Originally Posted by
Totaltotemic
Everything was balanced around level 100 raiding in beta. Before any of the hotfixes, BrM was middle of the pack in terms of survivability in tanks in raids and we could see this from raid testing, simcraft, and some pretty simple tank dummy tests.
What happened though was that everyone that was doing any kind of serious testing in beta were all people that had typically over a year experience with BrM and very in-depth knowledge about how the spec works. BrM has always had a somewhat high skill ceiling with a moderately high skill floor (at its base level, press EB when it lights up, keep Shuffle up, and Purify at red stagger is not very difficult), and if they just balanced with the MoP level of complexity in mind BrM would have ended up in a pretty good spot.
What happened though was that both Chi Explosion and Serenity added giant layers of complexity on top of what was already there in terms of Purifying. Serenity increases how often you have the ability to purify by 2-3 times what it used to be, so it becomes a huge game of playing around the 5-20% Stagger range and knowing whether you should PB right this instant or 2 seconds from now. On the other hand, CE practically handcuffs PB and BoK together so if you want any benefit out of the talent you have to recognize the big hits and set yourself up to have 3 chi exactly when it happens, which takes a lot of foresight and planning. On top of that, they tried to do this attunement thing where everyone has one clearly always best stat, except they failed when it came to BrM and did not make Crit always the best stat simply because EB is not always useful. So they balanced around an above average level of skill when a massive gap opened on the lower end of huge mistakes people can make, to the point where if CE is mismanaged you won't even keep 100% Shuffle uptime, which used to be a given. Basically, BrM's skill floor fell down a few stories so unless someone has a very good idea of what they're doing, they won't be able to function as a tank on a decent level, so that needed to be brought up some.
Edit: That's not to say that people that are having trouble are bad (although if you literally cannot complete a CM in 630 gear, it's not the spec that's the problem), but there's a huge burden of knowledge to figure out how to optimally play. The knowledge required isn't really even a lot related to BrM as a spec, but to mobs, bosses, and mechanics themselves. Both CE and Serenity require a mental timeline of future Stagger to be running at all times to use properly so that you know when you're wasting chi and when it's a good idea to just wait one more second. That means that if you don't know what ever mob in every dungeon does, you're going to be blind-sided in a way that other tanks aren't because they just press the damage reduction buttons almost all of the time and it's okay.
It's more damage and self-healing than Versatility, but like I said above sometimes EB's benefit is nonexistent whereas Versatility's straight damage reduction is still useful in all circumstances. Personally I think the gap might be too wide for the few times EB isn't useful to be overtaken by Versatility, but there's just enough there for it to not quite be better than mastery.