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

[Cirira]

Someone's angry. Also, no, not all tanks were viable in WotLK. Well, they were in the sense that it was possible to complete content with any tank, but that's still true right now where everyone has swapped to BrM regardless. It doesn't change the fact that you were massively gimping yourself if you used non-DK tanks on Sarth+3 or for the entirety of Ulduar. Most serious guilds swapped to DK tanks in 3.1, pretty much in the exact same way that most serious guilds swapped to BrM for this raid tier. Every tier in Cata and MoP arguably had an overpowered "best" tank, but the current situation of having one god tank class and a bunch of shit bench warmers has not existed since patch 3.0 in WotLK.

In 3.2, DKs were nerfed so badly that the first boss in heroic Coliseum could global you from 100% through Vampiric Blood, it was pretty hilarious. Paladins had close to double your EH plus an extra life from their shiny new Ardent Defender.

Also, I'm not sure what your point is about EH, I never said EH was king now, I said it was in WotLK, which it was. It was literally the only thing that mattered in WotLK, and Blizzard was willing to nerf one tank to have about half the EH of another out of the desire to make sure the masses were appeased.

I played a DK all through Wrath and had 0 issues with any of the raids or bosses. I tanked with a Paladin and we took similar damage (other than the extra life from Ardent Defender). We killed Lich King with me as a DK and Anubarak with me as a DK and I don't recall any problems whatsoever. Healers never commented on one of us being harder to heal than the other or anything.

Prior to Colliseum DKs were stupidly overpowered, but come Colliseum and Icecrown they felt like they were in line with the other tanks. Ulduar and Naxxrammas made my Paladin tank cry with how I could solo tank shit that needed 2 tanks without a DK, but after the nerfs the DK felt just like any other tank.

That being said I'm more afraid of the play style change that these changes seem to be leading Brewmasters towards than the numbers changes. I'll wait until the PTR is nearing close, but right now I'm dusting off my DK to have a backup.

[Xequecal]

I played a DK all through Wrath and had 0 issues with any of the raids or bosses. I tanked with a Paladin and we took similar damage (other than the extra life from Ardent Defender). We killed Lich King with me as a DK and Anubarak with me as a DK and I don't recall any problems whatsoever. Healers never commented on one of us being harder to heal than the other or anything.

Prior to Colliseum DKs were stupidly overpowered, but come Colliseum and Icecrown they felt like they were in line with the other tanks. Ulduar and Naxxrammas made my Paladin tank cry with how I could solo tank shit that needed 2 tanks without a DK, but after the nerfs the DK felt just like any other tank.

That being said I'm more afraid of the play style change that these changes seem to be leading Brewmasters towards than the numbers changes. I'll wait until the PTR is nearing close, but right now I'm dusting off my DK to have a backup.

At some point in patch 3.3 they added in some Paladin nerfs and DK buffs via hotfix, this mostly balanced out the tanks. I remember this happening because I was raiding at the time and my health dropped for what seemed like no reason. For all of Coliseum though, DKs were shit. I mean, really shit.

[Gothmog]

Derailing the thread even more!

It doesn't change the fact that you were massively gimping yourself if you used non-DK tanks on Sarth+3 or for the entirety of Ulduar.

Feral tanks were just as good if not better than DK's for them. Simple sheer HP pool. It's true that warriors and paladins couldn't compete for the job on Sarth 3D.

I progressed Ulduar on top30 rank. We used a Warrior and Feral. Sure, there were deaths, but you won't tell me anything other than DK's was gimping ourselves, not at that rank.

[Yesil]

Ok, this post comes from a somehow novice brewmaster. I had to switch back to the spec i abandoned in the early days of highmaul and only got the rotation right a week back or so.

The nerf was really needed. We are currently trying out gruul mythic, and when i look at how i can handle easily the smashes and even sometimes don't drop in health compared to my co-tank war, all the while cheesing some mecanics by moving the boss instantly using transcendance... it was really needed. I think there's a consensus on that.

