is brewmaster a good raid tank?

[Schaden]

If I was healing, I'd rather heal a paladin or a warrior over a monk though. We take rather spiky damage, we have almost no tank cooldowns. Sure, overall we take less damage, but those times we take insane damage without being able to use cooldowns, and without mitigating it with block or high armor - those are the times I'd want to play another class. Those moments don't happen very frequently, and I absolutely love tanking as a monk, but the unpredictability can easily mean a wipe, but good RNG can also easily lead to surviving that hit that would've killed a warrior, or any other tank. There are obviously ups and downs of it.

Our biggest problem is magic mitigation, not physical. Stagger deals with that easily.

[itsyaboy]

Our biggest problem is magic mitigation, not physical. Stagger deals with that easily.

guard+diffuse magic makes us pretty decent at taking magic damage. zen meditation also but that's highly situational.

[Deleted]

Monks are pretty complicated to play, as any spec really (not sure about healer spec). Personally, I'd rather watch what's going on on the screen, than check the short buffs, energy, chi, what cd is ready, 24/7.

[Deleted]

The culprit is shuffle for most players, Imo all our chi spenders should ad some duration to it except for Chi Sphere.

I'd say breath of fire should definately cause shuffle, as aoe tanking and maintaining shuffle is a nightmare.


Regarding raid tanking i tanked stone guard heroic tonight. I took half the damage of our death knight tank who was also only taking 1 of the dogs.

---------- Post added 2012-10-17 at 10:38 PM ----------

so i informed my gm about it but he keeps saying that monk tanks take to mutch damage...
he ses he healed some in hc dungeons and they took massive damage

Jessday#2338

Tell him to add that on battletag and do a dungeon with me and i'm sure he'll change his mind about monks taking too much damage.

[Deleted]

I'd like to see our armor triple and our active mitigation take a massive hit.

Why? Because what I want to be good at this expansion is tanking challenge mode, and right now, with 16k armor, if I get stunned, I get 3-shotted.

All other tanks are better, not marginally better, just plain better for tanking challenge mode.

So yeah, none of you probably care about that because the game is about raiding, always has been, always will be. But right now I'm a dps in our 5-man comp, and completely reliant on the OP-ness of Death Knights to do solid times. Not very balanced to me, is it?

[Saverem]

Only bad monks take a lot of damage - if you know how to play a monk, you will take less damage than most other tanks (overall), but you have less cooldowns to take you out of sticky situations, so having tank CDs from healers is really nice (I am the one calling for CDs on fights with heavy tank damage (Will of the Emperor, Gara'jal last 20%, Feng and so on), whereas my DK tank buddy just pops one of his 4 or 5 or 6 cooldowns and smiles about it. When the dust settles however, I usually sit at 30 to 40% less damage taken than him, that's just how it is.

Comparing damage reduction to a DK doesn't work. DKs are designed to take more damage and heal themselves up from it (the more damage they take, the more they heal).

You'd have to compare your Monk to a Pally/Warrior in terms of damage reduction.

[Leafos]

If a Monk Tank is ''taking too much damage'' then they are playing their class wrong.

Monks have a Stagger effect from the Ox Stance, which allows them to stagger 20% of the damage and take it as a DoT, you will see a debuff that will change from green > orange > red (depending on the danger level i.e 'higher DoT dmg). I've noticed a lot of Monk Tanks generally forget to drink their brew spell that has a cost of 1 chi, which removes the stagger debuff, or just haven't noticed / understood how Stagger works, also as a Monk, you should be using the 'Guard' spell, very frequently, whilst applying your dodge buff upon 10+ stacks.

And choose your perks (talents) wisely. Learn to generate and spend your chi effectively.

[Deleted]

If a Monk Tank is ''taking too much damage'' then they are playing their class wrong.

Monks have a Stagger effect from the Ox Stance, which allows them to stagger 20% of the damage and take it as a DoT, you will see a debuff that will change from green > orange > red (depending on the danger level i.e 'higher DoT dmg). I've noticed a lot of Monk Tanks generally forget to drink their brew spell that has a cost of 1 chi, which removes the stagger debuff, or just haven't noticed / understood how Stagger works, also as a Monk, you should be using the 'Guard' spell, very frequently, whilst applying your dodge buff upon 10+ stacks.

