Brewmaster Monk is in a weird spot right now in The War Within. It is, arguably, balanced, and yet it feels so damn weak in dungeons while feeling alright to strong in raids. As someone who plays the spec as a raid main and likes to do dungeons with it occasionally, the question in my mind and the struggle I’ve had in Season 1 of TWW is reconciling two simple facts – that Brewmaster is in fact mostly balanced but it also feels really bad to play in keys as you grind up the Mythic Plus ladder. Why is that?

Today, I wanted to discuss that ever so briefly (I’m gonna try to be brief!)(and fail, but hey).

How Brewmaster Works

Brewmaster is the most unique tank in WoW in my estimation, due largely to its foundational mechanic – Stagger. Brewmasters, unlike most tanks, actually doesn’t have a standard, spammable defensive cooldown that is intended to be used rotationally, at least not in the way most other tanks have one. Instead, Brewmasters have a passive active mitigation – they simply take damage, and a portion of that damage is instead fed into a resource bar for Stagger, which becomes a ticking DoT that does damage every second to you, with damage delayed over 10 seconds and up to 13 seconds based on talents. Stagger amount is based on your Agility, but is generally close to 40%ish baseline and creeps up over time with gear. Stagger is then increased in value by an ability called Shuffle, which is a talent but generally one you cannot avoid to play Brewmaster, which doubles your Stagger value for a set duration when using rotational Brewmaster abilities. Two things to know with Shuffle – it is basically designed to have 100% uptime if you have something to hit, and while it technically doubles your Stagger, Stagger’s total value reaches diminishing returns, so it rarely, if ever, truly doubles Stagger. (On my Brewmaster at 627 item level, my base Stagger is around 42% and with Shuffle it hits about 72%). Stagger affects Physical damage fully but has reduced effectiveness on Magical damage, staggering a smaller portion of it.

Stagger is then managed primarily through abilities that reduce the Stagger bar, with the main one being Purifying Brew. You get two charges of this and they cycle quickly, giving you the basic feeling of active mitigation like other tanks, and using a charge cuts your current Stagger stored damage in half, removing it from play and causing you not to take it at all. There are other talents that interact with Stagger in ways that reduce it, like Quick Sip, which reduces it by a small amount every time you gain Shuffle duration, or Staggering Strikes, a generally awful talent that reduces Stagger by a fixed value when using Blackout Kick. Purifying Brew is your main vector of Stagger reduction, and it carries with it a secondary benefit – the larger the purified damage amount, the more stacks of a buff called Purified Chi you gain. This buff feeds the last major rotational cooldown you hit regularly to defend against damage as Brewmaster – Celestial Brew, which grants a shield that absorbs damage, scaling with attack power but also increasing with Purified Chi stacks, with a 200% increase in absorption amount at 10 stacks of Purified Chi.

So the core of Brewmaster gameplay is that you facetank your incoming damage for the most part, then interact with Stagger to reduce the actual incoming damage after the fact. Smoothing this out is the Brewmaster mastery stat, Elusive Brawler, which provides your mastery value as chance to dodge in the form of a stacking buff that resets when you successfully dodge a melee attack. This adds some longevity, as in dungeons this buff cycles quickly on trash pulls, where on bosses, it will often save a larger single melee attack of damage on a fairly regular cadence.

To manage the exception cases and provide some pre-planning, you get a large number of talents that provide longer cooldowns with more defensive benefit. There’s Dampen Harm, which reduces all attacks by 20-50% damage, scaling up the more damage an attack deals. There’s Diffuse Magic, which reduces magic damage taken by 60% for its duration and also functions as a dispel on most magical effects, removing them from you. There are passive versions of both as choice nodes with the active talent choice, with Diffuse Magic’s passive choice being a stacking magic damage absorb effect and Dampen Harm’s passive version being a 5% dodge increase. Lastly, Brewmaster gets the most underwhelming “big” defensive in the game in Fortifying Brew, which has a base version talent that is a 20% max health increase and 20% damage taken reduction, with a choice node in the class tree to increase both of those values to 30% or to shorten the cooldown by 2 minutes, and a Brewmaster-specific talent node to also cause it to increase your Stagger effectiveness by 15%.

As a cycle, this means that Brewmaster is reactive to a point but also designed to reward smart preplanning – use of your big cooldowns early to reduce incoming damage means less Stagger management which means less overall damage taken, and smart Stagger management means you can disappear a larger amount of damage which also leads to less damage taken, while the spec’s baseline passiveness gives you a measure of foundational damage reduction while also meaning that big incoming damage is less of an immediate emergency – Brewmaster can almost be beginner-friendly because the basic Stagger interaction means far fewer one-shots, with the caveat being that you spiral into emergency faster and more frequently than a tank that needs setup like Vengeance Demon Hunter or Protection Paladin. Once you learn the cycle of preplanning for big hits (coupled with the necessary encounter knowledge) and the reactive mitigation of the Stagger/Purify loop, you can be a halfway decent Brewmaster!

