts with label stagger. Show all posts
Saturday, August 20, 2016
Sunday, July 10, 2016
Some Happenings have been Brewing
Seeing as I haven't made a blog post on Brewmasters in a while, despite the notable happenings, I figure this is about as good a time as any to go in and talk about some of the stuff that's changed over the last couple builds. Firstly, there's the most recent changes where some of our damage was nerfed a touch... but that's not too big a deal in my mind. Keg Smash was hitting like a truck full of cement and it already had a very low cooldown. We'll be fine, I feel. But onto the other big thing that happened...
*ahem*
WE DID IT FRIENDS!
*ahem*
WE DID IT FRIENDS!
Sunday, June 19, 2016
Brewmaster Feedback - Artifact Traits
Good evening (or afternoon / morning if you happen to read this after I post it) friends! Today I'm going to be going deep into my thoughts on our artifact's traits. I want to preface this and say that this is NOT going to really be something about balance, and more so about mechanics, play feel, and the degree to which I am excited to get each trait. Do note that the order I put down here is completely arbitrary and in no way is representative of the path that I would recommend to go in order to get the most out of Fu Zan in as little artifact power as possible. So without further ado, let's get started!
Sunday, June 5, 2016
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.
Level 30
Level 45
Level 60
Level 75
Level 90
Level 100
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.
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.
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:
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.
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 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.
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.
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
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 15Level 30
Level 45
Level 60
Level 75
Level 90
Level 100
Level 15
Also its animation is freaking gorgeous, so yeah. Sold.
Level 30
Level 45
- 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
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 90
Level 100
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
Brewmaster Feedback: Normal Dungeons
Hello friends! So I've done some more dungeons and I'm fairly happy with the results. I've also had the chance to really experiment with the different talents and I'm pretty confident in my thoughts on them as well. Without further adu, let's dive right in!
Right now my Brewmaster is sitting at ilvl 803. She's getting there for Heroics but I'm still confined to Normals right now. That being said, Normals feel pretty good. While leveling, I got comments saying I was one of the easiest tanks to heal and I was very confident in my tanking. Once I hit 100, I noticed my stagger was hitting extremes much more often (averaging about 3-6 times per dungeon rather than 1 or so) and I felt notably squishier. I'm still currently in a leveling / world content build so I'm going to experiment with Light Brewing instead of Gift of the Mists to see if additional charges of brews would solve that. Fairly confident it should. The general consensus right now is that the brew talents of that tier will largely be what you'd want in higher difficulty content.
I'm a bit worried that because of this and the likely need to switch out Healing Elixirs for a proper damage reduction CD come hard content that we won't have nearly as effective self-healing as we might need, but I want to make the point that such is just a worry rather than anything amazingly grounded. I've noticed that self-healing from Healing Elixirs has saved my butt during Normals enough that it almost feels like it should be baseline. It fills this wonderful niche that is a short-CD defensive ability that Brewmasters rather lack. We've got the moment-to-moment stuff with ISB and PB which feels great. We've got long-CD's in Fortifying Brew and Zen Meditation.
I'd say we'd have a mid-CD in Explosive Keg but I've honestly not really felt the defense from it. Just having one auto-attack miss doesn't really feel very noticeable. I more or less just use it on cooldown for general damage reduction rather than anything more purposeful because of that. And To get off track a little bit, I think the reason why is because it has a high rate of mitigation over an extremely short period of time. While technically it's only a 20% nerf in terms of damage reduced from the original version (15% damage reduction over 8 seconds) it's lack of a real duration means that it doesn't really help enable healers to catch up with your damage intake as significantly. It's basically a 1.5 second gap from auto-attacks and then you go back to full damage taken sans other CD's and that just doesn't feel that strong or significant. But anyway, we're missing a mid-to-short CD that'd be able to regularly help out, but not be something we totally rely on for most incoming damage. I'm going to be trying some different stuff over the next couple days as I continue to gear for Heroics, and we'll see if I really do feel like I'm missing something without Healing Elixirs.
Getting back to it though, dungeons have been pretty fun and while the spike in difficulty at 110 was a little jaunting, I really can't say I've been struggling because of it. Brewmaster still feels engaging and entertaining and I feel like I'm on top of the things which it throws at me most of the time. There's these giant crystal elementals in Neltharion's Lair which truck me but they're one of the few things I've found. It's quite possible I just don't know how to counter them, though I didn't see anything that made a counter known. In any case though it's been pretty enjoyable. I'm looking forward to a couple more experiments and some Heroics, once I get enough gear.
This is a bit of a short post, but that's because I've got a LOT written up for Talents, which is coming tomorrow! Thanks for reading! I want to try something a bit different for comments and discussions. There's still my Twitter, but I've made a thread on ChiBurst to discuss this and tomorrow's topics. Hope to see you there, ChiBurst is an awesome site that we're trying to get a bit more love and attention.
So long for now, see you tomorrow.
~ The Brewing Scribe
Right now my Brewmaster is sitting at ilvl 803. She's getting there for Heroics but I'm still confined to Normals right now. That being said, Normals feel pretty good. While leveling, I got comments saying I was one of the easiest tanks to heal and I was very confident in my tanking. Once I hit 100, I noticed my stagger was hitting extremes much more often (averaging about 3-6 times per dungeon rather than 1 or so) and I felt notably squishier. I'm still currently in a leveling / world content build so I'm going to experiment with Light Brewing instead of Gift of the Mists to see if additional charges of brews would solve that. Fairly confident it should. The general consensus right now is that the brew talents of that tier will largely be what you'd want in higher difficulty content.
