The two-piece bonus is genuinely decent. It’s boring, but it’s okay. An extra 4% damage reduction is a fine 2-piece bonus. If you are using
Charred Passions,
Breath of Fire has roughly 100% uptime, so this is comparable to a defense-only 8% Versatility buff. Technically, it adds slightly more defensive value than raw Versatility due to being additive with
Breath of Fire’s flat defensive bonus, but that’s a bit technical. Some community members have speculated that this could make the previously-useless talent
Spitfire a viable defensive option. Nope.
Spitfire should still never be used. This bonus adds a small degree of defensive synergy onto
Charred Passions, but even if you’re running
Stormstout's Last Keg, you’re still getting 75-80% uptime on
Breath of Fire. Worst-case scenario, it’s a decent, boring bonus. It’s fine. It doesn’t change your playstyle, talent choices, Covenant choices, Legendaries, or anything else, and you probably won’t even notice it, but it’s adding a bit of defense. It’s free real estate.
Then there’s the 4-piece bonus, which doesn’t do anything. Increasing
Shuffle duration is literally useless. Brewmasters, even novices without Legendaries and gear, should have zero difficulty maintaining 100%
Shuffle uptime. There is no situation where it is anything except a trap. The other component of the 4-piece bonus is Brew cooldown reduction. That might sound alright, but here’s how it’s tuned: If you use this bonus perfectly, with zero mistakes AND zero boss downtime, you get one extra
Celestial Brew every 12 minutes. Comparing that against Sanctum of Domination’s encounters, it adds 1
Celestial Brew cast in exactly ZERO out of 10 fights. Sylvanas (roughly 14 minutes on Mythic) is the only fight long enough for this bonus to do anything, but it has lots of downtime. That zeroes this bonus’ value. Brew cooldown reduction is not a good bonus when it’s doled out in small amounts. When it’s provided en masse, as with Necrolord’s
Bonedust Brew, you get enough to compensate for its inefficiency.
Anyone with even a passing familiarity with World of Warcraft should know that you don’t just hit all of your defensive cooldowns the second they are available. There are times where you need to use a cooldown instantly upon it coming back up, but that’s relatively uncommon. Typically, you hold them to counteract a specific boss attack. Because of that, there likely isn’t a situation where this bonus would ever add even one
Celestial Brew cast, even if a fight took hours to complete. You would just wind up wasting the Brew cooldown reduction every time. There’s absolutely nothing redeemable about the 4-piece bonus. I don’t think there’s a shred of an idea that’s good here. Even better, if you are using
Charred Passions, you don’t cast
Tiger Palm, so this bonus offers literally nothing. I’ve seen suggestions of making it work with
Keg Smash, which would bring the amount of time required to get an extra
Celestial Brew down to 4 minutes. Again, this still offers virtually nothing, for all the reasons I laid out before. You’re just not going to spam CD’s the moment they come up.
Finally, just to dunk on this tier set’s corpse, this is the only tank tier set that doesn’t add any damage value at all. It’s all defense, except it doesn’t even add defense. If they try to re-tune this bonus to make it worth using, that will not succeed. The design is the problem. There’s nothing here worth saving. A complete redesign is the only hope. If that doesn’t occur, the lack of a bonus will seriously hurt Monk’s value in the next raid tier and Mythic+ season. You can still expect to see Monk get played in progression raiding due to high-end guilds assuming they won’t be guaranteed tier bonuses, and Monk is tanky enough that it doesn’t need any kind of tier set to be able to stay alive. When it comes to farm raiding, raid progression for guilds that aren’t in the world-first race, and pushing Mythic+ as the season progresses, I think Monk will be one of the least-popular tanks. In conclusion, I know this comes across extremely negative, but I’m actually very happy with the state of Patch 9.2 in virtually every single thing I have seen except the Monk Tier bonuses. Blizzard has done a pretty good/excellent job with the other tank tier sets. This one just completely fell flat, and being polite/dishonest about how absolutely dreadful it is won’t get it redesigned, and that’s what it needs. At this point, I would explicitly recommend not wearing the 4-piece, even if it’s available, for the same reason I wouldn’t recommend enchanting your bracers with Intellect. It doesn’t do anything. Better-itemized non-set pieces will provide more value.
