Review of Monk Dragonflight Season 3 Tier Set Bonuses - Initial Impressions

• Brewmaster Monk Season 3 Tier Set First Impression

2-Set-Monk Brewmaster 10.2 Class Set 2pc- Breath of Fire deals 20% bonus damage as Shadowflame and causes you to heal for 50% of all Fire damage dealt.

4-Set-Monk Brewmaster 10.2 Class Set 4pc- Your attacks against targets afflicted by Breath of Fire have a chance to deal 10% extra damage as Shadowflame, and each Celestial Brew also grants a Stagger absorb for 100% of the Shadowflame damage you have dealt, causing damage delayed by Stagger to instead be prevented.

• Firestarter

This tier set bonus is based primarily around Breath of Fire, which has usually been a mistake in the past, but not this time. It’s very good. It fixes Brewmaster Monk’s biggest issue in Mythic+, and generally makes Monk tankier in all situations. It’s a great bonus.

• Fight Fire With Fire

Let’s look at the offensive side of this bonus first. 20% more Breath of Fire damage is pretty weak. It’s arguably better in AoE than single-target, but the offensive contribution of the 2-piece is pretty minor either way.

The 4-piece bonus adds a proc with a pretty high rate (~50%) to add a 10% multiplier onto all your damage events. This means it’s worth roughly the same percentage of damage increase in all situations (~5%). That being said, Brewmaster Monk’s damage output scales up dramatically in AoE, so this is a substantial damage increase in AoE. That’s great.

• Set Fire to the Rain

Now let’s look at the more interesting aspect of this bonus: The defensive components.

The 2-piece bonus grants healing for 50% of all fire damage dealt. This includes the straightforward sources of fire damage such as Breath of Fire and Exploding Keg, but also includes talents like Charred Passions. These heals can crit, proc Celestial Fortune, and currently they are double-dipping from Versatility. How much of this is intended is unclear, but at present, it’s unreasonably good as a source of self-healing.

The 4-piece bonus procs deal Shadowflame damage. Shadowflame damage counts as Fire damage. This also heals via the 2-piece. It’s good. Monks deal a fairly high amount of fire damage, so these bonuses stand to be roughly equivalent to 15% Leech, or possibly a bit more. This is a stronger bonus in AoE than single target, since damage values are higher in AoE, but in both cases, it’s good.

Additionally, the 4-piece grants an extra shield when you use Celestial Brew. This added shield (also named Celestial Brew, presumably to add unnecessary confusion to logs and weakauras) absorbs Stagger damage, and it is worth 100% of the Shadowflame damage you have dealt since the last Celestial Brew. This shield can be worth 200k-400k Stagger absorption in normal tanking circumstances, added on top of the 400k-700k shielding you get from a normal Celestial Brew.

Brewmaster Monk: It’s tanky! What a concept!

• Burning Down the House

This addresses the single biggest problem Monks have faced throughout Dragonflight (and the history of the class, really).

Monks have great bursts of damage mitigation, and great damage smoothing. This makes them good against large sources of predictable damage, which is the main source of danger in raids. They compensate for this by taking a lot more damage than other tanks overall, but generally being easier to heal in raids by having smaller base health pools and multiplying all incoming healing. It has worked really well in raids for nearly the entire time Monks have been in the game.

In Mythic+ dungeons, Monks’ increased damage taken and small health pools are a huge liability. Their ability to mitigate big, predictable bursts of damage is no longer a great advantage, because tanks face constant pressure in Mythic+. Monks’ inability to constantly convert a large portion of their damage output into some kind of damage mitigation or self-healing, such as Druids’ Ursoc's Fury, Demon Hunter’s Spirit Bomb, and so on, is a huge liability for them in Mythic+.

Monks deal great AoE damage, they have good self-healing tools and great defensive cooldowns. Aside from that lack of a consistent way to turn offense into defense, they’re really great tanks. They have almost everything they need to be top-tier Mythic+ tanks.

This tier set unlocks all those other positive attributes. It gives Monks a way to directly convert their excellent damage output into a steady source of much-needed self-healing.

It also adds an even larger defensive safety net onto Celestial Brew, which is every bit as good in raids as it is in Mythic+. This is a tier set that’s great in both Mythic+ and raids.

• Burnin’ for You

This tier set is tied to Breath of Fire, so talents that synergize with it like Sal'salabim's Strength and Charred Passions, both of which are already extremely popular, will remain must-haves.

In terms of altering talent choices or the rotation from the established setup, this tier set doesn’t. If anything, it locks in the established Brewmaster Monk meta even harder.

Whether you see this as a positive or negative is entirely a matter of personal perception.

Do you like the current state of Brewmaster Monk’s talents and playstyle? Great! Nothing is changing!