I'm a bit worried that because of this and the likely need to switch out Healing Elixirs for a proper damage reduction CD come hard content that we won't have nearly as effective self-healing as we might need, but I want to make the point that such is just a worry rather than anything amazingly grounded. I've noticed that self-healing from Healing Elixirs has saved my butt during Normals enough that it almost feels like it should be baseline. It fills this wonderful niche that is a short-CD defensive ability that Brewmasters rather lack. We've got the moment-to-moment stuff with ISB and PB which feels great. We've got long-CD's in Fortifying Brew and Zen Meditation.
I'd say we'd have a mid-CD in Explosive Keg but I've honestly not really felt the defense from it. Just having one auto-attack miss doesn't really feel very noticeable. I more or less just use it on cooldown for general damage reduction rather than anything more purposeful because of that. And To get off track a little bit, I think the reason why is because it has a high rate of mitigation over an extremely short period of time. While technically it's only a 20% nerf in terms of damage reduced from the original version (15% damage reduction over 8 seconds) it's lack of a real duration means that it doesn't really help enable healers to catch up with your damage intake as significantly. It's basically a 1.5 second gap from auto-attacks and then you go back to full damage taken sans other CD's and that just doesn't feel that strong or significant. But anyway, we're missing a mid-to-short CD that'd be able to regularly help out, but not be something we totally rely on for most incoming damage. I'm going to be trying some different stuff over the next couple days as I continue to gear for Heroics, and we'll see if I really do feel like I'm missing something without Healing Elixirs.
Getting back to it though, dungeons have been pretty fun and while the spike in difficulty at 110 was a little jaunting, I really can't say I've been struggling because of it. Brewmaster still feels engaging and entertaining and I feel like I'm on top of the things which it throws at me most of the time. There's these giant crystal elementals in Neltharion's Lair which truck me but they're one of the few things I've found. It's quite possible I just don't know how to counter them, though I didn't see anything that made a counter known. In any case though it's been pretty enjoyable. I'm looking forward to a couple more experiments and some Heroics, once I get enough gear.
This is a bit of a short post, but that's because I've got a LOT written up for Talents, which is coming tomorrow! Thanks for reading! I want to try something a bit different for comments and discussions. There's still my Twitter, but I've made a thread on ChiBurst to discuss this and tomorrow's topics. Hope to see you there, ChiBurst is an awesome site that we're trying to get a bit more love and attention.
So long for now, see you tomorrow.
~ The Brewing Scribe
Saturday, May 28, 2016
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:
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
- 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?"
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.
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
Sunday, April 24, 2016
The Secret Ingredient to Brew Charge Talents Analysis
As of last Wednesday's patch, we got two big things: Healing Elixirs became a charge-based heal that auto-casts at low health, and Secret Ingredients got its proc rate buffed from 30% to 50%. I've heard that Healing Elixirs has become a decent niche talent now for fights where the other two cooldowns on that row but I'll leave specifics on that to the testers proper. Today I did a good chunk of work on comparing Secret Ingredients to the other talents on its row, as well as picking no talent whatsoever as previous looks showed that with artifact perks it was actually a net loss before now. This was of course before all the brew cooldown changes as well as haste CDR being added, so with the latest change I thought it would be a good time to revisit it! Shoutout to Xiaojin for getting me the SI data for this analysis.
Once again, the amount of data I have here is a LOT so I won't be showing many pictures. You can again find the raw data on my spreadsheet. Quick reference for format: All the numbers are assuming a combat period of 10 minutes with scripted / "perfect" use of abilities and averaged proc chances. Green highlights are when each specific talent option (LB, BoB, no talent) will always be better, teal highlights show when another option is only temporarily better. Things to keep in mind are that this is not meant to be a measurement of specifically when SI becomes less valuable than other options, merely to find whether it does, the general ballpark, and trends across all brew gen talents. As well, the numbers shown are theorycrafted, which means you should take them with a grain of salt. Things won't line up perfectly like this in game. That is especially true of BoB and it's effectiveness, as right now its numbers assume you waste 10% of the energy regenerated and can use all charges. This is very optimistic.
To get right into it, I actually have a graph for you guys this time!
Once again, the amount of data I have here is a LOT so I won't be showing many pictures. You can again find the raw data on my spreadsheet. Quick reference for format: All the numbers are assuming a combat period of 10 minutes with scripted / "perfect" use of abilities and averaged proc chances. Green highlights are when each specific talent option (LB, BoB, no talent) will always be better, teal highlights show when another option is only temporarily better. Things to keep in mind are that this is not meant to be a measurement of specifically when SI becomes less valuable than other options, merely to find whether it does, the general ballpark, and trends across all brew gen talents. As well, the numbers shown are theorycrafted, which means you should take them with a grain of salt. Things won't line up perfectly like this in game. That is especially true of BoB and it's effectiveness, as right now its numbers assume you waste 10% of the energy regenerated and can use all charges. This is very optimistic.
To get right into it, I actually have a graph for you guys this time!
So to talk about this graph for a sec, this shows the rough number of charges gained as you get more haste, your tier 19 4-set, and ranks in Face Palm. Each high point in the slopes represents when you have three ranks in FP and your 4set, with the new low being when you increase your haste by 5 but drop those perks.
