Brewmaster monk Viability

[Deleted]

So Before i say anything i just want to declare that this is not about how "sucky" their are of anything like that simply what people's Opinion is about the class. and what i have said below is From the my own characters of course they might not have BiS SoO HC gear but they stil have an Equal Ilvl atleast 3 of them but the Armor difference on Monk compared to the others are increadibly High so i would like to see what other people think ive heard from Treckie and Slootbag that Brewmasters are the Worst tanks in WoD and that theres no point in Having one unless their get a major buff to their survival and im completly aware of stagger by the way but monks have stagger. I crit heal with death strike on my blood dk for about 50-60k

The problem with brewmaster is what to say explained below
560 Guardian druid Base Armor Physical Damage Reduction: 58.75% (1491 Armor)
560 Brewmaster Monk Base Armor Physical Damage Reduction: 36.12% (592 Armor)
555 Blood dk Base Armor Physical Damage Reduction: 56.93% (1384 Armor)
542 Protection Warrior Base Armor Physical Damage Reduction: 56.48% (1359 Armor)

This is the problem with Monk And before anyone says anything about ahh their plate users Guardian druid uses leather aswell and Before anyone says anything about Bear form or Dire bear form not 100% certain wich you have now.

Monk Should have something close to Guardian to increase their armor sure their ox thing increases their armor by 50% But its Obviously not giving them anything Close to any other tanks i bet my i would have about the same Base Armor Physical Damage Reduction if i Boosted a prot pala and he would have 483 i bet he would have about the same or slightly lower

[Promdates]

Monks have always had lower armor compared to the other tanks. Did that make them terrible before? No, because of the way active mitigation works.

Treckie/Slootbag are also looking at it at a very high level compared to what the majority of the world will see/do. These are two people who look for any kind of advantage and try to maximize them as much as possible, BECAUSE THEY NEED TO. That's what happens when you're on the bleeding edge and are doing fights at an undergeared position.

You mention crit heal with DS on your blood dk, but you also have to remember that's exactly how blood dk's work. Their entire active mitigation is take the damage, heal it up and make a bubble to lower the next incoming damage. Each tank class is different in their respective active mitigation, and you actually can't compare them that way because they're all different and take damage/do healing differently.

The reason their armor is considerably higher is because they more often take unmitigated hits while their AM is down. Shuffle is generally up all the time and gives you a flat damage reduction % based on your mastery (20% base+10% from BoK+Mastery%). Honestly, it might have been better if they didn't take the 10% shuffle off of BoK, but that would have kept us at the top of the lowest damage taken. As of right now, we are very competitive with warriors/paladins for damage taken, but are at the lower end of healing done from self heals.

[Deleted]

Monks have always had lower armor compared to the other tanks. Did that make them terrible before? No, because of the way active mitigation works.

Treckie/Slootbag are also looking at it at a very high level compared to what the majority of the world will see/do. These are two people who look for any kind of advantage and try to maximize them as much as possible, BECAUSE THEY NEED TO. That's what happens when you're on the bleeding edge and are doing fights at an undergeared position.

You mention crit heal with DS on your blood dk, but you also have to remember that's exactly how blood dk's work. Their entire active mitigation is take the damage, heal it up and make a bubble to lower the next incoming damage. Each tank class is different in their respective active mitigation, and you actually can't compare them that way because they're all different and take damage/do healing differently.

The reason their armor is considerably higher is because they more often take unmitigated hits while their AM is down. Shuffle is generally up all the time and gives you a flat damage reduction % based on your mastery (20% base+10% from BoK+Mastery%). Honestly, it might have been better if they didn't take the 10% shuffle off of BoK, but that would have kept us at the top of the lowest damage taken. As of right now, we are very competitive with warriors/paladins for damage taken, but are at the lower end of healing done from self heals.