For Mistweaver Monk, the initial set bonuses are
Grandiose Font for 2pc and
Tea of the Grand Upwelling for the 4pc. The 2pc will extend the HoT applied by
Essence Font by an additional 2 seconds. This means the HoT will last 10 seconds instead of 8 second baseline. The 4pc will trigger a zone that will last 10 seconds under your character whenever you press
Thunder Focus Tea. By standing in that rune, your healing spells will be increased by an amount. One note, the current value of this looks to be a placeholder. This ability, based on the wording and some datamining seems to function like a Mage's
Rune of Power.
Speaking of the 2 pc first, this is a very middling set bonus. It will equate to potentially one extra trigger from a
Mastery: Gust of Mists proccing spell like
Vivify or
Renewing Mist. Also, just 1 additional full tick of the HoT. This is minor at best, even if you combine it with
Rising Mist and extend the HoT by an additional 4 seconds, still does not make this set bonus any more powerful. This won't materially change the way you play Mistweaver and generally will be a nice, minor bonus.
The 4pc has the potential to be both very strong, but also require some thought to use properly. Based on the tooltip reading, the rune is triggered when you press
Thunder Focus Tea, before you consume the charge. With the rune stationary, you have to ensure that you can stand within your rune for the full 10 seconds that it is active. Also, with
Thunder Focus Tea being something you want to cast every 30 seconds, on cooldown, you will need to identify when you can safely use
Thunder Focus Tea and be able to stand relatively still for the next 10 seconds. If you can though, the initial view looks great. The increasing in healing is very good and this will be a set bonus you want to target and collect as soon as you can. The nice part of both the duration and trigger spell is that
Thunder Focus Tea has a relatively short cooldown, and with a 10 second duration, you should be able to make the most of this in any content.
The initial set bonuses are basically polar opposites in terms of both power and gameplay changes. The 2pc is a passive bonus, that offers a negligible increase in healing, and provides zero gameplay changes or impacts. The 4pc is much different. This is essentially an on demand healing increase on a low cooldown, that does have some restrictions in terms of use. This will change the way you view and use
Thunder Focus Tea and based on the current numbers, will provide a solid healing increase if you can make use of it. I would suggest some sort of 2pc bonus that plays better with the 4pc and they build on each out. The 4pc currently is an interesting new gameplay change for Mistweavers and does actually provide a meaningful healing increase.
Like the other specs, Windwalker Monks got a chance to see the first shot at our tier sets for 9.2.
These tier sets have been rather polarizing in our discussions, but they are unlikely to be polarizing once we are able to test them. This is primarily the case with the 4pc bonus, as the 2pc bonus is relatively simple. The 2pc bonus is a flat buff to
Fists of Fury that we've seen in past expansions in a variety of forms. It seems to be a common theme that
Fists of Fury needs a sizable buff throughout an expansion. In Battle for Azeroth it was
Open Palm Strikes and in Legion it was
Transfer the Power. Through some quick maths this should work out to anywhere from a 2.5% to 5% increase in damage depending on the fight and how often you use
Fists of Fury. Putting more damage into
Fists of Fury may have an effect on when, or if, we cancel
Fists of Fury during
Weapons of Order or if we continue to ignore it during
Bonedust Brew. Whether or not this happens will come once we get closer to 9.2 and the numbers seem more final.
The 4pc bonus is what has been really polarizing. To some it seems like a minor nuisance that will be something the best players get a TON of use out of and many others will lose damage chasing. To others its a ridiculous thing to get added to a spec that already has more things to track and consider than most specs. How strong or difficult to use comes down to how it is implemented, and we won't know that until we can get into it and test it. There are a few questions that we need answered:
- What does “offensive abilities” mean? Does it include abilities that trigger Mastery but don’t deal damage like Weapons of Order and Bonedust Brew?
Does the 10 count start as soon as you hit the previous 10? Or does it only start after you use the buffed 3 abilities? - Is there a time frame before the 22% buff wears off?
- Are we going to be stuck stacking it up before combat or will it reset?
22% more damage is a LOT more damage, especially if we can make those 3 offensive abilities
Rising Sun Kick,
Whirling Dragon Punch,
Fists of Fury, or a fully buffed
Spinning Crane Kick. However, it is difficult to say whether that will be automatic, just something that happens and we don't worry about it, or something that we'll change our entire playstyle around maximizing, such as throwing in less important abilities, or even non-DPS abilities that are considered "offensive", to hit the 10 so we can use the 3 on the larger spells. If the latter is the case, it will massively change how Windwalker plays, and not into a very fun version. So we'll just have to cross our fingers and hope that isn't the case.