The Brewmaster Tanking Guide [5.4]

[SurrealNight]

Erm look at the logs i posted, 48.7% of my damage taken is from melee hits.. so you really shouldn't be using glyphed guard, just use zen meditation/ other raid CDs to reduce the magic damage.

Where in this tier can you actually use Zen Meditation? Since it breaks on melee dmg and is channeled it just seems almost useless.

[The Madgod]

Where in this tier can you actually use Zen Meditation? Since it breaks on melee dmg and is channeled it just seems almost useless.

Feng the Accursed when not actively taking to mitigate the massive AoE damage abilities of all three phases (normal mode, at the least).

Elegon for when the add explodes.

Gara'jal when not actively tanking and when the spirit guys are a bit too populous.

And those are simply the ones I've seen.

[Hinalover]

Well I am tanking 2 adds on Stone Guard heroic. I got murked tonight big time. Even keeping proper buffs up. I expended our healer CD's 2 minutes in.

I feel 2 things are happening here

1 - You gem for Exp/Hit Haste reforge for it etc and gimp your HP to a point where melee attacks even with buffs up from shuffle Purifying brew can't help you.

2 - Mastery.stamina gemming or agi/stam - haste/stamina but then your haste is low energy regen is sucks

I am at a loss seeing so many Brewmasters gem/reforce/gear differently that its giving me headaches honestly. lol

Are you using the Glyph of Stoneskin? I admit it's only for a short period of time every 3 minutes but it could help on this fight. And what I would suggest is you be the one who is only tanking 1 dog and when you need to take 2, to use Fortifying Brew every other.

[Deleted]

Where in this tier can you actually use Zen Meditation? Since it breaks on melee dmg and is channeled it just seems almost useless.

Are you honestly saying you haven't used it?!

As Madgod has said where you can use them, i have to say i can use them on most fights apart from fights where im always tanking and thats only really 3 fights or so.

[Thoranar]

After tanking 2/6 HM I can honestly say that Monk EH is undervalued. Here is what I observed:

Stone guard:
Great fight for using the standard hit>exp>haste>crit. I was able to let my gifts stack around and use them when I was tanking two dogs. I also let me elusive brew stack high when I was tanking one dog, and then pop it on two. This allowed me to have a full 15 stack nearly everytime. I used agility shoulder, leg, and wrist enchants(LW) as well as the Darkmoon agility trinket and engineering trinket with haste crit and hit.

Feng:

Holy crap this guy hits hard. This guy changes the gameplan for monks and is a fight where I eventually took my monk out and replace with a warrior. I was the lead off tank and also using the barrier buff. Right off the bat I knew I was in trouble when I would channel the barrier and my shuffle would drop. This meant that the OT had to hold the boss longer for a possible 3 debuf stack while I built up some chi. Then when I did take the boss back, I was getting hit for 150-200k melee hits followed by 100k debuff ticks. This meant that I had to use purify brew more and again found it difficult to maintain shuffle and guard. This kind of damage is normal for tanks, however monks just do not have the defensive cooldowns to be able to manage the hits. I finally replaced my shoulder, leg, and wrist enchants for Stam, and replaced the engineering trinket for a Stam trinket. At 550k health , the healers had a better time but it was still not manageable. I finally replaced my monk with my warrior and we eventually got a kill.

For this fight, I would suggest a heavy mastery/Stam build as well as on use defensive cd trinkets such as the dodge darkmoon card during progression. I would also suggest NOT being the barrier tank. Being the OT would allow us to attack from behind, meaning we can reforge out exp to mastery/haste/crit and still maintain a high shuffle and elusive brew uptime. Lastly, because of our stat weights and the fact that the debuffs you're "stealing" and using on the boss scale with AP(hint vengeance), Brewmasters should be able to parse very high on this. I was not able to try out being the OT.

[SurrealNight]

Are you honestly saying you haven't used it?!

I've only done LFR where the only requirement is "don't be AFK" =P Will keep those spots in mind for this weekend. I guess Stoneguard is really the only one that has 100% tanking time.

Just wish it had more use while your actually tanking but guess we already have our 3min CD for that and Blizz just gave it as raid utility. Does Avert Harm effect stack if you use it before the ZM channel?

