BrM 6.0 stats

[numlocked]

So I've heard that haste and crit is still the build to go to for brewmasters. I've also heard a lot of people saying in trade chat that mastery is now our go to option regardless if you're doing mythic raiding or not.

Can anybody elaborate a little more on this? If I had a guess it would stay haste and crit as of now, and switch to mastery at the start of the xpac which will be replaced by crit later on, or am I wrong to assume that?

[Deleted]

Taken from the following thread (which you should have checked in the first place, but that's neither here or there):

Because Brewmasters have several different ways to avoid damage, there are a couple ways you can tweak the stat priority. Of course, depending on your gear level and what content you're doing, it may change a bit.

First off, you need to ensure that you've got your essentials covered: grab as much bonus armor as you can.

After that, there's two central paths you can take: you can either focus on getting mastery and versatility for minimizing damage taken and maximizing effective health, or focus on getting more crit, haste, and multistrike, which bumps up your ability to avoid and heal through damage.

Now that Vengeance is gone and Mastery granting AP as well as pure damage reduction, I think Mastery is definitely ahead, especially during the start of the expansion when you'll want to minimize damage intake as much as possible while our secondary stat budget will be sort of low. Maybe Crit will find its place later on, but I doubt that will come until T18 as the tier 17 4 piece kind of devalues Crit.

[Deleted]

T17 4 piece doesn't devalue critt. it just puts mastery ahead but I guess this would the same discussion like "is the glass half full or half empty?"

Regarding to 6.0 stat prio, I still think critt pulls ahead of mastery in terms of damage reduction. You can probably go critt > agility > haste > mastery as good balance between defensive and DPS aspect or critt > haste > agility > mastery for more EB uptime since agility doesn't increase crittical strike anymore. Some monks are probably going mastery > haste as strongest DPS priority combined with 4P bonus for more self healing with high resolve.

I might be wrong. I didn't focus on stat priority that much since 6.0.2 came because it will only last for 4 weeks so.

[Totaltotemic]

Regarding to 6.0 stat prio, I still think critt pulls ahead of mastery in terms of damage reduction.

It doesn't even in a straight-up Patchwerk sim which is the absolute maximum value of crit (since it gets devalued quite a lot on any kind of tank swap or really any break in not getting meleed in the face). It does pull ahead of Versatility though in that scenario, but that doesn't exist yet.

Agility in general is also, for the most part, awful. Mastery gives more AP and the dodge from Agility is negligible. It's better than haste at least, and typically Multistrike, but doesn't even come close to Mastery/Vers/Crit.

Of course as for level 90, you could walk into Mythic SoO with full haste gems and still laugh at the bosses with 570 or high item level, provided you have competent healers. That raid is a bit of a joke now, and not particularly worth concerning yourself about when it comes to stats.

[Deleted]

It doesn't even in a straight-up Patchwerk sim which is the absolute maximum value of crit (since it gets devalued quite a lot on any kind of tank swap or really any break in not getting meleed in the face).

If you're talking in terms of damage reduction as I was, how mastery doesn't devalue with tank swaps and critt does? If you are talking only because you will be sitting at 15 stacks while not tanking, that didn't change from 5.4. Monks were still camping at 15 stacks while not tanking and then using EB as soon as they took aggro. And there are still fights that requires full time or close to full time tanking such as Protectors, Shamans, Spoils, Paragons.

[Totaltotemic]

If you're talking in terms of damage reduction as I was, how mastery doesn't devalue with tank swaps and critt does? If you are talking only because you will be sitting at 15 stacks while not tanking, that didn't change from 5.4. Monks were still camping at 15 stacks while not tanking and then using EB as soon as they took aggro. And there are still fights that requires full time or close to full time tanking such as Protectors, Shamans, Spoils, Paragons.

Yeah, and Crit wasn't good as a mitigation stat in SoO either for that very reason. The only reason BrMs ever stacked Crit was because a halfway competent BrM with a little bit of Mastery was basically invincible in 5.2/5.4, more damage was a lot more useful than more mitigation, and mastery gave 0 damage. Mastery is never devalued because more mastery always increases your Stagger, and now it also always increases all AP-based tools as well (self-heals, Guard). Crit only affects self-heals (i.e. doesn't affect Guard) and Elusive Brew can't be stacked with itself.