On the design of those changes, well... i like part of it. Maintaining shuffle was a part of our class since release, and we all grew accustomed to it. But is it fun ? Not really. Is it active mitigation ? No, it becomes a passive effect as when you get things right, you have 2 minutes of shuffle really quickly (and again thanks to the one pointing me my errors in my rotation). So, the whole things served only for punishing new brewmasters. And made the class more complicated, especially since we have so many resources to watch (between the energy, the chi, the EB stacks, guard stacks, shuffle uptime, ... that a lot to keep track of). Habing one less thing to worry about, or made less important is a good thing to me.

I feel like the numbers are too high, but again, i hold my breath before criticizing. In 6.1, a lot of mistweavers, including myself, were criticizing the tea nerf, how it would end up killing our class, and so on. In the end, in gave us MORE control on how we could regen mana, and now it's just a matter of balancing your regen and your output, and it opens up new options (double spirit trinkets for massive healing using rushing jade wind, more output using DPS-like trinkets for uplift, well you get the idea).

I'll personally wait and see. The DPS nerf is surprising, since we were not that high in that department.

Sure, Shuffle lost a good chunk of its value. Sure, we are going to drop Serenity, most likely, and go Chi Ex. Sure, it's a patch that brings changes to our class, and we can prepare accordingly. I'm glad i focused Mastery/Crit, seeing as at least one stat will still be useful.

To me, managing Chi Ex seems more challenging than using Serenity...

The only thing you've managed to identify correctly is Shuffle being a core mechanic for us and how we use it. Frankly, if you have 2 minutes of Shuffle pooled then you're doing something very wrong but I guess that's one of the reasons why we're getting nerfed this hard; no matter how you play a BrM, you're bound to perform on-par or even above every other tank (survivability-wise).

[stross01]

Someone's angry. Also, no, not all tanks were viable in WotLK. Well, they were in the sense that it was possible to complete content with any tank, but that's still true right now where everyone has swapped to BrM regardless. It doesn't change the fact that you were massively gimping yourself if you used non-DK tanks on Sarth+3 or for the entirety of Ulduar. Most serious guilds swapped to DK tanks in 3.1, pretty much in the exact same way that most serious guilds swapped to BrM for this raid tier. Every tier in Cata and MoP arguably had an overpowered "best" tank, but the current situation of having one god tank class and a bunch of shit bench warmers has not existed since patch 3.0 in WotLK.

In 3.2, DKs were nerfed so badly that the first boss in heroic Coliseum could global you from 100% through Vampiric Blood, it was pretty hilarious. Paladins had close to double your EH plus an extra life from their shiny new Ardent Defender.

Also, I'm not sure what your point is about EH, I never said EH was king now, I said it was in WotLK, which it was. It was literally the only thing that mattered in WotLK, and Blizzard was willing to nerf one tank to have about half the EH of another out of the desire to make sure the masses were appeased.

I raided with a blood dk, feral druid, prot warrior, and prot paladin in WotLK. (The same ones through every single tier) All of them were viable. You must've played with some grade-A trashcans if you think otherwise.

It's funny you picked ToGC though, as every single one of our 50-chest runs was tanked by a blood dk.

And yeah, so mad. At least five mads. Such foam wow.

[Leblue]

I'll personally wait and see. The DPS nerf is surprising, since we were not that high in that department.

I suspect this is more of a "we threw stuff on the wall to see what sticks and we'll fix from there". Unless they're fully expecting every Brewmaster to suddenly take ChiExplosion and completely ignore Serenity and Soul Dance (which we kind of do, but in more magic heavy environments could have use barring the amount we get being minimal because of stagger changes) and balancing from there. DPS numbers aren't something to be concerned about, its a pretty easy fix and maybe they'll start using seperate ability ids for BrM or push more of our damage back into Keg Smash again to balance us back out.

The only thing you've managed to identify correctly is Shuffle being a core mechanic for us and how we use it. Frankly, if you have 2 minutes of Shuffle pooled then you're doing something very wrong but I guess that's one of the reasons why we're getting nerfed this hard;

Shuffle in an ideal world acts as a sort of balance so that you can't purify every single swing with minimal defensive drawback while also being balanced against having the chi for Guard. Shuffle should be significant enough so that keeping it up is something of a priority and be noticeable when it drops off vs something you could literally attribute to RNG anyway. You actually still see some of this with Chi Explosion while balancing early guards, 2 chi vs 3 chi, and 4 chi Chi Explosion uses because watching your shuffle duration is a thing (although at the moment guard is so overpowered right now the penalty for dropping shuffle to guard is pretty minimal). Serenity in its current state pretty much nullified the need to do this.

