March 31 Blizzard Posts: Upcoming 7.2.5 Class Changes Featuring Brewmaster Monks

Pubblicato 31/03/2017 alle 19:26 da Squishei

yesterday's HotfixesRogue Class Fantasy InsightBlizzard's Spring Cleaning Sale2v2 DampeningPvP Artifact TraitsArmonia degli Spezzalegione

Blizzard

There are two important points we want to make sure everyone knows:

1. All artifact traits are active in PvP, including Arenas and Rated Battlegrounds.

2. Players always receive 36 points worth of Stamina in their Artifact, including the 10% Stamina received from the first trait on the new Artifact Emblem.

'All traits' means everything, including any and all points placed in Armonia degli Spezzalegione. Nothing is disabled.

7.2.5 Class InsightsRogue Class Fantasy Insight.General Class Talents

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Unholy DK

Blizzard

We are increasing the cost and damage of Spira Mortale in 7.2.5. Even with no other changes, that change is likely a pure buff (even though it looks neutral), since the resource it's draining is one that was being wasted anyway.

It's not yet clear whether we'll open up further changes in 7.2.5, since the core rotation is generally working well. Having 3 main buttons (Ferita Putrescente, Assalto del Flagello, Spira Mortale) that all have no cooldowns, but instead juggle 3 resources (Runes, Runic Power, Ferita Putrescentes), is a relatively unusual melee rotation that we think has turned out pretty interesting. The biggest thing it needs is space to breathe on the resources, as has been discussed a lot. We'll see how it looks with the Spira Mortale change in addition to the earlier Corruzione Runica change, as well as the loss of T19 set bonuses, and see if there's still a problem.

If we need to make further changes, the goal would likely be to focus on talents that cause a very large swing in resource generation or GCD usage. Because the rotation needs to not be flooded for max-level players with endgame bonuses, but also not too slow for leveling players, as was pointed out. This is an issue we're starting to pay more attention to across all specs (especially melee specs). As we have more rotation-affecting talents in the game than ever before, and we buffed a lot of of them in 7.1.5, many talents (or legendaries or similar bonuses) are trying to effect large DPS increases solely through giving more of a resource or proc. It's becoming a more common problem that specs which initially had good pacing get flooded in certain setups, and we want to start correcting those where we can.

Balance Druid

Blizzard

I was glossing over the details--it would be possible in a sufficiently important case (the one you mention was adding a new talent, Cavalier). Ordini ai Cannonieri not mentioning that it buffs Fuoco Solare is not a huge problem. Anyway, that was an aside--main point was that adding Fuoco Solare to the benefit was meant to double the value of the trait to get it closer to where it should be, and we were fine doing it immediately.

Mistweaver Monk

Blizzard

On the initial 7.2.5 PTR, we are trying out a version of Fonte dell'Essenza that is even stronger, but has a cooldown. In addition to some combination of a healing increase and mana cost reduction, the duration of the HoT will be increased.

Fonte dell'Essenza having no cooldown has held back the spell and the spec in a few ways. It essentially says that three relatively heavy heals (Fonte dell'Essenza, Nebbia Avvolgente, Vivificazione) have to compete with each other at all times. The texture of using a heavy spell on a short cooldown, then falling back to the decision between spammable spells (selecting based on cost, number of targets, etc.) is common among healers for good reason. And Fonte dell'Essenza's HoT mechanic that improves mastery is meant to specifically enhance that sort of gameplay, and will be more effective on a spell with a cooldown.

As already mentioned, the first change that comes along with it is buffing Fonte dell'Essenza itself. It no longer has to be held back by "if it gets too much stronger than e.g. Vivify, people will only use Fonte dell'Essenza", and can simply be a high-priority spell. We will make other adjustments as needed for gameplay or tuning.

Blizzard

However, one point that I would like addressed is what are we supposed to do when Essence Font is on cooldown, Uplifting Trance isn't available, Whispers of Shaohao has been used, and the the group still needs to be healed?

The initial version going out has a small buff to baseline Vivificazione. Also, the changes greatly increase the practical value of mastery, which is a hidden buff to the Vivificazione, Nebbia Avvolgente, and Vivificazione Migliorata casts you'll be making in between Fonte dell'Essenzas.

