[GUIDE] Drunken Savagery: Brewmaster Tanking in [6.2]

[Totaltotemic]

Flamebender is a joke once you unlock the secrets of Dampen Harm. Diffuse Magic a red herring; sure it's magic damage that comes in a big burst, but you only need to cut it in half. You can Diffuse one breath and then have to eat 2 or 3 at full force, or you can just eat the first one naturally (it'll only do ~200k damage) and then Dampen the next 3. With Dampen, even a 4th breath will only do 500-600k which is easily mitigated with a Guard. Basically do this:

1) Nothing
2) Guard + Dampen
3) (still have Dampen)
4) Guard + still have Dampen

And you will never die.

Oregorger is another boss that's just a big distraction. It looks like a mess that requires external CDs and all kinds of planning, but it turns out that Acid Torrent happens exactly every 15 seconds, which means you only take one every 30 seconds. The answer is literally as simple as just use Guard for every single one. As long as it is fully absorbed it will do the minimum amount of raid damage.

[Yax]

@pandanaconda (nice name btw )

Oregorger:
Brewmasters don't need any externals for the Acid Torrent. There is a maximum amount that can be mitigated by Acid Torrent (in terms of the final explosion damage), and this maximum can be reached with a single Guard, which you will have a charge for every time. However, do make sure that you Guard while you have decent Resolve levels, to ensure it's a big enough absorb. There are two ways of tanking this:

• The *active* tank soaks the Acid Torrent: In this case, Guard during the cast of Acid Torrent, or just before.
• The *inactive* tank soaks the Acid Torrent: In this case, Guard just after the tank swap, while you still have Resolve from the boss hitting you. Then when Acid Torrent comes you should have enough absorb left to fully soak it.

If you mess up for some reason, and don't have a Guard ready, then Dampen Harm and Zen Meditation are excellent options for mitigating the damage.
Oh, and obviously, have Shuffle up when you soak!
This means you can use Fortifying Brew whenever you want:

• While tanking, just to mitigate some damage. Kind of pointless though.
• Crazy panic button for when all your healers got rolled over and you need to be self-sufficient (situational).
• DPS boost by popping it just before you use Touch of Death on one of the Ore Crates. Can also be helpful if your guild uses a "set crate/roll pattern" that requires the first crate to be killed ASAP. Combine with Rallying Cry and stamina trinket for instant one shot if your guild struggles.

Flamebender:
There are 3 breaths before the Overheated Wolf becomes a normal wolf and a different wolf becomes Overheated. Typically, guilds have one tank take the 3 breaths of the first overheated, and then do a tank swap so that the other tank takes 3 breaths from the newly overheated (though wolves normally die before 3 breaths of the second wolf).
Don't be scared to ask for an external, at least Barkskin seen as it has such a short cooldown. It might also be a good idea to watch a quick PoV video to get a feel for the timings of the breaths so you know when to hit each cooldown.
A couple of suggested rotations:
Using Dampen Harm:

1. Pop Dampen Harm.
2. Guard (with 2nd stack of Dampen Harm).
3. Guard + External (Barkskin, Hand of Sacrifice, Pain Suppression, Vigilance - take your pick) (with final stack of Dampen Harm).

Using Diffuse Magic:

1. Guard.
2. Guard + External.
3. Diffuse Magic.

There isn't quite 3 minutes between each set of Wolf spawns, so I left out Fortifying Brew. However, it's still a strong cooldown for these (despite Stagger not working on Magic damage) due to the HP increase and Damage Reduction. Use it on one of the sets of breaths just to help out. Pop it just before the 2nd breath so that it lasts for the 3rd as well.
As for Soul Dance, I suppose there isn't much of a reason *not* to, provided you can keep Shuffle up for the important parts of the fight. I've never ran with it though so can't comment.