Now obviously, Black Ox Brew is killing it right now, as it should. It's an active ability which requires very good timing on the part of the player to maximize its effectiveness. Light Brewing, king before the nerf to the base brew cooldown, is still fairly solid and only becomes ever so more competitive the more haste we have. The last two are where it gets tricky for brew generation. Secret Ingredients is actually very marginally worthwhile compared to no talent at all, but only until you get both your 4-set and 3 ranks in Face Palm, where no talent ever so slightly takes the lead. Again I do want to stress that this is theorycrafted data, which does make specifics like that imperfect and not wholly absolute. Being said, the general patterns and trends should translate into the game. So let's dive into the data and see what's going on here.
For starters, the biggest thing to notice is that you're getting a decent chunk more Keg Smashes. The problem there is that they are at the cost of Tiger Palms. Because both share the resources of energy and GCD's, you only get so many and more of one comes at the cost of the other. What's happening though is that the extra Keg Smashes are pretty significant (about 50% more at base haste), these come at a very significant cost of Tiger Palms. And because there's less Tiger Palms, the talent is inherently throttling itself when the other options don't have such mechanics. Looking at the differences between the 30% proc rate (which is also on the sheet) and the 50% proc rate, we're seeing a good number more Keg Smashes with the new iteration but again, much fewer Tiger Palms.
Ultimately, the 20% increase on the proc rate only results in 1 or so more charges gained across a 10 minute fight with no interruptions and as perfect a cooldown usage as possible. More or less, in regards to brew charge generation, it's negligible. Being said, that's a lot more damage opportunity, but as shown in the graph, at a fairly steep cost to defensive power. At three ranks of Potent Kick (+1.5 seconds total on ISB uptime), if you want to just be able to maintain ISB fully (which I don't think Blizzard is intending), you need 80 brew charges. BoB can do this at 0 haste and no ranks in FP / 4-set. LB can begin to do this at 10% haste, 3 ranks of FP, and 4-set (though it dips down afterwards). SI can do it at 25% haste, 0 ranks in FP, and with the 4-set (again dipping down afterwards). Those are some pretty far apart numbers.
Realistically, the issues with SI at least from a defensive standpoint really stem from the opportunity cost that KS shares with TP, very specifically because in the current iteration of the spec, TP is very important to maintain because the brew charge artifact perk, and set bonus really only focus on buffing TP. As shown on the graph, these things make SI relatively less valuable compared to even baseline and really the talent just throttles itself because of said opportunity cost. The more KS' you use, the fewer TP's, which means fewer procs. It ultimately seems to balance out the brew generation regardless of proc rate.
But the ultimate question I think is whether or not Blizzard intends for this talent to be the way hardcore raiders can get back that desired trade-off of defense for damage. If it does, it seems like it's a good way to do it, though I think it could use buffs in other ways than proc rate, like perhaps reducing the energy cost of KS when procced. If not wholly intentional, then I think a rework is in order. This was on the wishlist of my friend LeBlue, but maybe have it so that you get a second charge of KS that only activates when SI procs so that you don't just have weird RNG with the cooldown resetting a couple seconds before it's up, which wastes it. This is an issue that I see becoming ever more prevalent the higher haste you get, which could explain why the ratio of KS' compared to other talent options is reduced the more haste you get on the table. This way, you can hold onto the second charge and use it while the original CD can tick away as normal. Perhaps a combination of both options would work.
Another big issue is actually the t19 4-set and to a lesser extent, the Face Palm artifact trait. The 4-set is a temporary issue but both exacerbate the problems that SI has. Another potential facet of the solution is to change how these work... give them the same effect of better brew charge generation, but in different places. Maybe on Keg Smash. Another possible avenue is changing either KS' or TP's energy cost so that they are the same baseline, rather than just on proc. Either way reduces the opportunity cost. I think the biggest thing with SI is that there's not really one thing that will likely significantly change it, if it needs changing at all in the eyes of the devs. Any meaningful changes to the power of this talent would need to be directed at manipulating or breaking the opportunity cost and negative feedback loop the talent maintains.
So right now I think the data supports discounting SI as a serious defensive talent option and pretty much relegates it to being used purely for damage if you are 100% confident in your survivability. Ultimately I don't know what the devs want from this talent, it's just my hope to give as much info to everyone in the community as possible. This might be intended, it might not. My job is mainly just to parse info, I can only speculate on design intentions. We can only just wait and see how Blizzard decides to go forward and while I understand sometimes that's a difficult thing to ask, it's the reality we have.
Thanks for reading guys, hope this has been enlightening. As usual, feel free to throw me a message on twitter if you're interested in chatting further!
~ The Brewing Scribe
Wednesday, April 13, 2016
A Staggering Revelation: A look into Purifying Brew Post-Nerf
So it took me a bit but I've finally been able to create a proper model for stagger for build 21414. I'm just going to get straight into it. There's not really going to be any pretty pictures this time around but if you're interested in the raw data you can find it here, on my theorycrafting spreadsheet. For the sake of clarity, the model starts at 0 seconds in a fight and models for attacks every 1.5 seconds, which are assumed to hit. It then compares how much damage you would take in the next 6 seconds if you either purified and dropped ISB, or maintained ISB at that point in time. A green highlight means that purifying is guaranteed to be better from that point forward and an aqua highlight means that purifying is better at that point but it dips down at a later point.
