Taking my BM tanking to the next level

[Deleted]

Hello!

I'm the secondary tank on the side of our main blood DK in my 10 man raiding guild and we took down Garrosh normal a couple of weeks ago, and have now started to gear everybody up to the point where we feel comfortable to start doing HC.

But with our first tries on Immerseus i'm always the guy who dies first and have started doubted my self that i'm not doing what i'm supposed to do. Our next raid will be on Sunday were we hopefully will start doing HC for real, and then i can probobly record some tries and show what's going on.

My characters name is Thiede on EU Kazzak, a male pandaren in the guild Ilerminaty, since i apparently can't post links until i have posted a couple of times you just have to look me up if you are willing to take the time.

And also when i was tasked with tanking Garrosh during a try with a new tank since our main was gone, i died on like the second ad pack and when me and the other tank (a paladin)wich where around 20ilvl below me swapped places it went fine without any hassle and deaths, sure i was happy about the kill but it still felt like did something really wrong since i've been reading alot about monks that tank malkorok solo on hc for example.

So my questions are what am i probobly doing wrong? And have i've been gearing correctly?

Thank you in advance for your time.

[allaiva]

The only way we can figure out what's going wrong is with some combat logs really >.>

[Deleted]

Yeah i figured that, we have started using the World of Logs thingy. But i don't know how to show it here since i can't link anything. :P

[Gethe88]

Armory link
There isn't anything terribly wrong with how you are gearing. Like Allaivia said, we'll need to see logs as it's likely a play issue.

I went to WoL and tracked down your guild. Here is the most recent log.
Looking at Garrosh, your Shuffle seems pretty spotty even during active times. I'd recommend figuring out how to keep that up more as step one.

[britishbubba]

What is killing you on immerseus? Are you not hitting guard for the breath? Are you tunneling into the boss during its debuff and getting lots of stacks? Are you being hit with swirl?

Looking at your logs (paragon's specifically because there is always something for you to hit during that fight) your uptimes are "meh". Your shuffle falls off several times through the fight for long periods. You lose a lot of stats if you don't keep shuffle up so you'll want to work on that. You missed ~10 kegsmash casts over the fight through not hitting it on CD which is not just a large chi loss, but also a large DPS loss. Make sure you pool enough energy to allow you to hit KS more or less on CD. Also not sure what you're using Breath of fire on on paragons... Not really a reason to use that there.

I feel like you could use your Chi wave more often. 71 direct heals is something like 18 casts? could have gotten almost double those during the fight. It's free damage and free healing.

[Deleted]

On Immerseus you can die from 4 things. Getting hit by swirl, stacking the debuff too high from hitting the boss (taunt adds and hit them to keep chi incoming when you're on the boss), tanking adds+boss+sloppy healing or finally taking 2 stacks (1 stack won't kill you alone, use glyphed guard on this fight too and pop it for the breath, you can take a second with Zen med/diffuse and even a third if you combine zen med/diffuse and fort brew+guard!)

Immerseus you should be the last to die really as you have all the tools to deal with incoming damage. Just remember that the blast is a cone attack.

On Garrosh are you sure you didn't get the boss+the adds? Most classes have trouble keeping aoe threat off a monk, thats why most monks get stuck on adds with the other tank taking the boss. If you get the boss' vengeance and the paladin tanks the adds ontop of the boss you're very likely to overaggro them and tanking both adds and the boss can be enough to kill you, especially if people aoe stun/disorient so the add attacks line up.

One other key aspect to Brm tanking is getting your selfhealing sorted, i use glyphed guard on 9/10 fights these days as with 100-150k+ vengeance Expel harm/chi wave heals for several 100k and the only damage i need smoothing out is magic more or less (5/14 hc so far). You should also try to see ahead, if you know that a Whirlwind is incoming on garrosh in 10s, make sure to bank up 2 chi for a guard and hold off on using Chi wave or expel harm. Wait until you drop to 60-70% hp, pop the guard and the heal, you'll need close to 0 healing during the entire whirlwind phase. Also make sure to build your EB stacks while offtanking, pop them half a second before you taunt, makes tanking transitions a lot smoother. Small things like that make a huge difference.

Try to sort close to 100% shuffle uptime, learn to use guard properly, learn to use your self-heals. If you can nail those three there is very little that can go wrong!

[Hypro]

I would like to know a couple of things. 1st why is your mastery only at 9.68. Trust me when i say get higher mastery, Means you will stagger more. 2nd why are you using a HP trinket they are pretty much pointless for us, 3rd For heroic Imm take difuse magic... His breath is magic and defuse magic is a 90% reduction in that... i can take 2 breaths comfortably with it.. Guarding the 1st and defusing 2nd...

