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

[Leblue]

Wait what? Are those errors or is that currently what's on the ptr? THat makes so little sense (Archimond's trinket being slightly higher wouldn't be too far-fetched).

[Totaltotemic]

Wait what? Are those errors or is that currently what's on the ptr? THat makes so little sense (Archimond's trinket being slightly higher wouldn't be too far-fetched).

This build changed all of the item levels in HFC. Each wing drops 5 higher ilvl up to Archimonde dropping the highest. Yes, it's very stupid.

[Hinalover]

This build changed all of the item levels in HFC. Each wing drops 5 higher ilvl up to Archimonde dropping the highest. Yes, it's very stupid.

Wowhead seems to have updated

690 - http://ptr.wowhead.com/items=4.-4?fi...rs=1;crv=60102
695 - http://ptr.wowhead.com/items=4.-4?fi...rs=1;crv=60102
700 - http://ptr.wowhead.com/items=4.-4?fi...rs=1;crv=60102
705 - http://ptr.wowhead.com/items=4.-4?fi...rs=1;crv=60102

[Xequecal]

Restating that it's an error on MMO-Champ's part, not even the datamining says this. Mouseover the tooltip to see.

In other news, the new loot ilvls in HFC made trinkets a bit weirder.

Top tier (735/720/705) - Class trinket from Archimonde

Mid tier (730/715/700) - Tyrant's BA trinket with stacking Stamina passive

Low tier (725/710/695) - BA/Mastery trinket and WUE (Haste/damage reduction passive)

Bottom tier (720/705/690) - Stamina/Vers/BA trinket

How does this ilvl stuff work with class sets? Can you get a full set from each wing or is everyone going to be stuck with -10 ilvl gear in a few slots just to complete 4pc?

[Deleted]

This build changed all of the item levels in HFC. Each wing drops 5 higher ilvl up to Archimonde dropping the highest. Yes, it's very stupid.

If nothing else, Blizzard delivers with admirable consistency in the "head-scratchingly awful decisions" department.

A shame it's the only department they seem to deliver in.

[Totaltotemic]

How does this ilvl stuff work with class sets? Can you get a full set from each wing or is everyone going to be stuck with -10 ilvl gear in a few slots just to complete 4pc?

Currently all of the tier sets are at the 725/710/695 ilvl tier. Realistically that means that most slots will have options 5 ilvls higher, while anything that drops off Archimonde would be 10 ilvls higher.

The current tier-slot drops off Archimonde include:

A Cloth helm
Plate shoulders
Mail gloves
Leather gloves

What's more disconcerting is the fact that there are weapons for everyone except all classes that use Agility (Hunters, Rogue daggers, 1h Agi weapons, and 2h Agi weapons) off of Archimonde, meaning Ferals, Enhance, all Rogues, all Hunters, Guardians, BrMs, and WWs get left out in the cold without the best possible weapons from a given difficulty.

I briefly mentioned this before, but when they increased the Archimonde item levels the class trinkets got better too.

Sacred Draeneic Incense (Wowhead link appears to be wrong on the EB damage since it's not scaling with item level at all)

Normal - When you drop below 60% health, you gain a charge of Elusive Brew. Elusive Brew also increases damage dealt by 16%.

Heroic - When you drop below 69% health, you gain a charge of Elusive Brew. Elusive Brew also increases damage dealt by 19%.

Mythic - When you drop below 80% health, you gain a charge of Elusive Brew. Elusive Brew also increases damage dealt by 22%.

The damage increase on EB is kind of insane, and once you get to the Heroic version (with WF being 72% or 73%) the amount of free EB skyrockets to literally every AA that connects from 100% health being an extra EB stack. I'm almost positive there will be bosses where 100% EB uptime will be possible, but it's still not the end-all be-all trinket because it's not nearly as good on tank swap fights or fights where the boss stops to cast a lot.

[Xequecal]

If nothing else, Blizzard delivers with admirable consistency in the "head-scratchingly awful decisions" department.

A shame it's the only department they seem to deliver in.

Other than weapons on Archimonde, which I'm sure will get fixed, why is this bad?

[Totaltotemic]

Other than weapons on Archimonde, which I'm sure will get fixed, why is this bad?

In short, it makes gearing in HFC an absolute nightmare. They keep experimenting with ways to avoid the BiS syndrome of getting the best possible piece and then not examining it for the rest of the tier/expansion. The problem with this is that WoW is not an individual game, and while maxing out gear might be boring for an individual it's absolutely necessary for a raid to keep Mythic raid content competitive.

Let me put it this way: eventually everyone equalizes. Once you're farming half of a tier, it doesn't really matter how much further you get gear-wise. Blizzard sees this as a bad thing because it makes gearing boring after a point. The rest of the raiding community sees this as a good thing because the last 2-3 bosses of every tier are always the most well-tuned because it can be assumed that the entire raid has at or near the ilvl of loot that the difficulty drops by then.

