Brewmaster Survivability

[Kisho]

and imo we do need something to help for when we have bad luck with crits and or dodge/parry. maybe the small mastery buff will help enough, maybe all the stats from 5.2 gear will suffice, either way, i find monks die more frequently "out of the blue". which from being a old prot paladin, and reading theck's theorycrafting is bad.

Sooorrrtttt of. Honestly I can't remember the last time I got RNG'd to death, if it ever happened. If I died, it's because someone failed: either me or the healer (usually me :P). Either I didn't keep Shuffle up, or I didn't use EB at the right time, or I didn't Guard the Overwhelming Assault, or whatever.

Yeah, we're avoidance tanks, and there's always an element of RNG in there. But as I posted earlier, the chance of being properly RNG'd and having NOTHING you can do about it is super low. Really, REALLY low. my example was for the Dread Thrash on Sha of Fear, but it applies elsewhere too.

But hey, if you feel like you're getting RNG'd a lot, then there are ways to fix that. 2x stam trinkets, stam enchants, stam consumables. This will give you a much bigger buffer to survive against potential RNG problems. It also makes it more likely for those RNG moments to occur, and will mean you take more damage overall, but it gives the healers more time to react.

I'm just not sure if we're going to really need more buffs. I'm concerned that 5.2, as it is currently, will make us OP tanks. Being OP puts us on the radar for nerfs, and those are never fun.

[Ampere]

The only environment where we actually suck is, unfortunately, Challenge modes.
(Well, I prefer to be balanced in raids and suck in Challenge, as currently, than the opposite, bu still.)

For those I switch to my DPS spec.

This is not correct.

Brewmasters are very strong in Challenge modes, probably the highest dps of all tanks and when played properly there aren't many survival issues. We have a 5 second AoE stun on a 45 second cooldown, very strong AoE damage, and the ability to kite if needed.

You can explain the issues you had, but I can assure you from experience that Brewmasters are very solid Challenge mode tanks. If you are experiencing otherwise, it is a tanking, healing, or coordination issue, not a problem with the class.

[Yorgl]

I'm just not sure if we're going to really need more buffs. I'm concerned that 5.2, as it is currently, will make us OP tanks. Being OP puts us on the radar for nerfs, and those are never fun.

Agreed.
But I feel that currently we're more on the way of being less spiky. (And for that, I agree we don't need a huge buff, we're nothing like 4.2-DKs, but still a little one would be helpfull.)

This is not correct.

Brewmasters are very strong in Challenge modes, probably the highest dps of all tanks and when played properly there aren't many survival issues. We have a 5 second AoE stun on a 45 second cooldown, very strong AoE damage, and the ability to kite if needed.

You can explain the issues you had, but I can assure you from experience that Brewmasters are very solid Challenge mode tanks. If you are experiencing otherwise, it is a tanking, healing, or coordination issue, not a problem with the class.

I'm pretty sure this is correct though...

I agree completly regarding the DPS, which is almost OP at the moment. But compared to my fellow warrior I get WRECKED (Scarlet Monastery and Jade Temple) ; and frankly, I'm not afraid of admitting when I am the problem and it happened several times during the T14 that I realised that I was just bad and not unlucky or squishy and therefore did what was needed to step my game up.
But in this case I really really feel that BrM need to develop unecessary (or counter-productive) methods to survive.

I previously posted about that in another topic : http://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/...1#post19196590
If you have advices, I'd be happy to hear them but so far my friends and I feel that we'd rather have the war tanking and me DPS than me having to kite and do nasty stuff to compensate, as Challenge are already hard enough. :-/
But

[Ampere]

I'm pretty sure this is correct though...

I agree completly regarding the DPS, which is almost OP at the moment. But compared to my fellow warrior I get WRECKED (Scarlet Monastery and Jade Temple) ; and frankly, I'm not afraid of admitting when I am the problem and it happened several times during the T14 that I realised that I was just bad and not unlucky or squishy and therefore did what was needed to step my game up.
But in this case I really really feel that BrM need to develop unecessary (or counter-productive) methods to survive.

I previously posted about that in another topic : http://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/...1#post19196590
If you have advices, I'd be happy to hear them but so far my friends and I feel that we'd rather have the war tanking and me DPS than me having to kite and do nasty stuff to compensate, as Challenge are already hard enough. :-/
But

You mention in that post that the first pulls in Jade Serpent with the elementals destroyed you. That is a dangerous pull, but I'll explain how I did it.

