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

[Deleted]

So 'no offense' why is a prot pally main lurking in a brew thread telling someone their opinion on a blood dk is uninformed.

Because said Prot Paladin is in a guild that doesn't let you exclusively play one class and also has multiple top-100 Mythic parses on his Blood DK?

Look, I'm fine with people offering their opinion on stuff. You don't necessarily need to be an expert, but there are things like Blood DK and issues with RP capping where you sort of need to have hands-on experience with it to understand just how bad it is. You're incentivized to stack a stat that basically does nothing but make you waste resources unless you play with Breath of Sindragosa. That's why it needs to stay. The fact that it's an example of the sort of gameplay ALL tanks need to be compelling (i.e the ability to smartly make a tradeoff between mitigation and DPS) in high-end content for good players is why it's also relevant to BrMs. BrM being the most "modern" of tank classes you sort of don't suffer from as many of the old, weird design flaws that many other specs have (but then of course suffer under the fact that the devs literally seem to not understand how you work) - something like ChiEx is essentially an analogue in terms of what it offers gameplay-wise to BoS, presupposing of course that it's not just the highest-survivability choice like it might be in 6.2 because they're dismantling Serenity.

[Chuupag]

My cotank is a dk who doesn't take BoS. He just doesn't like it. I play a blood dk on an alt who is just a few ilvl behind my brew and I don't take it bc I don't like it. I also pull off pug tanks at the drop of a hat and BoS would just make that worse. No I am not a mythic player, but neither is the majority of raiders. This thread, as most of the mmo forums, is not a valid cross section of the playerbase. I stack MS on my DK and never seem to cap resources. So that either makes me a bad player, a liar, or just lucky.

But back to the regularly scheduled Brewmaster thread. My cotank has joked for a long time that he is just there so my stacks can reset otherwise I'd solo tank bosses, and the set bonuses as they stand just have me drooling. I can easily get 400-600k guards just watching trinkets/resolve and having that every 20 secs, unless they change it, would just be sweet.

[Trendy-Ideology]

It's to draw a line between saying "you are an idiot" and "what you said there was idiotic". I generally think Lyuben is level-headed most of the time, but even smart people say stuff that ain't all too bright sometimes. I wanted to point that out despite not having any issue with Lyuben himself. There's nothing faux-apologetic about it. I genuinely don't mean to offend him - what he said was just ill-informed and made little sense.

What the fuck stopped you from just fucking saying that the first time?

[Evolved]

it CAN be 100% uptime in 6.2

If people are still getting 100% uptime, then the damage problem wasn't fixed. Blizzard has already shown that they're not comfortable with tanks damage being competitive with DPS classes. Anyone who expected the BoS DPS train to continue in it's current state is deluding themselves. One of 2 things has to happen, either the damage goes or the duration goes.

[Deleted]

If people are still getting 100% uptime, then the damage problem wasn't fixed. Blizzard has already shown that they're not comfortable with tanks damage being competitive with DPS classes. Anyone who expected the BoS DPS train to continue in it's current state is deluding themselves. One of 2 things has to happen, either the damage goes or the duration goes.

I'm fine with the damage going (in the sense that I'm 100% fine with BoS being tuned down in situations where it's too strong. Single-target BoS needs a 5-10% nerf AT BEST and every other tank needs to be taken out of the dumpster and actually do 70-80% of what a DPS does when they're going ham instead of 50%), so long as the duration stays. The entire, amazing thing about BoS isn't the damage - the damage is effectively irrelevant for the purposes of the argument. It's the fact that it actually fixes a core design flaw with the spec in an elegant way that promotes cognizant tanking rather than just mashing DC like a fucking idiot and praying to God you don't overcap RP anyway.

Every spec in the game deserves - needs - a mechanic like that.

[Totaltotemic]

Anyway... I'm starting to put together the picture of what BrM builds (stats, gear, talents, etc) are going to look like in 6.2. I say multiple builds because it turns out that there are massive synergistic pieces that only really work with one particular build each among the different trinkets. This is looking like one of those tiers where you'll want to be switching from fight to fight.

I'm going to break down what I think the different setups are primarily based off of what type of damage they are good against. I can't really comment on the general trend of HFC bosses because we haven't seen Mythic yet and haven't even gotten a good look at some of the bosses without being utterly broken, so I'll do my best to compare to BRF bosses.

Threat - Auto-attacks when tanking for an entire fight (e.g. Blackhand/Iron Maidens/Hans and Franz where you tank for over a minute at a time against primarily AA damage)
Note: Also applies to general "applies magic DoT" with just AAs bosses like Operator.
Best mitigation tool - Elusive Brew combined with self-healing
Best trinkets - Class trinket and WUE for mitigation or BA/Mastery trinket for best damage.