Part of it, though, is you should have more of cadence between the high-priority heals that somewhat solve problems on their own, and the spells that don't always do that. You asked what to do when the "best" 3 or 4 things are on cooldown or not available, and that's similar to a Druid falling back to laying down Rinvigorimento Miglioratos when she can't use Crescita Rigogliosa or Guarigione Immediata, or a Paladino using Lampo di Luce between Luce dell'Alba and Folgore Sacra cooldowns. Making use of the no-cooldown spells that are more limited is meant to be a moment when you look forward to the next heavy hitter coming back (even if it's just a few seconds for an Fonte dell'Essenza).

The concerns in feedback seem to mostly reflect tuning--that the "filler" kit of Vivificazione, Nebbia Avvolgente, Vivificazione Migliorata, and Nebbia del Sollievo isn't strong enough. Possibly that's true and the problem has been papered over on live by the ability to focus everything on Fonte dell'Essenza. Overall tuning will be something to watch on PTR, as with any spec getting any degree of shakeup. Sintonizzazione debates usually aren't too productive in early feedback, but maybe a helpful thing to say is: "if we hadn't been making any changes to Mistweaver, it would probably have gotten a small flat throughput buff before the next raid."

With the changes to Mistweaver during the transition to Legion, there was already a degree of homogenization from what was previously a fairly unique gameplay experience to something more similar to what already existed in other healing classes. As you consider further changes to Mistweaver, is further samey-ness something that's "on the radar"?

It is, although possibly in the opposite way. If anything, thinking that Essence Font had to be forced into an off-cooldown design from the start "just to be different" probably didn't help anybody. The spec flowing better for everyone using it matters more than symmetries or antisymmetries between specs and how they look on paper. Nobody actually playing either spec is going to forget whether they're on a Mistweaver or a Resto Druid just because Essence Font follows a successful design like Wild Growth. The spells around them, the different interactions they have, and the whole pile of talents, traits, and item bonuses all doing different things ensures that.

There's always a balance between lessons and good designs that are generally true throughout the game, and variance between specs. And powerful AoE heals usually having some cooldown (for a number of reasons) is a factor that's more likely to improve Mistweaver gameplay than worrying about being a carbon copy of other specs (which it's pretty far from, all things considered).

Brewmaster Monk

Blizzard

Hail! First round of Brews is on me, Monks. Shall we talk a bit about Brewmasters?

As Seph talked about in a recent Rogue thread, 7.2.5 will include much more significant class change than 7.2 did, and one of the specs that we're focusing on is Brewmaster. Brewmasters are currently quite strong, performance-wise, but have a few notable issues that we'd like to work out.

Offensive Abilities
Rotationally, Brewmasters are using a mixture of offensive and defensive buttons. Some parts of this worked well, such as Lancio del Barile and Palmo della Tigre granting partial charges of your Brews. One part that hasn't worked out well is in Calcio dell'Oscuramento and Soffio di Fuoco. Having no direct defensive value, or interaction with other abilities in your rotation, they end up feeling disconnected, and leave you wondering why you're hitting them. There are a couple minor artifact traits that give them some defensive value, but that's ultimately negligible as far as rotation design goes. One saving grace here is the Combo dell'Oscuramento talent, which gives a strong reason to care about Calcio dell'Oscuramento, and add a lot of depth (and complexity) to your rotation.

Another problem is that Calcio dell'Oscuramento has a 3.0s/Haste cooldown, which is actually rather bizarre on a class with a 1.0s GCDs. Experienced players have learned that you should get a significant enough amount of Haste to bring that down to something in the 2.2-2.5sec range, and alternate Calcio dell'Oscuramentos with other abilities, with awkward 0.2-0.5sec gaps in between your abilities. This also means that with the forced gaps, you become GCD-capped, and Energy stops functioning. Finally, one last problem we're looking at is that there are rather limited options for customizing the rotation through talents (pretty much just Combo dell'Oscuramento), and no baseline variability, leading to some people finding it repetitive and predictable.