I Keg Smash and Blackout Kick the first elemental and proceed to run/roll and Spinning Crane Kick through the rest. I'd usually Expel Harm and throw up Guard sometime during the run through them. When a bunch of mobs approach me at the top of the stairs, I'd pop Fortifying Brew and face tank them a bit, using Rushing Jade Wind, Spinning Crane Kick/Keg Smash and Breath of Fire as much as I could without dropping Shuffle. I'd also throw in Leg Sweep for an AoE stun and call out for other AoE stuns. As soon as the big elementals were either dead or close to dead, I would announce that I'm pulling the boss so everyone can get close to him to avoid water bolts. It's all about coordination. I would die sometimes on this pull, it's a dangerous pull, but the deaths were the fault of me and/or my group's coordination, not the class.

If you're about to die you can always roll away and get healed up a bit. Or use Transcendence.

The gear I use for Challenge modes is not identical, but very similar to the gear in my armory link in my signature. Prioritize hit/expertise (at least to cap for lv92 mobs) and then haste > crit. I saw you mention reforging parry... never do this, the energy regen/elusive brew stacks are much more valuable.

Also look at the top of the leaderboards for North American Challenge mode times, you'll see the Brewmaster Nerthfu is pretty close to the top on all of them. Brewmasters are certainly viable, you just have to play them well. It kind of stinks having such a low health pool, so you do have to be careful with that.

[Yorgl]

Yeah the parry reforging was kind of a desperate attempt iirc.
Thanks for the advices, I guess when we will be done with all the dungeons in Gold and other guild mate will need them, I'll redo them as a tank and try harder... (But for now, unless my mate is afk or if we have PLENTY of time, I'll stick DPSing T_T)

[SurrealNight]

Cleared all of ToeS and HoF last night on 25m for the first time and it was a breeze. Didn't have a single EH related death including Empress and the trash before her. I'm going to blame the deaths and bad impressions on either the player or being undergeared for the content possibly.

Yeah at the beginning of fights we don't have any of our buffs up but it just takes 2 GCD's to put up Shuffle and Guard benefits from TP being up and some vengeance to boost the shield anyways. Also, maybe I am the only one that does this but I "pre-pot" Dampen Harm since the buff lasts so long. Gives you three 50% hits right at the start and will probably be up before you need it later anyways.

[initialt]

I've been playing Protection Paladin for years. Back in Cata I had every tank class levelled and played them as alts since I needed to be sure, as a raid leader and main tank, what the other tanks could do.

Paladin for me feels very passive and easy, and I would recommend anyone to play Prot Paladin as their first tank class. Monk is just flat out fun, but you definitely need to be prepared and ready for each fight.

^ Definitely this. I am in the same boat and have had every tanking class leveled and played them all as tanks for as long as I can remember. Monk tanking is by far the most challenging and difficult to master of all the tanking classes, IMO.

As others have said, we do not have the armor bonus or shield block passive mitigation tools to rely on, so we must be aware and pay close attention to every active mitigation tool we have. When played perfectly, it's incredibly rewarding, but mistakes are much more brutal.

Stuns and bad crit/avoidance RNG are probably the most frustrating aspects of playing BrM. Last night on Sha, there were a few times where I didn't have any stacks of EB for a thrash, whereas other times I'd have 9+ stacks. Hoping DW will fix this and give me more reliable stacking of EB. Using 2h staff atm.

I still play my warrior sometimes, and am incredibly envious of shield block and how much smoother the damage intake is. However, it's just not as fun or rewarding to play. Take a look at the guide and the discussions in the thread, there is alot of great and helpful information there.

[Ampere]

Yeah at the beginning of fights we don't have any of our buffs up but it just takes 2 GCD's to put up Shuffle and Guard benefits from TP being up and some vengeance to boost the shield anyways. Also, maybe I am the only one that does this but I "pre-pot" Dampen Harm since the buff lasts so long. Gives you three 50% hits right at the start and will probably be up before you need it later anyways.

I do the same sometimes. It will work much better in 5.2 when Dampen Harm's CD starts ticking on ability use, rather than charge expiration/consumption.

[Yorgl]

I do the same sometimes. It will work much better in 5.2 when Dampen Harm's CD starts ticking on ability use, rather than charge expiration/consumption.

Yes it'll feel like Bone Shield again.

[SurrealNight]

Stuns and bad crit/avoidance RNG are probably the most frustrating aspects of playing BrM. Last night on Sha, there were a few times where I didn't have any stacks of EB for a thrash, whereas other times I'd have 9+ stacks. Hoping DW will fix this and give me more reliable stacking of EB. Using 2h staff atm.

Save Dampen Harm and Fort Brew for those moments, you shouldn't need those for the platform (though I save Xuen for that cause he tanks the panda) since you can Xen Med through Death Blossom. Also, you only need 2-3 stacks of EB at most (so 1 crit of a 2H) to negate Thrash because it has a really obvious animation and EB is off the GCD so you can time it exactly if your latency is reasonable. I agree that DW is superior in this fashion I'm very grateful to get a Empress claw finally instead of staff.

