[GUIDE] Drunken Savagery: Brewmaster Tanking in [6.2]

[Deleted]

The forum has been getting spammed with questions like this in the past week, for all three specs. I guess we could get some psuedo-official stat weights put together to list in the OP, but I dunno what's worse: the spam, or everyone following a list of weights blindly without understanding why.

Short story, whoever looted that crit/haste ring to you made a mistake. You'll replace it the instant you get any 670 ring with BA on it (eg. the BA/mastery ring from the same boss), and haste is still terrible for us. It should have gone to a DPS who could get full benefit out of it, and then you wouldn't be asking this question. Hang onto it for your WW offspec I guess, but in the meantime my guess (without looking at the particular numbers) is that the BA on the 640 is going to beat out the extra agi+stam on the 670.

Run some sims if you want to be sure.

Did you even bother reading the rest of my post? Literally the next line says I'm simming my monk. I'm not looking to just be told what's better, chances are if a lot of people are asking it's because they're unsure of the value of bonus armor relative to other stats other than knowing 'it's good'.

edit; it was a pug with personal loot and I have shit luck.

[Totaltotemic]

Did you even bother reading the rest of my post? Literally the next line says I'm simming my monk. I'm not looking to just be told what's better, chances are if a lot of people are asking it's because they're unsure of the value of bonus armor relative to other stats other than knowing 'it's good'.

edit; it was a pug with personal loot and I have shit luck.

Just don't even think about how good Bonus Armor is. Consider things without Bonus Armor to be like Cloth, you don't wear it. Yes, in some crazy circumstance where you go from a heroic blue to a Mythic ring there's a slight chance that it might be a 1% overall increase to skip out on the Bonus Armor, but freak extremely high (talking like 40-50 here) ilvl upgrades simply don't happen often. This doesn't even have anything to do with Monks, it's an intentional design difference to mark jewelry as being for a different role just like cloth/leather/mail/plate. Asking if you should wear something without bonus armor just because it's higher ilvl is like asking if you should wear a cloth piece that's 50 ilvls higher, and the answer is that you lose out on so much that it's just basically never worth it.

Haste's value also goes up and down a lot based on how much you have in SimC. The problem with the default scaling option is that it will only tell you what the benefit of one point is from your current levels. If you run a full scaling plot that shows various weights across 500 or 1000 rating, you'll see that it actually increases TMI for the first ~500 haste or so and then starts to lower it, but if you're already at that peak of course it looks like it's lowering it by a lot per point, but meanwhile if you actually had another stat instead it would already be lower.

[Deleted]

Bonus Armour is love. Bonus Armour is life.

[Deleted]

hmm there seems to be some contradiction between 'disregard everything without bonus armor' and 'sim yourself'.

Agility just seems really strong for reducing damage taken and increasing healing done. It's still decent for tmi although not as close to bonus armor than the previous categories.
The two rings I mentioned; for TMI the bonus armor ring comes out ahead. for DTPS and EHPS the 670 comes out ahead. Just bodging it by averaging the values they come out near damn equal and that's without giving any value to the extra stamina. Once you include stamina (which affects tmi but not dtps or hps) it pushes it even further in favour of the 670.

All that said, it's very close. I realize I asked for help then debated it but I just want to understand better rather than blindly following the mantra ^^

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can anyone explain what's going on here;

[Chuupag]

Is it intended that we are getting non bonus armor rings etc on bonus rolls and such. I just had a highmaul mission come back with the crit/mas ring from kargath. And while yes those are our best stats no bonus armor just makes me scream 'why are we getting dps shit.'

[Totaltotemic]

hmm there seems to be some contradiction between 'disregard everything without bonus armor' and 'sim yourself'.

