The Brewmaster Tanking Guide [5.4]

[sleepness]

I got bored while I had the day off work and decided to regem/reforge to hit 15% exp, as I had quite a few things to play around with after picking up the 1500 hit trinket from shado pan friendly, and honestly, even though I know it's recommended against in this thread, it just felt smoother overall. I may lose a couple percent exp to get more crit but otherwise I think this tier once I start getting more 520+ pieces, hard cap exp will be not bad to maintain.

[SurrealNight]

IMO, crit's amazing for Tortos. Always had a good 8-10 stack of elusive brew for his snapping bite. I literally took less than 3mil damage the entire fight from snapping bite. My highest damage taken to me was stagger from staggering all those snapping bite.

Will be working on Tortos tonight, guild got there last night but I couldn't make raid. Probably cut back some haste before the raid there doesn't seem to be any fights like the ones I kept extra haste for so far in ToT that I'll be working on atm. Seems like we would be really good at exploding the bats though too since our AoE damage is so high.

So, as a maintank offspecing as DPS in our raids, I'm not really sure how to move forward with the changed stat weights for Windwalker.

Outside of the haste issues the only thing I did special for my WW spec is use Agil hybrid gems in my Red and Blue sockets, in 5.2 we can push Crit even harder so the gap should close even more now between the spec's. If you have a fight you run WW and are wiping to enrage timers then maybe look into optimizing just for WW.

I have been using Askmrrobot to reforge etc but from reading the forums I'm under the impression this is not the right thing to do for a BrM. I have checked AMR since the patch and it is now telling me to stack more haste etc so I'm thinking that maybe they've adjusted the weights to go the way most people think BrM should.

http://www.askmrrobot.com/wow/gear/usa/stormrage/rikimu
- Removed the after soft cap weight from expertise.
- Set haste cap to 0.25 resulting in ~5800 haste.

I'm rolling with a few Stam enchants right now until I get an idea how hard the ToT 25m bosses hit.

[Kisho]

What do you guys think of the Tiger Stance dmg reduction? I know someone did the math, and figured out that DPSing even without KS in Tiger Stance is better than DPSing in Ox Stance with KS; Is that still the case, how much has the gap closened? Is Tiger Stance still better?

The gap wasn't much in the first place, so I'd suspect it's not worth swapping to tiger stance now at any point.

[Bryce]

Will be working on Tortos tonight, guild got there last night but I couldn't make raid. Probably cut back some haste before the raid there doesn't seem to be any fights like the ones I kept extra haste for so far in ToT that I'll be working on atm. Seems like we would be really good at exploding the bats though too since our AoE damage is so high.

The only reason I opted not to do the bats was because we had a DK as well. He had more room health wise to not get taken to the 350k threshold where the bats start draining life, etc on the tank. I would be fine on them, but when the stuns would come out, it was basically game over even with everything up and there was no time for healers to really get me back over the 350k mark.

[SurrealNight]

With the stam gear I'm wearing right now it will put me at 625k HP but our warrior could easily leap back and pick up the bats as well I guess, idea of being surrounded by them with stuns going out isn't that thrilling. Sounds like we are very strong vs his tank targeted attack due to EB as well.

[sleepness]

The only reason I opted not to do the bats was because we had a DK as well. He had more room health wise to not get taken to the 350k threshold where the bats start draining life, etc on the tank. I would be fine on them, but when the stuns would come out, it was basically game over even with everything up and there was no time for healers to really get me back over the 350k mark.

We moved me to the bats after our warrior was having difficulty picking them all up, and it went pretty well. They should die quickly enough for you to get close to full eb stacks and have enough vengeance from all the aoe damage going out that after your stun, combined with guard they usually are dead to the point of me not taking any damage.

[Bryce]

I had an easier time picking em up and I was fine until quake went out. That's when I basically said fuck it and went to boss lol.

[Deleted]

Could you guys help a fellow Brewmaster out a bit? I'm having tons of problems on Horridon, especially when tanking the boss itself. Taking 300k hits (about 100k of which is absorbed) is basically the standard for me there. Any idea how to better handle it?

Armory here: http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/characte.../Quanji/simple
Should have logs of this night's tries in a bit.

[Deleted]

Could you guys help a fellow Brewmaster out a bit? I'm having tons of problems on Horridon, especially when tanking the boss itself. Taking 300k hits (about 100k of which is absorbed) is basically the standard for me there. Any idea how to better handle it?

Armory here: http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/characte.../Quanji/simple
Should have logs of this night's tries in a bit.

Wouldn't say I'm having tons of problems but he sure is smacking me around a bit after transitions when I take over tanking him, so I'd also like to know what we can do to soften the blow a bit. I'm saving Fortifying Brew for about 4 stacks and Dampen Harm for 5-6, but the first 3 I'm counting on my healers and a well placed Expel Harm.

Also, going to dial back the Haste a bit as I don't need quite as much now that Chi Wave is free, for those of you I talked to before

[krykiett]

Hey guys,

Hope everyone is enjoying the patch!

Just curious what the best way to determine upgrades/make a wishlist would be? AMR, Wowhead?

I'm also curious how you figure out how to determine stat weights and apply them AMR or on Wowhead item compare.

Thanks!

[SurrealNight]

Just curious what the best way to determine upgrades/make a wishlist would be? AMR, Wowhead?

AMR works out pretty good with the updated weights ran my BiS list through it today and was happy with the results.

Magaera: I glyph'd Guard and used Zen Sphere for this fight, was going to switch to diffuse magic too but we killed it in only a few tries. The fire head's breath is just brutal.