[towelliee]

After tanking 2/6 HM I can honestly say that Monk EH is undervalued. Here is what I observed:

Stone guard:
Great fight for using the standard hit>exp>haste>crit. I was able to let my gifts stack around and use them when I was tanking two dogs. I also let me elusive brew stack high when I was tanking one dog, and then pop it on two. This allowed me to have a full 15 stack nearly everytime. I used agility shoulder, leg, and wrist enchants(LW) as well as the Darkmoon agility trinket and engineering trinket with haste crit and hit.

That is so weird Thor I would have figured for this fight Stam/mastery would shine. Maybe because I was taking 2 dogs the entire fight I felt like having a stamina/mastery build was acceptable. Expertise hard cap is insane. I guess we have to see how my guild uses me for tonight or we adjust the strategy for the fight. Cause no matter what build I used I was getting slammmeeeeddd.

[Thoranar]

That is so weird Thor I would have figured for this fight Stam/mastery would shine. Maybe because I was taking 2 dogs the entire fight I felt like having a stamina/mastery build was acceptable. Expertise hard cap is insane. I guess we have to see how my guild uses me for tonight or we adjust the strategy for the fight. Cause no matter what build I used I was getting slammmeeeeddd.

You really can't go wrong with Stam stacking on this fight, but since the bulk of the damage is coming from rend flesh I wanted to make sure I had plenty of gifts on hand. This is why I kept the same stat weights. Bring extra shoulder/leg enchants and switch as needed. Also be sure your paladins are specced for Hand of purity. It's a lifesaver.

Some other helpful tips:
Expel Harm is amazing here, use it on CD for the most part, but for sure after an explosion.
Guard can be used to mitigate a lot of rend flesh damage and is what I used it for.
Make sure you are attacking the correct dog when you have two, one takes more damage than the other. This will maximize your statue guards.

Edit:

I'll have to check my logs later, but I'm not sure if Stagger even mitigates the rend flesh bleed damage which would make mastery even worse for this fight. Maybe someone else can confirm this.

[lanerios]

Something I don't get.

Everywhere here on the forum I see "If the tank doesn't have a shuffle uptime of 100% he sucks and should go diaf" or at least close to that.

I just specced tank for the guild, but I keep noticing that on larger group pulls I just can't do that. I am to busy handling AOE thret, to also keep reapplying some 6 second buff that lasts obviously for way to short. If I want to do that, I have to use most of my chii to actually keep that up.

What's up with this? ><

[SurrealNight]

I'll have to check my logs later, but I'm not sure if Stagger even mitigates the rend flesh bleed damage which would make mastery even worse for this fight. Maybe someone else can confirm this.

It's really hard to tell looking at the logs from one of the other posts. Rend doesn't happen more often than once a Guard cycle so I can't be positive if the absorb's are coming from Guard or Shuffle.

1) [20:42:15.734] Amethyst Guardian Rend Flesh Tankingchi 24300 (A: 9450) - 100% of Rend's had an absorb factor that ranged from absorbing 28% (9450) to 100% (33750).
2) Total absorb for Guard was about 4 mil, total damage absorbed from rend was over 6 mil so it's impossible for Guard to account for 100% of the damage absorbed.

Based on the above it seems to get soaked unless I'm missing something that would result in at least a 9450 absorb each time.

[Thoranar]

Something I don't get.

Everywhere here on the forum I see "If the tank doesn't have a shuffle uptime of 100% he sucks and should go diaf" or at least close to that.

I just specced tank for the guild, but I keep noticing that on larger group pulls I just can't do that. I am to busy handling AOE thret, to also keep reapplying some 6 second buff that lasts obviously for way to short. If I want to do that, I have to use most of my chii to actually keep that up.

What's up with this? ><

I strive for 80% uptime, my highest so far in heroic progression was 78%. Like yoy said, If you're maintaining 100% uptime that means you're not doing something else that might be more beneficial, such as a chi wave or zen sphere explosion to help out raid healing, or using zen meditation, or holding onto your chi for a fully powered guard right before a big hit (elegon, feng, will)

Another way of thinking about shuffle is how a deathknight thinks of death strike. The majority of DKs use it on cooldowns. The top 5% in the world time their strikes to match incoming dmg to maximize self healing, which means leaving runes unused for the right moment.

Brewmasters have a high skill cap, spamming blackout kick for 100% uptime will get you through heroics, LFR, and even normals once you get gear. If youre doing HMs, it takes proper timing and planning.