[britishbubba]

I would like to know a couple of things. 1st why is your mastery only at 9.68. Trust me when i say get higher mastery, Means you will stagger more. 2nd why are you using a HP trinket they are pretty much pointless for us, 3rd For heroic Imm take difuse magic... His breath is magic and defuse magic is a 90% reduction in that... i can take 2 breaths comfortably with it.. Guarding the 1st and defusing 2nd...

1) He has more than enough mastery for 10m for the first bosses. Yeah it's mostly a personal comfort level thing, but the first 5 bosses don't have anything that makes you actually want mastery as the damage that will kill you is magic.
2) In a fight where the only thing you're going to die to is magical spike damage... stam is far from useless.
3) You shouldn't need to take two breaths in a row. Take the first, then go pick up adds while the other tank holds the boss. Unless you're solo tanking for some odd reason.

[Hypro]

1) He has more than enough mastery for 10m for the first bosses. Yeah it's mostly a personal comfort level thing, but the first 5 bosses don't have anything that makes you actually want mastery as the damage that will kill you is magic.
2) In a fight where the only thing you're going to die to is magical spike damage... stam is far from useless.
3) You shouldn't need to take two breaths in a row. Take the first, then go pick up adds while the other tank holds the boss. Unless you're solo tanking for some odd reason.

1st. My monk has 51% crit unbuffed and 20.5% mastery buffed.. idk why he doesnt have the same since we are the same iL
2. I would much pref to use my Ebon ticker and Rune of Re than a stam trinket any day
3. I can solo tank it since in the 1st phase is the only time where our group got 2 blasts...

[britishbubba]

1st. My monk has 51% crit unbuffed and 20.5% mastery buffed.. idk why he doesnt have the same since we are the same iL
2. I would much pref to use my Ebon ticker and Rune of Re than a stam trinket any day
3. I can solo tank it since in the 1st phase is the only time where our group got 2 blasts...

There's no reason to have 20.5% mastery in 10m, at least not on immerseus of all bosses. The only time I've taken more mastery is for thok, and that's because we're solo tanking it, and with that in mind I did a few pulls without more mastery (something like 5k) and I was fine.

You can prefer the trinkets you want all day, that doesn't make stam useless.

If they're just starting in on immereus, it's likely not advisable to solo tank it. The fight isn't a tough dps check so you might as well just duo tank it to be safe, so there's really no reason to take DM as you can just guard any blast you do take.

[Citykid]

Garrosh: U use leg sweep and the lock uses aoe stun (of to work so just looked at the logs for 2 sec) probably more aoe stuns involved in your kills, what that does is that u line upp all the adds abilitys and they will hit u FOR A SHIT LOAD when the stun drops..Tell ppl to stop aoe stuns and also use Ring of Peace instead.

[AeneasBK]

Garrosh: U use leg sweep and the lock uses aoe stun (of to work so just looked at the logs for 2 sec) probably more aoe stuns involved in your kills, what that does is that u line upp all the adds abilitys and they will hit u FOR A SHIT LOAD when the stun drops..Tell ppl to stop aoe stuns and also use Ring of Peace instead.

What thread are you posting in I came here for tips on BrM, but your post just seems out of place.

[Citykid]

And also when i was tasked with tanking Garrosh during a try with a new tank since our main was gone, i died on like the second ad pack and when me and the other tank (a paladin)wich where around 20ilvl below me swapped places it went fine without any hassle and deaths, sure i was happy about the kill but it still felt like did something really wrong since i've been reading alot about monks that tank malkorok solo on hc for example


Taken from OP

[britishbubba]

Garrosh: U use leg sweep and the lock uses aoe stun (of to work so just looked at the logs for 2 sec) probably more aoe stuns involved in your kills, what that does is that u line upp all the adds abilitys and they will hit u FOR A SHIT LOAD when the stun drops..Tell ppl to stop aoe stuns and also use Ring of Peace instead.

Uh... If you hit Leg sweep, Hit guard when the stun is about to wear off. Or hit elusive brew. I've never been gibbed by using leg sweep on garrosh. Not sure why this is said so much about leg sweep.

[jijuiji]

Uh... If you hit Leg sweep, Hit guard when the stun is about to wear off. Or hit elusive brew. I've never been gibbed by using leg sweep on garrosh. Not sure why this is said so much about leg sweep.

It's more to do with the fact a lot of players don't realise stunning these adds resets their timers and especially the 'Hamstring' move, which when doubled up with the warcry can hit for quite a lot on unsuspecting players. Obviously when you know this happens and can anticipate it makes it easier :P
Having said that, why does anyone take leg sweep for these adds in the first place? Ring of Peace for P2/P3 MC's is surely a must.

In response to OP dying on adds in P1, pop forti brew if you need too on the adds when they recieve the warcry/shout buff and make sure nobody stuns them and they are fairly straight forward. You don't really need fort brew up again until P3 so don't be afraid to pop it.