Bosses like Blast Furnace and Blackhand are balanced around the assumption that the raid has ~698 ilvl (2 or 3 pieces not 700). Bosses like Kromog are balanced around having ~690 ilvl. However, because you start getting 700 ilvl gear at soon as you start killing bosses, Kromog is pretty damn easy once you've been around the raid for a month or two. Blast Furnace and Blackhand though never get much easier. Reckoning, a guild on Mannoroth, had 700 raid item level and got the 8th fastest kill in the world yesterday for Blast Furnace and still couldn't kill more than two Primal Elementalists in only one round of the shield being down. Blackhand doesn't have any time-forced delays in the fight and the difference between the fastest kills and the slowest kills is still only one minute.

In this gear model, the hardest tuned bosses are going to be gear walls themselves because if Mythic Archimonde isn't balanced around having mostly 730 gear, he'll be a joke once you've killed the 3 bosses before him two or three times. If he is balanced around that, then he'll be a nightmare if you haven't. Each boss's difficulty will be dictated by how long you have been on that specific boss, not how long you've been in the entire tier. Rather than having a uniform difficulty based on what type of guild you are (super hard for world first racers, getting less and less difficult based on how slowly you progress) the difficulty will only really be determined by how long you have been on that "wing."

The reason why content comes out in tiers is because gear plateaus are necessary to balance the game to an appropriate level. With no plateau, you will always be either undergeared or overgeared for a boss depending on how long you've been at only that boss, so steady learning to get through something like most people learn for fights like Blackhand and Blast Furnace won't happen; if it takes you 3 weeks to kill a boss you'll just get a free kill because you soaked up a bunch of the next tier of gear and your raid got 2% more DPS every week.

To make this relevant to BrMs - bosses will hit super hard when you first hit each new wing until you've gotten a bunch of gear from the previous wing. Good luck tanking the bosses that drop 730 gear while you're still wearing 720 gear because you only just passed all of the 725 bosses. Then, after a while, the bosses will be a joke and boring because they'll be so easy and survival won't be an issue. I am exaggerating a bit, but this is what a linear gear increase causes instead of the diminishing returns on gear each week raids get with the flat ilvl model.

[Deleted]

I don't really see the trinkets being changed in value with a 5 ilevel increase, trinkets will be trinkets.

Even if the weird stacking stamina one has slightly more bonus armor than the tectus style one, I'd prefer the tectus one because it is consistent and has added versatility. Something like the haste one is weird because you really use it for the active, not for the haste; as its a poor stat when compared to bonus armor. The mastery proc will be good for tanks who love mastery still. And if your class trinket is bad, having slightly more ilevel won't make it not bad.

I am slightly concerned about the weapons but I'm a tank so its not that much a concern, sucks for ferals and such though.

[Totaltotemic]

I don't really see the trinkets being changed in value with a 5 ilevel increase, trinkets will be trinkets.

Even if the weird stacking stamina one has slightly more bonus armor than the tectus style one, I'd prefer the tectus one because it is consistent and has added versatility. Something like the haste one is weird because you really use it for the active, not for the haste; as its a poor stat when compared to bonus armor. The mastery proc will be good for tanks who love mastery still. And if your class trinket is bad, having slightly more ilevel won't make it not bad.

I am slightly concerned about the weapons but I'm a tank so its not that much a concern, sucks for ferals and such though.

You know, this is one of those posts that has nothing to do with Brewmasters. I get that you and PTS like to think that this thread is some kind of general tanking forum lately, but it really isn't and these kinds of posts get quite annoying.

Weapons matter a lot for BrMs because Expel Harm has weapon DPS in the formula and is directly affected by how good the weapon is. The trinkets matter because now there's a 10 ilvl difference between the BA/Mastery trinket and the class trinket, which resulted in a 2% increase in the EB damage amount which pretty much entirely offsets the Bonus Armor in terms of damage where before it was pretty close.

There was a lot more than a 5 item level increase going on. Some trinkets went down 5 ilvls, some went up 5 ilvls, some stayed the same, and the class ones went up 10 item levels. This matters quite a lot because the BrM class trinket compared to anything else is entirely dependent on what kind of numbers we're looking at from it, and it just got a whole lot better compared to what it was before.

[Hellkung]

You know, this is one of those posts that has nothing to do with Brewmasters. I get that you and PTS like to think that this thread is some kind of general tanking forum lately, but it really isn't and these kinds of posts get quite annoying.

Weapons matter a lot for BrMs because Expel Harm has weapon DPS in the formula and is directly affected by how good the weapon is. The trinkets matter because now there's a 10 ilvl difference between the BA/Mastery trinket and the class trinket, which resulted in a 2% increase in the EB damage amount which pretty much entirely offsets the Bonus Armor in terms of damage where before it was pretty close.

There was a lot more than a 5 item level increase going on. Some trinkets went down 5 ilvls, some went up 5 ilvls, some stayed the same, and the class ones went up 10 item levels. This matters quite a lot because the BrM class trinket compared to anything else is entirely dependent on what kind of numbers we're looking at from it, and it just got a whole lot better compared to what it was before.

I don't know why you're getting annoyed by his opinion on how the ilvl difference doesn't matter when people pick their trinkets, this being the average player.

For the rest (and in specific for BRM), you just proved him wrong. I don't know what it is but everyone is like super sensitive lately.

