The Brewmaster Tanking Guide [5.4]

[Dimzum]

You don't need to exp hard cap. You can use the extra points in better places at that gear level.

I'd argue you'd want it. That's 7500ish points that didn't get reduced with the squish. It's still added dps, probably even more than crit/haste.

[BrioWoW]

I'm rusty with BrM tanking and our dps is good, so I wanted to try an EH build for my group at least until I am as familiar with BrM as I am with WW and since I seem to have been pushed into a full time tank position. I am using AMR and the effective health build has me putting stam everywhere. While, yes, it's kind of a "Duh!" thing, considering it's effective HEALTH, it just kind of worries me a little to be putting such an emphasis on stam alone. Is stam better than mastery for gemming, for instance? That is, unless you have to specifically handle magic damage.

[Promdates]

Stamina does provide EH, but I wouldn't worry about gemming for stamina unless you're considerably lower ilvl compared to where you're tanking (i.e. you're 540 ilvl tanking 25H, maybe stamina could be more beneficial to give you a large hp to take the spikes.)

[BrioWoW]

Yeah, in this thread http://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/...er-tanks/page3

I was asking about going to EH build to help the healers since I am not as familiar with BrM as I am with WW. I guess worst is I try it out and we find out I don't need as much EH.

[Promdates]

Do you have an armory to look at, what's your progression level, ilvl, gear options, etc. There's a lot more to it than just "do I use mastery, stamina, or crit?"

[Pazx]

it's been awhile since i've read up on anything and i was wondering if someone could refresh my memory for DW crit cap and 2H crit.

[Leblue]

Your cap will be
103% - (your hit % - 26.5%) - (your expertise % - 15%) - 24% = DW crit softcap (60% at 7.5% hit and 15% expertise)
103% - (your hit % - 7.5%) - (your expertise % - 15%) - 24% = 2H crit cap (79% at 7.5% hit and 15% expertise)

Keep in mind your yellow hits don't cap out at the DW soft cap that's when your white hits will no longer increase in their chance to crit (meaning it won't increase your elusive brew generation rate). Keep in mind all hit greater than 7.5% while dual wielding will increase your white hit crit cap up until you hit the dual wielding hit cap (which is really silly to go to anyway).

[Deleted]

Hey guys, do any of you remember with how much mastery you went with during Garrosh progression (on normal?) my guild just started on him and he seems to be the first boss to really hit hard. I've tried investing a bit more than what I usually do and went to about 10k (raid buffed). Is it simply a healer issue with my guild (we have a fairly weak disc priest) or am I being bad for still sticking (somewhat) to crit?

[Orion Antares]

I'd argue you'd want it. That's 7500ish points that didn't get reduced with the squish. It's still added dps, probably even more than crit/haste.

They aren't reduced but the points are pulled from your other secondary stats to make that happen which reduces your other secondaries even more.

[Pazx]

Your cap will be
103% - (your hit % - 26.5%) - (your expertise % - 15%) - 24% = DW crit softcap (60% at 7.5% hit and 15% expertise)
103% - (your hit % - 7.5%) - (your expertise % - 15%) - 24% = 2H crit cap (79% at 7.5% hit and 15% expertise)

Keep in mind your yellow hits don't cap out at the DW soft cap that's when your white hits will no longer increase in their chance to crit (meaning it won't increase your elusive brew generation rate). Keep in mind all hit greater than 7.5% while dual wielding will increase your white hit crit cap up until you hit the dual wielding hit cap (which is really silly to go to anyway).

Thanks for all that

[Leblue]

Hey guys, do any of you remember with how much mastery you went with during Garrosh progression (on normal?) my guild just started on him and he seems to be the first boss to really hit hard. I've tried investing a bit more than what I usually do and went to about 10k (raid buffed). Is it simply a healer issue with my guild (we have a fairly weak disc priest) or am I being bad for still sticking (somewhat) to crit?

I couldn't tell you the exact rating but I want to say I was at about 55% stagger (so 15% mastery?) Starting at about Thok I've pretty much rocked a mastery build though so it may/may not have been higher. I also got TED on our first week and my second trinket was a H TF Bad Juju (yay almost 2k mastery from that). If your healer is weaker concerning tank healing you may want to consider a heavier mastery build to make yourself more self sufficient. To counter this you may also want to invest a little bit more haste to give you a bit more leeway in purifying (more mastery means larger staggers more often). Garrosh hits really hard and its kind of a wake up call after all of the other bosses (only boss that hits about as hard is solo tanking Thok imo). That said, a lot of the earlier heroic bosses don't even hit as hard as him either.

Thanks for all that

Not a problem, thanks to Madgod for correcting me when I screwed up crit stuff. Figured I'd pass it on :P

[Deleted]

I couldn't tell you the exact rating but I want to say I was at about 55% stagger (so 15% mastery?) Starting at about Thok I've pretty much rocked a mastery build though so it may/may not have been higher. I also got TED on our first week and my second trinket was a H TF Bad Juju (yay almost 2k mastery from that). If your healer is weaker concerning tank healing you may want to consider a heavier mastery build to make yourself more self sufficient. To counter this you may also want to invest a little bit more haste to give you a bit more leeway in purifying (more mastery means larger staggers more often). Garrosh hits really hard and its kind of a wake up call after all of the other bosses (only boss that hits about as hard is solo tanking Thok imo). That said, a lot of the earlier heroic bosses don't even hit as hard as him either.

