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

[Hellkung]

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.

The nerfs along with the set bonuses and the class trinket is as close to a class redesign as they can do mid expansion.

[Evolved]

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.

Which is why I feel that those trinkets were a silly idea. Blizzard has a hard enough time balancing classes as it is, throwing individual class trinkets and gimicky ring procs into the mix with tier bonuses is a recipe for disaster when it comes to trying to tune encounters.

Hopefully getting hit for half your HP isn't actually how that boss is supposed to go, even without being fully geared up with end boss trinkets and 4pc tier.

[Deleted]

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.

You make it sound like Transcendence doesn't work on Kormrok's Mark of Chaos. It does. You just have to pop it during the cast, just like you had to on Mark of Chaos... not sure what you're complaining about. Warrior Leap and Druid Blink work too, btw.

The stun is probably in place so you pop a defensive beforehand/need healer attention so the mechanic doesn't get completely ignored.

[Deleted]

You make it sound like Transcendence doesn't work on Kormrok's Mark of Chaos. It does. You just have to pop it during the cast, just like you had to on Mark of Chaos... not sure what you're complaining about. Warrior Leap and Druid Blink work too, btw.

The stun is probably in place so you pop a defensive beforehand/need healer attention so the mechanic doesn't get completely ignored.

I'm almost 100% sure that you could Transcendence while rooted by MoC so long as you were in range of your Transcendence spirit, but I could be misremembering - it was a fundamental part of our P3 strat on Mar'gok and I'm pretty sure our Monk got the root then ported out AFTER the root was cast.

It's just stupid that there's no consistency with this sort of shit. Like, why does it silence us? Why does the idiotic crushing hand thing tick for 200k after a few seconds and render you completely incapable of doing anything? It's just obnoxious and fundamentally un-fun gameplay for tanks, and it's gone and become utterly pervasive in WoD. If mechanics casually immobilized DPS or healers 4-5 times every fight for 5-6 seconds at a stretch you can bet they'd be yelling their heads off, and yet every single fight in WoD seems to have some sort of mechanic that picks us up, or silences us, or stuns us, or punts us to fucking China, or just all of the above.

It's just dumb, honestly. When you can't use a class' toolkit reliably to deal with mechanics, that's terrible design. If they don't want us to be able to Transcendence roots like that, just fucking remove it. There's no point to having it in if every other boss fight is going to have some weird exception to how and when you can use it, or if it's just going to be generally useless.

[Totaltotemic]

Mark of Chaos could be Transcendenced after it went off and you had the root on you. Kormrok's has to be done before it goes off. It's funny because the first time around on Heroic it didn't even silence and was literally exactly the same as Mark of Chaos. They slapped a band-aid on that doesn't.. actually.. fix anything.

Personally I don't know why you can Trans while rooted in the first place.

[Deleted]

Mark of Chaos could be Transcendenced after it went off and you had the root on you. Kormrok's has to be done before it goes off. It's funny because the first time around on Heroic it didn't even silence and was literally exactly the same as Mark of Chaos. They slapped a band-aid on that doesn't.. actually.. fix anything.

Personally I don't know why you can Trans while rooted in the first place.

I think being able to Transcendence with roots is perfectly fine. In terms of boss mechanics, it gives BrM a very well-defined niche. Need to get something out of the raid that roots with the least amount of disturbance possible? Bring a BrM. Ideally every tank spec would have the sort of clearly-defined niche that BrM and DK have with Transcendence and Mass Grip respectively atm.

Hell, I mean I guess it'd be fine if you couldn't Transcendence it either, it's just the generally glaring lack of consistency with these things. They seem incapable of keeping "which things can I use Transcendence for" consistent between two separate PTR sessions, never mind between actual boss fights.

[Tech614]

Mark of Chaos could be Transcendenced after it went off and you had the root on you.

Pretty sure that only lasted a week and got hot fixed. After that you had to use it during the cast as well.

[Deleted]

Pretty sure that only lasted a week and got hot fixed. After that you had to use it during the cast as well.