We'd like to clean this up, and here are our current thoughts on how (not set in stone, very interested in discussion and PTR testing).

First, Calcio dell'Oscuramento and Soffio di Fuoco will have a direct defensive value: they'll grant a stack of Maestria: Attaccabrighe Inafferrabile (per target hit, in Soffio di Fuoco's case).
Second, Calcio dell'Oscuramento will more smoothly fit into the rotation. We're going to try it having a cooldown, but Palmo della Tigre significantly reducing that cooldown, such that you can Calcio dell'Oscuramento every few GCDs, and not have any forced partial-second pauses. We want to make sure that Energy (and thus Haste) controls the speed of your rotation, so that that's in your control. If you want a more full, button-spammy rotation, you can favor Haste. If you prefer being more tactical with your GCDs, optimizing the timing of each one, you can favor other stats.
And finally, to let you customize the rotation with both higher GCD utilization and some variance, we're planning to add a talent that gives Palmo della Tigre a high chance to reset the cooldown of Soffio di Fuoco. (Where exactly to put that talent is unclear; replacing Chi Burst is the current idea, but we're not super thrilled with that.)

Defensive Abilities
Overall, Noncuranza is working quite well in the general case. Ironskin vs Purify (and in particular when to Purify) is a good choice, though maybe a tad bit skewed toward Ironskin right now. However, it becomes problematic in the extreme case, where Noncuranza is used to cheese mechanics that aren't intended to be survivable. For example, a Brewmaster may use Sopportazione and Birra Fortificante in order to get 100% Noncuranza, soak several of some raid mechanic that is intended to be entirely unsurvivable (probably even piercing immunities), Purify twice quickly, and get healed through what little of the damage is remaining.

The key source of this is when Noncuranza reaches 100% or near-100%, and our planned changes to solve this focus on that:

We'll be reducing the Noncuranza gain of Birra Fortificante, and slightly reduce the Noncuranza gain of Birra di Pelleferrea.
We'll be raising Brewmaster's base armor to compensate.
We're going to add a cap on how much damage can be Noncuranzaed (high enough that you won't hit it in normal gameplay, but enough to stop cheesing mechanics).
There is also an artifact trait that increases the Noncuranza gain of Birra Fortificante that has been mostly-useless since 7.1.5, which we're going to redesign.

Again, the point of this is not at all to be a nerf in intended circumstances, but rather to shift around where the mitigation comes from, such that it can't be used to unintentionally bypass mechanics.

Relatedly, one mechanic that causes imbalance with tanks is that in a tank-swap situation in a raid, tanks can store up a large amount of active mitigation while not actively tanking, both in terms of ability charges, and buff durations. In general, this is fine, but it can be taken to extremes, and Brewmasters are a good example of that, frequently being able to go into their tanking with a 30+sec duration Birra di Pelleferrea rolling. Some amount of this is fine, but to keep it within a reasonable range, we're going to put a cap on how long you can extend tank active mitigation buffs, to a maximum of twice their base duration.

Thanks for reading! We look forward to your feedback.
What are you doing to address the fact that ISB has basically become the new shuffle and requires 100% uptime? That's literally brew gameplay right now -> 100% ISB uptime and anything left goes into purify.

I touched on that a bit, that the decision is skewed a tad bit towards Birra di Pelleferrea right now. There are 3 changes here that will help with that:

How does a talent like Palmo della Tigre resetting Breath Fire work when you have the legendary chest? Clearly we wouldn't take it since Barile is resetting breath about every 5 seconds. With both it would be absurd.

Occasional legendaries that push you away from or toward a particular talent are generally OK. If you have the Soffio di Fuoco chest, you likely will want to pick one of the other talents instead of Spitfire (the Palmo della Tigre resets Breath of Fire one), and that's OK.

Will there be exceptions added to this rule? For example, will this not just completely negate the use of the '' talent for Protection Paladins? Gaining the instant charges allows them to go much further beyond the "twice their base duration", essentially throwing away all that additional SotR uptime that comes from the talent during the activation window.

There may be, yes. We don't want to invalidate any existing gameplay, just prevent the "I've been offtanking for a bit and have a crazy long duration buff up when I take over, skewing my priorities.