Agility just seems really strong for reducing damage taken and increasing healing done. It's still decent for tmi although not as close to bonus armor than the previous categories.
The two rings I mentioned; for TMI the bonus armor ring comes out ahead. for DTPS and EHPS the 670 comes out ahead. Just bodging it by averaging the values they come out near damn equal and that's without giving any value to the extra stamina. Once you include stamina (which affects tmi but not dtps or hps) it pushes it even further in favour of the 670.

All that said, it's very close. I realize I asked for help then debated it but I just want to understand better rather than blindly following the mantra ^^

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can anyone explain what's going on here;

TMI Standard boss does far more magic damage than any boss in the entirety of Highmaul except Brackenspore. It naturally skews away from things that reduce physical damage taken in favor of things that increase HPS when it comes to TMI. Try simming with the Mythic Tank Dummy boss for a more appropriate valuation of stats.

I did acknowledge though that in cases of crazy item level disparity a higher item level piece without Bonus Armor may come out slightly ahead, but does it really matter? You can sim it and do whatever you want, but chances are if you're trying to decide between a 640 ring and a 670 ring you got on personal loot in a heroic pug, you're probably not doing any kind of content where a 1% difference means anything at all. By the time you get to that kind of content, you already have a heroic ring with bonus armor on it anyways, so the entire idea of massive item level gaps is irrelevant. Hell, the second you do a full clear of heroic or even normal Highmaul on Master Loot instead of Personal you're almost guaranteed to have all bonus armor jewelry.

It's not that items without bonus armor can't or won't be better, but that the situation that would cause such an item level gap doesn't exist if you're doing content that requires that level of min/maxing. "Just sim it" or "just use the bonus armor one" are, quite frankly, lazy answers because no one really cares what the actually right answer is in the scenario since it'll get replaced in a week anyways. We could try to go into some super in-depth analysis and find out exactly how many items levels it takes for other stats to eclipse bonus armor, but what would be the point?

And I don't mean your question is a bad question or anything, just that when you take a step back and look at the big picture, are you doing any kind of content where a 1% overall difference is going to matter?
__

Anyway, about the haste plot, what you're seeing is what I was describing before. Different levels of haste cause different actions to fire in the APL (because of when energy comes back and abilities become available), sometimes leading to a gain in haste showing worse performance by a little bit. How you end up seeing the simple weight that might show haste being good is if you're at one of those peaks where it was actually getting worse before. All the stat weight is saying is the slope of the line if you take your current value and add 1 point, and haste does go pretty steeply down at some points there. Overall it's always quite a bit worse though if you imagine a line of best fit (or just create one in Excel), it's just kind of a quirk of a simulation always following a robot set of commands that it can potentially do worse with more haste at some points.

Is it intended that we are getting non bonus armor rings etc on bonus rolls and such. I just had a highmaul mission come back with the crit/mas ring from kargath. And while yes those are our best stats no bonus armor just makes me scream 'why are we getting dps shit.'

For some reason things without bonus armor (including trinkets) are listed under tank specializations as well because we can potentially use them. I had a similar issue when originally gearing up that I got two Agility trinkets from heroics before I saw a single bonus armor one. I kind of wish they would be taken off of the table for raids though.

[Deleted]

I'm not disagreeing that I should be using a 670 bonus armor ring. But I don't have one. What's wrong with wanting to be the best I can with the gear I have available? I'm not sure why the content matters. If I'm doing heroic in a pug or not it's still heroic. I find your attitude quite strange from a self confessed theorycrafter. Do I even need to be raiding to be interested in gear comparisons?
and, with the stat weights SimC is giving me I'm looking at about 15-20% difference between the rings, not 1% ^^

Anways, good shout on the tmi boss. Will play around with various magic damage results.

