BrM looking for high-level feedback

[hatduck]

Hi,

I'm the MT and GM of a pretty solid guild, Baddies, and since I would very much like to reassure myself that I can continue to perform at an acceptable level as we advance through the ranks. I'm looking for some intelligent, informed feedback on my play.

Armory:
http://us.battle.net/wow/character/stormreaver/Daddy/

UI:
http://i.imgur.com/Dv3meSh.jpg

Recognizable Issues/Strengths:
My elusive brew uptime is an issue, I think. I have an UI element that shows stacks near my character, and it even glows at 14 or 15 stacks. I think tiger palm up-time is a strength of mine.

Logs:
Unfortunately, most of my recent logs are on Heroic Garrosh.
http://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports/6xHFNnwk2f93PWgG
http://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports/d76JAXMyGNBY2cjP
http://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports/7pDW1xFNgzHTKcjm
http://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports/ZqTWnJHMth89jGvf
http://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports/GNwJVZg9P6fXay8M

I'm kiting, so keep that in mind if you're looking at our longer attempts.

Here's a typical night of clears. For some reason Immerseus isn't on here:
http://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports/kXtA92rxKbqnzy1W

Battletag:
Daemios#1636

[Totaltotemic]

I'll preface this by saying that you're doing just about everything right and shouldn't have any real problems at all.


That said, there are 3 major things I'm seeing that you could improve on.

First, your Elusive Brew usage is, frankly, spotty at best. Based on your logs from Garrosh, it seems like you never use it unless it's up at 15 stacks, when you can actually use EB every single time you taunt Garrosh at your level of crit. Even if it's only back up to 10 stacks or so, you can taunt, EB, and just press EB again every time it falls off and you'll make it through your entire turn tanking with 100% uptime and then build stacks back up when he's not on you. You just have to mentally beat it into yourself that EB is not a cooldown, it's something you spam the hell out of every time a boss is hitting you. Unless there's an incredibly specific ability you need to save it for like Injection from Paragons, there's almost never a reason to not press EB right when you taunt a boss (although macroing it in would be bad because you taunt for many more reasons than just trading a boss).

Secondly, you need to Guard more. Heroic Garrosh should spike your to 250k+ Vengeance after he's hit you once or twice (or even not hit you if you used EB as it often puts you over 70% avoidance) which can give you a 700-800k Guard, which is worth 2 or 3 of his hits. With EB and then Guard when you hit 2 stacks of the DoT, you should almost never drop below 35%. If you're using both of these properly (it's not like you die if you don't though) that's more times that heals can go to other targets instead of you. This means more Divine Aegis on raid members, more Healing Rain ticks on the raid to keep AV at 100% uptime, and more Paladin shields on the raid. You'll never actually see the difference because it's incredibly minute, but it is an improvement you can make.

Finally, your choice of Vial as a trinket does not mesh with the rest of your choices on your gear. Gemming pure crit implies you want to do damage, but Vial provides no damage whatsoever. Furthermore, it barely provides anything in the way of survivability with how little the CDR is, and Stamina is all but useless as a BrM. If you used any other trinket with an Agi proc (TED, Renetaki's, Bad Juju, hell even Curse of Hubris) you'd see a damage gain of 3-4% on top of whatever secondary stat is on it that might actually be useful.

Honestly though you can kill Garrosh just fine with what you're doing, it just might be very slightly easier if you made those adjustments.

[Hugme]

First up, what are you using to track your stagger amount and time remaining?
On that siegecraft kill you would purify occasionally when under 50k stagger, and while it's not a big deal for someone with ~7k haste + Ascension, it does all add up. I'd set up StaggerMeter to go red when >50k dps.
If your elusive brew uptime is bothering you, and your interface isn't aiding you, we need to change that. I'm currently running weak auras for 1 icon on the right to show when EB is missing from my buffs, and the other icon opposite to show when I have >= 6 stacks available. Really made it easy in a visual sense to throw it up again when it's available, using my peripheral vision without having to track another tiny icon specifically for it. If you're interested in the strings to test it out, just ask ^_^

Just quickly browsing through logs before rushing out the door, you may also need to think about preemptive Guards instead of reactionary. It looks like you're throwing up guard almost at the peak of dmg instead of smoothing the initial, which is okay if everything was simply melee dmg. But alas it's not. Some things to always remember is if you know a spell is about to be cast against you, you have 3 spells to self heal and show delay for them. (Prime example is the caster boss on Dark Shamans) *pool 2 chi, see her casting, pop guard* Fully soak the spell, next time save expel harm for it.

[hatduck]

First up, what are you using to track your stagger amount and time remaining?

You can't see it from my weakauras that are visible on that screenshot, but there's an invisible one that floats over my character that slowly fades in as my stagger gets higher and higher, complete with stagger type, but not duration.

Secondly, you need to Guard more. Heroic Garrosh should spike your to 250k+ Vengeance after he's hit you once or twice (or even not hit you if you used EB as it often puts you over 70% avoidance) which can give you a 700-800k Guard, which is worth 2 or 3 of his hits. With EB and then Guard when you hit 2 stacks of the DoT, you should almost never drop below 35%. If you're using both of these properly (it's not like you die if you don't though) that's more times that heals can go to other targets instead of you. This means more Divine Aegis on raid members, more Healing Rain ticks on the raid to keep AV at 100% uptime, and more Paladin shields on the raid. You'll never actually see the difference because it's incredibly minute, but it is an improvement you can make.

Currently I run the glyphed guard for H Garrosh so I can cheese vengeance in transition 1 and use it for extra survival in p2-p3 kiting. That's probably why you're not seeing a ton there, but I certainly don't use it preemptively enough, so you're right anyways.