Without hard numbers, it is difficult to see if this will be a blessing or a curse.

Numbers matter for performance, and I want to reemphasize the fact that the changes I'm talking about are intended to be net-neutral, performance-wise. Of course they will affect performance, but we'll offset them with number tweaks, in whichever direction is necessary.

The point of all of these is gameplay, mechanics, and particularly rotational flow.

My first concern on hearing that there is a stagger cap is what does that mean for damage intake: once you're at stagger cap, do you take full damage from hits? How do you anticipate this working on mobs like The Demon Within, which is already hitting for approximately 5 million white damage per auto set? Extrapolating further to future mythic tiers, it's not necessarily unreasonable to anticipate mobs that will be hitting a monk in excess of 7+ million white damage (for example) every 1-1.5s. Given brew generation in your most favorable circumstances, it seems there is a real possibility of brewmasters essentially hitting some upper limit of mob they're able to tank before they're essentially as squishy as a dps, save dodging, due to having capped stagger.

To be clear, the stagger cap is not on the amount you can stagger per-hit, but on the total amount you can have delayed in your "stagger bar" at once. As stated, it's mainly a limit to avoid abusive cases, similar to how spells like Guardian Spirit have a point where they stop working. If you're about to try to soak something that will do a few times your maximum health in damage (even after cooldowns), you should expect to die immediately. This should come into play only in relatively extreme cases.
On the AM max duration discussion, there's been a ton of great feedback on that so far. I'd like to go into why we're considering this change a little more. Forgive me for the verbosity (hah):

This effects Brewmasters more than other tanks, but not exclusively. The main reason that this affects Brewmasters more is that they are meant to split their resource between two brews: Ironskin and Purifying.

Consider a simple situation of two bosses, each beating on a tank. The Brewmaster is using a mixture of their Brews, maintaining ISB while using excess on PB (or maybe even letting ISB fall off when the boss stops to cast something, or is otherwise unthreatening for a moment). She gets more Brew charges than she needs to keep ISB up, but she's using those excess charges on PB, so ISB duration is remaining low.

The co-tank, let's say a Warrior for example, is built a little differently, having two separate defensive resources (Shield Block charges and Rage for Ignore Pain). Both are being generated and consumed at a similar rate, also not gaining increasing Shield Block duration.

Things are good here, and let's suppose for the sake of argument the two tanks are 'balanced' in this context.

---

OK, now let's change the design of the fight, to one where there's one huge boss, and the two tanks take turns tanking for 30sec at a time. Arguments of this being a less-engaging fight aside, let's look at how that affects the tank balance.

While the Warrior is OTing, he's building up Shield Block charges, but once he hits max charges, they're being wasted. He can use one at a time as they're generated, but they don't last longer than it takes to generate, so his Shield Block buff duration doesn't grow over time. Similar deal with Rage and Ignore Pain. He builds up Rage, and when that caps out, he builds up an Ignore Pain stack, but that caps out pretty quickly too. Excess Rage is wasted (at least defensively anyway; they can put it into damage). When the Warrior taunts, he goes into it with some buffer of his max Shield Block charges, maybe a single partial Shield Block buff, and max Rage and Ignore Pain. Overall, he could carry over some value from that time not tanking, but not all of it.

Meanwhile, when the Brewmaster is not tanking, they're building up charges of their single defensive resource, Brew charges. Once at max Brew charges, she starts using Ironskin Brews, as they're generated. Since there's nothing to Purify, she never does so, and all of her charges go into Ironskin Brew, creating a surplus of Ironskin duration that just grows over time. When she taunts, she goes into it with max Brew charges, and a 1min long Ironskin buff. She never has to Ironskin the whole time she's tanking, and can send all of her Brew charges into Purifying, over tripling (if not more) how often she can Purify, providing a sizable gain over her Warrior counterpart. All that time she spent not tanking goes into storing up defensive value for when she is tanking, with no limit.

If the two tanks were 'balanced' in the first fight, then the Brewmaster is overpowered in the second. Alternatively, if you argue that they're balanced in the second fight, that means they're underpowered in the first. The goal of this change is to place a reasonable limit on how much value you can carry over from time spent not tanking, so that we can tune the tanks to be balanced in both of these situations, not just one of them.