fwiw I'm in a heroic pug because guild is on on xmas break :/ Will be doing mythic alts quite soon

edit; after simming for the mythic dummy instead of tmi boss the relative values of bonus armor against the other secondary stats is really much the same. The value of agility was reduced somewhat and the value of stamina diminished but otherwise it's much the same picture. Regarding the rings the 670 is 17.9% better on the tmi boss and 'only' 17.1% better on the mythic dummy. I do think that value is actually somewhat higher than it should be though, the 670 ring has haste on it which in all sims so far is showing as one of the top3 secondary stats (not including bonus armor). However, giving haste a straight up value of 0 the 670 ring only becomes 2% worse than the 640 bonus armor ring given the simc ratings.
It looks a little different if I ignore tmi, the value of stamina plummets. However in the BEST case for the 640 ring, using only the DTPS values (0 value for stamina) AND giving haste an artificial value of 0. the 640 rings comes out 7.2% ahead of the 670. So sure there's a little subjective thinking here but the haste and stamina contribution from the 670 must surely make up that difference.
Everything I'm seeing from these sims is telling me that 670 without bonus armor is significantly more valuable than 640 with bonus armor, contradicting the previous posts on this page.

[Totaltotemic]

I'm not disagreeing that I should be using a 670 bonus armor ring. But I don't have one. What's wrong with wanting to be the best I can with the gear I have available? I'm not sure why the content matters. If I'm doing heroic in a pug or not it's still heroic. I find your attitude quite strange from a self confessed theorycrafter. Do I even need to be raiding to be interested in gear comparisons?

Anways, good shout on the tmi boss. Will play around with various magic damage results.

I'm just trying to offer an explanation for why we sometimes just go with the easy answer even if there's a possibility it might be wrong, and it's usually because there are so few people with that situation with stakes pretty low that no one has cared enough to go figure out an exact answer. I guarantee you that if you had told everyone that the 640 ring in question was the legendary quest ring, no one would have said a word about the theoretical 640 vs 670 comparison because all anyone would probably say is "just go get the 680 legendary ring and this isn't an issue." It's not really a scenario worth talking about in-depth because realistically it should never actually occur if you're truly trying to min/max as hard as you can.

[Deleted]

I'm just trying to offer an explanation for why we sometimes just go with the easy answer even if there's a possibility it might be wrong, and it's usually because there are so few people with that situation with stakes pretty low that no one has cared enough to go figure out an exact answer. I guarantee you that if you had told everyone that the 640 ring in question was the legendary quest ring, no one would have said a word about the theoretical 640 vs 670 comparison because all anyone would probably say is "just go get the 680 legendary ring and this isn't an issue." It's not really a scenario worth talking about in-depth because realistically it should never actually occur if you're truly trying to min/max as hard as you can.

sure, but I care more about the 'why' than the final answer.

[Totaltotemic]

Well the why is identical to when the armor specialization bonuses were put in, which is why I often compare bonus armor gear as an armor class in and of itself.

Bonus armor is just worth a lot. There's nothing really special about it, it gives more AP and more damage reduction than Mastery or Agility or Crit do. It's obviously not an infinite value (like the armor specialization bonuses are not infinite), so there is some threshold where X amount of other stats is better than Y bonus armor. What we know is that, like the armor specializations again, that amount is so high that it doesn't occur in the reasonable course of upgrading gear without massive item level jumps that are either the result of getting absurdly lucky or an awkward progression path. Because of the fact that the replacement might be different stats and that armor's value itself varies depending on the fight, it's almost impossible to nail something down like "at 34 item levels non-BA wins out" because there are just too many variables. At the end of the day, we mostly just ignore those outliers because you can always just pretend you never got the higher ilvl item and keep using the bonus armor piece anyways and at most you might be 1-2% lower efficiency than you could have been.