The primary goal of this comparison was largely to determine what significance, if any, these changes have on our core gameplay: managing purifying and maintaining Ironskin Brew uptime. The findings were pretty conclusive: while there is a difference and it takes longer for purifying to become the right choice if you need to give up your ISB buff, it is only a matter of about 1.5-3 or so seconds, or the equivalent of one or two boss attacks using this model. So as far as the rough math goes, purifying is still useful and our core gameplay remains more or less intact. In reality it will take longer because you're going to be doding attacks more often but ultimately there is a point where you do benefit more from purifying.
The biggest difference is that purifying now reduces about half as much damage as before as far as how much I've modeled is concerned... which isn't unexpected. There's some worrying consequences though for intuitive use of the mechanic. Around every point on the table where purifying is better, there's about a space of two or so seconds where the numbers are virtually indistinguishable between using PB and using ISB. Personally speaking, I was taught that if a game required external assistance for a player to appropriately learn a mechanic, then the design is not doing its job properly. While this phenomenon occurs for PB when it purifies 100% of the stagger pool, its much less dramatic. The time it takes to see a significant difference in the damage taken when purifying in comparison to maintaining ISB is much lower than when PB reduces the stagger pool by 50%. This has further consequences in that players will take longer to feel out when it's better to purify, which means they will take more damage as they hold off on purifying, making the nerf even greater in magnitude than just a 50% reduction.
There is actually another worry here that in the long-term of a fight, it's an even greater nerf. Because you can't totally remove the stagger pool via gameplay, over time it will continue to increase. This means that while you can purify at any point, by the end of a fight, you WILL be taking more damage per second than at the start. This amount could possibly be not a whole lot, or it could be more depending on how much purifying is practically necessary. This has a lot of consequences for gameplay and design. If you are constantly tanking (or at the very least tanking so often that you do not have 10 seconds where you don't take damage), you are ultimately liable to just take more damage unless you are fairly liberal with your purifying and even then it just delays and suppresses this problem, rather than fixing it entirely.
I see this having a notable chance of messing with balance in the new Mythic+ dungeons which are supposed to more or less be the new Challenge Modes. You're on the clock and if you spend 10 seconds waiting for stagger to tick off every couple of packs, that's a lot of extra time that you've wasted. Or if you only wait before bosses, you're potentially liable to be chunked on trash and that's not good either. On top of that, there's some affixes that could be very bad for Brewmasters, like the constant damage of Decay. You're just piling up constant damage and even if Decay isn't affected by Stagger, that's just even more of a constant mana drain for healers. In combination I think it's fair to worry about the viability of Brewmasters in this environment when you're talking about the higher difficulties.
This is also a potential problem for hardcore progression. While I'm not going to say that the game should be balanced around a very small minority of players (sorry guys), the worry that a Brewmaster would be taking more damage at the end of a fight than at the start, compounded with the ends of fights largely being tougher on everyone really makes Brewmasters seem like a bad class to bring. That is, I think, a very strong worry.
The change to purifying I think reinforces a fairly valid concern about Brewmasters and that is that we actually have very little control over how much damage we take. Our emergency heal is pseudo-randomly procced and requires us to move around which is potentially not a valid option depending on the encounter or the point in time in an encounter. Our cooldowns are very long and realistically not useful in moment-to-moment situations if you are on an encounter with sufficiently deadly mechanics that you need to save these cooldowns for. We have no passive mitigation so damage taken is roughly equivalent to a DPS without purifying, and now purifying can't even fully get rid of the amount of stagger we have which according to feedback that I've seen does not feel good. I realize that this is in part necessary because of the paradigm change from Warlords to Legion. Tanks as a whole are supposed to rely more on healers. That being said, I thing being able to purify some damage is important for that as well. We're giant mana sponges without it. I'm just a humble theorycrafter and budding designer. I'm not a Warcraft dev, I don't have the specific experience of being a class designer on World of Warcraft. Perhaps I'm just over-sensitive to the potential of this change. That being said, I still do think that changes to what we have wouldn't be a bad idea. There are other avenues that could be explored to balance Brewmasters.
Ultimately if the big reason Purifying Brew was nerfed is because Brewmaster's capacity to reduce the amount of damage taken is too high with it (which I don't know if this is the reason, I'd honestly really like a clarification on this still), then you have to ask how to try and rectify that while bringing purifying back up to 100% of the stagger pool.
You could reduce the amount of stagger Brewmasters have, but that has a lot of worry about taking way too much burst damage for the tools we have to mitigate it and that's already a concern of players (which admittedly isn't a foolproof metric for balance). You could reduce their self healing, but there's frankly not that much there in the first place. Reducing health doesn't reduce the amount of damage you mitigate and would make it easier for Brewmasters to be burst down. You can't really reduce the amount of passive mitigation they have seeing as they have zero from being a Brewmaster.
I think that strategic buffs and nerfs would be appropriate. Perhaps have less stagger from ISB but at the same time, give some passive defense and/or some more self healing. Just doing something like this would be much easier to test across various encounters and content to see whether or not it's good balancing and I think ultimately it would be the best for everyone. I don't see messing with purifying brew as an easy method of balancing the spec. There's just so much going on under the hood and it's exceptionally difficult to realistically model the consequences of that without scripting.