Watching other tanks health on Sha I personally feel like my damage intake is a lot smoother than the other tanks were as they were constantly going up and down. I can go pretty lengthy chunks of time without taking any damage at all and soon as I take a hit (worst I got down to was 50% maybe) I just hit Expel Harm and gobble up some GotO orbs taking care of a large chunk of that dmg myself. At least it's one of the easiest fights for me this tier.

Stuns shouldn't really be an issue in PVE outside of HoF trash and Challenge modes, fortunately they haven't put any raid stuns in this tier. Actually I hate Lei Shi the most cause I can't build Chi on her during protect outside of Expel Harm.

I do the same sometimes. It will work much better in 5.2 when Dampen Harm's CD starts ticking on ability use, rather than charge expiration/consumption.

Yeah what idiot coded that ability. Are there other buffs that don't reset until the buff timer is up or expended? Would be like Fort Brew having a 3min+25sec CD....

[Nerthfu]

The only environment where we actually suck is, unfortunately, Challenge modes.

I'll have to disagree with you on that one, I'm confident brewmaster tank are really good in challenge modes when trying to get gold and might be the best tank class when it comes to beating the top 10 times in each challenge.

Edit:
to elaborate a bit, played right you have decent surviability, an awesome AoE stun, alot of group/self healing and the most ridiculous AoE dps of any tank. A brewmaster tank can cut alot of time in each big AoE trash pack of any challenges which is great. There's also alot of boss where a brewmaster tank won't need any healing and can even keep the rest of the group up from random dmg.

[Lissa]

Or really hugh spike damage : Twin Emperor I fell like i have to purify before i even go in moderate stagger or i will just die.

Actually, if played well, in my opinion Brewmasters really rock on this fight. You can build up stagger while dancing, and when not dancing, just use all your chi for purifying brew and self-healing (the lvl 30 talents scale pretty damn awesomely with Vengeance); plus if you got decent enough gear, you'll have elusive brew up the majority of the time you're actually tanking the boss. I was comparing my damage taken on that boss on heroic to that of our protection paladin MT (I normally dps) and I was taking half the damage he was.

So in essence, it's just situational. Yes, we suck while stunned. But for all the bosses we can do good, and some we can do really really good. Kinda like all the other tanks.

[Gestalt]

A few things to bear in mind in these discussions (ARMCHAIR SERMONIZING MOMENT!) :
-Peoples impressions of things like which tank is easier to heal is often based as much on public consensus as personal experience.
-Different mitigation models optimize to different incoming healing models, i.e. healing a monk like you would a 1.3 warrior will have subpar results. This is where much of aforementioned "consensus" comes from: mismatched healing styles, difficulty in learning new patterns, etc.
-The other, and this one is bet-the-mortgage reliable: When an expansion creates tanks with high avoidance numbers, healers will say they are "streaky" and prefer the EH tanks. This will be the consensus for most players for most that expansion. High-end guilds will be using these avoidance-intensive tanks mid-way through the expansion cycle, when EH scaling levels out. By the end of the expansion, Blizzard will roll out some bullshit like Sunwell Radiance to compensate for tanks that have as much EH as the "less streaky" tanks but double the avoidance. During this cycle Blizz will adjust diminished returns on the stats in question no less than three times before giving up and nerfing your Defenses sheet when you zone into the end-expansion raid.

Brewmasters' multiplicative scaling across wide-spectrum stats (BrM's scale from literally every stat Blizz has ever had to nerf in endgame) makes em a shoo-in for "we have to nerf everybody to keep Brewmasters from trivializing content" in 5.X.

[kaiadam]

I hate to keep saying this but damage taken is a seriously crappy metric for survivability.

Anecdotally, our brewmaster died more than any of our other tanks during progression despite heavy mastery gearing.

[Raider321]

I hate to keep saying this but damage taken is a seriously crappy metric for survivability.

Anecdotally, our brewmaster died more than any of our other tanks during progression despite heavy mastery gearing.

Bad players will die more often than good players... pretty obvious if you ask me.

Monks are very good tanks and don't have survivability issues if played correctly.

[Kisho]

I hate to keep saying this but damage taken is a seriously crappy metric for survivability.

Anecdotally, our brewmaster died more than any of our other tanks during progression despite heavy mastery gearing.

I'd imagine that's more 'because of', rather than 'despite'...

I know there was this huge thing amongst cutting edge progression Brewmasters to stack Mastery until the cows come home, but there's nothing to suggest it's optimal in the slightest, especially when undergeared. Consider the following cause and effect scenario:

You're undergeared and stack mastery to reduce burst damage taken. More mastery means more stagger. More stagger means more PBs needed. More PBs needed means more Chi needed. More Chi needed, more Haste needed. More haste needed, stack has- OHWAIT.

Unless of course, those mastery stacking tanks used PB at the expense of Shuffle uptime, in which case... No bloody wonder they died all the time.