General playstyle - This is more or less the target dummy boss, where Elusive Brew is kind and dodging is great. The yo-yo effect of bouncing from 100 down to ~40% and back to 100% every 2 AAs that connect basically defines this build. The tier bonuses effectively let you be immortal so long as you properly pool resources to mash Expel over and over and over while using Guard and EB to prevent drops from happening in the first place.

Talents - Might need Serenity even in its nerfed state to deal with the extra chi consumption of extra Guards. This is a relatively high damage build anyways because the Expel Harm spam is pretty good.

Stats - Crit would be useful up to the point where you have more EB than you know what to do with, but past that Mastery and Multistrike are both pretty good. Haste is less cancer here than in any other build.

Threat - Mini bursts of big damage (e.g. Gruul, Brackenspore, Oregorger if Acid Torrent actually mattered)
Best mitigation tool - Stagger and Guard
Best trinkets - BA/Mastery trinket, and either WUE if the burst is in multiple hits (like Manny) or god forbid the Stamina/Vers/BA trinket if it's all in one hit.

General playstyle - Basically what we're used to. Every 10-30 seconds the boss will try to wreck you, so top yourself off, press Guard if it's that infrequent, and if it's not then either rotate Dampen Harm or just pray. With the tier bonuses though there should be virtually no situation where you can't have Guard for these things, so yay go us.

Talents - Chi Explosion is fine, Dampen Harm almost required.
Stats - Mastery to survive physical hits, more Mastery to make Guards bigger to survive magic hits, and Multistrike to top yourself off before hits.

Threat - Massive burst of damage no more frequent than every 60 seconds (e.g. Crippling Suplex)

You are a Brewmaster. Press Guard and Dampen Harm and what the rest of your build looks like is totally irrelevant. These things should never dictate what you do for the rest of the fight and nothing is going to 100-0 you with Guard and an external CD so you might as well just ignore them.

Threat - Enrage timer (for when survivability is not an issue but DPS is)
Best mitigation tool - Being a Brewmaster
Best trinkets - BA/Mastery and Class trinket (the others are all missing damage in one way or another)

General playstyle - Chi Explosion to the max, but also some heavy Expel Harm and EB cheesing for maximum damage. You might want to pool resources to only use abilities during EB if you can help it. It's very similar to the anti-AA build except without really caring about saving EB or using the extra Guards.

Talents - Chi Explosion

Stats - Crit/MS all day

[Antifu]

I enjoyed this thread more when it was about theorycrafting and suppositions. Certain people have recently brought a lot of aggression here, and the whole tone is different. Nowadays I just scroll past the toxic posters to find a few key names that are trustworthy. I know I'm not adding a lot here, but could these new, argumentative people just stop posting or learn some manners so we don't have to scroll through 3 pages of bickering to find something with substance, please?

[SlippyCheeze]

I enjoyed this thread more when it was about theorycrafting and suppositions. Certain people have recently brought a lot of aggression here, and the whole tone is different. Nowadays I just scroll past the toxic posters to find a few key names that are trustworthy. I know I'm not adding a lot here, but could these new, argumentative people just stop posting or learn some manners so we don't have to scroll through 3 pages of bickering to find something with substance, please?

You can ignore posters, which shows you a pleasant "this is a waste of space" block and the ability to view their comment should you desire. It adds significant value to some forums for me.

[The Madgod]

You can ignore posters, which shows you a pleasant "this is a waste of space" block and the ability to view their comment should you desire. It adds significant value to some forums for me.

He's right though, the ignore feature shouldn't be necessary.

Guys this is a Brewmaster discussion thread. Keep the talk about other specs out of it, if we're going to be seeing discussions like these happen.

[Deleted]

We killed Blast Furnace, hurrah! Rough in the middle there but a nice clean kill was really satisfying.

Can anyone direct me to a good post/video/guide on being a brewmaster on blackhand on mythic? The human reroll is imminent but besides that I don't really know where to start!

[Deleted]

We killed Blast Furnace, hurrah! Rough in the middle there but a nice clean kill was really satisfying.

Can anyone direct me to a good post/video/guide on being a brewmaster on blackhand on mythic? The human reroll is imminent but besides that I don't really know where to start!

Assuming you're going to be tanking the demolisher, this is roughly how it's done in its entirety from my co-tank's PoV: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I7tBZ0-EJbs. Note that you literally can't see a damn thing for half of P2. You're likely not going to enjoy it.

[Saiyoran]

We killed Blast Furnace, hurrah! Rough in the middle there but a nice clean kill was really satisfying.

