LB + HT is pretty damn strong and fluid. Prolly best combo for getting juicy purifies and easing strain on healers.
LB with boc is shit though.
If you're farming content, then you can experiment. On progression, however, I wouldn't condone a Brewmaster selecting Light Brewing without at least 14% haste and the T19 4-pc set bonus. Given such constraints, Light Brewing isn't ideal to use, and for some it's not even an option. Bottom line... you'll get more brews/minute using Black Ox Brew than you will if using Light Brewing, at a nice soft cap of 14%.
"Hope can turn into despair in a heartbeat."
R.I.P Chester Bennington 1976-2017
More brews/minute means nothing if those brews have no use. If you take Black Ox Brew and its cooldown keeps ending while you are currently not tanking, then the brews are useless as you have no stagger to purify. If you keep delaying it's use for when you need it, then the brews/minute that it gives over LB drops drastically.
Bottom line, the benefits of BoB is player/encounter/skill dependent. Raw brews/minute numbers mean very little in a raid situation, especially on progression when nothing is routine and the flow of the fights and damage intake patterns haven't been learned.
"X is mathematically better when the stars align" doesn't mean much when you're so drunk the universe keeps spinning.
I've seen a handful of brewmaster monks hovering around 10%. That obviously gives them less BoB casts/minute than other brewmaster monks that hover around 20% (I operate on Haste (20%) > Crit = Mastery > Haste).
There comes a point when LB outdeals BoB. This would need to be an insane amount of haste, though (35-40%). If you ran BoB with that much haste, you would eventually hit a cap and feel that the extraneous haste is useless (because it would be).
With 22% haste, I can make the CD on BoB drop to ~60 seconds within that CD window of 90 seconds.
"Hope can turn into despair in a heartbeat."
R.I.P Chester Bennington 1976-2017
Which again, unless you are in a perfect world situation where you can perfectly use it off cd every single time means nothing.
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If you're using it to maintain 24s ISB while not actively tanking, congrats you're doing something every single brewmaster does regardless of their talents.
LB is there for people who don't want to think about what the "rotation" entails. It generates brews passively, and with more haste (plus HT), it can generate more brews, but that would need to be a lot of haste.
The battle between these two talents is "which talent can generate more brews?" The answer is no one truly knows, as the math hasn't technically been done. However, the BoB talent has a better utility mechanic to it than LB. At a point, LB will generate more brews, but you have so much haste that you're probably starving for energy, which reduces your survivability... unless you're careful.
It's actually complicated math, but it doesn't really need to be done because we have what we need to know in my previous section in this post.
TL;DR - LB is nice for generating brews IF one has a lot of haste, but it can leave you starved for energy if you're not careful and taking your rotation "slow."
"Hope can turn into despair in a heartbeat."
R.I.P Chester Bennington 1976-2017
This is exactly how talents should be, not being a cookie cutter build for everything.
Not to derail the thread but I've been tanking on my monk alt and am curious about the comment that people are keeping 24s ISB while not actively tanking? Is there a reason why? Is it just because chugging brews is part of the downtime in the rotation and it just keeps your fingers going?
Define "not actively tanking". There are very few bosses that lets you chill doing nothing. Most of the time there is something to care about like ticking dots, small adds, soaking stuff. If you're keeping ISB on Harjatar for the dot you're doing good; if you're doing it on KJ while not soaking stuff then you're wrong here.
Ok. It's more about what are you doing in your time not tanking the boss. If it's anything that's dealing dmg to you then keeping up ISB is always a good thing. Sound about right? I'm going to try and get into a Normal Tomb this week so I can tank things that actually do dmg, so far it's only been LFR tanking while I've been doing the gear grind.
I tried LB multiple times, it doesn't work. BOB provides more brews, more burst cleansing, it's an absolute winner. I'm usually playing with HT.
Brew generation seems much less of a strength now that a cap has been put on Ironskin Brew. I personally operate mostly in Heroic raids, where I now generally favour the dps rotation over anything else. I had about 33% Haste before the 7.2 changes, now with the Haste Nerfs and the cap there seems little to no value in haste anymore.
Personally I feel like they destroyed a lot of different builds this way. But going LB over BoB?
I don't get how LB of all things is supposed to be less clunky than BoB. Even if you don't use BoB to reset the BoC DPS rotation, worst case it still makes a great Oh-shit-button, which LB just does not have. And when poo hits the fan, like some hits on KJ Heroic, then I really like having the safety net of 3 extra purifies, even if it means I won't exactly use BoB on curve for damage.
Generally I also use the DPS Shoulder Legendaries (still not luck with the chest), though on Kil'jaeden I switch to the Zen Med Helmet and put in Dampen Harm as well. And use them as extra Cooldowns for each Fel Claw phase.
And besides "but it gives you energy for BoC build" I have never heard anything plausible.
This is similar to frost mage effect where Blizzard kept buffing it infinitely and nobody still played it until some high tier raiders switched to it and suddenly it's actually insanely op and needs 2 waves of nerfs.
As people already said before for BOB to be much better than LB in brew generation it has to be used every time on CD and if you keep it for something it's value goes down pretty fast. Extra energy is fine and all, but it's a strictly offensive thing. Well, it's a World of Logs and Parses anyway. Shucks.