Tl;dr – My attempt at explaining the Armor buff and stagger nerf.
Tl;dr 2 – My suggestion is to keep armor buff, nerf stagger by only 10% total, and nerf guard by 50%.
Let me preface by saying I’m a mitigation focus Mythic monk. Some monks pride themselves on topping the DPS charts, I pride myself on taking as little damage as possible. This write-up will focus on the mitigation aspects of the armor and stagger changes and will not factor in avoidance such as parry or elusive brew
For this discussion, I’ll be using a mythic parse of Oregorger:
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports...en&options=130
On this pull, we use a typical tanking swap strategy after every acid torrent, with myself tanking on the pull and after each transition. My warrior tank took 5.62million damage and I took 2.70million damage. I took less damage than over half the raid. At the time, this was the least amount of damage taken by an actively tanking tank on this mythic fight, but since then I’ve seen monks take less than 2 million. I use this as an example of the concern Blizzard has with Mythic Monks and their OP mitigation. The breakdown is this:
Warrior
- Normal– 81.60% - 4.58 Million damage – Average hit taken 82,294
- Mitigated (Blocked/Staggered) – 28.80% - 2.27 Million
- Shield Barrier absorbed – 829k – 8 Casts – 5% uptime
- External Healing Required – 4.58 Million
- Boss Melee swings on Warrior - 36
Monk
- Normal – 50.28% - 1.36 Million damage – Average hit taken 238,194.3 (before stagger)
- Mitigated (Blocked/Staggered) – 74.89% - 8.04 Million
- Guard absorbed – 4.35 Million – 10 casts – 65.37% uptime
- External Healing Required - 1.36 Million
- Boss Melee swings on Monk – 49
Let me start by attempting to explain the Armor buff to our stance. Blizzard is trying to scale down the huge difference in pre-mitigated/staggered damage between the classes. Before stagger came into play, I took 3 times more damage per melee swing than the warrior. This amount is only offset by armor and bonus armor. I currently have +1000 bonus armor. Imagine an under geared Monk, they would take even more. To further compare, a DK takes roughly 150k hits and a Druid takes 193k hits. Now is this a problem? Of course not, because we have stagger. Currently I have 2455 unbuffed mastery which means 6.3% stagger. Base stagger is 30%, Shuffle is 10% so with mastery that equals 46% stagger. That means that 238k hit I staggered 109,569 and took an immediate hit of 128, 624. (I’m using unbuffed numbers for stagger). So blizzard may look at this number and think, “Let’s make them equal”. And if we look at the suggested armor buff alone, that’s exactly what they are trying to do. On live I currently have a Total Armor Physical Damage Reduction of 45% and on the PTR I have 50%. So let’s do some math again assuming that the before armor hit from the melee swing mentioned above is 529,320(238,194 / 45%)
- Live = Melee Swing after armor mitigation – 238,194 (45%)
- PTR = Melee Swing after armor mitigation – 211,728 (50%)
If we apply current Stagger of 46% to the new 211,728 then we get a total immediate hit of 114,333. This is 14k less than before and closer to what the warrior took
To compensate this “alignment” by blizzard, they nerfed our stagger by 30% (10% from shuffle, 20% from stance). Applying the new stagger of 16% to the new 211,728 we get a total immediate hit of 177,851, and a stagger of 33,876.
- Live = 228,194 hit with 46% stagger = Immediate hit of 128,624 and stagger 109,569
- PTR = 211,728 hit 16% stagger = Immediate hit of 177,851 and a stagger of 33,876
With this change, the value of purify is greatly diminished, while the value of guard is increased. In order to keep the intent of the armor buff, while NOT diminishing purify would be to nerf Stagger by 10%. A 10% stagger looks more reasonable
- Live = 238,194 Hit with 46% stagger = Immediate hit of 128,624 and stagger 109,569
- My suggestion = 211,728 Hit with 36% stagger = Immediate hit of 135,505 and a stagger of 76,222
Here the value of purify is still lowered, but not by much.
Finally let’s talk about the elephant in the room that is Guard. GUARD NEEDS A NERF. There I said it, and it’s completely true. It’s no secret that undergeared Monks are not on par with other undergeared tanks. I.e. a fresh 100 Brewmaster will get trucked compared to a fresh 100 Warrior. We experienced this at the beginning of Mists and again in Warlords. The problem with the warlords launch is that blizzard introduced daily Challenge Mode quests that offered the highest iLvL gear. You NEEDED this gear to progress at the highest level in Highmaul. This translated to undergeared monks getting destroyed in Challenge Mode. So on November 25, blizzard hotfixed guards value by 100%. At the time this was perfect. My guards went from 50-100k to 100-200k.
However, Blizzard didn’t revert the buff once we started getting geared. Now the guard amounts are insane. Here is the same fight but filtered for only my Guard casts:
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports...95&view=events
On the pull with both trinkets, a pre-pot, and 220% resolve I cast a 1 Million guard (1,003,588). You may also notice a had over half of it still remaining when it wore off. My lowest guard was 155,043 which is no trinket procs and no resolve, the lowest possible I can get. It’s obvious this needs some balancing and Blizzard is attempting to balance this out by making us take more initial damage. However, I have a better idea.
Let’s do one of two things with guard. Keep guard’s amount but decrease the duration from 30 seconds to 5 seconds, and the recharge to 15 seconds. This makes using guard a more active choice for key boss abilities. Similar to Shield of the Righteousness for Paladins and Rune Tap for DKs. This change would not go over well with the masses though as it raises the skill cap of the class.
Or two, reduce guard’s amount by 50%. This is the simplest change and would balance out well with the current health pools of tanks and not effect the play-style.
I know this was a long post so I thank you for reading it all. In summary I agree that BrM need a mitigation nerf, but the current PTR build is not the way to go.