[Deleted]

So we was doing heroics so im thought was people were saying that stamina was helping etc so i decided to buy the DMC stam trinket and reforge/ re-gem etc so i was only at the hit and expertise soft cap and went into a bit of crit..

Without the haste it did my head in trying to keep shuffle up, i had HORRIBLE up time on it and seemed to have even more energy problems. The extra like 80k hp didn't seem to be that much and i would take a truck load of damage without shuffle up etc so personally i think im just going back into the expertise hard cap and haste.

[Deleted]

I went pretty much 7.5% hit and expertise, and then mass haste, landed at about 15% haste or so, 22% crit, and barely any mastery nor dodge. I was tanking 2 dogs for all of Stone Guard (unfortunately didn't get him down, but it was really close - going down tomorrow for sure), because we found out that I was much easier to heal than our DK (who, just for the record, does nothing wrong) - I was taking less damage while tanking 2 dogs, and I had a rather high uptime on Elusive Brew I felt, and I wasn't really dropping too much, wipes were not because of tank deaths. I was worried when people said that they were getting their faces smashed in on heroic modes, but I didn't feel any of that today on SG HC.

[Deleted]

Hey,

you should have a look in your logs. You will see that a large amount of the damage comes from the Add explosions and his total annihilation at the end. What I did was glyphing Guard and taking diffuse magic. So I put shield up when the add starts exploding and if I wanted i still had a 90% magic reduction in the bakchand if i needed. it.

With this I had absolutely no problem of dying

try it.

You should not glyph Guard (not in that fight, probably not anywhere) at the moment. It causes your Ox statue to bug out and not cast Guards on raidmembers.
A mere 10% more magic absorb doesn't offset the fact that your raid misses multiple 200k shields.

[Deleted]

You should not glyph Guard (not in that fight, probably not anywhere) at the moment. It causes your Ox statue to bug out and not cast Guards on raidmembers.
A mere 10% more magic absorb doesn't offset the fact that your raid misses multiple 200k shields.

So what ? even if the statue buggs... the shields which it would give are completely useless since they do not absorb the magic damage in the encounter...

sorry but for me it just went perfect with glyphed guard ..

Btw. Thoranar did you have a look in your logs? I am interested to know if the rend dot can be staggered

[Flutterguy]

I consider a lot of the short buffs like a dance you gotta weave through. Those that expect you to just spam blackout kick don't understand the class spec.

Awesome guide, btw. I was still fuzzy on what stats to put my weight behind. Now I got a better understanding and some confirmation on what I already understood.

One question, though...Is there a viability difference between 2h and DW1H for tanking?

[Deleted]

As sometimes stated here, DW can even out procs (Elu Brew / GotO) because of the faster attack speed, but it shouldn't be a really big difference. I personally use 2H, mostly because our raid has two ele shaman and no feral / guardian druid and no other WW/BrM so far, so I'm the only one getting the 2H agi weapons. Though it's only my second spec, so I'm not really familiar / good at it.
And a question for the better tanks here: What's your opinion on shuffle uptime vs heal? I only tanked 10 man so far (25 man raids were starting yesterday and we've got enough tanks for that), and it seemed to me that Chi Burst or Zen Sphere, depending on positioning, can do a massive amount of healing for your raid with vengeance stacked. E.g. on Elegon I healed for about 8M only in the last phase with Chi Burst, our tactic was that our warrior did all the tanking and I only taunted once in between Elegons Breath for him to reset stacks, but didn't use BoK at all and was regenerating Chi for the next Chi Burst. Or on Feng I used Zen Sphere detonations in P2 / P3, which was extremely reducing my shuffle uptime, but was healing for ~ 40k HPS in the fight, about 40% Zen Sphere detonation and 25% Chi Torpedo. Which is the next question: Is it really not worth taking that to support your healers, especially on fights where you have tanking downtimes? Since everyone seems to love Xuen or RWJ.
Is the healing done worth the more damage taken, especially in 25 man?

[Deleted]

the shields which it would give are completely useless since they do not absorb the magic damage in the encounter...

Ofcourse they do.
Unglyphed Guard absorbs both physical + magical damage, as does the Guard cast by the Ox statue.
The glyph just adds 10% to your own guard, limits it to magic only and stops your statue from working.

Just to add some numbers to this: WoL
I'm Zhin, Brewmaster is my off-specc (normally Mistweaving) so I probably didn't play to the fullest potential... anyway, we killed it and the shields added up to quite a bit of healing in the raid.