And choose your perks (talents) wisely. Learn to generate and spend your chi effectively.

Also, make sure your screen is properly turned on while playing, and plug your keyboard to the appropriate jack at the back of your PC.*

*You might want to disregard that if you're using a laptop.

/Sarcasm off/ I think most people who want to know about viability and tanks comparison can read tooltips and understand that they need to push their buttons for the class to work. There is way too much elitism going on about this issue. The spec is high skillcap, we get it. Is it viable, yes it is. Is it where it should be in terms of what you get for the efforts you put in? Most certainly not.

Brewmaster are the Affliction Warlock of the tanks. You got twice as much stuff to be doing right if you want to achieve the same performance as, say, a bear. I feel that may contribute to answering OP's question better than "bads need to l2p, 'cause you know, we pro gamers' all gud."

[Appletini]

Shuffle's duration should probably be increased a second or two, IMO. We'll see how it changes.

Brewmaster should be a good raid tank if the tank is skilled. Compared with DK and Bear tanking, which I also do, I find it to be much more engaging/challenging. Far more buttons need to be pressed to do it just as well, and they need to be pressed at the right time and in the context of very limited resources. No offense to Bears or DKs, but tanking with them seems quite simple by comparison.

Probably your GM has just been grouped with Monk tanks who don't know what they're doing. I can almost guarantee they're spamming keg smash and fire breath but not using Blackout Kick or Guard.

[SurrealNight]

You'd have to compare your Monk to a Pally/Warrior in terms of damage reduction.

You can compare them just fine if you know how to read WoL (and are familiar with the BrM bugs atm). If anything looking at healing taken by outside sources is a fairly solid comparison.

[Deleted]

All other tanks are better, not marginally better, just plain better for tanking challenge mode.

Totally disagree there. I've had no trouble getting half the golds so far and we haven't put in much time at all. The idea is you co-ordinate with your party. If you know a pack stuns, you get your party to stun while you're stunned.

Brewmasters can tank challenge modes perfectly well, it's just a little more hectic with all our mitigation being active.

[-aiko-]

My experience thus far has been that we are competitive. As long as you keep some dusts for switching talents/glyphs around you can handle most encounters. We do seem to take a lot of magical damage which we cannot stagger, so if you do heroic raiding I recommend keeping a stamina set.

Just note that playing a good Brewmaster is no easy task. You have many abilites to watch and even letting one thing lapse (such as letting stagger get too high) you will start taking huge damage spikes that can catch even the best healers off guard.

[kamikaze148]

This is my worry as well. Blizz overdid our avoidance by giving us a whopping 20% parry, basically baseline, and a CD in elusive brew that gives a huge amount of dodge that is great in the long term but very rng during pivotal moments. We need a serious shift from avoidance to damage reduction, perhaps more armor, more base damage reduction or more stagger. Going from being a block-capped paladin in Cata to a high-avoidance monk is pretty nuts.

These are my thoughts entirely.

I find my tanking is fine, threatwise and general 5-man running. but i find the initial WHOMP damage when pulling, and i dont have guard, or when my shuffle lapses for a second or two and i get my ass handed to me.

Its a simple fix in giving us maybe a bit of a stance armor boost of some sort, putting us in line slightly under a plate wearer perhaps?. maybe a bit OP there, but yeah...could possibly be me still learning the ropes.

i find alot of healers either love us, or hate us at various moments. with guard up, EB and shuffle managed, the healer may aswell AFK, but as soon as any one of our mitigation spells are down, we are mince meat fodder nightmares for healers.

again...maybe im still noob.

[Bysu]

Like others have mentioned already, the biggest problem with monk tanks is that you just can't rely on yourself to get out of big trouble once things go wrong. It doesn't happen all that often but you can clearly tell when things are going just fine (i.e.: your health flows steadily) and when it just starts going wrong all the way because it's pretty much downhill from there unless a healer can get you out of the hole, you simply don't have any reliable panic buttons since those abilities that could be considered as such are part of your regular rotation (Guard and Expel Harm), so what happens if you suddenly start dipping low on health and those abilities are on cooldown?, yep you guessed it right, there's not much you can do about it.