Honestly though you can kill Garrosh just fine with what you're doing, it just might be very slightly easier if you made those adjustments.

I'm not really posting to kill Garrosh. I fully expect us to pop him off next week. I'm more focused on the fact that I'm incredibly blessed as a GM to have some pretty skilled players next to me, and I dislike being a mediocre player by comparison.

One thing I really struggle with is our apparent lack of an EJ-esque area that is active. I love hard math, and playing next to a world-class paladin tank who has a huge player base to rely on for theory, I sometimes wrestle with my monk-respect.

[Totaltotemic]

Oh Glyph of Guard would explain it, I didn't use it on Garrosh because I was using Agi food and flask and only had like 7k mastery with 800k health so I kind of needed it to make sure I didn't get gibbed when I wanted vengeance.

There's no EJ equivalent for Monks because there simply aren't many theorycrafters that actually play Monks. They're new, have never really been completely OP except MW in 5.0/5.1, and have been kind of a mess of design through the expansion. EJ was already in decline by the time MoP launched, and a good 50-60% of the heroic raiding people that jumped onto Monks as mains have fallen off throughout the expansion as each spec has had its huge problems at one point or another. This is actually the most advanced Monk forum there is, but that's not really saying much considering the competition is the official forums (which are an awful cesspool complete with other classes posting just to complain about Monks) and there's this new chiburst.com but it's got very few members and isn't poised as a theorycrafting site like some class-specific ones and instead prefers to take a more general stance not unlike a large version of this forum.

There's like 5 or 6 of us for each spec that post here, and almost no one that posts on some other site that doesn't also post here that does theorycrafting and hardcore raiding stuff. If you go into the guide threads from page 1 you'll see the same names popping up over and over again for months. This is actually a bit more useful than an EJ type forum because there's not enough of us to populate a forum alone (and some of us might ruin it with a tendency to be a little stubborn >_>) and there's a lot of ideas that get sparked by the average player to look into. Hell, Reglitch practically ripped discussion topics for his blog from the MW sticky for months (and I do something similar). There's a lot of math to be done, but not a lot of people willing to actually do it.

[hatduck]

Off topic slightly, what do we think I should be using as a trinket, since it was mentioned? I have H Haromms, HWF Vial, HWF Sigil of Rampage, HWF RoRo, H Assurance, and H Rooks.

[Totaltotemic]

Oh sorry, it was me that was somewhat off topic. Actually those trinket options are pretty bad alternatives. I mean you've already got the Haromm's but you don't have a second really viable trinket you can use considering both Sigil and AoC would only really be half a trinket. If you wanted to push like 1% more DPS you could wear either the AoC (although I don't know if it will proc for a tank spec?) or the Sigil, but without a trinket with an Agi proc that also has useful stats Vial is fine.

[Rainbowdash]

I have little to add but I thought I'd share my Elusive Brew weak aura.

pastebin-com-Zk8GQXGp
(obfuscated because i can't post links yet.)

It puts a lot of information in a small amount of space, and makes a sound at 6 and 11 stacks.

Leeflow is the person I look up to for Brewmastering, even though he's MS WW now. He just finished 25H Garrosh.

edit: i don't see Vengeance anywhere on your UI. I have a WA simply displaying my current attack power (which is useful for WW spec as well)

[hatduck]

@Rainbowdash
That's another thing that doesn't show on my UI shot, but I do show it. Also, I'm getting an error when I try to load your WA. Is it missing a piece of code? Getting a 'no table end marker' error.

[Deleted]

Oh sorry, it was me that was somewhat off topic. Actually those trinket options are pretty bad alternatives. I mean you've already got the Haromm's but you don't have a second really viable trinket you can use considering both Sigil and AoC would only really be half a trinket. If you wanted to push like 1% more DPS you could wear either the AoC (although I don't know if it will proc for a tank spec?) or the Sigil, but without a trinket with an Agi proc that also has useful stats Vial is fine.

so why not mention HWF RoRo, from what I remember daught calculated it to be the best Dps trinket for BrM, even in 5.4
I'd personally go with that if dps is your goal

I'd also replace it with a hc thok's tail tip if you can, and then just stack crit like crazy, adding to both your survivability (crit heals etc) and damage

[Totaltotemic]

so why not mention HWF RoRo, from what I remember daught calculated it to be the best Dps trinket for BrM, even in 5.4
I'd personally go with that if dps is your goal

I'd also replace it with a hc thok's tail tip if you can, and then just stack crit like crazy, adding to both your survivability (crit heals etc) and damage

If Heroic 25 man Garrosh hits you when you have 0 mastery he'll do over 500k per hit. On lesser bosses maybe, but I just don't see RoRo working post-Thok on 25 man.

[Tech614]

If Heroic 25 man Garrosh hits you when you have 0 mastery he'll do over 500k per hit. On lesser bosses maybe, but I just don't see RoRo working post-Thok on 25 man.

A 500k hit isn't really threatening, on garrosh's swing timer. You would just need to make sure you have a away to know the second your RORO procced and be ready for those hits. 2 500k hits with no healing in between still isn't enough to 2 shot a full heroic geared brewmaster you should easily have over 1 million health if you have a resto shaman anyways. Don't get me wrong, tanking Garrosh with 0 mastery for the entire fight would be pretty stressful but for 10 seconds? Not even a big deal. RORO would be far more dangerous on a spikier fight like pre nerf Paragons(they're still spikey but nothing like before). Garrosh is a lot of damage, but it's slow predictable big hits, the easiest damage in the game to heal.

[Rainbowdash]

ugh I have no idea why that set won't export. I did a clean install of WA and everything. It's based off this set minus the shuffle.

pastebin-com-fetpY16V

Basically paying more attention to the dodge buff, and your stacks, you can use Chi Brew to make up for dry streaks if you happen to have any.