The Brewmaster Tanking Guide [5.4]

[Ergar]

Generally for Brewmaster it's recommended to sit somewhere between 4.5-6k haste rating unbuffed. Any more and you're either not using Tiger Palm enough or not hitting keg smash enough, or just plain energy capping. Any less and you may have trouble keeping shuffle up on some fights.

4-6k with ascension or without? Im not entirely sure how much haste i have atm myself.

[zurm]

4-6k with ascension or without? Im not entirely sure how much haste i have atm myself.

With. The other talents don't really compare for a brewmaster this tier (power strikes tend to be optimal at lower ilvls though, and Chi Brew just doesn't really apply to us very well since it's so easy to get EB stacks and chi).

[Ergar]

Aight tyvm.

[Radio]

With the haste you'll be forced to get as you acquire Siege gear, as long as you reforge out of it as much as possible you should always be sitting in a suitable haste range.

[Orion Antares]

With. The other talents don't really compare for a brewmaster this tier (power strikes tend to be optimal at lower ilvls though, and Chi Brew just doesn't really apply to us very well since it's so easy to get EB stacks and chi).

Chi Brew is actually pretty nice. If you are only using the one charge to keep it rolling on recharge you then have that spare 2 Chi for when you need it with Guard, similar to the banking method used with Ascension. Really the reason to prefer Ascension over Chi Brew is if you are going to use your healing abilities a lot in which case you'd also want to push the higher end of the haste range you put on your gear.

[Ergar]

So im having a bit of a problem now. For the first time since start of mop i feel soooo squishy with crit build. I dont know if it's just my bad:ish gear (547ilvl atm) or the fact that some bosses hit pretty hard (garrosh and thok come into mind). I keep a good suffle uptime, and i constantly use elusive brew, but still when i get hit, i feel like i lose half my hp with one attack. I've also been reforging all my excess haste into mastery. Im at 12.89% without buffs atm.

E:http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/characte.../Ergarr/simple my armory, if it helps.

[Radio]

So im having a bit of a problem now. For the first time since start of mop i feel soooo squishy with crit build. I dont know if it's just my bad:ish gear (547ilvl atm) or the fact that some bosses hit pretty hard (garrosh and thok come into mind). I keep a good suffle uptime, and i constantly use elusive brew, but still when i get hit, i feel like i lose half my hp with one attack. I've also been reforging all my excess haste into mastery. Im at 12.89% without buffs atm.

E:http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/characte.../Ergarr/simple my armory, if it helps.

At your gear/mastery level bosses like Garrosh/Thok normal will bring the pain train with their auto attacks, Garrosh in particular was hitting me for ~180-240k during p2/p3 on 10N after stagger on our kill a few weeks ago, and I had ~10k mastery and about 13 more ilvls at the time than you do now. You could try to up your mastery a bit or play more defensively until you're able to pad out your ilvl a bit more. Those two bosses (especially Garrosh) hit a lot harder than pretty much anything in heroic ToT. Comparable to Ra-den as far as I remember.

[Ergar]

Yeah Thok was a bitch for me, even more than Garrosh. Got the hang of Garrosh's damage after one wipe, so it got kinda ok, but jesus christ my hp bounced up and down like a hooker, on Thok.

Could you shed some light on "playing more defensively"? I've heard people say this, but i've never understood what it means. Use cooldowns more wisely? Dont take risks (not using a cd for lets say paragon's shield slam or w/e its called)? or what

[SurrealNight]

Playing defensive is mostly meaning to stack more mastery instead of the common super crit heavy builds and probably considering using a Mastery Proc'ing RoRo. Using trinkets with mastery like TED, Bad Juju, etc or keeping the CD red trinket instead of the "DPS" focused ones like Haromm's.

Fort Brew, DH, EB don't take any resources (energy or chi) so assuming you aren't ignoring Guard/PB to use the Chi on more BoK's for DPS there really isn't a way you can focus more in fight resources to defense.

[Rockets]

It can also mean to really focus on tanking instead of trying to help out with other things that the raid is dealing with. Garrosh in particular has been a real problem for me on this front; he's really been forcing me to just pay attention to my own job and trust that the rest of the raid will do theirs.

For example, interrupts on the MCs in p2-3. Yeah it's great if I can help, but DPS should be able to handle that themselves, and meanwhile if healers are among the MC'd then I'm in real danger of dying until they're broken free. I had a number of deaths where I was too busy trying to RoP or Clash to interrupt when I should have been reaching for FB or Guard, or I'd miss my taunt swap and let the other tank go up to 5-6 stacks. Garrosh just hits too damn hard for me to be doing anything other than watching out for my own healthbar and using defensive CDs if needed. FB is guaranteed to be up once between every intermission, so making sure to actually use that 20s when you're in danger is really important.

[Bryce]

or I'd miss my taunt swap and let the other tank go up to 5-6 stacks.

What? You don't swap normally at 5-6 stacks? My raid we regularly swap at 6-7 or higher stacks most of the time. This was on 25 as well.