Monk is stil the weaker Tank though as a blood dk i have the least dmg taken on probably 60% of the bosses below Most of the dps aswell cause of all the healing
Guardian druid you have dream and Frenzied regen Prot warrior has Block and barrier while monk has stagger wich isnt anything to compensate for it compared to any other tanks and Monk tanks have ben horrible throughout mop and this is their first xpac even The only place they've ben useful is in CM cause monk has more Mobility than suvivability Compared to other tanks Running Kegging Works in Cm for Quick clearing but Double rolling Sprint dosent help you when your facetanking a boss with shuffle & Elusive brew on wich is what 55% avoidance? fine its over 50% wich is good stil but BUT when they get hit Oh boy they get hit like a DPS gets hit as a Frost dk i have 49.35% Base Armor Physical Damage Reduction with almost 1.1k Armor

[Ampere]

a) Death Strike heals can't crit
b) Game is not balanced for level 90 in 6.0
c) Monk armor isn't that low anymore, I'm at ~49% damage reduction from armor
d) You can't compare armor for tanks in a vacuum and say stagger doesn't matter

You don't really have any points other than "Blood Legion and Midwinter say Monks are bad!!" Like prom said the bleeding edge players have different things they must consider, but they are likely overblowing the issue anyway because it's "cool" to say things like "x sucks and y is better!!".

There's also a 6.0 Brewmaster thread stickied if you want to ask actual questions and not rant.

- - - Updated - - -

MMonk tanks have ben horrible throughout mop and this is their first xpac even The only place they've ben useful is in CM cause monk has more Mobility than suvivability Compared to other tanks Running Kegging Works in Cm for Quick clearing but Double rolling Sprint dosent help you when your facetanking a boss with shuffle & Elusive brew on wich is what 55% avoidance? fine its over 50% wich is good stil but BUT when they get hit Oh boy they get hit like a DPS gets hit as a Frost dk i have 49.35% Base Armor Physical Damage Reduction with almost 1.1k Armor

What am I even reading...

Monks have been fantastic throughout MoP, though we had a bit low HP for the first tier. Running and Kegging in CMs? Lol. Facetanking was always the best way to do CMs to abuse vengeance. And Fortifying Brew was bar none the strongest physical damage CD for tanks in MoP.

[Totaltotemic]

There is an aspect of which the sheer passive damage reduction of Warriors in particular is about 5-10% too high though, but everyone has known that for months and, much like Disc Priests, Prot Warriors are just an ordained spec that must be overpowered at all times for some reason.

When talking about armor though, it's very important to realize that the tooltip is lying to you. Armor damage reduction is only actually against a same level target on the character sheet, the K value for higher level mobs brings down that amount of damage reduction.

To this end, I have a spreadsheet that was originally intended to be used to evaluate how much damage reduction any given amount of bonus armor is, but it works for this too. Click File and Make a Copy if you want your own.

For example, with beta pre-made characters (I don't have the K value for level 93 mobs, sorry, only 100 and 103 because I'm not sure how to extract them):

Paladin (full 660, no bonus armor)

2783 armor
Tooltip says - 43.53% damage reduction
Actual damage reduction vs level 103 mob - 34.8%

Monk (full 660, no bonus armor)

1425 armor
Tooltip says - 28.30%
Actual damage reduction vs level 103 mob - 21.4%

So while (against a 100 mob), a Paladin would take 56.47% damage and a Monk would take 71.7% damage (making the Paladin take only 78.76% of the Monk's armor-only damage),

Against a level 103 mob it's 65.2% for the Paladin and 78.6% for the Monk, or the Paladin is taking 82.95% of the Monk's armor-only damage.

So these tooltip values are very deceptive, I wouldn't use them at all.

[Promdates]

So you're blinding ignoring everything and only care about healing done from self. Also, blood dks take the most damage and then heal it up via death strike. That's how it was through the whole of mists (and continues into warlords, which is why they're subpar compared to other tanks. gg shitty active mitigation). Guardian druids were pretty consistent in being one of the worst tanks throughout mists because of a faulty AM system they had (which was somewhat fixed for warlords). Warriors are always all around good and are generally considered the baseline of tanks.