[Deleted]

Hey Guys,

since 5.2 i switched to my monk for ToT but ... it feels like I lost some skill regarding BrM.
I get the feeling that I take a lot more DMG compared to 5.1.
Could be due to false reforging/gemming.
If anyone has some advice to share feel free to throw your critism at me (even PM are welcome)

Log: http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/n833ckns17dtpmm7/

Arsenal is in the signature.

[krykiett]

AMR works out pretty good with the updated weights ran my BiS list through it today and was happy with the results.
.

It terms of stat weights, it seems that it values haste extremely high and it's pushing the expertise hard cap. I am not 100% how to edit these values.

Edit: Also does AMR have a decent BiS list for 10M normal? I haven't used it in ages and I don't know if I trust it /shiftyeyes

Edit x2: When I do BiS with my 10M normal settings, why would it give me two different weapons instead of utilizing the same weapon that takes advantage of my specialties for expertise?

[cyqu]

I was just providing a high level view. If those are the curves you suggest, the general theme is the same: mastery builds will take more damage overall but spike less, and therefore at progression levels where the top spikes and your EH are perilously close together, will end up surviving more. For what it's worth, on PTR, our gear was scaled up to ilvl 530 (It may have been 527? Regardless, still higher than what I expect we'll actually encounter them on live at) when we were testing the heroic modes of the last 3 encounters and tanks were still getting trucked. I mean obviously, if you have a tier's worth of gear on top of what you should have when you're hitting those bosses up, then of course that EH bar is high enough that you can not care what build you're going. When you're progressing though, you'll often find that you're bumping up against that EH bar more often than not.



I don't disagree. Having evaluated where the red line should be, my brewmaster (who is -still- half a tier's gear behind the top brewmasters - stupid valor upgrade system *grumble*) is ranked like top 30 on every fight this tier. My healers still say they have their trigger fingers on their flash heal every time I taunt though, and getting "monk'd" is now a catchphrase in my guild :P

I can't totally agree with the "appropriately geared = no mastery needed" statement though. It seems like a design flaw that a tank at appropriate gear levels doesn't die when they prioritize nothing for mitigation. I agree when you're overgearing a fight that none is needed, but then again I guess our definitions of appropriately geared and overgeared do not merge. (For me, appropriately geared = roughly 15-20 ilvls lower than what your current target drops.)

I'm merely defending my decision to go full mastery for unknown encounters.

Sorry but if your getting "monked" your doing it wrong obviously. Being in a 25m guild doing progression might give you some sort of excuse to say mastery is a good stat to stack, but saying its because you get monked when you taunt is ridiculous.

[DesireKT]

I started tanking the boss on Tortos and kept getting agro on the bats as well and there was nothing my DK could do to take them off of me. It MIGHT be possible to solo tank it, but during the falling rocks things got really sketchy and I usually died after 1-2 cave in's. So we switch and he got to play ezmode boss tanking and in the end I was getting face rolled during the stun, to which I manage to find a pretty decent rotation to survive perfectly fine and rarely dipped below the HP mark.

Build 25-30 seconds of shuffle prior to the bats spawn and use Zen Sphere on yourself (at least thats what I've used after such weak healing from my chi wave) grab healing spheres and use EH (assuming you'll heal yourself) as the bats are spawning and I generally had agro over healers as they landed. If not I used SCK to gather them off the healers as they were hitting the ground (NOT KS!) and then drag them up towards the boss. I had to yell at our raid not to cc them or slow them otherwise it would take a while to get grouped up and in position (hence no KS slow). I generally had Good EB stacks to roll during that whole section and I would save my Leg Sweep for right before every raid stun. In the end we started killing them fast enough that they weren't up during the stuns so I switched to stunning them about 15 seconds before the raid stun then using Guard right as it falls.

In short for bats
25s Shuffle
Gather adds
Elusive Brew
KS -> Fire Breath
SCK ETC
Leg Sweep
Guard
Elusive Brew
SCK ETC
Dead

[SurrealNight]

It terms of stat weights, it seems that it values haste extremely high and it's pushing the expertise hard cap. I am not 100% how to edit these values.

Edit: Also does AMR have a decent BiS list for 10M normal? I haven't used it in ages and I don't know if I trust it /shiftyeyes

Edit x2: When I do BiS with my 10M normal settings, why would it give me two different weapons instead of utilizing the same weapon that takes advantage of my specialties for expertise?

You need to delete the soft cap weight for Expertise and put in a hard cap for Haste (0.25 will result in ~5800 haste).

Under the options you can select what tier is available for you so for me I marked T14 for heroic and T15 for normal. I assume that the benefits of that weapon are rated higher even without expertise or there just isn't a valid option in it's place.

[krykiett]

You need to delete the soft cap weight for Expertise and put in a hard cap for Haste (0.25 will result in ~5800 haste).

Under the options you can select what tier is available for you so for me I marked T14 for heroic and T15 for normal. I assume that the benefits of that weapon are rated higher even without expertise or there just isn't a valid option in it's place.

+internets for you!

I think I got it so that it will work out for me. I appreciate your assistance!

[Brian23]

So what T30 is everyone running now? I'm hearing Zen Sphere is supposed to be pretty solid?

[Deleted]

Tried the first 4 Bosses with Chi Wave and Switcht for Megara at first to Zen Sphere and after a few tries to Chi Burst, in the last transitions Chi Burst healed everybody by about 150-250k and thats quite a nice catchup for the healers in my opinion.

Normaly i ran with Chi Wave.

[NeitherDoI]

About the Tortos fight, don't forget the new timer we receive that can dispel stun. Combined with a well placed guard / ae stun, BrM are really good to handle the last remaining bats before the big stun occurs.