Nah, I just went back and watched my co-tank's PoV from our very first Mythic Mar'gok kill the week before BRF released. He's definitely casting Transcendence AFTER getting the root from MoC. They might have fixed it since then, but it was definitely still a "thing" up until BRF release.

[Merau]

Nah, I just went back and watched my co-tank's PoV from our very first Mythic Mar'gok kill the week before BRF released. He's definitely casting Transcendence AFTER getting the root from MoC. They might have fixed it since then, but it was definitely still a "thing" up until BRF release.

Did this a couple weeks ago (maybe a month or so ago.) Could still Trans while rooted.

[Deleted]

The timing on the root/stun doesn't really matter once we have timers though, so I guess it's just whatever.

[Deleted]

The timing on the root/stun doesn't really matter once we have timers though, so I guess it's just whatever.

It's still stupid - it's exactly like how they make mechanics like Aim during Klaxxi or Impale and then don't have immunities work on them. Like, if they're immunities, why the fuck don't they make you immune to all damage?

There's just so much crap in this game that they make weird "special exceptions" to instead of just designing properly. Drives me insane.

[eschatological]

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.

I used something called bossswingtimer (I believe) when I wanted to time my DSs on my DK, but I haven't really found that to be relevant in awhile. I still have it installed on the DK, but I'm not sure it's very accurate any more. Having to rely on it for BrM would be bad.

[Primalthirst]

Quartz can be configured to track swing timers. Not sure how accurate it is. Maybe try and track down a Guardian, a few of them use swing timers to fit 2 AAs inside Guardian of Elune on Kromog.

[quthar]

Quartz can be configured to track swing timers. Not sure how accurate it is. Maybe try and track down a Guardian, a few of them use swing timers to fit 2 AAs inside Guardian of Elune on Kromog.

Quartz will only show the player's swing timer. If you want the boss's swing timer the only addon I know of is BossSwingTimer.

[Bryce]

WTB co-tank that has threat so I can stop having to afk in raid =/

On another note, doing operator mythic progression. Any tips for us here? I'm running chiex/rjw/chi burst and my co-tank (monk also) running serenity/xuen/chi burst. Tips for the fight?

[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.

I'm not trying to brag here, but honestly I saw no real issues with Zakuun. I got absolutely fucked a few times on the previous Heroic boss, but Zakuun felt exactly like where I'd expect a mythic boss to be. It literally just feels like the old MOP tanking days.

I was mixed Crit/Mastery build (2.5k Crit, 2k Mastery) and felt sustainable as hell. Jace got fisted on his DK, but I was ok for the most part.

[Deleted]

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.

Hrm, are you taking into account that with the change the gap between mid-tier mythic and high-tier heroic gear goes from 15 ilvls to 10? Of course, this would go against blizzard's previous decision to not force mythic raiders into lower difficulties too much but well... HFC gearing nightmare confirmed, either way.

[Deleted]

Didn't really have any problems with Zakuun either, Xhul'horac Heroic felt more threatening and I switched to DK after 4 pulls there.
I'm usually running stamina flask on PTR though so I had like 600k hp.

Either way with set bonuses, trinkets, no euro lag and better calling of externals I can't see any issue at all.

[Hellkung]

I'm not trying to brag here, but honestly I saw no real issues with Zakuun. I got absolutely fucked a few times on the previous Heroic boss, but Zakuun felt exactly like where I'd expect a mythic boss to be. It literally just feels like the old MOP tanking days.

I was mixed Crit/Mastery build (2.5k Crit, 2k Mastery) and felt sustainable as hell. Jace got fisted on his DK, but I was ok for the most part.

This is really good news. Could you elaborate on how the playstyle has changed?

I remember you saying that you were keen to play pally next tier because of said changes.

[Leblue]

Expel Harm and dance dance revolution as you pick up GotOx orbs. With tier bonuses jab is irrelevant and at least with the mythic tanking dummy I never saw more than a moderate stagger (yellow, and not even very high at that). Guard for boss abilities and you win!

They really need to make purifying feel irrelevant and not just an after thought of ChiEx. Oh well, Death Knight lite it is (~")~