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

[The Madgod]

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[Azaranth]

Great guide TMM!

I never had a chance to play in the beta, so I was hoping someone could give a more thorough breakdown on the L30 talents. Zen Sphere seems to have had it's healing rebalanced. Is it the go-to tanking choice now? Do you expect people to be swapping this talent around frequently? Most of the time, I was more-or-less using Chi Wave on cooldown. Any best practice suggestions for Zen Sphere?

[The Madgod]

Keep in mind guys that Section 9 will be updated sometime after Warlords of Draenor hits, but before raids open.

[Totaltotemic]

Something I found out while leveling (oddly, this didn't seem to matter in 5 mans, but I imagine it would really matter for raid trash) is that the Black Ox Statue basically requires some macros to function properly.

There's the old "auto-taunt Statue" macro (which is a lot more useful now that mobs run directly to it):

#showtooltip Provoke
/target Black Ox Statue
/cast Provoke
/targetlasttarget


But now a "dismiss Statue" macro is also absolutely mandatory if you don't want to accidentally pull some trash:

/click TotemFrameTotem1 RightButton

This macro is caps sensitive, it will not work without proper capitalization.

Finally, here's one that I personally started to use to mark the Statue so that you can see where the damn thing is in the middle of the mass of bodies that are now attracted to it:

#showtooltip Summon Black Ox Statue
/target Black Ox Statue
/script SetRaidTargetIcon("target", 1)
/targetlasttarget
/cast Summon Black Ox Statue

You have to hit it again after it's up for it to actually be marked, but it's been very helpful for targeting Dizzying Haze to land when mobs get to it when I can keep track of exactly where it is (and an easy way to check if it's still alive without needing the totem frame all up in your face). Here's a list of things to change the 1 to for different icons.

[Dimzum]

Are the t16 set bonuses going to be worth keeping after 6.0 hits? I haven't seen anything about what will happen with the now even more worthless 2 piece. With us purifying even more with 6.0 will the 4 set continue to be worth having?

We're gonna keep pushing for SoO kills and I am just now coming back after about a 2 month break, so trying to figure out what I need to prepare.

[Leblue]

Last time I saw the T16 set bonuses on beta your two piece simply reduces the cooldown of fortifying brew and the 4 piece stays the same. The value of the 4 piece itself though will likely depend (imo) how hard the bosses are tuned to hit in this "nerfed" SoO.

Also I just noticed, but Mark of Blackrock was missing from potential weapon enchants. I don't have any math (or haven't seen any for that matter but easily could've missed it) on it and understand that part of it may be devalued because it can only proc while below 50% health but didn't see it mentioned.

[Totaltotemic]

FFS, why post a link to Icy-Veins guides on the front page when better guides are typically found in the site's own forums?

This is the Icy-Veins BrM guide's stat priorities actually saying that mastery is the worst stat in 6.0. It's so irritating, I wish people would stop holding that site in such high regard.

I guess I should actually expand on this subject of why mastery is actually one of the best stats, if not the best.

Effect of self-heals

Mastery is a very simple 1% attack power per 110 rating, or essentially 1% more on all AP-based self-heals (spoilers, they all are). For the same of other stats we get:

Crit - 1% (1% increased potency)
Multistrike - 1.67% multistrike (or 1% increased potency)
Versatility - 0.85% (0.85% increased potency)
Haste - 1.1% haste (variable)

Haste doesn't affect Chi Wave, and doesn't affect Expel/GotO when you need them, just makes them more available. It's clearly the worst self-healing stat.

From there, Versatility is the second worst, it simply has less potency for heals than MS/Crit/Mastery do.

Finally, MS/Crit/Mastery are equal on everything they actually affect, but Crit/MS do not affect Guard (for some reason it doesn't share the same shield calculation Power Word: Shield does) although MS does give slightly more GotO orbs and Tiger Strikes uptime. It's debatable whether Mastery or MS is better for self-healing purposes, but they're both clearly better than every other stat including Crit.

Reducing damage taken

For starters, Multistrike does not reduce damage taken whatsoever, so if it's worse or equal to mastery in self-healing, then it must be worse than mastery overall.

Haste's effect on damage taken is also extremely minimal, no where near anything even close to any other stat especially once Chi Explosion and Serenity enter the picture. At best it gives more GotO and PBs, but that's it. It's also obviously worse than mastery (the math takes too long to explain here).

Versatility vs Mastery is an interesting distinction. Per 110 rating, vers reduces damage taken by 0.42%. Mastery increases Shuffle amount at this rating by 0.625%. I think we can effectively say that the exponentially increasing aspect of Mastery is written off by the fact that it's not a pure damage reduction and liable to be wasted. Versatility also reduces magic damage taken while Mastery does not (even with Soul Dance it's such a small amount). Overall, it might be a wash, but as proved earlier Mastery has better self-healing than Versatility, making it the superior stat.