[britishbubba]

Having said that, why does anyone take leg sweep for these adds in the first place? Ring of Peace for P2/P3 MC's is surely a must.

Our fury warrior gets every single interrupt with disrupting so I've never bothered. And if he gets MC'ed I can just walk around the boss and get one interrupt while our protadin gets the other.

[Deleted]

Holy shit replies, thanks for all the feedback.

What is killing you on immerseus? Are you not hitting guard for the breath? Are you tunneling into the boss during its debuff and getting lots of stacks? Are you being hit with swirl?

I die because im picking up all the ads when im not tanking the boss and sometimes it's hard for our dps to not focus on the boss :P. So that surely is not a problem on my end but on the dps, when we decided to just keep going on normal i pointed out on TS a couple of times that i still had ads on me and the dps did nothing.

Looking at your logs (paragon's specifically because there is always something for you to hit during that fight) your uptimes are "meh". Your shuffle falls off several times through the fight for long periods. You lose a lot of stats if you don't keep shuffle up so you'll want to work on that. You missed ~10 kegsmash casts over the fight through not hitting it on CD which is not just a large chi loss, but also a large DPS loss. Make sure you pool enough energy to allow you to hit KS more or less on CD. Also not sure what you're using Breath of fire on on paragons... Not really a reason to use that there.

I feel like you could use your Chi wave more often. 71 direct heals is something like 18 casts? could have gotten almost double those during the fight. It's free damage and free healing.

Yeah now that you say it i should probobly try to set up weak auraus or something like that to keep track on everything, but i just get so confused on the weak auras set up, any tips?

[britishbubba]

I die because im picking up all the ads when im not tanking the boss and sometimes it's hard for our dps to not focus on the boss :P. So that surely is not a problem on my end but on the dps, when we decided to just keep going on normal i pointed out on TS a couple of times that i still had ads on me and the dps did nothing.

Tell the dps to turn and burn the adds lol. Our lock and I pretty much duo them every time, it doesn't take much to kill them.

Yeah now that you say it i should probobly try to set up weak auraus or something like that to keep track on everything, but i just get so confused on the weak auras set up, any tips?

http://sunniersartofwar.com/brewmaster-weak-auras/

I would give those weakauras a go and see if you like them. It has everything you should need displayed in a very nice fashion. Best part is it's organized well enough tha tyou can customize positioning of certain groups very easily.

[Deleted]

In response to the original question, here's a few things you can do to take your BrM to the next level.

Chi preservation : Are you sitting on zero chi usually, or 2-3? A good tank will -always- be on 2-3 chi and maintain 100% shuffle uptime, guard when he needs it and be able to purify enough. You do this by mostly taking advantage of the times when you're not tanking to tunnel into BO-K, ignoring guard and PB. Ultimately there is no difference between being on 2-3 chi than 0 in terms of uptime, it's simply a bank you have. If you have 10 seconds left on shuffle. And you're on 4 chi, you cast BO-K once to put yourself up to 15 seconds(16-1 for the gcd). You don't want to then spend the remaining 2 chi on BO-K. You'll have another chi in 2-4 gcd's and you can recast it then. This way you ALWAYS ALWAYS have chi for an emergency purify if you need and chi for that Guard that's coming off CD. Your average shuffle length is going to be 6 seconds shorter, but you should be able to maintain 100% uptime on shuffle regardless.

Tiger palm as filler : Similar to above, you should be using your Tiger palm as filler, not jab. You hit jab when you're approaching 100 energy. Not when you hit 40. You do this because it means you ALWAYS have energy for Keg Smash when it comes off CD.

Purify 4 set : If you have 4-set, you need to not be purifying at full health, or you're wasting your 4-set. Similarly you'll likely just push your healers heals into overheal. It's a delicate balance between Purifying when you need it and getting the heal. However you also need to take into account incoming damage and hold the heal for that. If you know you're ab out to get smacked for 700k (nazgrim execute for instance) you want to hold off on purifying until right after the blow. Split second later + expel harm bam that's 500k healing right back.

[RuneeBH]

I solo tanked Heroic Thok last night with 7% mastery, full crit build. I don't see why anyone would need more mastery in 10 man. All it does is force you to purify more, and you have less shuffle/dmg that way. Make your healers work, until you hit an absolute wall and can't survive, I wouldn't worry about mastery. 20% is a ridiculous number.
And also, any tank with a shield/block mechanic is going to be better for garrosh adds. We rely on dodge, if you don't dodge, you get smacked. You're better for the boss in p1, and you'll do better damage. You'll notice a difference with more gear though, we solo tank Garrosh now, and I just pick up everything and I'm fine, well timed guards and stuff are more than enough. The more experience you get the more you'll notice your gameplay improving. Being able to anticipate spike damage and whatnot is what separates good from mediocre monks. Proactive tanking instead of reactive tanking.