There's something to be desired from the fact that we can already purify, maintain shuffle, and use guard on roughly cd at 0 haste which can really be derived from the fact that haste is such a minor gain in energy that its not worth its current weight and could use a pretty hefty buff for Brewmaster to make it a thing to where gaining the leeway to purify more often. Expel Harm becoming even more important next tier because of the potential set bonus, reduced stagger, and increase in magic damage can help haste to have more value than it currently does should haste have an appropriate value to not be a complete waste. Making Soul Dance actually worth using next tier by not gutting it through the heavy nerfs of stagger can also make us desire a beefier energy regen from haste as well.

no matter how you play a BrM, you're bound to perform on-par or even above every other tank (survivability-wise).

I disagree with this statement pretty vehemently. Sure, played well brewmasters are incredibly OP given Guard and the current raiding situation. I to this day still get people relieved when they see that I'm not an awful brewmaster in dungeon content and am not a paper tank. The interesting thing about Mastery as a mitigation stat is it merely promotes smoothing out spikes until you actually mitigate it with purify (read as removing the damage staggered). Every second you let stagger tick, stagger loses value as actual mitigation because you still take the damage. This is why you'll take more damage with Chi Explosion (you're on a sort of schedule to purify if you choose to use 3/4 chi) and significantly less with the spare chi granted by Serenity (Nearly all of your chi outside of serenity's buff can be dedicated to purifying with no penalty).

Going on a sort of tangent sort of related to tanking, I'm curious how much our current smoothing abilities is exacerbated by the strength of Holy Paladins with double beacon and their strength with tank healing.

[Yesil]

Wall of text.

No clue why you're explaining the mechanics of Serenity and how it affects our gameplay to me. I'm pretty sure even the most novice BrM player understands that Serenity pretty much implies going into Haste is superfluous.

Making Haste a useful stat by nerfing the things that makes a BrM a BrM mid expansion is just odd and disgusting. Some minor-mediocre nerfs to Stagger + Guard would have been sufficient, imo.

An answer to the last paragraph of statements: BrMs current situation pretty much makes you able to negate almost ALl of the potential damage you're about to take. If you don't know how to cheese Guard, then you take some damage and might be perceived as a bad tank cuz "lol this other monk took 0 dmg u take some dmg, noob ffs". Right now our base Stagger is very huge (not taking Mastery into account) and as long as you Purify some of the damage you take, you're up to par with other tanks.

I feel like the Highmaul changes to us brought up the lower skill floor but also brought up the higher skill floor and that's the issue. They never thought of the consequences to how Guard would work in synergy with our other mitigation abilities + core mechanics.

Shuffle in an ideal world acts as a sort of balance so that you can't purify every single swing with minimal defensive drawback while also being balanced against having the chi for Guard. Shuffle should be significant enough so that keeping it up is something of a priority and be noticeable when it drops off vs something you could literally attribute to RNG anyway.

Indeed. Key word: Ideal world. Right now you can almost Purify every melee swing and get away with it without any Chi/energy starvation. 10% Parry makes it heavily reliant on RNG, which makes it, imo, useless.

And don't even mention Soul Dance in its current form, please.

[Totaltotemic]

Going on a sort of tangent sort of related to tanking, I'm curious how much our current smoothing abilities is exacerbated by the strength of Holy Paladins with double beacon and their strength with tank healing.

Holy Paladins are a large part of why Purifying right now is just utterly pointless unless it's up a heavy Stagger. Why Purify when free healing will rain from the sky on you? You might as well just press BoK instead.