Do you hate the current state of Brewmaster Monk’s talents and playstyle? Ah, shucks! Nothing is changing!

• Sleep Now in the Fire

Brewmaster Monks have been a great raid tank for most of their history, and that is only getting reinforced by this tier set. That’s great news.

In Mythic+, these bonuses are an incredible source of much-needed consistent defensive power that could be a tremendous boost to Monks in Season 3. Saying that a tier set could catapult a spec from the bottom of the pack to the top of the pile might be an overreaction in a lot of cases, but here, it’s warranted.

Most – but not all – of Brewmaster Monk’s toolkit has been well-suited to Mythic+. It has great CC, good defensive group utility, strong cooldowns, and eye-watering AoE damage. It has been missing a single, crucial element of a good Mythic+ tank: A way to directly protect themselves by dealing damage.

Like a pile of wood soaked in kerosene, Monk has just been waiting for a spark to set the whole thing ablaze. Here it is.

• Mistweaver Monk Season 3 Tier Set First Impression

2-Set-Monk Mistweaver 10.2 Class Set 2pc- Renewing Mist applies Chi Harmony, increasing the healing they receive from you by 50% for 8 seconds.

4-Set-Monk Mistweaver 10.2 Class Set 4pc- 20% of all* healing you do to targets with Chi Harmony is stored and then dispersed evenly among your allies with Renewing Mist when Chi Harmony fades or is refreshed.

• 2-Set Bonus

In isolation, this is a pretty cut and dry set bonus. Players you cast Renewing Mist on will then receive more healing from you for a brief period of time. This does apply to Renewing Mists that are created by Essence Font, which keeps Rising Sun Kick as our number one priority spell in raids. This also keeps Invoke Yu'lon, the Jade Serpent firmly as the front-runner for our celestial of choice in raids, as the chain of Enveloping Mist casts will spread Chi Harmony to many people during moments of high throughput, making our casts of Vivify buffed by Clouded Focus even stronger. But overall, this set bonus doesn't change how we approach our talents or playstyle. At most it wants us to be a little smarter with Renewing Mist placement, prioritizing injured targets or those with damage over time effects, as they would be able to get the most benefit from the increase to our healing.

• 4-Set Bonus

With the pretty potent percent increase to our healing on targets with Chi Harmony on them, a percent of that healing is stored, to be split and shared to several players, all with your Renewing Mist active. One of the strongest parts of this set at the moment is that overhealing is stored, making it so that incidental healing done to full health targets can still be used to heal others later on. An example of this would be during a Invoke Yu'lon, the Jade Serpent ramp, where, before damage, you cast spells that generate Renewing Mists for Vivify healing as damage occurs. With this set bonus collecting overhealing, that means that healing from Enveloping Breath, Enveloping Mist, healing from Renewing Mist, all of it being funneled into Chi Harmony buffs and ready to heal Renewing Mist targets in quick succession.

This is all assuming the set is working as we assume it's intended to work, though. With the current PTR build though, there are some spells whose healing isn't being counted and stored in the buff. Below is a table of what spells do and do not contribute to the pool of healing to be split among Renewing Mist targets:

Overall testing has been fairly inconsistent though, as small changes are being made and unmade and interacting with this set has been...difficult. Until some of the major contributors of our healing, specifically Invigorating Mists, are included, this part of the tier set cannot be tested accurately. However, with the assumption that it's PTR being PTR and the non-implemented spells will be implemented, this is a very powerful tier set, in both Raiding and Mythic+.

• Feedback

The 10.2 PTR has seen two builds as of the writing of this article, with this tier set already seeing some heavy changes to curb how hard it'd scale in raid groups. With the list of spells not implemented above, I can see there being more changes as the PTR progresses to keep the overall power of this tier set out of extremes. It's quite evocative of Extend Life from Battlewrap of the Hurricane's Eye in Hellfire Citadel, with Renewing Mist placing a buff that increases healing done to targets, while healing done by Enveloping Mist and Vivify healed all players with that buff on them. But this implementation of that sort of concept should allow for a wide array of our healing to be affected by it, rather than two spells by themselves. It'll allow for people to make small changes to their build, rather than feel as though they were locked into Vivify for all of their healing because Fangs of the Vermillion Forge solely buffed its healing.

But with how our talents interact with it, it is still a major driving force for its power in raids. With Invoke Yu'lon, the Jade Serpent allowing multiple instances of Chi Harmony to fall off in quick succession during a moment when you'd need them to, when they'd have plenty of healing stored in them, we'll be seeing Clouded Focus, even with its nerf, be the talent to complement this tier set for Mythic raiding. It does make me yearn for playing away from Soothing Mist in raids and focus more on the other strengths that Mistweaver has, namely its mobility. But I don't think that's something that can be remedied by tier set changes and would instead need a patch-level rework of multiple abilities.