I see, that makes sense. We didn't have any problems with healing and tank damage until Garrosh either, so I was pretty much going full crit. I heard multiple times about how hard Garrosh hits, so I upped my mastery to 12% (I have no TED or other Mastery trinkets @549 ilvl) but I also severely cut back on my haste to allow a heavier mastery build. I was finding myself in red stagger almost every other melee hit, I'm sure if I had 4pc I would have healed myself for a lot there. I will try to get mastery off crit for next time and just hope the DPS do some more damage on our next attempts. Thanks for the insight!

[Promdates]

Hey guys, do any of you remember with how much mastery you went with during Garrosh progression (on normal?) my guild just started on him and he seems to be the first boss to really hit hard. I've tried investing a bit more than what I usually do and went to about 10k (raid buffed). Is it simply a healer issue with my guild (we have a fairly weak disc priest) or am I being bad for still sticking (somewhat) to crit?

I'm pretty sure I was still using a RoRo/TED combo at that point, so I had somewhat of a balanced kit. So I was probably around 10-11k mastery at the time. I also tank both Garrosh and all the adds, so having more was somewhat helpful.

[LuisKA]

hmm so decided to grab 9/9 gold on my monk aswell since you never know what will happen with em next expansion. whats the gearing strat? go full out critt or mastery? since we are lazy and just want smooth gold runs and not trying to get awesome times, so taken smoothness into account, how spiky am i with full critt, or full mastery? is there any difference

Ignore mastery, you will have so low haste levels that purifying all of it is not going to be reasonable. And stagger will destroy you if you have to kite chi starved. You will already have high staggers without going into it. Survival in CMs is all about CD management and stuns, not hard tanking stuff.

The general strat is soft cap accuracy (7.5/7.5) > crit > haste. More exp is only going to help with bosses, and if you are not going for heavy aggressive strategies to game vengeance on bosses, it will be more of a dps loss overall. Your typical boss damage with regular vengeance is far lower than dps damage.

I highly recommend a haste proc trinket to avoid energy starving (Windswept pages, Talisman of bloodlust).

[Sunnydee]

Ignore mastery, you will have so low haste levels that purifying all of it is not going to be reasonable. And stagger will destroy you if you have to kite chi starved. You will already have high staggers without going into it. Survival in CMs is all about CD management and stuns, not hard tanking stuff.

The general strat is soft cap accuracy (7.5/7.5) > crit > haste. More exp is only going to help with bosses, and if you are not going for heavy aggressive strategies to game vengeance on bosses, it will be more of a dps loss overall. Your typical boss damage with regular vengeance is far lower than dps damage.

I highly recommend a haste proc trinket to avoid energy starving (Windswept pages, Talisman of bloodlust).

well i did 2 gold last night (2 tries on each before hitting gold). went with hardcap expertise>haste>mastery>critt. felt like they nerfed the hell out of some stuff but im prob wrong on that hehe.

wasnt really any issues since we arent chasing top times, only gold. but i guess i can prob dump some mastery into more haste since my dmg intake wasnt that bad when it was at the places i didnt need to use cds.

But i gotta admit... CMs as Brewmaster is hell of alot of fun compared to doing them as blood dk

[Ergar]

Can anyone give me a semi-decent cooldown rotation for solotanking malkorok hc's bloodrage? I got the hc wf stamina trinket from protectors, so that can be included aswell.

[SurrealNight]

I use Rook's + the CD red trinket as we tend to get two BR phases still. So you'll have to supplement the 2nd BR with some externals if you don't have both.
1) Fort Brew (last entire phase) + Zen Med.
2) Rook's after Zen Med (will last rest of phase).
3) Dampen Harm.
4) Guard after DH stacks gone.
Purify each hit (you saved 5 chi right?) and you should be fine. The above pushes me through 25m BR damage no problem.

[Promdates]

Are you doing 10s or 25? Because that will make a rather large difference. This is what Blood Rage will hit for with 4k mastery:

10H 1st - 782k
10H 2nd - 978k
25H 1st - 2.1m
25H 2nd - 2.7m

So there's a huge difference. I personally had to get Vigilance, Hand of Sacrafice, Pain Suppression, Ironbark and stack mastery to 20% buffed to survive when we were first doing it on 25H. Once I picked up the HWF Vial, I just use Fort Brew and PS with about 17-18% mastery. Blood Rage happens too often to have both Fort brew and Zen med up for both.

[Ergar]

Im doing 10man hc. Only got 3 tries this night, since it was like 20mins before the raid ended when we got to him. Got to the bloodrage phase once, and i just used zed med for the first 8 seconds, then just popped fort brew + rook trinket. My health bounced a little, but it wasnt too bad. And yeah i was purifying after each hit.

[britishbubba]

Can anyone give me a semi-decent cooldown rotation for solotanking malkorok hc's bloodrage? I got the hc wf stamina trinket from protectors, so that can be included aswell.

If you're 10m? I use the Cooldown trinket so that FB and Zen Med are up for both things, then I just Zen Med the first 8 seconds of his cleave, Dampen harm the next 3 swings, then Fort Brew through the rest of it. Hit guard when your vengeance gets high. If it's 25m I can't help you much... would assume you'd just want to throw some externals in there.

I tried using the Protectors trinket but I personally think the Malk one is better as it lets your CDs be up for both blood rages. The dmg reduc on Rook's is too over the top for 10m.