I totally get that right now you can always get benefit out of hitting Ironskin Brew, never being fully wasted, and so the prospect of going to a system where there may be a time where you're just sitting on full charges, wasting them sounds like a negative. Please understand that for most other tanks, that's just normal; a Warrior that's not tanking is just wasting the defensive value of their Shield Block charges once at max charges, and that's just an accepted norm. By bringing Brewmasters into parity in this regard, we can then tune them to be more consistently balanced with other tanks, which is the core goal of the change.

One of the most common responses so far has been "I understand wanting a cap, but 2x*duration is too short". Totally reasonable argument, and we'll need your help finding what the right cap is. We chose that to start with because that's consistent with things like Ignore Pain, Mark of Ursol, Blood Shield, Soul Fragments, etc. Given the more liberal use of Brew charges, it may be more appropriate to be higher for Brewmasters.

I'd love to keep hearing your thoughts on this, and I hope that this massively-over-verbose post helped better explain our thought process here. Thanks to those of you that stuck with it, reading it all the way through. :)

How much of a threshold are we talking? One stagger bar? Two? Five? Ten?

When we reach this threshold, what happens? Do we begin to take unmitigated hits? Will stagger simply stop working? If so, what's the plan for taking an unmitigated raid boss hit, as a few bosses are capable of 100-0% a 910 brewmaster in a single swing?

The current idea is that the Stagger bar that the UI shows is the cap, which matches up with your health bar, since that'll be the most understandable and intuitive. Then, however much of a buff to max health is needed to make that balanced.

Example, with 80% Stagger, 33% Armor for convenient numbers:

HP: 100/100 ~ Stagger: 0/100

Take a hit for 30, armor reduces that to 20, then stagger takes 16, and 4 goes through to HP.
HP: 96/100 ~ Stagger: 16/100

Time passes and 8 of the Stagger damage goes over into HP.
HP: 88/100 ~ Stagger: 8/100

Then you take a big hit for 60, armor reduces that to 40, then stagger takes 32, and 8 goes through to HP.
HP: 80/100 ~ Stagger: 40/100

You quickly Purify 50% of that.
HP: 80/100 ~ Stagger: 20/100

Then you take a *massive* hit for 210 (something cheesy), armor reduces that to 140. Stagger would take 112, but there's only room for 80 in your Stagger bar. So Stagger takes 80, and 60 goes through to HP.
HP: 20/100 ~ Stagger: 100/100

TL;DR: The Stagger bar on your UI is now representative of your maximum stagger pool, and any overflow damage continues on into your HP bar.

Holy Priest

Blizzard

Preghiera di Cura has been a bit of a puzzle to decide the right approach for in recent expansions. We always appreciate feedback on where it currently is, but for a few thoughts on it:

We definitively wanted to get rid of the version based on raid subgroups in Legion. At this point, it was the only spell left in the game that relied on that, and required raid leaders to rearrange groups at the behest of one player to make one of their spells work correctly. Furthermore, with an increasing amount of raiding being done in the "flexible" framework, raid sizes are not even reliably a multiple of 5 anymore.

We also want to be careful with heals that are too smart. A Preghiera di Cura with a large radius, smart targeting, and no cooldown would essentially be a self-working raid healing spell/rotation. As long as 5 people are damaged (which is frequently), you can spam that spell to the get best efficiency from your mana, not overheal, and not have to worry about targeting. That's a direction we don't like for healing gameplay in general and have been paring back on in recent years.

One other thing that felt bad about the 7.0 version (20 yard radius) was that it didn't hit the whole party in 5-player content. That's a role that Prayer of Healing has always had and that it should keep having.

Oh and since we're here to complain, Cosmic Ripple costing 5% base mana is the cherry on top of the cake atm.

This is a bug.

Talking about bugs; are you guys aware of discipline priest mastery currently being bugged?
Actual transfer % from Mastery to Atonement is being "locked in" upon log-in, spec swap and zone change.

Yes, a fix for this is incoming as well.

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