If it worked for you, it's all fine. I'm just throwing out the word that it bugs the statue since not every Brewmaster seems to know that.

[noladrew]

Am i the only one that feels in general that Brewmasters are a bit weak compared to lets say a Blood DK and Druid/Warrior? We decided to switch me (brewmaster) to mistweaver and our resto druid to guardian. No matter what gearing/itemization I used as a tank, I would get hit SOOOOO hard by physical abilities. The scaling to me seems really low for it to be the best route atm. Gaining more EH is always a good thing, but currently could leave a brewmaster below the hit/expertise caps and drop haste/crit as well, thus resulting in lower energy regen / chi generation. Like someone previously said, there just doesnt seem to be an balance and most of the time the best course of action is to bring in a different class that can pretty much out perform the tank role.

[prestilence]

Well a few things I noticed in reading your strat you did on Stone Guards.
With no cooldowns/ self procs active (white swinging) my current avoidance is at 25.68
With Legacy of the Emp. 26.14
Then after Blackout Kick. 46.14
Now if you’re pretty tight and established with your rotation you basically only needs to ensure you have 2 Chi every 8 seconds. And myself being 12.22 Energy Regen, I am able to ensure I have enough Chi to maintain nearly 100% uptime of Shuffle via Blackout kick. So let’s assume that if a “Good” Brewmaster is playing and has no proc buffs, he should never be below 46.14 avoidance, and if so for a very short time until next Blackout kick.
When you said: (while tanking the two dogs)
“I also let me elusive brew stack high when I was tanking one dog, and then pop it on two. This allowed me to have a full 15 stack nearly every time.”
Elusive brew stack avoidance with 100% Shuffle (via Blackout Kick every 5 seconds)
15= 76.149
10= 76.149
8= 76.149
6=76.149
4= 76.149
3= 76.149
Time it takes for me (Duel wielding) to get to 15 Elusive brew stack (3 attempts) 29sec, 27sec, 31sec. So waiting to get a full stack of 15 gives no more benefit “to avoidance” than it would at 2 stacks assuming you can keep up shuffle. But, the only difference is the uptime. 15 stacks = 15 seconds of 76 avoid…and 6 stacks = 6 seconds of 76 avoid. With using Elusive brew at 15, by the time the timer came off CD I had regenerated 5 elusive brew and then waited 15 seconds roughly before I could use another 15 second stack. So going off one minute of 15 seconds of downtime on elusive brew, 15+, 15-, 15+, 15- = 60, so there’s about 30 seconds (est) of when its actually down per minute. More elaborate, I know. But, I’m pretty sure there is a happy median in which if we actually use elusive brew at a lower stack, then immediately using it again (using any gained stacks while buff was active) after your current elusive buff falls off, and essentially “double-dipping” it off cool down.
The question is with that theory is, what stack amount, if any… Would provide longer duration per minute of elusive brew uptime?
This is actually something I have been looking into in-between our raids. Now also, I have tested this with duel wield and 2H. And also, “Brewing: Elusive Brew: grant up to 3 charges of Elusive Brew, based on weapon speed” and staves roughly around 3.2-ish and DW’s around 2.6 weapon speed… Would that also mean that duel wield would stack faster hitting with two weapons, and also having the faster speed to grant elusive brew faster?
Or does the monks “punch” animation basically mean he doesn’t use Weapons to base his stack, and would it then just count only off the weapon speed from 1 source? Like DW= 2.6, and 2H= 3.2…I don’t think it would make sense to make DW tanking that much more viable than 2H simply because we have 50% more chance to re-stack elusive brew from 2 sources rather than just the 2H.


Here is a screenshot of my UI set-up (popped my cd’s to show “TellMeWhen” positioning)
http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images...112091242.jpg/
And just below my stance bar I use “TaO” which tracks active stagger and the internal CD on “Power strikes”
Here is my armory link
http://us.battle.net/wow/en/characte...nglight/simple

I’d like to hear some opinions behind these thoughts. I’m not entirely sold on switching to Mastery or anything like that over my current set-up. But I do see Going FULL 100% Mastery on Gara’jal the Spiritbinder.. Purifying Brew all the incoming raid damage.. No other tank will provide better survivability than a full mastery BM monk for that fight on heroic.