The tier set is great numerically (once the spell implementation is fixed anyway), and those that play Mistweaver now won't see that much playstyle differences going into the new season (with the one exception of mana being more scarce because of the Season 2 Tier set change). Mythic+ players will have more healing coming their way as Rising Sun Kick cascades Chi Harmony explosions consistently as it gets reapplied to players. Those that are able to can track the healing stored in all of their buffs and try to min/max the explosions by forcing a reapplication of Chi Harmony with Renewing Mist, but that's about all the depth that gets added to Mistweavers with this tier set.

• Windwalker Monk Season 3 Tier Set First Impression

2-Set-Monk Windwalker 10.2 Class Set 2pc- Melee attacks have a chance to make your next Spinning Crane Kick free. Free Spinning Crane Kicks grant Blackout Reinforcement, increasing the damage of your next Blackout Kick by 100%.

4-Set-Monk Windwalker 10.2 Class Set 4pc- Blackout Reinforcement empowered Blackout Kicks reduce the cooldown of Fists of Fury, Rising Sun Kick, Strike of the Windlord and Whirling Dragon Punch by 2 second.

• Overview

Now that we've been able to get some time to look at, and play with, the new tier set, opinions have already started to roll in. Getting started, the tier set is pretty standard and doesn't really change much. The biggest change is the "loss" of the Aberrus tier, which lowers the value of Rising Sun Kick. Since we currently focus on getting as many powerful Rising Sun Kicks as we can, this moves some of that importance around to the other abilities. Unfortunately, because the tier set focuses on giving us more free spells, it becomes even more evident that we have little, to no, free globals to use these free spells. This means that you'll inevitably have to make the painful choice of sitting on a proc and not using it, or delaying something else that feels important. This does exist most extremely in single target since there are more "open" globals in AOE, but it's not a strictly single target problem. Getting even more Spinning Crane Kick casts in single target also feels... wrong.

• Gameplay

When looking for potential synergy between our abilities, we find some, but also plenty of the opposite. Because of the way that the 2pc works; "free Spinning Crane Kick grant...", Dance of Chi-Ji procs also grant the buff to Blackout Kick, and if you have both the 2pc proc and a Dance of Chi-Ji proc, using Spinning Crane Kick will only consume one, which is quite nice. However, it doesn't work during Serenity when Spinning Crane Kick is also free, although this isn't a big problem, it is something that would be nice for consistency and usability. The increased cooldown reduction provided by Blackout Kick is a nice change, but even at 2 seconds per Blackout Kick, it is still designed in a way to be self-defeating and self-limiting. The more buffed Blackout Kicks you get, the more you can use your other abilities like Fists of Fury, Rising Sun Kick, and Strike of the Windlord. However, the more you can use these abilities, the less time you have to use the procs generated by the 2pc, thus getting less cooldown reduction and less casting of these abilities. This has been a longstanding problem with Windwalker's relationship with Haste, and this tier set simply draws more attention to that.

• Feedback

It is very clear what the intention of the tier set is, Windwalker is flooded with resources right now, to the point of often having more than we can spend. By reducing the cooldown of our spenders, this should help to utilize many of these resources. However, it does it in a way, relying on RNG, that moves Windwalker even further into the unpredictability that would have felt completely alien a few years ago. Unfortunately, this also leaves the tier set be very weak relative to what we've seen from others and in past tier bonuses. Because the procs aren't always easy to use, it caps the potential for the strength of the tier set.

There have been many suggestions for ways to improve the tier set so far, here are some of mine, and some of the ones I consider the best from the community:

• Allow the 2pc to trigger from Fists of Fury and have it buff the next Blackout Kick or Spinning Crane Kick, making it more seamless in both ST and AOE. Having it automatically happen after Fists of Fury would also help to eliminate the RNG aspect, which is something that people have said time and time again that they don't want more RNG.
• Allow the 2pc to make your next Rising Sun Kick OR Spinning Crane Kick free, for the same reason as above.
• Skip the Spinning Crane Kick middle-man and have the 2pc simply increase the damage of your next Blackout Kick and have it hit additional targets. The 4pc would still add the additional CDR.
• Change the 2pc to allow Blackout Kick to reduce the CD of Strike of the Windlord and Whirling Dragon Punch like it does Rising Sun Kick and Fists of Fury (this should be baseline, but I'll take what I can get). The 4pc then adds the additional CDR.
• Instead of making abilities free, make them deal 2x the damage, so that you get the same value but without needing to spend additional GCDs that we don't have, also allowing them to work during cooldowns like Serenity.

Overall I am hoping for some pretty significant changes to the tier set, or maybe even the baseline Windwalker, to help make it more reasonable. Right now it feels bad numerically, mechanically, and enjoyably.