Druids AM is a dodge mechanic with an oh shit heal option (think of it as a subpar block/barrier mechanic), warriors have shield block and shield barrier (which were generally very good and broken with high vengeance throughout the siege of orgrimmar encounters).

The simple fact that you say that monks were "horrible throughout mop" and that "the only place they've ben useful is in CM cause monk has more Mobility than suvivability Compared to other tanks". shows me that you know jack fucking shit about monks in either the 5.0 expansion or the 6.0. In 5.0 raids, monks were somewhere towards the bottom due to shitty scaling and stats that were terrible. Once geared enough it became very obvious that monks were going to be broken towards the end of the expansion. This was shown explicitly well in T15 when monks were doing dumb things like single tanking dark animus and taking very large numbers of stacks (that would kill other tanks) without cooldowns. Then it came around in T16 when monks were so broken because of stat scaling they had to put a 10% damage dealt reduction modifier on us so that we wouldn't be LEAGUES ahead of other tanks in damage done. They quickly realized that 10% didn't do shit, and made it 15% instead. This put monk damage more inline with other tanks.

As far as damage reduction, when it comes to any physical damage fight, monks are the go-to tank to do cheesy dumb stuff like solo tank malkorok blood rage on 25H without any outside cooldowns and only using Fort Brew (try this on your blood dk and get squashed hard). Now with Elusive Brew up prior to 6.0 it wasn't uncommon for me to have 70%+ avoidance, add in the fact that I had 55% shuffle... that meant that whenever a boss would hit me for 1,000,000 damage before any mitigation, that I would take (between my 22k armor and other mitigation %'s) 214k damage. Compare that to the 244k for druids, and 300k+ for paladins/warriors/dks.

Get your facts right please, before you come here and try to point out that monks are terrible and the worst tank class in the game because we can't solo heal ourselves like blood dk's or druids, OR because two people from top 5 guilds in the world said that they were bad.

[Xequecal]

I posted this a bunch of times in the other thread and nobody seems to believe me. But the fact is, when you're a tank running world first bleeding edge content, your EH is the only thing that matters. The highest-EH tank is the go-to tank, period. You're so undergeared relative to the bosses that getting two-shot is a realistic possibility and in such a situation a Monk is just not good. That's what Blood Legion is talking about when they say Monks are bad. The strongest part of your kit, Elusive Brew, just does not matter when you can't afford to RNG die in two hits.

It's not relevant to most of the playerbase, Monks are fine in Heroic raids, and they're fine in Mythic raids assuming they have Heroic gear already. It's when they only have like two pieces of Heroic gear from their one week of clearing and are going into Mythic with the intent of getting to the end of the instance literally that week that they become bad.

This is also why I posted the other thread about Ashran, if your intent is to kill shit on Mythic difficulty on day 1, you NEED that Mastery/Versatility EH gear. You'll just get gibbed without it. You don't have all that much time to farm it all up and so you need to take every advantage you can get.

[diggorey]

The problem is not BrM being worse than other tanks in terms of EH. The problem is Blood Legion/Paragon/Midwinter/whoever saying "XY is bad" - by their standards - and the whole community goes crazy and is all like "XY is shit because <insert world top 10 guild here> says so! No way you're going to tank our normal/heroic raid!". Even though the "problems" do not concern them in the slightest.

So if you're not shooting for top 20 rankings, it doesn't matter to you. At all.

[Totaltotemic]

The problem is not BrM being worse than other tanks in terms of EH. The problem is Blood Legion/Paragon/Midwinter/whoever saying "XY is bad" - by their standards - and the whole community goes crazy and is all like "XY is shit because <insert world top 10 guild here> says so! No way you're going to tank our normal/heroic raid!". Even though the "problems" do not concern them in the slightest.

So if you're not shooting for top 20 rankings, it doesn't matter to you. At all.

To be fair, a lot of their opinions are based on a small period of post-squish Mythic testing where Warriors and Paladins still had stupidly strong tier bonuses. There was less than a week of Mythic testing after their bonuses got nerfed and then it just stopped entirely. They were generally correct for a while, but circumstances changed and their opinions never did. Then you have people like Riggnaros who literally do not understand the point of Serenity trying to talk about BrM viability.