To wrap it up, I think the changes to Purifying Brew are... complicated. I think there's a lot of potential "down the road" consequences for it, especially in various content where downtime is not really available. Being said, the model I made really didn't have that significant of a difference for at least gameplay, so that at least is largely okay in the sense of actually needing to purify at all. Still, the model's worrisome because there's a larger period of time where as a player it's harder to tell when purifying is useful, so there's a double-dipping of increased damage taken. Overall I would like to see some changes and I can only hope that Blizzard appreciates this post if anyone from the class team comes across it. I'd like to say that I've been fairly reasonable and objective in this feedback rather than alarmist, but ultimately that's for Blizzard to judge.
Thanks for reading guys. Sadly, I don't have alpha myself so if people would be interested in trying out the stuff I mentioned here and seeing if it's worrisome, that would be appreciated. Any more specific data we can throw Blizzard's way the better.
~The Brewing Scribe
The primary goal of this comparison was largely to determine what significance, if any, these changes have on our core gameplay: managing purifying and maintaining Ironskin Brew uptime. The findings were pretty conclusive: while there is a difference and it takes longer for purifying to become the right choice if you need to give up your ISB buff, it is only a matter of about 1.5-3 or so seconds, or the equivalent of one or two boss attacks using this model. So as far as the rough math goes, purifying is still useful and our core gameplay remains more or less intact. In reality it will take longer because you're going to be doding attacks more often but ultimately there is a point where you do benefit more from purifying.
The biggest difference is that purifying now reduces about half as much damage as before as far as how much I've modeled is concerned... which isn't unexpected. There's some worrying consequences though for intuitive use of the mechanic. Around every point on the table where purifying is better, there's about a space of two or so seconds where the numbers are virtually indistinguishable between using PB and using ISB. Personally speaking, I was taught that if a game required external assistance for a player to appropriately learn a mechanic, then the design is not doing its job properly. While this phenomenon occurs for PB when it purifies 100% of the stagger pool, its much less dramatic. The time it takes to see a significant difference in the damage taken when purifying in comparison to maintaining ISB is much lower than when PB reduces the stagger pool by 50%. This has further consequences in that players will take longer to feel out when it's better to purify, which means they will take more damage as they hold off on purifying, making the nerf even greater in magnitude than just a 50% reduction.
There is actually another worry here that in the long-term of a fight, it's an even greater nerf. Because you can't totally remove the stagger pool via gameplay, over time it will continue to increase. This means that while you can purify at any point, by the end of a fight, you WILL be taking more damage per second than at the start. This amount could possibly be not a whole lot, or it could be more depending on how much purifying is practically necessary. This has a lot of consequences for gameplay and design. If you are constantly tanking (or at the very least tanking so often that you do not have 10 seconds where you don't take damage), you are ultimately liable to just take more damage unless you are fairly liberal with your purifying and even then it just delays and suppresses this problem, rather than fixing it entirely.
I see this having a notable chance of messing with balance in the new Mythic+ dungeons which are supposed to more or less be the new Challenge Modes. You're on the clock and if you spend 10 seconds waiting for stagger to tick off every couple of packs, that's a lot of extra time that you've wasted. Or if you only wait before bosses, you're potentially liable to be chunked on trash and that's not good either. On top of that, there's some affixes that could be very bad for Brewmasters, like the constant damage of Decay. You're just piling up constant damage and even if Decay isn't affected by Stagger, that's just even more of a constant mana drain for healers. In combination I think it's fair to worry about the viability of Brewmasters in this environment when you're talking about the higher difficulties.
This is also a potential problem for hardcore progression. While I'm not going to say that the game should be balanced around a very small minority of players (sorry guys), the worry that a Brewmaster would be taking more damage at the end of a fight than at the start, compounded with the ends of fights largely being tougher on everyone really makes Brewmasters seem like a bad class to bring. That is, I think, a very strong worry.
The change to purifying I think reinforces a fairly valid concern about Brewmasters and that is that we actually have very little control over how much damage we take. Our emergency heal is pseudo-randomly procced and requires us to move around which is potentially not a valid option depending on the encounter or the point in time in an encounter. Our cooldowns are very long and realistically not useful in moment-to-moment situations if you are on an encounter with sufficiently deadly mechanics that you need to save these cooldowns for. We have no passive mitigation so damage taken is roughly equivalent to a DPS without purifying, and now purifying can't even fully get rid of the amount of stagger we have which according to feedback that I've seen does not feel good. I realize that this is in part necessary because of the paradigm change from Warlords to Legion. Tanks as a whole are supposed to rely more on healers. That being said, I thing being able to purify some damage is important for that as well. We're giant mana sponges without it. I'm just a humble theorycrafter and budding designer. I'm not a Warcraft dev, I don't have the specific experience of being a class designer on World of Warcraft. Perhaps I'm just over-sensitive to the potential of this change. That being said, I still do think that changes to what we have wouldn't be a bad idea. There are other avenues that could be explored to balance Brewmasters.
Ultimately if the big reason Purifying Brew was nerfed is because Brewmaster's capacity to reduce the amount of damage taken is too high with it (which I don't know if this is the reason, I'd honestly really like a clarification on this still), then you have to ask how to try and rectify that while bringing purifying back up to 100% of the stagger pool.
