Legion Brewmaster First Impressions

They’re finally here, and surprisingly little has changed from the initial announcement!

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Love

  • Fu Zan, the artifact, feels incredibly special. It has unique animations, including the resting on your shoulder and dangling jugs (shown above). It even stays on your shoulder for emotes and while in combat.
  • Artifact quest line: It’s a bit buggy at the moment, but the story is so very fitting for a brewmaster. It’s straightforward but full of character.
    Summary of the artifact quest
    You are tasked with retrieving the Monkey King’s staff, Fu Zan. The Monkey King agrees to pass it on to you if you solve his riddles. The solutions to the riddles lead you to beer ingredients, and when you bring them all together you follow the Monkey King’s instructions to make a special hozen brew. With that accomplished, the Monkey King agrees to pass the staff on to you, but he left it with Yulon the serpent celestial (who originally gave it to him) for safekeeping. However, upon arrival in the Temple of the Jade Serpent, you discover it’s under attack by the Legion. You must rescue the scribes of the temple from demons, and eventually Yulon herself. After chasing off the invaders, you are presented with Fu Zan, the Wanderer’s Companion.
  • Breath of Fire as our primary AoE. I missed this spell in Warlords.
  • Keg Smash has a 15 yard range by default (25 with a completed artifact), which is a pretty strong replacement for Dizzying Haze (which is gone in Legion). It’s our first true pulling tool, and pulls instantly which is an improvement over Dizzying Haze.
  • Choice of Ironskin Brew vs. Purifying Brew. Right now it’s too easy to keep Ironskin up all the time, especially with artifact traits, but I like the potential. My healer ran out of mana when I used Ironskin exclusively, and I think there will be an interesting learning curve while we figure out the right times to use Ironskin or Purifying Brews, and when to not use anything at all.
  • With the loss of Dizzying Haze, I feel like Ox Statue finally has a strong place without overwriting the niches of our other abilities. In Warlords, it made Dizzying Haze and Rushing Jade Wind less useful because a pulsing passive threat is just better in almost every single way. Now that Ox Statue is a talent, I actually value that choice because it’s the king of its own niche (ranged add pickup) that comes with an opportunity cost (add control).
  • Pooling Resources
    • Brews: It’s often necessary to save brews for when you know you’ll need them, or to pool them when you currently don’t. It can be really satisfying to make those decisions. You don’t need to have Ironskin up all the time, because either due to RNG or a calm moment in the encounter, but there are also times you might need a full Ironskin+Purifying combo. This is especially engaging when you start to understand the fights better, and know when those dangerous or calm moments will happen.
    • Gift of the Ox: When an orb spawns, you know you have a big heal waiting for you. That means you can safely start pooling Brews and go without AM for a few seconds, because you can heal whatever damage you take soon. These are the cases where I like that Gift of the Ox is a big heal.
    • Elusive Brawler: I think our mastery, which increases our chance to dodge every time we fail to dodge, will also be key in providing pooling opportunities. If it gets close to 100% chance to dodge, there’s no point in using Ironskin Brew to reduce the next melee swing because you’ll already dodge it. However, it’s just a buff in the regular buff UI, so it’s difficult to track without addons.

Shrug

  • Self Healing
    • Gift of the Ox barely ever procs on solo content, even at low health. I actually died while questing because my self healing was so limited (part of that might be my slow adjustment from a healing heavy demon hunter to a healing limited monk).
    • Even in dungeon content, relying on orbs as your biggest heal is scary when you have to move around a lot. It was frustrating to need a heal and see an orb on the other side of a pool of fire, out of reach. I think I’d rather have gift of the ox orbs be common and small heals to offset the cost of having to move around and track them in your environment.
    • When I could reach my healing orbs, I liked them quite a bit, and felt smart for using them when I found them. However, I think it would be a great place for a talent to offer some compensation for the cases where you have to move away from your big orb pile.
    • Ox Orbs heal for so much more than our healing talents (about 16 times more) that it feels really sad to use our talents. They matter so little that you might as well pick the passive one.
  • DPS Rotation Fillers
    • Having Blackout Strike on a 3s cd feels weird. Part of the trouble is adjusting to a spammable Tiger Palm in Warlords to a cd ability with a similar role. With a cooldown, you have to spend some cognitive resources just to keep track of it, and I spent a lot of my time in alpha staring at that timer. It’s not a huge deal when it’s just a damage dealing ability, but with our artifact it becomes a minor defensive ability, and one that benefits from being used as frequently as possible.
    • I was really tempted to create a castsequence macro with Blackout Strike, Breath of Fire, and Rushing Jade Wind to fill empty GCDs on single target. Since we have so many empty GCDs, we are welcome to fill them with any of our free spells, with Blackout Strike being the highest priority. I’m not great at castsequence macros and generally discourage their use because most of the time a human decision is more valuable, but in this case I wanted one just to avoid the tedium of watching a 3s cooldown.
  • After losing quite a few unique animations (Guard, Blackout Kick, Spinning Crane Kick), the new ones are a little disappointing. Ironskin Brew has the same drinking animation as Purifying Brew (which makes sense), with the swirly animation from old Elusive Brew. Blackout Strike has Jab’s weapon swing animation with a purple swirl. They all make sense as far as animations go, but I was hoping for some compensation for the varied animations we lost. (At least the animations combined with Fu Zan are great.)
  • I’d like to see stagger incorporated into the handy little active mitigation UI. In my dream scenario, they’d find a way to put that bar that shows stagger damage as a percentage of your health, but I’d settle for a green/yellow/red icon on the bar, to keep my eyes from darting all over my screen.

Interesting

  • Flaming Keg literally does 1 damage. Probably not final.
  • Ranged add pickup is really hard with Keg Smash when you have to switch targets. Maybe Flaming Keg will offset that when it gets fixed, or maybe we’re meant to rely on ox statue, which still remains powerful.
  • You only have 2 AoE tools by default: Keg Smash (8s cd) and Breath of Fire (15s cd). You can talent into Rushing Jade Wind, Chi Burst, and Black Ox Statue to help. Some artifact traits will also likely add to AoE ability (Dragonfire Brew, Flaming Keg). The default setup is limited, which is fine, but takes some getting used to. RJW will pretty much be a necessity for 5 mans, but I miss using that ability so I’m glad to see it back in a stronger niche.
  • Brewmasters still have strongly themed talent tiers, which risks theorycrafting an objective answer. The healing tier and the resource tier are especially going to have “right” and “wrong” answers in their current state. (For contrast, look at the Vengeance DH talent tiers, where none of the rows are strictly themed.)
  • Can’t use Purifying Brew unless you actually have a stagger dot.
  • Using Ironskin Brew while a previous buff is still active will extend the buff, similar to today’s Blackout Kick / Shuffle.
  • If I were to put us on a scale with other tanks, where on one end we have warriors with almost no self healing and on the other end we have death knights with really vital self healing, monks would be right up next to warriors. We still have some healing, but most of our survival comes from preventing and smoothing damage. (For the record, demon hunters would be right next to death knights.)
  • Keg Smash is doing that thing it did in Mists beta where it doesn’t apply its debuff to unsnarable mobs, like bosses. This means that Breath of Fire doesn’t apply it’s DoT effect. I hope that’s a bug.