On a talent note, with the Serenity nerf there is absolutely zero reason to use Serenity anymore. Serenity is so good because it grants 60 free seconds of Shuffle (the auxiliary benefits of a free Guard or some free PBs aren't really important) while Chi Explosion only grants an extra 2 seconds of Shuffle per BoK/PB combo. With the nerf, Serenity only gives 30 seconds of Shuffle, and 15 3x CEs every 1.5 minutes is pretty much on par for the average (that's a 3x every 6 seconds, which happens with KS/Jab and factoring in Power Strikes).

If 3x CE spam provides the same Shuffle benefit as Serenity, then Serenity has no purpose because its only benefit then is that it's a little more flexible but that's easily played around. With CE being a good 10% at least DPS boost over Serenity, no one would ever use Serenity. This makes the BoK nerf irrelevant and the TP nerf a ~4% damage reduction which really isn't a big deal. Soul Dance remains to be unusable garbage at 30% and probably needs to be up a lot higher before anyone cares about it (unless BrM is so on the razor's edge that 10% magic stagger is important, but you lose so many PBs that even then it's probably not good).

With the current build, I'm looking at full Mastery/Crit stacking still (even if Mastery is worth less it's probably necessary to not get 3-shot by AAs from bosses) with perma-CE. Versatility would be the new favored 3rd stat (with MS's value going in the toilet because flat HPS isn't nearly as good when you're getting wrecked as % damage reduction).

Of course, in this brave new world of a 50% Desperate Measures from the tier set, Haste might actually rise to the 3rd best stat because frequent Expels would actually be a big thing. Don't quote me on that though. I wouldn't want to be seen saying Haste is anything other than the worst stat ever.

- - - Updated - - -

Finally finished downloading the PTR and hit the dummy in the garrison for a couple of minutes.

Shuffle not having its text changed to remove the Stagger portion is just a tooltip error, I was only Staggering 25.7% of damage with 15.7% mastery (no mastery buff or food) so the amount from Shuffle really is gone.

Serenity is absolute garbage. After I used it, I wasn't even sure why I pressed the button because it took two rounds to even get up to 50 seconds of Shuffle banked. I can do that with CE after a minute of just spamming 2x CEs on a tank swap fight, so what's the point?

Currently flying to Shattrath to get smacked by the raid dummies because the one in the garrison is worthless (40k hits before Stagger, no thanks).

[keqe]

Don't quote me on that though

Haste best stat

There, I did it

But seriously, if they really go through with this huge stagger reducement, they will have to adjust soul dance to have it actually do something.

[Totaltotemic]

Okay, I'm wrong, you're wrong, everybody is wrong. We overlooked something extremely important that basically saves the entire spec from being trash. Our Lord and Savior Dave has come back from Pandaria to save us all with his wondrous gifts.

That Tiger Strikes change is massive. The increase from 25% MS to 40% balances out with not proccing from Multistrikes for WW and MW because they stack Multistrike to the high heavens. We don't. We also double-dip from Multistrike because it both spawns more orbs and makes them heal for more. I just self-sustained against the Mythic raid dummy (which starts outputting damage around 160% Resolve and increases damage by 5% every time it does its shadow attack every 10 seconds) for 6 minutes until I was sitting up at 220% Resolve and it finally killed me because I was lazy and not running Dampen Harm to deal with the magic attack. Its melees were hitting me for 200k pre-Stagger (similar to what live Mythic raid bosses do) which was passing through as 140k direct hits and I didn't really care because every time Tiger Strikes procced I stepped to the left or to the right and got a LoH from all of the orbs.

Let me put this in perspective:

That's GotO healing for almost as much as Guard does. I basically could not die as long as Tiger Strikes was up, so everything fell into this minigame of dipping low while Tiger Strikes was active and then in the final second popping Expel and a stack of orbs (that all benefit from the 40% MS) to pop back up to full. Then I'd rotate a Guard charge while Tiger Strikes wasn't up, and the 30% healing increase would let the other stack that was still laying around be another LoH when I needed it.

Buckle up everyone, we're heading right into DK land.

Edit: Going to do this again but with actual logging instead of just a Skada screenshot for more information.

https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports...e=damage-taken

I forgot to turn on advanced combat logging on the PTR so you can't see Resolve but I was up at 225% for a while. I'll do one more with Dampen Harm and ACL on.