To cover the remaining gaps, you get some self-healing, primarily through Expel Harm, which has a fixed amount of base healing tied to it and a 15 second cooldown. Its healing can be increased through orbs from Gift of the Ox, a talent that spawns orbs as you take a sufficient amount of damage, and while you can run over the orbs manually for healing (or vacuum them in with Spinning Crane Kick), using Expel Harm pulls them all to you and gives you a nice burst of healing. You can also take the class talent Vivacious Vivification, making the Monk cast heal Vivify low-cost, instant, and larger every 10 seconds, and while that can affect your energy economy, it’s overall a good option in high incoming damage scenarios, and all of these tools together provide the Brewmaster mitigation cycle.

The Issues

Right now, Brewmaster balance is such that it shines in raids while feeling a bit lacking in dungeons. The core reason this is the case is down to how Stagger works, coupled with the effect of Mastery. Stagger in the raid environment is a consistent smoothing effect coupled with smooth, predictable damage cadence being fed into the bar. Likewise, while your Mastery is a little less effective in raids because of that predictability, it tends to reduce spikes in damage as auto-attacks from raid bosses and raid trash are generally spicier to make up for the consistent cadence of incoming damage. In dungeons, trash pulls can be unpredictable, so while Brewmaster is very strong in a scenario that afflicts a lot of tanks this season (the walk-in one shot) because of Stagger, the longer a trash pull runs, the harder it gets, as you continue to accrue Stagger and spend resources to reduce it only for it to be filled quickly through the current season model of large, fast auto-attacks and trash mob tankbusters with heavy magic damage.

In the current model, you will cycle a lot of your longer-cooldown defensives on trash, and it requires a fair bit of additional preplanning and action compared to other tanks. A Protection Warrior can put up Shield Block, Spell Block, and Ignore Pain and just ride the wave, a Protection Paladin has similar long cooldowns but with more-reliable self healing, and Vengeance Demon Hunter has less overall tankiness without setup but can get a groove with Frailty stacks, Demon Spikes uptime, and passive magical mitigation from their spec kit. A Brewmaster, by comparison, has a lot of button pressing to do in order to manage their health as effectively as possible. Functions that exist combined for other tanks, like how Death Strike on Blood Death Knight is both a heal and an absorb shield, are two separate buttons for Brewmaster, with differing cooldowns and longer time between less-effective versions of the same effects.

To actually detail the specific Brewmaster issues:

–Celestial Brew Nerfs- Coming into The War Within, Celestial Brew’s absorb was nerfed compared to Dragonflight. In many dungeon scenarios, Celestial Brew felt pretty impactful, but the current version, even with a relatively minor nerf of 10%, feels much less impactful. The effect it had on incoming damage was fairly substantial, and that 10% nerf means it does less, while also providing an incentive to maximize Purified Chi stacks more than in Dragonflight, a task which is difficult because…

–The Somewhat Anti-Synergy Of The Brewmaster Kit- Brewmaster gets a lot of their damage from a talent called Special Delivery, which hurls a keg into the air every time you drink any brew ability – Celestial Brew, Purifying Brew, Fortifying Brew, Black Ox Brew to recharge your brews – all of them. This provides a weird give-and-take to the structure of the spec, where Special Delivery incentivizes you to use your brews regularly for not just their defensive potential but also damage. This does, to an extent, encourage gameplay around maximizing damage via brews, which can encourage you to use them when you’re not particularly in-danger in order to get more damage. This isn’t inherently bad – Brewmaster takes enough damage that purifying at green or yellow Stagger levels isn’t awful and then also gives damage done, but it does mean that truly maximizing Purified Chi is relatively harder, especially if you play the Master of Harmony hero talents, which encourage you to use Celestial Brew more regularly (even giving an extra charge of it!) so that you can do more damage via those hero talents. If played less judiciously, you can burn the candle at both ends – less damage out via Special Delivery and more damage in through suboptimal Brew use.