You could reduce the amount of stagger Brewmasters have, but that has a lot of worry about taking way too much burst damage for the tools we have to mitigate it and that's already a concern of players (which admittedly isn't a foolproof metric for balance). You could reduce their self healing, but there's frankly not that much there in the first place. Reducing health doesn't reduce the amount of damage you mitigate and would make it easier for Brewmasters to be burst down. You can't really reduce the amount of passive mitigation they have seeing as they have zero from being a Brewmaster.
I think that strategic buffs and nerfs would be appropriate. Perhaps have less stagger from ISB but at the same time, give some passive defense and/or some more self healing. Just doing something like this would be much easier to test across various encounters and content to see whether or not it's good balancing and I think ultimately it would be the best for everyone. I don't see messing with purifying brew as an easy method of balancing the spec. There's just so much going on under the hood and it's exceptionally difficult to realistically model the consequences of that without scripting.
To wrap it up, I think the changes to Purifying Brew are... complicated. I think there's a lot of potential "down the road" consequences for it, especially in various content where downtime is not really available. Being said, the model I made really didn't have that significant of a difference for at least gameplay, so that at least is largely okay in the sense of actually needing to purify at all. Still, the model's worrisome because there's a larger period of time where as a player it's harder to tell when purifying is useful, so there's a double-dipping of increased damage taken. Overall I would like to see some changes and I can only hope that Blizzard appreciates this post if anyone from the class team comes across it. I'd like to say that I've been fairly reasonable and objective in this feedback rather than alarmist, but ultimately that's for Blizzard to judge.
Thanks for reading guys. Sadly, I don't have alpha myself so if people would be interested in trying out the stuff I mentioned here and seeing if it's worrisome, that would be appreciated. Any more specific data we can throw Blizzard's way the better.
~The Brewing Scribe
Tuesday, March 22, 2016
A Random Update: My Blog, not the Alpha.
Hey guys! First things first, I want to again thank Chaithi for inviting me onto Monk Meditation last night. I had a wonderful time. I'm actually writing this post in part because of that podcast, as I had forgotten to mention something during the Brewmaster alpha news bit. There's also been some interesting changes to brew generation that I will be talking about in a little bit. So without further ado, let's dive right in!
So the latest update to the alpha gave us very little in the way of new stuff to think about and tear into. Relatively. Gift of the Ox now scales with attack power rather than health, Obstinate Determination - which in the previous update was changed so GotO overhealing provided a shield - now guarantees a GotO orb spawn when you drop below 35% health. We also got a new passive, Celestial Fortune, which provides a percent chance equal to our crit to duplicate any heal on you.
To basically reiterate what I said on the podcast, the GotO change is... honestly kinda expected. Overhealing on GotO is VERY easily cheesable so changing it to where GotO is more reliable at spawning when you need it to is a healthy change design-wise. Changing to AP vs health isn't really that big a deal, it just means it scales a bit differently. I still think that GotO as our only emergency ability apart from hard CD's is a bit questionable for players who don't really get the ISB and PB balance and upkeep, as there's more steps needed to save your bacon (noticing health is low and pressing a button (guard) vs noticing health is low, looking around for your orb, and moving over to it). But a lot of that is very much tied into the damage intake model and whether punishing poor play like that is a good idea for a specific difficulty of content, all of which is something that could honestly fill a post on its own. The big thing I want to talk about is what I didn't actually bring up too much on the podcast, and that is Celestial Fortune.
The Brewmaster community at large has really taken to pointing out the similarity of Celestial Fortune to Shining Protector for paladins, only that one is based off of multistrike and not critical hit chance. A lot of people point to how this passive is just complete trash for Prot Pallies and how multistrike is their worst stat. That being said there's a couple key differences between the two.
Firstly, the amount of base crit we have is much higher than base multistike (I believe it's 20% vs 5%) so already we're going to see more use out of this at baseline. Secondly, the potential throughput is also much higher. Shining Protector, when procced, provides 30% additional healing from whatever heal triggered it, including multistrike heals. Celestial Fortune on the other hand effectively provides a secondary stacking source of crit. If a heal crits on you and procs Celestial Fortune, that should effectively mean that crit has crit. Thirdly, the nature of damage intake is going to be very different. Protection Paladins have to deal with a lot of burst damage right now, which makes their passive less appealing because they need to focus more into stats which actually provide solid burst reduction. In Legion, Brewmasters have ludicrous amounts of stagger which means that we should be very smooth on damage intake, but because we lack baseline damage reduction, we'll be taking a lot more straight damage across a fight. This is actually a perfect environment for this kind of passive as over a fight, it makes healing much more efficient... and we're already leaning a bit more towards being friendly for mana-efficient healing. This just makes that even nicer.
The other thing I wanted to talk about was something Hinalover brought to my attention this morning. Namely that we did actually get some haste CDR! But only for Keg Smash. So I decided to model out how that'd look in my usual way (+10% haste rating and seeing the difference of charges generated across 10 minutes) and found some very interesting data as well as some worrying data.
So the latest update to the alpha gave us very little in the way of new stuff to think about and tear into. Relatively. Gift of the Ox now scales with attack power rather than health, Obstinate Determination - which in the previous update was changed so GotO overhealing provided a shield - now guarantees a GotO orb spawn when you drop below 35% health. We also got a new passive, Celestial Fortune, which provides a percent chance equal to our crit to duplicate any heal on you.