[TaurenNinja]

Hi. Is there already a BiS brewmaster list for Hellfire Citadel gear? Or at least a stat priority list for 6.2 Brewmaster?
I've made an attempt to do a 6.2 BiS list using mostly 6.1 stat values:

Weapon: Bite of the Bleeding Hollow (Kilrogg Deadeye)
Trinket 1: Sacred Draenic Incense (Archimonde)
Trinket 2: Tyrant's Decree (Tyrant Velhari) *OR* Anzu's Cursed Plume (Shadow-Lord Iskar)

Head: Mask of the Hurricane's Eye (Kormrok)
Neck: Contained Fel Orb Locket (Soulbound Construct)
Shoulder: Mantle of the Hurricane's Eye (Xhul'horac) *OR* Rangefinder's Spaulders (Siegemaster Mar'tak)
Back: Void Lord's Wizened Cloak (Xhul'horac)
Chest: Robe of the Hurricane's Eye (Mannoroth)
Wrist: Gorebound Wristguards (Siegemaster Mar'tak)
Hands: Fistwraps of the Hurricane's Eye (Soulbound Construct) *OR* Felfinger Runegloves (Archimonde)
Waist: Belt of Misconcieved Loyalty (Shadow-Lord Iskar)
Legs: Legwraps of the Hurricane's Eye (Gorefiend) *OR* Rivet-Studded Leggings (Iron Reaver)
Feet: Toxicologist's Treated Boots (Kilrogg Deadeye)
Finger 1: Sanctus, Sigil of the Unbroken (Legendary)
Finger 2: Mannoroth's Calcified Eye (Mannoroth)

Please feel free to correct where necessary.

[Cubcake]

Hi. Is there already a BiS brewmaster list for Hellfire Citadel gear? Or at least a stat priority list for 6.2 Brewmaster?
I've made an attempt to do a 6.2 BiS list using mostly 6.1 stat values:

Weapon: Bite of the Bleeding Hollow (Kilrogg Deadeye)
Trinket 1: Sacred Draenic Incense (Archimonde)
Trinket 2: Tyrant's Decree (Tyrant Velhari) *OR* Anzu's Cursed Plume (Shadow-Lord Iskar)

Head: Mask of the Hurricane's Eye (Kormrok)
Neck: Contained Fel Orb Locket (Soulbound Construct)
Shoulder: Mantle of the Hurricane's Eye (Xhul'horac) *OR* Rangefinder's Spaulders (Siegemaster Mar'tak)
Back: Void Lord's Wizened Cloak (Xhul'horac)
Chest: Robe of the Hurricane's Eye (Mannoroth)
Wrist: Gorebound Wristguards (Siegemaster Mar'tak)
Hands: Fistwraps of the Hurricane's Eye (Soulbound Construct) *OR* Felfinger Runegloves (Archimonde)
Waist: Belt of Misconcieved Loyalty (Shadow-Lord Iskar)
Legs: Legwraps of the Hurricane's Eye (Gorefiend) *OR* Rivet-Studded Leggings (Iron Reaver)
Feet: Toxicologist's Treated Boots (Kilrogg Deadeye)
Finger 1: Sanctus, Sigil of the Unbroken (Legendary)
Finger 2: Mannoroth's Calcified Eye (Mannoroth)

Please feel free to correct where necessary.

I can't say for certain but I feel crit/mastery would be ideal once you have a 4pc and the Archimonde trinket. Crit for the ebrew stacks which go perfectly with the trinket damage bonus and your set bonus and mastery for incoming damage smoothing. As mentioned, I've yet to test this out tho so I would be curious what everyone else is thinking about this since I am curious myself.