Can anyone direct me to a good post/video/guide on being a brewmaster on blackhand on mythic? The human reroll is imminent but besides that I don't really know where to start!

http://www.twitch.tv/saiyoran/c/6616138 This is my PoV of our kill. I ran Tiger's Lust/Zen Sphere/Chi Brew/(doesn't matter this tier)/Dampen/Xuen/Serenity.

Siege tanking was a lot of strafing for GotO orbs since our DK tank was getting shit on and needed lots of single target. Both Blackhand and the Siege hit decently hard if you're not full mastery (I'm crit build with about equal ms/mastery after that). I used Zen Sphere solely on myself for the Detonate heals, instead of keeping it up on the other tank as well (in P2 that is).

[Shaey]

Howdy everyone, long time lurker, first time account maker/poster. I've recently switched from WW to BM for my guild, as we lost our tanks from MoP into WoD and were getting sick of long wait times hunting for tanks. I've been at it for a month and a bit now, and have tried to follow most of the advice I've seen from you beautiful people.

We're a semi-casual guild, starting to get back into the swing of things after having to recover half our group. We're about to start pushing Heroics and I want to make sure I'll be in a decent position to not be a... uh... baddie.

wwwdotwarcraftlogsdotcom/reports/g2cQChqAzxY8v74B#boss=-2

Aside from not potting ever like the fool I am, are there any glaringly horrible areas where I can improve on?

Cheers for the feedback and feel free to be brutally honest. I assure you I can "Tank" it. Get it? get it? Ahh.

Edit: I guess I cant post links since I'm a fresh account. I sure hope altering "." to "dot" doesn't get me in trouble, and if so sorry.

[Deleted]

I have a question for you guys and gals.

It seems my tiny brain can't understand how the charge system of Guard works. I must admit I play Warlock and the charge system of Dark Soul and that of Hand of Gul'dan is also messing with me...

The question is: how many Guards can I use in a minute/how does the charge system work? Is it two (meaning I use one charge, it goes in CD, I use the second, the CD is reset to 30s as the second charge cools down) or is it three (meaning I use one charge, it goes in CD, I use the second, it goes in CD independently from the first as they cool down separately)? It's probably the worst sentence I can come up with (not a native speaker) but I hope you'll understand it.

For Dark Soul, I know that the charges do not recharge independently, meaning I only ever get one more use out of Dark Soul during the fight, but I recall reading Guard doesn't work like that.

(There are things I feel I'm too stupid to comprehend. Lots of "hard" stuff click in my head, but some little things like that do not and it's driving me crazy...)

Thanks a lot.

[Deleted]

Just a question about Ore Mythic, AskMrR logs show me as scoring 0.2 on Acid torrent

I use Zen Med first
then Guard + FB
Guard + armour trink (gives 17xx Barmour)
Guard

then its P2

each time I do the above I also have a PW:S on me, Zen Med can be funky at times but works 90% (sometimes I get knocked out of it even with clearing stagger and I cast it 0.8 sec left on Acid T)

That correct or could I do something better? I watch the health of the raid and at worst they drop 50%

[Ziktator]

Only one charge of guard will refresh at any given time. This means that if you use one charge of guard at 0s and one at 10s, the first charge of guard will be ready again at 30s. At that point, the second charge of guard starts refreshing, and the second charge will be ready again at 60s. Roll works the same way.

[Totaltotemic]

Just a question about Ore Mythic, AskMrR logs show me as scoring 0.2 on Acid torrent

I use Zen Med first
then Guard + FB
Guard + armour trink (gives 17xx Barmour)
Guard

then its P2

each time I do the above I also have a PW:S on me, Zen Med can be funky at times but works 90% (sometimes I get knocked out of it even with clearing stagger and I cast it 0.8 sec left on Acid T)

That correct or could I do something better? I watch the health of the raid and at worst they drop 50%

Just Guard every single one, no reason to use anything else. It does like 300k damage maximum.

[Deleted]

Only one charge of guard will refresh at any given time. This means that if you use one charge of guard at 0s and one at 10s, the first charge of guard will be ready again at 30s. At that point, the second charge of guard starts refreshing, and the second charge will be ready again at 60s. Roll works the same way.

OK, same as Dark Soul then. I don't know where I read the opposite. Oh well, it basically means that I get one charge every 30s, and one other charge to use once whenever I want during the fight.

In a 6-min fight, I can guard only 13 times? Seems low.

[keqe]

OK, same as Dark Soul then. I don't know where I read the opposite. Oh well, it basically means that I get one charge every 30s, and one other charge to use once whenever I want during the fight.

In a 6-min fight, I can guard only 13 times? Seems low.

Getting to use super powerful CD 13 times during 6 min encounter seems godlike to me.

[Deleted]

Hey 13 times is 13x 1 million so 13 million absorb the whole figth, i mean all guards are 1 million absorbs rigth?