To basically reiterate what I said on the podcast, the GotO change is... honestly kinda expected. Overhealing on GotO is VERY easily cheesable so changing it to where GotO is more reliable at spawning when you need it to is a healthy change design-wise. Changing to AP vs health isn't really that big a deal, it just means it scales a bit differently. I still think that GotO as our only emergency ability apart from hard CD's is a bit questionable for players who don't really get the ISB and PB balance and upkeep, as there's more steps needed to save your bacon (noticing health is low and pressing a button (guard) vs noticing health is low, looking around for your orb, and moving over to it). But a lot of that is very much tied into the damage intake model and whether punishing poor play like that is a good idea for a specific difficulty of content, all of which is something that could honestly fill a post on its own. The big thing I want to talk about is what I didn't actually bring up too much on the podcast, and that is Celestial Fortune.
The Brewmaster community at large has really taken to pointing out the similarity of Celestial Fortune to Shining Protector for paladins, only that one is based off of multistrike and not critical hit chance. A lot of people point to how this passive is just complete trash for Prot Pallies and how multistrike is their worst stat. That being said there's a couple key differences between the two.
Firstly, the amount of base crit we have is much higher than base multistike (I believe it's 20% vs 5%) so already we're going to see more use out of this at baseline. Secondly, the potential throughput is also much higher. Shining Protector, when procced, provides 30% additional healing from whatever heal triggered it, including multistrike heals. Celestial Fortune on the other hand effectively provides a secondary stacking source of crit. If a heal crits on you and procs Celestial Fortune, that should effectively mean that crit has crit. Thirdly, the nature of damage intake is going to be very different. Protection Paladins have to deal with a lot of burst damage right now, which makes their passive less appealing because they need to focus more into stats which actually provide solid burst reduction. In Legion, Brewmasters have ludicrous amounts of stagger which means that we should be very smooth on damage intake, but because we lack baseline damage reduction, we'll be taking a lot more straight damage across a fight. This is actually a perfect environment for this kind of passive as over a fight, it makes healing much more efficient... and we're already leaning a bit more towards being friendly for mana-efficient healing. This just makes that even nicer.
The other thing I wanted to talk about was something Hinalover brought to my attention this morning. Namely that we did actually get some haste CDR! But only for Keg Smash. So I decided to model out how that'd look in my usual way (+10% haste rating and seeing the difference of charges generated across 10 minutes) and found some very interesting data as well as some worrying data.
So this is the table from my last post's discussion on haste scaling with our brew generation. Below is the table now, factoring in Keg Smash's CDR.
At first glance, it seems pretty good doesn't it. The baseline amount that haste provides across 10 minutes has roughly doubled. The trouble comes from its scaling. The things that bump up our charge generation all focus on Tiger Palm as the medium for the change. Because while Keg Smash is primarily operating off of its cooldown, it still shares a resource with Tiger Palm. More KS casts inherently means less TP casts as well. This is actually the core problem of Secret Ingredients... because Face Palm and our 4-set both make Tiger Palm more lucrative, KS has an increasingly high opportunity cost. Specifically for this scenario, it appears as though this change starts to trend negative once you get your 4-set and have 4+ ranks in FP.
That's a complicated scenario because on one hand, despite this change actually causing an overall negative in brew generation over time, if you look at the one GCD, Keg Smash still provides more brew recharge than one Tiger Palm. But that does go away fairly quickly the more seconds you look at. Another factor is that this again only negatively affects you when you have 4+ ranks in FP and also have the 4-set. It's unlikely that people will be using relics to boost their FP rank because of other more lucrative choices out there. A lot of the problems with the change are that at first glance, you think it's positive. "Less CD on our Keg Smash, our biggest brew generator? Sign me up!" But the truth is really hidden under the inner workings of the mechanics and the relationships therein. That lends itself to the design of the spec causing miscommunication between the designers and the players.
But this ultimately brings up design philosophy and from my personal experience with design and my own philosophies, I'd rather design something so that even if it's not an optimal choice, it's not actively punishing you if you do it. Even if the scenario where this happens is pretty rare, I would prefer to take steps to not let it happen at all if I can't help it. I'm not comfortable assuming that players will just get it, especially when I have experience with Brewmasters in particular who have had trap abilities, trap talents, which have confused a lot of people in regards to why they aren't doing well.
So what is to be done about it? There's a couple things that I think Blizzard could do. For one, either have one or both of FP / 4set affect Keg Smash in some way so the biggest factors to brew generation increases scale with it as well, For another, just have haste provide CDR to the brew charges. I could see them bump up the base CD's of them by a little bit just to be on the safe side for scaling, but even adding a couple seconds on should still result in an overall positive change, especially because haste would become very lucrative in that case. Another idea would be to actually reduce the energy cost of Keg Smash to 25, same as Tiger Palm. The question with that one though is whether there'd be some scaling issues across energy regen, because higher energy regen does favor TP. At the same time, the core issue of the present is that Keg Smash just becomes less efficient in terms of CDR per energy as you get more TP perks, so having it be the same cost as TP would get rid of that. I think further modeling on that idea would be necessary.
In any case, thanks for reading everybody! Feel free to comment below or hit me up on twitter if you want to further discuss the topics above. See ya next time!