–Gear Scaling And Brew- Monks in general in WoW have some very weird stat scaling, especially the Agility-based specs. In the past, both Windwalker and Brewmaster hated having Haste on gear, because they simply didn’t get much out of it. The Monk class has a base 1 second global cooldown, which means that Haste provides no GCD scaling for Monks, auto-attack damage is generally low, and for Windwalker, so many abilities that do big damage also delayed or paused auto-attacking in general to make increased attack speed not generally worth much. In TWW, that has changed for Windwalker, because they now gain damage based on Haste during Fists of Fury which has made Haste their number 1 secondary stat and in 11.1, they even get a huge buff to Mastery which should take it out of dead-last on stat priority. Meanwhile, for Brewmaster, Haste scaling is still poor due to low auto-attack damage, insufficient effect on energy regen, and no GCD effect to speed up the rotation further. Mastery, while it is a crucial part of the Brewmaster smoothing and mitigation structure, also isn’t hugely beneficial, because the attack power gain is minimal, the dodge chance gain was reduced coming into TWW, and it also scales quite poorly with gear – the offensive benefit increases as you have a higher amount of attack power, but the dodge chance benefit decreases as you gain a lot of dodge from item level creep, especially as Agility increases it. Functionally, this makes Brewmasters love Crit and Versatility, with only Versatility having a positive defensive benefit, but unlike in Dragonflight, where both Agility-based Monk specs had almost identical secondary-stat priorities, they now have nearly completely opposite priorities, which means dual-speccing both with one set of gear is suboptimal for the lower priority spec.

–Defensive Disparity- I started in on this point above, but it bears detail here. Brewmaster plays the most like a Blood Death Knight, in that damage mitigation is largely reactive with some ability to preplan using larger cooldowns and a cycle of damage reduction that involves taking the damage up-front and then dealing with it on the back-end. Blood DK’s, however, have one sizeable advantage – they can use their reaction ability for incoming damage, Death Strike, far more frequently. As long as a DK has Runic Power, they can Death Strike, and the total number of casts of Death Strike in a dungeon will reflect this. They also get to feed Death Strikes by using rotational kit to generate RP and then spend it on Death Strikes. Brewmaster, by comparison, is cooldown-locked on their equivalent abilities in Expel Harm and Celestial Brew, the utility of Death Strike is split into two distinct abilities for Brewmaster in this way, and the self-healing is reduced (even factoring in Purifying Brew damage removal as part of it, which would mark a third ability to match Blood DK power!) so you have less ability to rebound, longer times between ability uses, and reduced utility per ability requiring you to hit multiple buttons to match a fraction of what the Blood DK can do rotationally from one button.

Even if we compare it in similarity to Vengeance Demon Hunter, which has a similar self-healing loop through Soul Fragment generation into Soul Cleave or Spirit Bomb, DH generates Soul Fragments on demand with abilities, has a larger CD to generate a lot of them, and then Soul Cleave is in the same boat as Death Strike – as long as you have the Fury generation, you can Soul Cleave and Spirit Bomb your heart out. In scenarios with controlled incoming damage, like raids and bosses, this is fine. In a dungeon trash pull, however, the limited cooldowns and multiple button presses required creates a constant tension with the kit and the pull that other tank specs simply don’t have. Brewmaster nearly always starts a pull in a relatively stronger position to other tanks – but as resources deplete, the situation inverts, with nearly every other tank being more comfy as a pull is established compared to Brewmaster, which has a real threat looming as their Stagger fills and they whittle away the toolkit.

–Difficulty Scaling Oddity- Brewmasters have this weird thing where they are fine in low keys, and unironically fine to good in high keys, because both scenarios play to strengths for the spec. Doing low keys at low gear means playing the rotation properly and doing high keys has the same effect. However, in mid-range keys, where most players who touch Mythic Plus will spend a lot of their time, Brewmaster is kinda in a weird spot from scaling – with difficulty-matched gear, your Stagger will fill quickly but not too quickly, the combination of auto-attacks and magical damage can be managed but is also somewhat difficult, so you end up spending cooldowns in weird ways because the damage profile is just wonky. Couple that with the synergy struggles introduced by Special Delivery, and you end up smoothing less damage as a percentage of total, doing good but not exceptional damage, and burning cooldowns in a way that has some logic to it but also isn’t as optimal as could be.