Even the Passive "panic mechanic" built into our class makes no sense, Desperate Measures doesn't even reset the cooldown of Expel Harm when triggered which is lame, not to mention that you can't really "spam" it to get yourself back up on your feet since it costs 40 energy each cast. Also the damage taken during pulls can be nasty since you start out with pretty much zero active mitigation up, which in my case I try to work around by running in with Keg Smash followed by Guard (unbuffed at this point) just so I can soak the first or second hit and get the Shuffle buff up.

IMHO they need to make some changes like these:

- Switch some active mitigation to passive mitigation, since Shuffle is way too critical of a buff at the moment. They could just remove the stagger component from Shuffle and make it a plain 20% parry buff, increase baseline Stagger to 30% of physical damage (instead of 20%), and buff mastery so it counts for 1-1.5% extra Stagger per point which should make it more attractive for us compared to how it fares right now.

- Give us a more reliable panic button or mechanic, like: "Whenever your health drops below 35%, Guard is automatically cast on yourself. This effect cannot occur more often than once every 60 sec.".

- Also improve the survivability while stunned with a passive or talent, say something like: "While stunned, your stagger amount is increased by an additional 30%", so the damage income gets smoother and you have the chance to cleanse it once out of the stun (accounting for partial damage mitigation).

[Deleted]

Something while stunned would be useful, just include it in adaptation.

While stunned, you can still dodge and parry. As we have low armor anyway that shouldn't be overpowered at all.

[Unholyground]

I'd say breath of fire should definately cause shuffle, as aoe tanking and maintaining shuffle is a nightmare.


Regarding raid tanking i tanked stone guard heroic tonight. I took half the damage of our death knight tank who was also only taking 1 of the dogs.

---------- Post added 2012-10-17 at 10:38 PM ----------



Jessday#2338

Tell him to add that on battletag and do a dungeon with me and i'm sure he'll change his mind about monks taking too much damage.

I would say though that because BoF is an AoE it should proc 3 seconds instead of the 6 seconds to balance it out.

[SurrealNight]

I would say though that because BoF is an AoE it should proc 3 seconds instead of the 6 seconds to balance it out.

Did Blizz ever confirm what % of uptime on Shuffle they "balanced" Monk's around? If the answer is near 100% then I agree that they should make it easier to keep the buff up in most cases, I'd even say BoF should proc the full 6 sec like RJW does. Pretty much any Chi spending attack (which doesn't count PB) should proc it.

Also agree a boost to 7-8 sec per proc would make the class a bit more forgiving.

[Unholyground]

Did Blizz ever confirm what % of uptime on Shuffle they "balanced" Monk's around? If the answer is near 100% then I agree that they should make it easier to keep the buff up in most cases, I'd even say BoF should proc the full 6 sec like RJW does. Pretty much any Chi spending attack (which doesn't count PB) should proc it.

Also agree a boost to 7-8 sec per proc would make the class a bit more forgiving.

Ya, it's just we look at all the other tanking classes that don't use shields and they all have one base mitigation stat over 25%, ours aren't going to be there until maybe T16 MAYBE, it is a stretch. So more shuffle time would be welcome.

Also someone mentioned not a lot of magic damage mitigation, the Guard glyph will be extremely useful if they find a way to make shuffle easier to maintain.

[Saverem]

You can compare them just fine if you know how to read WoL (and are familiar with the BrM bugs atm). If anything looking at healing taken by outside sources is a fairly solid comparison.

No one said anything about that. Please read the entire post instead of only one sentence so you don't take it out of context.

[The Madgod]

Did Blizz ever confirm what % of uptime on Shuffle they "balanced" Monk's around? If the answer is near 100% then I agree that they should make it easier to keep the buff up in most cases, I'd even say BoF should proc the full 6 sec like RJW does. Pretty much any Chi spending attack (which doesn't count PB) should proc it.

Also agree a boost to 7-8 sec per proc would make the class a bit more forgiving.

Hell it's actually fairly possible to have a 100% uptime on certain bosses without sacrificing other chi abilities, as long as there's a tank swap and you have free time to just spam chi generators and BoK.

I finished Gara'jal yesterday with about 30-40 seconds of shuffle up and that was kept up for the entirety of the fight.