It must be the whole waiting game for how much more Blizzard can screw up.

[Deleted]

I don't know why you're getting annoyed by his opinion on how the ilvl difference doesn't matter when people pick their trinkets, this being the average player.

For the rest (and in specific for BRM), you just proved him wrong. I don't know what it is but everyone is like super sensitive lately.

It must be the whole waiting game for how much more Blizzard can screw up.

Lyuben is just showing up in every single thread these days, and mostly says questionable things imo
Im slightly irritated by it as well, but as a random nobody, I don't see the need to say it every time :P

[Deleted]

Lyuben is just showing up in every single thread these days, and mostly says questionable things imo
Im slightly irritated by it as well, but as a random nobody, I don't see the need to say it every time :P

If you haven't figured it out, I'm a tank. And I'm a bear, I don't exactly have a big bear thread to retreat to.

[Hellkung]

If you haven't figured it out, I'm a tank. And I'm a bear, I don't exactly have a big bear thread to retreat to.

So sad and true.

[Gothmog]

So after tonight's PTR Mythic testing...

I don't see us stacking anything other than Mastery. I don't exaggerate at all when I say I'm getting hit for 50-55% of my HP every auto attack. And that's at 720ilvl with every single item having Mastery.
It is Fel Lord Zakuun, he's intended to be a heavy hitter though.

It felt pretty bad on PTR because of the latency. You needed to sync your GCD's to boss swings, so you'd be fast enough with EH if you didn't dodge. A badly timed TP could very well mean a death warrant.
Crit seems a strong 2nd secondary stat, simply for the fact that you'd run out of energy if you have to EH every AA.

We NEED 4p bonus in HFC, it'll just be constant ~40%->dead cases otherwise.

[Deleted]

So after tonight's PTR Mythic testing...

I don't see us stacking anything other than Mastery. I don't exaggerate at all when I say I'm getting hit for 50-55% of my HP every auto attack. And that's at 720ilvl with every single item having Mastery.
It is Fel Lord Zakuun, he's intended to be a heavy hitter though.

It felt pretty bad on PTR because of the latency. You needed to sync your GCD's to boss swings, so you'd be fast enough with EH if you didn't dodge. A badly timed TP could very well mean a death warrant.
Crit seems a strong 2nd secondary stat, simply for the fact that you'd run out of energy if you have to EH every AA.

We NEED 4p bonus in HFC, it'll just be constant ~40%->dead cases otherwise.

Zakuun's damage just seemed overtuned tbh. Maybe he's actually intended for a higher iLvl or they just shit the bed on how hard he's supposed to hit but I didn't see a single tanking class deal well with him at all.

That said, 4pc definitely looks more and more mandatory for BrM. What an awful thought it is that a boss swingtimer addon might be close to mandatory for BrM on the later fights in the instance just so you can't die to getting caught on global between melee swings.

Edit: Kormrok testing was just really obnoxious as well. This entire expac (and really for the entirety of their existence) one of BrMs huge, game-changing tools in a raid setting has been stuff like using Transcendence on Fortified Marks of Chaos, Blackhand smash, etc. Now they make a boss with a mechanic that's basically Mark of Chaos 2.0, but at the same time make it silence the tank because we can't have monks using any of those fancy abilities we gave them to get around it, can we now? I'd roll my eyes, but that's just more effort than they deserve at this point.

[Deleted]

Zakuun's damage just seemed overtuned tbh. Maybe he's actually intended for a higher iLvl or they just shit the bed on how hard he's supposed to hit but I didn't see a single tanking class deal well with him at all.

That said, 4pc definitely looks more and more mandatory for BrM. What an awful thought it is that a boss swingtimer addon might be close to mandatory for BrM on the later fights in the instance just so you can't die to getting caught on global between melee swings.

Do such addons exist? I tried finding one for kromog (didnt look very hard haha) but couldn't find anything; or is it more of a universal thing?

[Deleted]

Do such addons exist? I tried finding one for kromog (didnt look very hard haha) but couldn't find anything; or is it more of a universal thing?

I'm pretty sure you can't get an addon that gives you the exact swing-timer of the boss, but I've definitely seen addons in the past that managed to approximate it with somewhat decent accuracy. Haven't used one for ages though so wouldn't know what the best option in terms of a boss swing timer would be atm.

[Totaltotemic]

Keep in mind that you don't have either the Archimonde trinket or the WUE either, both of which would be extremely strong against heavy AA bosses. It's going to be hard to tell through this entire testing cycle if HFC bosses are tuned around a certain ilvl or if they're tuned around that ilvl + crazy strong trinkets and set bonuses.

[Deleted]

Keep in mind that you don't have either the Archimonde trinket or the WUE either, both of which would be extremely strong against heavy AA bosses. It's going to be hard to tell through this entire testing cycle if HFC bosses are tuned around a certain ilvl or if they're tuned around that ilvl + crazy strong trinkets and set bonuses.

That's a valid point. It's honestly extremely frustrating that they don't release instance gear to be tested along with it. I realize it's still relatively early in the testing cycle, but it sure would be nice to get a rough estimate of what sort of impact class trinkets and WUE have.