[Promdates]

What? You don't swap normally at 5-6 stacks? My raid we regularly swap at 6-7 or higher stacks most of the time. This was on 25 as well.

We generally do 3 stacks in 25, just because it's usually around that point where we noticed vengeance was declining. So we try to get as much as possible and just go every 3. I'm sure 6-7 should be fine though, I think my OT ends up with higher than 7 in p3 when I'm kiting adds around.

[Rockets]

What? You don't swap normally at 5-6 stacks?

...no? Garrosh already does a ton of damage with his autos, why would we want to let the dot stack higher than than the minimum necessary? Our healing team has enough problems as it is.

[Promdates]

...no? Garrosh already does a ton of damage with his autos, why would we want to let the dot stack higher than than the minimum necessary? Our healing team has enough problems as it is.

Are you doing 10s or 25s? Outside of solo tanking p1, annihilation, whirling corruption, and maybe the strat where you stack everyone and just aoe the desecration down... what exactly is causing your healers issue when there's only 1 person being attacked in all of p2?

Perhaps it's just because me and Bryce are using 10k+ mastery, but I haven't been too worried about ANYTHING on garrosh unless it's having 2 packs of adds with warshout on them (which, never happens now that we just stack in the middle and aoe everything down np.) It's really why I wonder why everyone tries to get as little mastery as possible, and then they come here and say they're getting wrecked by Garrosh and buddies.

[Rockets]

Are you doing 10s or 25s? Outside of solo tanking p1, annihilation, whirling corruption, and maybe the strat where you stack everyone and just aoe the desecration down... what exactly is causing your healers issue when there's only 1 person being attacked in all of p2?

Perhaps it's just because me and Bryce are using 10k+ mastery, but I haven't been too worried about ANYTHING on garrosh unless it's having 2 packs of adds with warshout on them (which, never happens now that we just stack in the middle and aoe everything down np.) It's really why I wonder why everyone tries to get as little mastery as possible, and then they come here and say they're getting wrecked by Garrosh and buddies.

10N, and this is now our third week of Garrosh attempts.

And I'm running a balanced crit/mastery loadout too; unbuffed I'm sitting at around 10.5k of each. We lose people during Empowered Whirl, we lose tanks during MC sometimes; generally we have a hard time even making it to p3 with everyone alive. I'm not actually an officer, so I don't know the exact problems the healers are having, but generally what I hear from them is that our healing team just has a lot of competency problems. From my perspective I just do what I can to not make things any harder for them than necessary.

[Promdates]

Those seem to be healing/strat/position issues perhaps. None of which you can actively fix.

[Radio]

Could you shed some light on "playing more defensively"? I've heard people say this, but i've never understood what it means. Use cooldowns more wisely? Dont take risks (not using a cd for lets say paragon's shield slam or w/e its called)? or what

On top of what Surreal said, there's also elements of playing more defensively outside of your gearing/talent choices/CDs such as:
- spending your energy a little later (pooling) such that you can expel harm/healing sphere (emergency) more readily
- purify a little more often (still be wary of doing it too often)
- splitting tank responsibilities as safely as possible (our tanking strats are usually geared to give me as much DPS as possible)
- more conservative gameplay in general (this is a 'feel' thing)
- figuring out good places to use surprisingly helpful abilities such as Grapple Weapon (I fucking love Grapple weapon in Siege)

[Leblue]

I've seen a post or two on brewmasters solo tanking heroic thok 10 man. What would I have to run/do to really make this work if we wanted to try this as a viable strategy? We just hit the boss and I'm trying to see if there's a way to make this easier on the dps/strat check (similar to solo tanking malk's bloodrage). If anyone could give me the skinny on this so I could present a reasonable argument to my gm/raid lead would help a ton while we progress on this.

[SurrealNight]

Those seem to be healing/strat/position issues perhaps. None of which you can actively fix.

On off nights we did 10m Garrosh during our progression on him and I have to say I would rather not kill him a week than come back in as 10m and do it. Unlike some fights the number of acceptable errors scales a lot higher than the rate the number of people that can make them grows between 10 vs 25m.

[cyqu]

So im having a bit of a problem now. For the first time since start of mop i feel soooo squishy with crit build. I dont know if it's just my bad:ish gear (547ilvl atm) or the fact that some bosses hit pretty hard (garrosh and thok come into mind). I keep a good suffle uptime, and i constantly use elusive brew, but still when i get hit, i feel like i lose half my hp with one attack. I've also been reforging all my excess haste into mastery. Im at 12.89% without buffs atm.

E:http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/characte.../Ergarr/simple my armory, if it helps.

you have about as much mastery as i have been using for most everything, it just comes down to using cds at the right time. guards for breaths and such, knowing when the big hit is coming and be ready with a EH to bring you back to full instantly.

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/characte...Tippz/advanced

my gear has changed quite a bit since normals obviously but my mastery has stayed relatively the same throughout.