So we're left with Crit as the only possible contender with Mastery. It already has worse self-healing (namely not affecting Guard), so it's at a disadvantage there. 1% Crit translates into 1% EB uptime (at no haste) which gives 45% dodge. At level 100 that's around 25% avoidance to 70% avoidance, or a 60% damage reduction. A 1% uptime on 60% damage reduction would therefore be a 0.6% damage reduction, which is inferior to the 0.625% Shuffle equal Mastery provides, and also does not work on anything other than AAs (special physical abilities are often a large part of damage taken). Therefore, we can conclude Mastery is better than Crit as well.
___

So it doesn't really matter if you're going for self-healing or EH or overall damage taken reduction, Mastery trumps all other stats in each of these areas where it's not dead even. Of course, I don't have a clue what sims Sunnier was running, because this is exactly what my sims show. I'd be interested to hear any argument that mastery is not BrM's unquestionably best stat.

[TheWindWalker]

Can we get some numbers for just how much armor a Brewmaster at 100 has without Bonus Armor and how much +% they have after equipping a few items? (Like, character sheet says "25.05% of physical damage..." and then what it says with those on.) I'm very curious just how much you actually gain from Bonus Armor because it's always sounded bad (even hilarious) after seeing Bears and plate users being so high up the the curve that it took a Mage's entire armor rating to increase their sheet % by another 5%.

Would go a long way to getting people to not only use BA because they're being told to but because they understand that it's a good stat.

[The Madgod]

Also I just noticed, but Mark of Blackrock was missing from potential weapon enchants. I don't have any math (or haven't seen any for that matter but easily could've missed it) on it and understand that part of it may be devalued because it can only proc while below 50% health but didn't see it mentioned.

I didn't mention it because it's probably the worst enchant out of all the ones we could use. Maybe aside from the bleed. There was some discussion about it earlier in the WoD BrM thread.

Great guide TMM!

I never had a chance to play in the beta, so I was hoping someone could give a more thorough breakdown on the L30 talents. Zen Sphere seems to have had it's healing rebalanced. Is it the go-to tanking choice now? Do you expect people to be swapping this talent around frequently? Most of the time, I was more-or-less using Chi Wave on cooldown. Any best practice suggestions for Zen Sphere?

Sorry for not responding earlier. I haven't had the ability to do any actual testing because I too have not had the chance to be in beta but from what I've gathered Zen Sphere is pretty good now, yeah. Dunno personally if it's better than Chi Wave though since again, no ability to test it, but I'm fairly confident in my theorycraft.

And I'd say maximize its uptime. There's no real cost to do so.

[Totaltotemic]

Can we get some numbers for just how much armor a Brewmaster at 100 has without Bonus Armor and how much +% they have after equipping a few items? (Like, character sheet says "25.05% of physical damage..." and then what it says with those on.) I'm very curious just how much you actually gain from Bonus Armor because it's always sounded bad (even hilarious) after seeing Bears and plate users being so high up the the curve that it took a Mage's entire armor rating to increase their sheet % by another 5%.

Would go a long way to getting people to not only use BA because they're being told to but because they understand that it's a good stat.

I don't really know what the armor formula is, but just some character sheet testing led me to this:

In 597 ilvl (copied character, I just hit 100 today on this one) with the 640 legendary ring I have 163 total Bonus Armor. If you mouse over Armor (why this isn't on the Bonus Armor stat I don't know) there's a Base reduction (which seems to include SotSO) and Total reduction.

Base: 19.71%
Total: 22.52%

Take off ring:

Base: 19.71%
Total: 21.28%

So the bonus armor on that ring makes me go from 21.28% to 22.52% reduction, or 78.72% to 77.48% damage taken, or a total reduction of 1.575% for 73 Bonus Armor stats. If we extrapolate this out to Versatility rating, it would be 1.575% damage reduction vs 0.28% damage reduction, or making the Bonus Armor literally 6 times better than an equal amount of Versatility for pure damage reduction.

At the same time, Bonus Armor gives 1 AP per point, so it's also similar to Agility in terms of raw AP it provides (but without the 11% from specialization/buffs Agi gets). For comparison, my total AP is 3214 with the 5% stats buff, making this 73 bonus armor 2.27% of my total AP. For comparison, Mastery is 110 rating per 1% AP.

So yes, Bonus Armor is seemingly 6 times the damage reduction of Versatility with two to three times the AP that Mastery gives (depends on total amount of Agi). It is literally the best stat you could ever possibly have on any piece of gear.