[Leblue]

So what you're saying...is if we can not get wombo-comboed by the boss and get Tiger Strikes frequently enough...we'll be okay?

[Rockets]

......lol. Two wrongs made a right.

e: three wrongs, GotO healing shouldn't be able to multistrike because that means we double-dip. Reported that back during beta, glad to see they never fixed that bug either :v

[Totaltotemic]

Yeah basically what my experience has been is that if you stack enough Mastery to not get globaled and appropriately use CDs to deal with large magic attacks, it's fine.

Oh also my WeakAuras are broken and I kept having to mouse over Guard and Resolve to get values. That's not very fun.

https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports...e=1&spell=1003

Here's a proper one. I kind of just got overwhelmed in the end because I took 4/5 melee swings and had blown everything at that point with like 5 seconds left on Dampen Harm. It did take the dummy hitting me for 30% of my health every swing to actually kill me though. I'm not sure how many bosses actually hit for 220k pre-Stagger on live but it's probably not many.

Just looked through some of my own logs. The only boss that hit this hard was Frenzied Kromog with at least a stack of Warped Armor, no one else had melees that big from a single mob (although having tons of adds on Operator or Blast Furnace surpassed that amount).

[klaghatagh]

So we'll be best in fights where we never have to move the boss and let our orbs stack up? Good thing those are really common.

[Yesil]

GotO.

Won't this make fights with a lot of movement an issue?

So we'll be best in fights where we never have to move the boss and let our orbs stack up? Good thing those are really common.

This.

[Saiyoran]

Buckle up everyone, we're heading right into DK land.

the MoP CM playstyle makes it glorious return??? Expel/GotO spiking my hp from 100% - 5% - 100% over and over? Oh boy I think I'm excited.

[Totaltotemic]

So we'll be best in fights where we never have to move the boss and let our orbs stack up? Good thing those are really common.

Oregorger, Gruul, Flamebender, Kromog, Beastlord, Iron Maidens, and Blackhand... yeah actually they are fairly common. You just don't notice or care because GotO is neither powerful enough or necessary to bother caring about it. Keep in mind I'm talking about a 10 second window at most, the proc rate for orbs is awful without Tiger Strikes up.

Fights with lots of magic damage and lots of movement are going to pretty much destroy us though.

- - - Updated - - -

the MoP CM playstyle makes it glorious return??? Expel/GotO spiking my hp from 100% - 5% - 100% over and over? Oh boy I think I'm excited.

This is basically exactly what was happening to me, but then again I was tanking the equivalent of a raid boss rather than a CM boss, so we can expect things like Paladin beacon heals to be coming in too to smooth it out some. I think it was kind of fun, but there are some situations where that just won't work and we'll either need a dedicated Disc Priest spamming Clarity or a rotation of external CDs when Guards are down.

[Saiyoran]

This is basically exactly what was happening to me, but then again I was tanking the equivalent of a raid boss rather than a CM boss, so we can expect things like Paladin beacon heals to be coming in too to smooth it out some. I think it was kind of fun, but there are some situations where that just won't work and we'll either need a dedicated Disc Priest spamming Clarity or a rotation of external CDs when Guards are down.

I just meant in MoP CMs when you had so many mobs hitting you at the same time that your health couldn't stay constant for more than 2 seconds and the self healing was all that kept you up.

[Gothmog]

Very interesting!

The good news is that it's wildly effective against magic damage, which seems so prevalent in HFC. Also the good news is that it's on the other end of the spectrum of dealing with it - consistent, granular healing of it, which complements our big CD's against it. ZenMed, Diffuse Magic, Guard.

Together, that sounds like a really really strong toolkit for magic heavy raid.


as long as you don't have to move...

[Hinalover]

Well I ran a quick Sim for Brewmasters with the 6.2 changes:

Live:


PTR:


I also ran some Stat weights using TMI as a basis:

Chi Explosion:


Serenity:


One thing for sure this does bring the value of Haste up quite a bit. Also Vers is really strong now.

Keep in my with Serenity, since the stagger amount is staying in the light stagger a lot more, it is not hitting the Moderate threshold as often. The sim only hit Purifying Brew 17 times.