1% Crit = 1% EB uptime, so if you start with 20% Crit you already have 20% EB uptime. If you add in haste (which increases current uptime total by amount of haste), 5% (raid buff) more of 20% would make it 21%. When you add in Chi Brew, you get another 8.33% uptime, bringing you to around 30% EB uptime before any stats whatsoever.

Further, there are heavy limitations on what exactly EB can do for you that Mastery/Versatility do that make it come out the way that it does. It does not protect you when:

• You get hit even when EB is up (Mastery/Versatility do)
• You get hit by a "special attack" (Nazgrim Execute, Thok AoE, various instant physical damage attacks mobs can have)
• RNG on self-heals fails you (i.e. Expel decides to not crit just because)
• You are CC'd for any reason (cannot dodge while CC'd)
• Something is immune to being hit (cannot build EB)
• You are being hit with magic damage (the one respect where Vers trumps even Mastery)

In all of these circumstances Mastery/Versatility still work. In an absolute best-case theoretical scenario (even beyond what we do in sims) might Crit beat other stats? Yes. In fact, I ran a sim just now of being a standard tank dummy that does no special attacks and just AAs, and Crit turned out to be the best secondary stat. In practice though, it has a lot of holes and putting a lot of stock into it will get you killed in situations less favorable because you were using a stat that was 5% better in 70% of situations. Tanks don't typically gear for the average scenario, they gear for the worst-case.

Going into WoD, the best way to go would probably be to have Mastery on every piece of gear with Mastery gems and Mastery enchants (because in every situation where Crit doesn't work it's quite a bit better than Versatility) and then about half and half of Crit and Versatility because in some scenarios Crit is a lot better and in some Versatility is not worthless like Crit might be.

[Deleted]

Mastery is never devalued because more mastery always increases your Stagger.

Yes, but during the time you weren't tanking, you didn't need to Stagger damage anyway, and during the time you were tanking, you basically had 100% effective uptime on EB. Just because you are wasting EB stacks when you don't need them doesn't mean it's instantly worse than mastery. And EB is now buffed compared.

And why would mastery be better than critt on Nazgrim because of one spiky spell that can be guarded and that doesn't one shot you anyway. Critt provided overall best damage reduction on that fight.

The reason why monks prioritised critt during SoO progression was because it was better in terms of dmg reduction. Still 80% of the monks are doing the same.

Update: regarding to Thoks deafening screech, it gets you green stagger all the time, and I doubt you'll be using 1 chi just to purify green stagger because it's a waste. Other special abilities as Immerseus cone, you have Guard for that, Zen meditation, Diffuse magic. Same for siegecrafter stacks for example, + I didn't count how many externals can you get. Just because of this special attacks, it doesn't mean you should go prioritise mastery because there are ther ways to overcome this damage.

Update 2: and how much times do you actually get CC'd in PvE and hitting immune target? Very rarely..and about magic damage, you can't stagger it, unless you have Soul Dance, but we are talking about current live patch.

[Leblue]

Crit in mitigation terms is weaker than mastery because its inconsistent. Crit gives you a chance to have a chance to not get hit which doesn't affect a lot of hard hitting boss abilities. Obviously as overall damage taken gains more value compared to straight damage smoothing (damage smoothing being the undisputed king) then dodge from elusive brew gains a bit of value, but a tank that takes consistent damage is always going to be the preferred tank to heal vs the one that goes 10 seconds without damage and is suddenly in the danger zone.

To add to this, the amount of damage that we will reduce in WoD with the Serenity talent will be incredibly good and make mastery even more powerful in reducing our overall damage taken because we'll have the ability to purify far more often without worrying about dropping shuffle which is huge.

Crit wasn't king for its mitigation, it was king for damage. It had an added survivability benefit in SoO of increasing our expel harm crit chance when expel harm could crit for our full health bar and make us invincible. That benefit didn't prevent you from going from 36% to dead (which a later H 25m bosses could and did do sometimes) and mastery could give you enough spike protection to give you that extra swing to heal yourself or give your healers time to get you back to saftey.

Nobody will debate crit was taken by most BrM because of the relatively low amount of mastery you actually needed to complete content (albeit you probably wanted a bit more for H 25M because of how hard later bosses hit) and the damage was more useful. What is wrong is saying that it was taken because it was the best stat in terms of mitigation which is 100% false in an environment where TMI is more important than overall damage taken and Brewmaster Mastery wins that game pretty handily.

[Tech614]

The reason why monks prioritised critt during SoO progression was because it was better in terms of dmg reduction. Still 80% of the monks are doing the same.