[Deleted]

I would never expect "at 34 item levels non-BA wins out". A stat weight for bonus armor probably isn't so obscure though, or a relative value to other stats. A 640 to 670 jump is also probably quite common. Whilst in my case it is a stage1 legendary due to a late reroll it could have equally been a crafted ring or challenge mode item. Fwiw comparing the 670 to my 655 crit+BA ring the 670 still comes out ahead on tmi mostly due to the agi+stam increase. I think bonus armor is really good (it is really good!) but it still seems like ilvl > itemization for the most part unless you stop giving a value to stamina. A 655 to 670 increase really isn't that awkward of a progression path, it's just moving from normal to heroic. When comparing rings of the same ilvl there's no question that bonus armor is relatively very far ahead. But when different ilvls are involved the primary stats just seem too important when stacked on the difference on overall secondary stats. Sure I could ignore that I got the 670 and lose '1-2% efficiency' (where did you get that value from btw?) but I'd rather take the better option :P

That said, I'm still open to being told I've missed something and bonus armor is better than I'm seeing it.

[Totaltotemic]

Sure I could ignore that I got the 670 and lose '1-2% efficiency' (where did you get that value from btw?) but I'd rather take the better option :P

The entire Ring slot can't possibly be more than 5% of your stats to begin with (look at the amount of Agi/Stam on your ring and then look at how much you actually have). A straight-up increase from 640 to 670 with the exact same stats is only a about a 35% increase in stats on that item to begin with, so you're looking at a maximum of a 2% increase for a straight 30 item level Ring upgrade. I'm not pulling numbers out of a hat or anything, it's just that rings/neck/cloak have almost no stats on them as far as items are concerned.

Anyway, I could go into a dissertation about why I think TMI is a flawed metric in WoD (mostly because 100-0 spikes literally do not happen outside of very special abilities in Mythic) or issues with trying to sim small differences in stats (see above haste scaling graph), but at the end of the day I can't answer which ring of yours would be better because I don't know for sure and don't really care enough to find out, and that seems to be everyone else's attitude here as well.

It's just one of those things with the new loot model in an organized guild, so much bonus armor gear rains from the sky that the idea of possessing a piece that's higher ilvl without bonus armor doesn't even make sense, and in the case of doing non-Mythic without systematically clearing Normal on Master Loot with a dedicated group, I just don't think differences of less than 5% really matter in terms of whether you can kill bosses or not. If you do or want to just min/max for the hell of it, that's great, and I've been writing a ton of posts recently about proper use of SimC to get accurate results so you can truly find out for yourself. I might just go finish the part about tank sims today, might also post it here when I'm done, but it's a bit too long and too intricate of a discussion to continue having here.

Edit: Of course as I say this and how I don't think this situation will ever actually happen I get a haste/mastery ring from my mythic highmaul follower mission cache. I'm just going to go crawl in a hole and die now.

[Deleted]

The entire Ring slot can't possibly be more than 5% of your stats to begin with (look at the amount of Agi/Stam on your ring and then look at how much you actually have). A straight-up increase from 640 to 670 with the exact same stats is only a about a 35% increase in stats on that item to begin with, so you're looking at a maximum of a 2% increase for a straight 30 item level Ring upgrade. I'm not pulling numbers out of a hat or anything, it's just that rings/neck/cloak have almost no stats on them as far as items are concerned.

Anyway, I could go into a dissertation about why I think TMI is a flawed metric in WoD (mostly because 100-0 spikes literally do not happen outside of very special abilities in Mythic) or issues with trying to sim small differences in stats (see above haste scaling graph), but at the end of the day I can't answer which ring of yours would be better because I don't know for sure and don't really care enough to find out, and that seems to be everyone else's attitude here as well.

It's just one of those things with the new loot model in an organized guild, so much bonus armor gear rains from the sky that the idea of possessing a piece that's higher ilvl without bonus armor doesn't even make sense, and in the case of doing non-Mythic without systematically clearing Normal on Master Loot with a dedicated group, I just don't think differences of less than 5% really matter in terms of whether you can kill bosses or not. If you do or want to just min/max for the hell of it, that's great, and I've been writing a ton of posts recently about proper use of SimC to get accurate results so you can truly find out for yourself. I might just go finish the part about tank sims today, might also post it here when I'm done, but it's a bit too long and too intricate of a discussion to continue having here.