[Ealyssa]

as a blood dk i have the least dmg taken on probably 60% of the bosses below Most of the dps aswell cause of all the healing

WTF ? Since when autohealing cause less damage taken ?

You don't know what you are talking about.

[Kitmajere]

Monks have always had lower armor compared to the other tanks. Did that make them terrible before? No, because of the way active mitigation works.

Don't forget the tank squish. We had less armor than other tanks, sure, but our stance used to give 25% DR. Now it's only 10% magical DR with a 50% armor bonus (so our armor is higher relative to the other tanks than it used to be, but still quite obviously very far behind). Also stagger % from shuffle was nerfed.
Our nerfs (tank adjustments, whatever) were quite possibly too much. Prot warr is blatantly ahead with their huge stance DR+armor, but that's well know. I'm more concerned about how we stack up against the non-warr tanks, since it's very obvious prot warr has far too much passive mitigation.

Edit: Also, these concerns are primarily for early gear/Highmaul progression/CMs. BrM looks much more reasonable once it gets gear.

[Hyve]

Sorry, but all the logic and reasoning you've provided here is absolutely garbage. It's already been mentioned, but it's clear you (and many others) don't understand how Monks work.

Sure, we're not the best tank, but we're not so horrible that we're worthless. I've gone from Brewmaster to Mistweaver for Warlords because of Monk Tanking, but that's only because we had a Paladin Tank alternative (To continue tanking with our Warrior), and that'll make life easier.

[Tech614]

Mastery will quickly be broken once again come the 2nd tier of WoD raiding, and we won't see these posts again until the next expansion.

Until they drastically change the way brewmaster work they're always going to be meh to average at the start of the expansion and near broken afterwards. Brewmaster stagger is the single most over powered tool in the game at reducing physical damage and gaining EH. Until they change how it works there is going to be a place for brewmasters, even at the most hardcore progression levels somewhere in every expansion. It probably won't be the first tier, but it's going to happen.

This of course is also ignoring the other niche things BRM can do that other tanks could only hope to do in regards to add pickup and kiting if/when necessary.

[diggorey]

To be fair, a lot of their opinions are based on a small period of post-squish Mythic testing where Warriors and Paladins still had stupidly strong tier bonuses. There was less than a week of Mythic testing after their bonuses got nerfed and then it just stopped entirely. They were generally correct for a while, but circumstances changed and their opinions never did. Then you have people like Riggnaros who literally do not understand the point of Serenity trying to talk about BrM viability.

Yeah, that's why you should take these opinions with a grain of salt. But most people around the forums (not just on mmo-c, on official forums as well) tend to take these statements as gospel.

Sure, we're not the best tank, but we're not so horrible that we're worthless. I've gone from Brewmaster to Mistweaver for Warlords because of Monk Tanking, but that's only because we had a Paladin Tank alternative (To continue tanking with our Warrior), and that'll make life easier.

For nearly the same reason I switched to WW. We have a Warrior an a Paladin or Guardian, so I'll be the backup in case something happens to our tanks.

[Shamanberry]

The tricky part is that top-10 level guilds have a completely different set of priorities than everyone else. It's rarely a case of "while X may be okay, Blood Legion said that Y is better for them, so Y will give us an advantage if we use it too". The truth is that Y may be only the best under a very specific set of circumstances, and X comes out on top in 99.95% of situations -- but those top 10 guilds will still use Y, because they only care about the other 0.05%.

The specific situation that Brewmasters are bad in, however, is a pretty critical one: when you're undergeared, you become extremely spikey because of the way resolve works. Basically, since they changed the formula, the worse your gear is, the worse buttons that scale with resolve are at smoothing out variance in damage in an encounter. If a boss gains a damage buff mid-fight, your healing may go from countering 50% to 40% of the damage taken if you're well geared -- but if you're poorly geared, it may go from 30% to 5%. Percent based mitigation will always be constant, so things like Shield Block or Shield of the Righteous will always be the same regardless - your uptime may be affected by lower gear, but if you go into the encounter able to reduce the damage of 50% of attacks by 40%, you will be able to do that no matter how much damage the boss is doing.