False. When Siege was actual progression and actually hit hard on 25mH and we where sitting around 565 ilvl we stacked mastery to not get globaled. Crit overall was terrible for dmg mitigation in SoO, it's just as you over gear the content crit was better as tank dps was king and you where invicible if you could avoid being globaled.

Any brewmaster who claims they where stacking crit for damage mitigation just looked at what a top brewmaster was doing, copied it without knowing why and went with it. Crit was stacked for dps, not mitigation.

[Deleted]

False. When Siege was actual progression and actually hit hard on 25mH and we where sitting around 565 ilvl we stacked mastery to not get globaled. Crit overall was terrible for dmg mitigation in SoO, it's just as you over gear the content crit was better as tank dps was king and you where invicible if you could avoid being globaled.

Any brewmaster who claims they where stacking crit for damage mitigation just looked at what a top brewmaster was doing, copied it without knowing why and went with it. Crit was stacked for dps, not mitigation.

I'm not agree with that : stacking crit was good in pure progress also because of the amount of damage procured ... We had just enough mastery on our stuff to go full crit and survive, even in 25mH. It was 100% more benefit to have like 1.5 more "dps player" (thanks to the crit build) than a Mastery BrM.

But it's an old time now ... With the damage reduction applied to tank in WoD, going Mastery will be the best choice and it's even more true for the beginning of an expansion.

[Infective]

I'm not agree with that : *proceeds to agree with that*.

...what? That's what he said. Crit was taken for damage purposes, not mitigation ones.

[Leblue]

Crit was stacked for damage, mastery for mitigation. If you weren't one of the first guilds pushing the content then you could probably get away with mostly ignoring mastery so long as you had gear w/ decent secondaries (read as Crit/Mastery).

The damage from crit was incredibly valuable in progression (particularly 10 man where you made up a larger percentage) and once you got to the point where you weren't getting gibbed (because even just before 6.0.2 Locust and Windreaver could still be potentially scary) you could comfortably stack crit, but it was by no means for mitigation which is what DexTM is arguing.

[The Madgod]

Crit wasn't king for its mitigation, it was king for damage. It had an added survivability benefit in SoO of increasing our expel harm crit chance when expel harm could crit for our full health bar and make us invincible.

That's an important distinction. In the guide during 5.4, the stat priority was laid out as "You need enough mastery to be comfortable (I.E. Not get globaled) and then stack crit."

Even then, mastery was technically higher on the priority in regards to tanking stats. It's just that we didn't need as much of it. With it providing more damage to boot, as well as continue to be an extremely strong defensive stat, crit doesn't really serve much of a purpose for the foreseeable future.

LeBlue and Total are absolutely right. Crit wasn't stacked for it's defensive properties. Though they were quite useful, they were still outstripped by those of Mastery. Crit is simply a powerful damage stat that provides a bit of defense for us.

[Deleted]

I'm not agree with that : stacking crit was good in pure progress also because of the amount of damage procured ... We had just enough mastery on our stuff to go full crit and survive, even in 25mH. It was 100% more benefit to have like 1.5 more "dps player" (thanks to the crit build) than a Mastery BrM.

the damage reduction from crit was just a nice sideeffect and the main reason for stacking crit was the damage benefit. On a few encounters you HAD to stack a little more mastery to survive the encounters (Klaxxi). Obv. talking about bleeding edge progression and not World#250 guilds which killed garrosh with 577 itemlevel...

Total and Leblue are absolutely right. Although reduction of overall damage taken will be more important in WoD, the most important thing for a tank is to stay alife and make sure you cant get globaled. Crit IS and WAS a terrible stat to achieve that goal (simply because its RNG) and thats the reason why mastery and vers are ahead of crit by a good chunk.

[Deleted]

the damage reduction from crit was just a nice sideeffect and the main reason for stacking crit was the damage benefit. On a few encounters you HAD to stack a little more mastery to survive the encounters (Klaxxi). Obv. talking about bleeding edge progression and not World#250 guilds which killed garrosh with 577 itemlevel...

Total and Leblue are absolutely right. Although reduction of overall damage taken will be more important in WoD, the most important thing for a tank is to stay alife and make sure you cant get globaled. Crit IS and WAS a terrible stat to achieve that goal (simply because its RNG) and thats the reason why mastery and vers are ahead of crit by a good chunk.