Edit: Of course as I say this and how I don't think this situation will ever actually happen I get a haste/mastery ring from my mythic highmaul follower mission cache. I'm just going to go crawl in a hole and die now.

I was thinking much the same about tmi. Tank deaths are very rarely from 'a spike' and more likely caused due to overwhelming damage (honestly, usually trash :S) or healers being distracted by raid damage and tanks ticking down over a number of seconds. The only real exceptions I can think of (from a healing PoV at 3/7M) is the reaver on margok and the breath on brackenspore, both of which are 'mechanics' of the fight to use CD / externals on rather than unpredictable random spikes.
Then again from a healing perspective, stamina isn't that awful. If there's big tank damage whilst I'm busy raid healing, a tank with more health allows me to finish my cast then swap over, set up some HoTs or whatever and efficiently heal him back up. A tank with lower health that spikes to a lower health% would likely cause me to stop whatever I'm doing (say, mid-prayer of healing) and spam some flash heals into him.
Other than stamina I'm not seeing much discrepancy between stat values for tmi and dtps/hps anyway so I'm trying to look at them separately and be sensible about applying the values.

[Xequecal]

Is the Primal Gladiator PvP armor better than Heroic Highmaul armor? I'm thinking it is despite the lower level because all the major HM leather pieces (helm, chest, shoulders, pants) have haste on them, and if you go for PvP gear you can avoid haste entirely.

[Insane Buttocks]

I know there is some info about this in the OP< but thought i would ask you guys still,

Got the heroic tectus staff, and the 2x of the one handed axe from twins.

Would you guys use the one handers, since you can use the two enchants, such as bonus armor+mastery?

Also, does 2hander proc more stacks of elusive brew?

[handofdesu]

Dual wield imo, the haste on the staff is basically a dead stat, while the 1H have 2 good ones. Damage is marginally better with DW as well. I use the Crit & Mastery enchants personally.

Elusive brew generation should be the same across the course of a fight, though dual wielding will be smoother because it has more opportunity to proc (for a reduced number of stacks per proc)

[Totaltotemic]

I know there is some info about this in the OP< but thought i would ask you guys still,

Got the heroic tectus staff, and the 2x of the one handed axe from twins.

Would you guys use the one handers, since you can use the two enchants, such as bonus armor+mastery?

Also, does 2hander proc more stacks of elusive brew?

1h vs 2h is kind of weird for BrM. 1h is definitely more damage and slightly more secondary stats via enchants, but less Stamina. It's not a terribly significant difference, although most people would probably go DW just because it seems like there are a lot more of those than there are 2hs and the extra Stamina isn't terribly important.

As for EB, the number of EB stacks you get is dependent on the speed, anywhere from 1 to 3 with partial chances in between. All weapons overall give the same amount of EB over time, although 2hs can be a bit more streaky because there are less events that each give more EB.

[Deleted]

Just thought I would post this here, It's Rigg from Blood Legion doing a commentary on their Mar'Gok kill. He talks about talents and porting in and out with the debuff etc.
Hope you guys enjoy it as much as I did

Happy Christmas to all you Brewmasters out there, and hope you have a lovely New Year. God Bless.

[Deleted]

Since there is/was a discussion about bonus armor, what are your thoughts on Evergaze Arcane Eidolon? http://www.wowhead.com/item=113861/e...idolon&bonus=0

I don't really like giving up "static" bonus armor (dont have many strong alternatives) but the proc is pretty strong even though the uptime isnt spectacular.

[Deleted]

Since there is/was a discussion about bonus armor, what are your thoughts on Evergaze Arcane Eidolon? http://www.wowhead.com/item=113861/e...idolon&bonus=0

I don't really like giving up "static" bonus armor (dont have many strong alternatives) but the proc is pretty strong even though the uptime isnt spectacular.

It's part of my dream trinket setup, alongside Pol's.