A less complicated comparison is just more than 3 times better than any other stat you could possibly have, or basically worth more than all the other stats combined on a piece of gear. This is actually a lot more than I previously thought, it makes bonus armor trinkets basically mandatory.

[Promdates]

Last sim I ran a couple weeks ago was showing between Bonus Armor to be about 2x Agility, and about 2.5x as good as crit/mastery, and 3.3x versatility.

[Totaltotemic]

Last sim I ran a couple weeks ago was showing between Bonus Armor to be about 2x Agility, and about 2.5x as good as crit/mastery, and 3.3x versatility.

Yeah my sims have shown something similar in the past, granted it doesn't affect magic damage. I'd still wager that any ring/cloak/neck/trinket without Bonus Armor is probably not suited for a tank.

[Deleted]

I'm not very excited with the changes in the BrM for WOD, but I love the spec anyway, my opinion about stats wages are:
- New paradigm: no reforge, far less gem sockets and mandatory items(Bonus Armor ones) just implies that we will use suboptimal stats during progress (i.e. less choices to make).
- Defensively the following stas: Mastery, Versatility, MS are fairly equals, because every single one has big drawbacks like mastery for instance, you can't extrapolate the stagger into raw physical damage reduction because stagger will THICK and you can't purify on every melee swing plus it doesn't work for magical damage (also Dodge (passive and EB) devalue mastery, by how much? who knows.. its difficult to quantify and depends on many variables), oversimplify math and/or complex systems like tanks damage taken in raid it's wrong and extrapolate those things into facts it's double wrong. But I do believe that Mastery is slightly better than Versatility and this two are better than MS.
- Seeing the bigger picture, I don't believe that we will have to worry too much about optimal stats/gear since every stats has a big defensive value (except Haste) and a meaningful offensive value.

[Leblue]

I didn't mention it because it's probably the worst enchant out of all the ones we could use. Maybe aside from the bleed. There was some discussion about it earlier in the WoD BrM thread.

I wasn't terribly impressed with it even in raid testing myself as well, but I never really got to test mythic as a tank either so I didn't get any logs on its uptime or anything. Could you clarify what you mean by bleed? Pardon if I'm missing something, it is early in the morning still.

[Promdates]

Yeah my sims have shown something similar in the past, granted it doesn't affect magic damage. I'd still wager that any ring/cloak/neck/trinket without Bonus Armor is probably not suited for a tank.

Well yah, but the majority of bosses are primarily physical damage. I could see a situation where we would want more versatility/stamina for a fight similar to lei shei. We didn't see anything like that this tier though. Even Brackenspore is mostly physical damage.

[The Madgod]

I wasn't terribly impressed with it even in raid testing myself as well, but I never really got to test mythic as a tank either so I didn't get any logs on its uptime or anything. Could you clarify what you mean by bleed? Pardon if I'm missing something, it is early in the morning still.

http://wod.wowhead.com/spell=159236

That one. It's the cheap enchant of the expansion.

[Extremities]

After testing the changes on the WoD beta, I am not excited for the changes to monks, or tanks in general. As I mentioned in a DK thread(I also play a DK tank) self healing has taken a massive hit for almost all tanks from what I've encountered. Brewmaster monks losing the healing orb drastically changes our self healing capabilities. Now, granted, I haven't really paid attention or tested the healing orbs that are passively summoned through us dealing dmg and how much they heal for so Ill have to take a look at those either today or tomorrow when it goes live.

[Promdates]

It seems there's a point between 560-585 where mastery/armor is good and haste is not, and then it switches. I'm not exactly sure why, I'll have to look more into it.

[Totaltotemic]

It seems there's a point between 560-585 where mastery/armor is good and haste is not, and then it switches. I'm not exactly sure why, I'll have to look more into it.

Well theoretically the higher your Agility goes, the more dodge you'll have, which would make EB more valuable (because of exponential avoidance value), which in turn makes haste more valuable. Also the more residual multistrike that happens to be on your gear makes haste more valuable because haste increases the uptime of Tiger Strikes even further which would also in turn increase its normal contribution to GotO generation.

Granted, I don't think any of those make a big enough difference to make it compete with mastery/versatility, but there is that weird phenomenon where MS/Haste/Crit interlock and scale with each other in various ways beyond just what the stat is supposed to do whereas mastery/versatility scale with themselves only.

[Promdates]

it's a scaling thing. The lower your gear level against a boss the more survivability stats you need vs when you overgear the content the less you need. It's no worry really. Should probably just go Crit/haste for 6.0 until you start leveling if you're 580+