Getting more stamina? Yeah, absolutely. Go for it. No objections there. More mastery, especially when undergeared? Ehhhhhh.

[SurrealNight]

Getting more stamina? Yeah, absolutely. Go for it. No objections there. More mastery, especially when undergeared? Ehhhhhh.

I agree, the ratio is what like 1200 rating for 1% boost in stagger? That is just too poor imo considering how much stam you can get instead (1500 for a trinket + /use, 750 for LW enchant). With a few minor changes I was able to easily give myself 100k more health which is still mitigated by my baseline 47% stagger.

Did 3/6 H MSV on 25m last night and N Elegon/Will with LW stam enchants and stam flask (first week healers have ever healed a monk) but Bottle/Xuen trinkets. Xero EH deaths while I was tanking including from Voodoo dolls and ranked on Will easily I didn't notice any difference then my 10m run the week before.

[kaiadam]

More mastery simply means your damage intake is smoother. I seriously doubt our brewmaster was using purifying brew much and letting his shuffle drop. I don't understand the impulse to use purifying brew, I mean, stagger is the absolute easiest thing to heal for, a constant dot tick. When your shuffle is high and you've got chi to spare, sure, purify a high stagger to give the healers a break, but 50k/sec is absolutely trivial to heal through for any high end raid. And regardless, you have enough chi at 0 haste for full shuffle/guard uptime and 3 purifies a minute. More if there's a tank swap mechanic and you're safe to just stack shuffle while offtanking.

And it's amazingly optimal. Tanks die to spike damage. Mastery reduces spike damage. I'm not sure there can even be an argument against it. And from a design standpoint, avoidance tanks simply have to take more spike damage than plate tanks to have an even playing field. If avoidance tanks had the same burst damage level as a plate, but back it up with 60-70% avoidance vs a plate's 30%, then they just take half the damage of the plate guy's and there just is no reason to take a plate tank.

Finally, 1200 rating per 1% sounds crappy on paper but when you can toss 12000 rating at it and boost your mastery from 50% to 60%, you flat out take 20% less damage per melee (pushed to stagger, of course, but stagger damage, once again, is trivial to heal and almost a non-factor in tank deaths.) I'm not arguing that stacking mastery is the current optimal way to go, because honestly, it isn't anymore, but it had its points when people were undergeared.

Did 3/6 H MSV on 25m last night

I'm trying to be as un-elitist as I can here but you (and your healers) literally outgear us by 20-25 ilvls since we did those heroics. With that amount of gear you could socket and enchant spirit + intellect and you'd still be at a survivability advantage. The other week in an alt run one of the tanks forgot to taunt heroic garajal and we had a frost dk tank him for a phase and no one died.

-----

There's no realistic time-to-death simulator that even approaches the complexity of what occurs even in a simple raid, so survivability is very hard to mathematically quantify, and all you have left is just collective experience. In my experience, mirrored by many high end progression guilds, monks and druids have worse survivability than plate tanks, that's all.

[Chuupag]

More mastery simply means your damage intake is smoother. I seriously doubt our brewmaster was using purifying brew much and letting his shuffle drop. I don't understand the impulse to use purifying brew, I mean, stagger is the absolute easiest thing to heal for, a constant dot tick. When your shuffle is high and you've got chi to spare, sure, purify a high stagger to give the healers a break, but 50k/sec is absolutely trivial to heal through for any high end raid. And regardless, you have enough chi at 0 haste for full shuffle/guard uptime and 3 purifies a minute.

Uh....what? 50k a second is a ridiculously high stagger number, and any BrM who sits that high should be drug out into the street and beat up. It isn't the stagger that kills a tank and the heals have to put up with, it's the boss attacks. Why would you not use a tool that it is given to you?

[kaiadam]

Uh....what? 50k a second is a ridiculously high stagger number, and any BrM who sits that high should be drug out into the street and beat up. It isn't the stagger that kills a tank and the heals have to put up with, it's the boss attacks. Why would you not use a tool that it is given to you?

That's exactly my point, it's the boss attacks that kill you and hots that would've been overheal otherwise go to healing stagger. I threw 50k as an example there because it's a fairly high amount - close to the maximum you can get from current content - and I still say that it's trivial to heal through.

This isn't about not using a tool, it's regarding Kisho's earlier statement that a mastery stacked tank would PB so much his shuffle would fall off, that's just not the case. You purify stagger, just not at the cost of shuffle or as often as that stupid blizzard icon thing pops up (I swear some fights that thing is up like 80% of the time and it's a pain in the ass for me to ignore.)

(For reference, Stone Guards, the easiest encounter of this tier, applies a dot that ticks for 50k/1 sec in 10man normal to your tanks. Almost 120k/sec to 3-4 tanks in 25H. And it's still more or less the easiest tank heal fight there is this tier. Dot damage is super-efficiently and effortlessly healed.)