The Big Concern

So all of this dances around the central thesis I have here, and it is one I am reluctant to share, which is this: Brewmaster is largely balanced and what makes it feel bad in dungeons compared to raids is a fundamental part of how the kit works – the very uniqueness of the Stagger interaction loop that makes Brewmaster fun to play. Stagger is, at this point in the game, a single gameplay mechanic that feels incredibly different in dungeons compared to raids, and with the current design paradigm of dungeons and the support role in general, Stagger feels relatively weak in dungeons while feeling pretty good in raids. Hell, as I finish this draft, I raided last night to do a Heroic Queen Ansurek kill for a missing raider, and on the kill pull, I took the opening Liquify tankbuster raw with 0 cooldowns popped and lived quite healthily because Stagger just took the damage for me and I was able to hit a Purify/Expel Harm after to resolve most of the actual damage taken! In dungeons, the bar just fills too fast, and is also problematic in current season dungeons because the increased pace of magical damage means you are Staggering less incoming damage and taking more of it directly, which creates and exacerbates the cooldown issues while also making the passive choice nodes for Dampen Harm and Diffuse Magic not worth taking.

The common denominator here, then, is encounter and dungeon design – trash pulls in Season 1 of TWW have too much incoming damage divided between white swings and magical hits, which means that Stagger both fills quickly but also doesn’t effectively mitigate a substantial component of the incoming damage, leaving cooldowns to pick-up the slack, which they can only do every couple of pulls, meaning that pulls in-between can be dicey, or that you cycle between Dampen Harm and Diffuse Magic pull-to-pull and make each pull slightly more precarious. Then, compared to other tanks, you just have more button presses to do for pure defense and mitigation – managing Stagger is multiple button presses, your longer cooldowns add more, and Fortifying Brew is relatively weak for such a long cooldown, even as cooldown reduction pushes it down to sub-3 minutes. Vampiric Blood is 90 seconds, a larger health increase without talents, and directly interacts with the Death Strike gameplay loop for Blood DK. Metamorphosis for Vengeance DH can be reduced to a 2 minute cooldown, has more damage reduction and health gain, and also buffs self-healing by giving more Fury and Soul Fragments on your generators!

My fixer brain says a couple quick fixes would be to either revert or scale-back the Celestial Brew nerf and offer some small buff to Fortifying Brew, either by reducing the number of talents you need to make it full power (which no one ever takes anyways because there are just too damn many) or buffing the cooldown reduction effect of rotational gameplay on it. I think an ideal path would be nerfing Celestial Brew scaling by 6% relative to Dragonflight value instead of 10% and then reducing the base cooldown of Fortifying Brew by 45 seconds, removing the Expeditious Brew talent altogether in favor of baseline reduction to the ability cooldown. Lastly, as one additional help, I think reducing the cooldown on Diffuse Magic would be ideal too. Right now, it’s 90 seconds, which isn’t awful, but Anti-Magic Shell on DK, an ability in almost exactly the same niche (class tree so all specs can get it, reduces magic damage by a good amount) is 60 seconds, and while Diffuse has the dispel effect on it, AMS also reduces magic damage to zero for as long as the shield holds, makes it so that magical debuffs are not applied through it, and generates Runic Power. The extra effects on Diffuse Magic, powerful as they can be, wouldn’t be out of proportion to AMS if they had the same cooldown – if anything, I still believe AMS would be the stronger cooldown!

I think the goal of the development team should be to reduce the complexity of playing Brewmaster defensively well without neutering the spec’s strong identity. To that end, I think that being busy with defensives isn’t inherently bad – it should just carry a greater reward than it currently does. Right now, what feels bad about Brewmaster in dungeons is that playing one well doesn’t feel like a reward over what other tanks can do – it feels like more work just to establish parity. More work isn’t a problem if the reward is more power, but blasting on buttons to just live makes it feel bad and pushes high-level Brewmaster gameplay to being a niche for a specific subset of high APM perverts. If a novice Brewmaster could play as well as a bad Protection Warrior who only ever uses Shield Block and Ignore Pain, they should be similarly tanky – so managing Stagger well should at least make you feel relatively comfortable if not completely safe.

I think a larger problem that affects all tanks and healers too is encounter design. Season 1 of TWW has been under fire for the changes made at a philosophical level to the roles for TWW while encounter design has not often stepped up to match those ideals, leaving healers dependent on strong personal defensive CDs from the party for constant spikes of burst damage while also make the healer more responsible for tanks, while tanks have to focus less on complete self-sustain and more on balancing incoming damage in a way that slows the descent enough to make them healable. In that context, Brewmaster is less of an outlier, but still winds up in situations where they really need healer help. It’s fine to have a tank with a higher skill floor and ceiling – I think on that front Brewmaster is excellent – but there needs to be a commensurate reward to playing Brewmaster well instead of the current state, which is fighting for your life to just ensure you live.

While the early 11.1 patch notes from PTR leave a lot to be desired on specific Brewmaster changes, there’s potential hope in dungeon and damage profile changes being teased in interviews with the development team, and hopefully those adjust a major pain point. All we can do now is wait and see.