On 0 encounters you HAD to stack a little more mastery, I killed klaxxis with 568 ilvl (top 140W on Garrosh) and a full crit build : no problems. What I wanted to say is that YES mastery was and will be the best stat for mitigation but it was also the worst stat in SoO just because being on top damage as a Tank is a real plus for your raid (and crit was the stat to achieve that).

Total and Leblue are absolutely right. Although reduction of overall damage taken will be more important in WoD, the most important thing for a tank is to stay alife and make sure you cant get globaled. Crit IS and WAS a terrible stat to achieve that goal (simply because its RNG) and thats the reason why mastery and vers are ahead of crit by a good chunk.

True.

[Deleted]

I killed klaxxis with 568 ilvl (top 140W on Garrosh)

Which is not bleeding edge at all...

btw: you killed Klaxxi on Dec. 10th 20:30 CEST and thats World#349 and not #140 but thats a little offtopic and none of my business ^^

[Henriksson]

On 0 encounters you HAD to stack a little more mastery, I killed klaxxis with 568 ilvl (top 140W on Garrosh) and a full crit build : no problems. What I wanted to say is that YES mastery was and will be the best stat for mitigation but it was also the worst stat in SoO just because being on top damage as a Tank is a real plus for your raid (and crit was the stat to achieve that).

Yeah, 10-man doesn't really count when you're talking about tank damage taken. I am also pretty sure the one you quoted isn't counting it either.

[Totaltotemic]

Yes, but during the time you weren't tanking, you didn't need to Stagger damage anyway, and during the time you were tanking, you basically had 100% effective uptime on EB. Just because you are wasting EB stacks when you don't need them doesn't mean it's instantly worse than mastery. And EB is now buffed compared.

...What? I'm not talking about when you're not taking. With absolute base Crit if you start tanking with 15 stacks of EB, you will go 18 seconds before you're completely out of EB. More crit is useless in this time, so if you go all-out and stack Crit you'll get destroyed in 2-3 hits if you ever happen to get unlucky. It's an unreliable stat, which makes it a terrible one to stack for tanking.

And why would mastery be better than critt on Nazgrim because of one spiky spell that can be guarded and that doesn't one shot you anyway. Critt provided overall best damage reduction on that fight.

Source? So far it doesn't seem like you have one, since just about ever heroic 25 man BrM in the world has known since 5.2 that mastery was better for mitigation and that people only ever went Crit for damage.

[Promdates]

Source? So far it doesn't seem like you have one, since just about ever heroic 25 man BrM in the world has known since 5.2 that mastery was better for mitigation and that people only ever went Crit for damage.

Crit actually was the best damage reduction stat to use until you reached the crit cap. Sadly for DW that cap was something like 60% paper doll, while 2h was 79%. Meaning you had less EB procs while DW than you would have had as 2h. It's why 2h was the best damage reduction. The reason for people going crit wasn't because of the damage reduction, but the damage output (which is what everyone has been saying).

No one is arguing that mastery wasn't better for mitigation and for managing spikes/effective health. It's often why you saw the undergeared bleeding edge monks sometimes swapping to mastery builds to survive spikes on specific bosses. The thing with mastery is, it's not damage reduction since it just shifts the damage to a dot. Yes, you can remove that damage with Purifying brew, but you'd almost never be in that situation (the Blood Rage situation is precisely what I'm talking about actually, where you had enough mastery to survive each hit and purified before the ticks.)

[Totaltotemic]

The thing with mastery is, it's not damage reduction since it just shifts the damage to a dot. Yes, you can remove that damage with Purifying brew, but you'd almost never be in that situation (the Blood Rage situation is precisely what I'm talking about actually, where you had enough mastery to survive each hit and purified before the ticks.)

You do with Serenity. And even without that, you'd need to go 10 seconds without Purifying before mastery can effectively be written off as "not damage reduction", and the only time that has ever happened is when people again don't care about the damage reduction and just keep pressing Blackout Kick instead. Of course if you're never Purifying mastery won't reduce your damage taken, but all you're doing then is extending the damage/survivability trade into the rotation as well. When you actually care about going for max damage reduction, full mastery has been the best since it was buffed in 5.2.

It's just that a situation where you truly needed max damage reduction basically hasn't been seen probably since world first guilds were doing MSV in like 463 ilvl. Tanks were OP for so much of MoP because of vengeance self-healing that the only time reducing overall damage really, really mattered was when people were horribly undergeared, which also happened to coincide with a need for EH. I'm not saying Crit was bad or anything, it's not even bad in WoD, just less effective than mastery if you're 100% focused on damage reduction and ignoring DPS.