THAT is the reason why Paladins and Warriors seem so powerful when you're in such low gear. All three other tanks get a large part of their mitigation via resolve, and if you're undergeared for the content you're doing, Percent-based mitigation is massively superior to Resolve-based mitigation.

Unfortunately, since they didn't do any Mythic testing after the final balance pass, we really don't know where that breakpoint lies. Brewmaster viability comes down to how successful Blizzard has been about making non-EH mitigation effective, and making the all-too-familar spike->full heal->spike->full heal->repeat gameplay less common. If tanks don't die inside a GCD outside of predictable spikes, and spend more time not at 100% health, then Brewmaster tools are actually really strong outside of that one specific situation; and get relatively more powerful the more geared we get.

[Ultramad]

Honestly I think everyone really is overlooking stagger in these situations. I saw some parses back before the squish, when BrM were said to be at their worst. Of the guild Obscure reference testing mythic stuff. Their BrM took less damage due to stagger than their warrior in every single one of their attempts. That is, less average damage per hit from the same sources. This is due to the fact that if you stack mastery while undergeared you can get an extremely good constant damage reduction added in with shuffle. This coupled with Serenity lets you use your practiced SC2 APM to quickly BOK+PB to negate your stagger every single time it's up. It's really fantastic. I've been bear tanking for the last few years and was considering warrior tanking, but BrM has just too much potential and too height a ceiling to ignore. I love the new gameplay.

I went and tanked mythic on my 554 BrM tuesday. Now mythic might not be a great indication, but just the ability to completely negate incoming damage via a swing timer and PB while keeping shuffle up just barely with every KS+BoK or a brew+BoK if it was getting too close to falling off, was just fantastic gameplay.

I've also tanked some stuff at 100 and BrM's playstyle is beautiful. You have all the tools you need to do anything as a tank. The only downside I can see people really clinging too and taking points from is taht BrMs might be less good at the beginning of the xpac. How many mythic bosses have you tanked? From my experience even before the squish it was 3 attacks + random encounter AOE + a mechanic that would kill you if you didn't get focused heals. I spent a lot of time figuring out my weakaura to put Expel Harm nice and large in the middle of my screen if it refreshed. Thus I would know that I needed to probably Brew+Guard and then immediately mash Expel harm as I was under 30%. It has been a long time since I've experienced gameplay like this. First tier of cata I believe when I had just dinged 85 and went into Baradin hold on my bear to see how many hits it took to kill me. Which was 7 at the time. This feels a lot like that early gameplay where you have time to make decisions when you're dying. Not just, blow CD and live, or miss CD and you die.

I don't know about you guys, but for me and my raid, monks tanks are very viable.

[Promdates]

... This coupled with Serenity lets you use your practiced SC2 APM to quickly BOK+PB to negate your stagger every single time it's up.

... but just the ability to completely negate incoming damage via a swing timer and PB while keeping shuffle up just barely with every KS+BoK or a brew+BoK if it was getting too close to falling off, was just fantastic gameplay.

For reference, in case people didn't actually have one: http://www.curse.com/addons/wow/bossswingtimer

[Totaltotemic]

This coupled with Serenity lets you use your practiced SC2 APM to quickly BOK+PB to negate your stagger every single time it's up. It's really fantastic.

It's going to be a while before people get this down very well.

[Ultramad]

Oh yes I love me them john madden flow charts. Guy's a genius! I don't mean my post to come off condescending at all. I reread it and I would completely understand if someone here felt that it came off like that. I just really enjoyed my time on my brewmaster. The playstyle, the way you can influence how much damage you take. It makes me feel active while tanking. It feels a lot like a game with a lot more interaction than my bear's playstyle I had all expansion. Which was mash 4 buttons and then keep SD up while spamming FR. Just not that fun if you ask me.