~ The Brewing Scribe
Friday, January 22, 2016
To Purify or Not to Purify, That is the Question:
So last night I had a lovely chat with my good friend LeBlue about the state of Brewmasters in the Legion Alpha... as far as they've been data-mined in any case. Specifically, we talked a lot about Purifying Brew and its usefulness to the Brewmaster kit in Legion. Be forewarned: this is all discussion based on said data-mined information. This could all be completely pointless by the time we actually get Brewmasters in a playable state, and is more speculation than not. I don't want this to come off as alarmist or anything of the sort. This post is purely a supposition of how the spec could play based on current data and knowledge that we have.
For those who aren't aware, Blizzard just recently gave word about their intentions for tanks this expansion. To give a quick summary of what they've said, it's basically as follows:
For those who aren't aware, Blizzard just recently gave word about their intentions for tanks this expansion. To give a quick summary of what they've said, it's basically as follows:
- Tanks will be relying more on their healers to survive damage
- Active Mitigation should feel useful
- Long cooldowns will be made longer, so they can't be used for all dangers in an encounter
- Tanks should be more tanky than DPS and healers, but not crazily so
- Tanks should spend more time actively tanking in encounters
Now, what THAT can be boiled down to is that tanks will - if the plan sticks - take less burst damage than currently. We effectively saw a second tank squish across the board with the latest major Alpha patch, including the nerfing of pretty much all the external CD's that healers have. With the reduced effectiveness of tanking tools and less beef for the meat shields, naturally spike damage is going to have to take a bit of a dive. This presents a very tricky problem in the case of Brewmasters.
Purifying Brew, present day
Purifying Brew is a pretty iconic ability of ours. It dates back all the way to the beginning, in Mists of Pandaria's beta. Back in Mists, and even so recent as 6.0, Purifying was a significant aspect of our kit. As the tooltip says (and I know most of you know it already, but bear with me I have a point to all this!), Purifying Brew clears all of our staggered damage, getting rid of the DoT that builds up naturally when we take physical damage.
Here's the problem with Purifying Brew: It isn't a means of damage reduction. While I think it was designed as a way to ensure that Brewmasters did reduce some of their incoming damage, its design also tells me it is meant to be more of a burst-reduction tool than a damage-reduction tool.
I posit the question, why do we purify? The answer is because stagger damage stacks high enough that, combined with the pre-staggered damage we take, we receive enough burst damage that it needs to be removed. We don't just do it because we take the damage. After all, we've all pretty much ignored a bunch of green stagger when we aren't in danger of being burst down. It's able to be healed through and we don't have to worry about it.
Purifying Brew and Ironskin Brew, as data-mined from Legion
The trouble is, in an expansion where healers are going to be doing more of the work for us and where burst intake is going to be lower, a burst-reduction tool like Purifying Brew does lose a good chunk of its value. If anyone's been paying attention to what LeBlue's been saying over the past couple of weeks in the Peak of Serenity Discord, you'll know he's been spreadsheeting out just when purifying in Legion a good idea. Turns out, it pretty much never is. A reduction in burst damage hits Brewmasters fairly notably. We were designed as extremely potent anti-burst tanks, at the cost of taking more overall damage due to how stagger functions.
With a smaller focus on burst damage, not only is stagger less potent for our survivability compared to other tank mechanics, so is purifying. As I mentioned before, Purifying Brew is more of an anti-burst tool than anything else. Even though we aren't playable in the game yet, I think that the recent change to tank dynamics could hit Brewmasters decently hard. This isn't to say that I disagree with the reasons those changes occurred or that they were put on the table at all, but that's neither here nor there. Ultimately, in an expansion where burst damage matters less and more damage will need to be soaked up by healers, damage taken will matter more. I sincerely doubt it will matter more than reducing burst damage because honestly that's never been the case, but we're an anti-burst, higher damage taken spec and we're going into an expansion where damage taken is going to matter more. That has potential for concern.
So what can be done about it? The answer LeBlue and I thought up is that Purifying Brew should become a proper damage mitigation tool, rather than just a spike mitigation tool. Allow it to provide some amount of either straight DR, absorb, or healing after a successful purify, scaling it in some way so that the more damage you purified, the more powerful this effect is. This gives you a couple of effects: Firstly and most importantly, it gives Brewmasters a significant way of turning stagger into true damage reduction, albeit with strings attached. This will allow them to fare a bit better in an environment where their originally designed talent of burst reduction is less important, while still keeping their means of dealing with damage fairly unique. Secondly, it brings back just enough complexity for the spec so that you have a place to show you are a better Brewmaster than another. The spec as is currently seems to be fairly simple, with the only significant damage reduction at a moment by moment basis really being Ironskin Brew. Simple isn't bad, mind you. Simplifying the spec was something that I said needed to happen. But currently, the spec's just a bit more complicated than Wrath Protection Paladins, which personally strikes me as a bit underwhelming. Having Purifying Brew mean something more has significant potential of giving us back its dynamic with Ironskin Brew (previously Shuffle), which would make the spec feel a bit more interesting than how it looks right now. I'd like to see that.
Obviously, we still don't know how the artifact's going to play into this, but I think that the potential issues here are that of mechanics, rather than numbers. Purifying Brew is probably going to need tweaks in order for it to be a useful part of our kit again, provided LeBlue's spreadsheeting is accurate within the game. And obviously, all of this could be rendered superfluous in the next update! Who knows but Blizzard, right?
Throw me your comments either here or on Twitter, lemme know what you think!
See ya next time!
-The Brewing Scribe
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