[Jivitz]

Hi. Is there already a BiS brewmaster list for Hellfire Citadel gear? Or at least a stat priority list for 6.2 Brewmaster?
I've made an attempt to do a 6.2 BiS list using mostly 6.1 stat values:

Trinket 1: Sacred Draenic Incense (Archimonde)
Trinket 2: Tyrant's Decree (Tyrant Velhari) *OR* Anzu's Cursed Plume (Shadow-Lord Iskar)

If you scroll back a few pages, Archimonde's trinket doesn't look like it'll be used, esp once 4 set. Warlords unseeing eye is looking really strong and a must for any tank. Probably pair it with anzu cursed plume. Tyrants is crap as it is a Stam trinket and Stam has always been crap.

Stat priority looks to be the same but being in the 0% Haste club isn't as big of a deal anymore. On par with multi strike possibly but mastery then crit will still be focused.

[Yax]

Hi. Is there already a BiS brewmaster list for Hellfire Citadel gear?

There was good discussion on "BiS" gear in HFC that shoudn't be more than a few pages back if you want details.

[Yesil]

If you scroll back a few pages, Archimonde's trinket doesn't look like it'll be used, esp once 4 set. Warlords unseeing eye is looking really strong and a must for any tank. Probably pair it with anzu cursed plume. Tyrants is crap as it is a Stam trinket and Stam has always been crap.

Stat priority looks to be the same but being in the 0% Haste club isn't as big of a deal anymore. On par with multi strike possibly but mastery then crit will still be focused.

WUE in its current iteration won't go through. It literally negates any one-shot mechanics. It's not intended to do so. I'd still use Archimonde's trinket in specific situations (DPS check/heavy add fight). The spiky damage generated from adds hitting you is enough to generate EB for 100% effective uptime during tanking. Tyrant's is pretty meh, indeed. Imbued Stone Sigil might have some value if we have issues getting globalled because of lack of energy for EH (Tyrant Velhari prime example).

[Deleted]

On the issue of gear inbalance and ilevels, surely we already know the items that are coming.

Are there any big examples for monks and other classes which exemplify the problem of ilevel vs optmization of stats? From my experience of looking at Guardian, there was only really one example for bracers, but its all really just fine. No real big doom and gloom.

[Totaltotemic]

WUE in its current iteration won't go through. It literally negates any one-shot mechanics. It's not intended to do so. I'd still use Archimonde's trinket in specific situations (DPS check/heavy add fight). The spiky damage generated from adds hitting you is enough to generate EB for 100% effective uptime during tanking. Tyrant's is pretty meh, indeed. Imbued Stone Sigil might have some value if we have issues getting globalled because of lack of energy for EH (Tyrant Velhari prime example).

Why would adds automatically mean "spiky damage"? Adds generally hit for far less than bosses, and as already discussed the problem with the trinket is that even super hard hitting bosses won't break through Guard very quickly, greatly limiting how much it procs. It won't give anywhere near 100% uptime, the thing barely gives 6% Crit worth of uptime even when you're trying to cheese it.

We also don't need to derail every single discussion that includes Warlord's Unseeing Eye with the fact that it's currently bugged on attacks that would otherwise kill you. The trinket is incredibly strong even without the bug, and it doesn't really need to be dismissed every time it comes up because only people that have abused it on the PTR can tell that it's bugged anyways and always mention that it's bugged when someone comes up with weird results.

[Yesil]

Why would adds automatically mean "spiky damage"? Adds generally hit for far less than bosses, and as already discussed the problem with the trinket is that even super hard hitting bosses won't break through Guard very quickly, greatly limiting how much it procs. It won't give anywhere near 100% uptime, the thing barely gives 6% Crit worth of uptime even when you're trying to cheese it.

We also don't need to derail every single discussion that includes Warlord's Unseeing Eye with the fact that it's currently bugged on attacks that would otherwise kill you. The trinket is incredibly strong even without the bug, and it doesn't really need to be dismissed every time it comes up because only people that have abused it on the PTR can tell that it's bugged anyways and always mention that it's bugged when someone comes up with weird results.

When I said Effective Uptime I meant the uptime EB has during the time you actually tank. The more adds you tank, the more spiky your health will be. I don't know if you've done any PTR testing in HFC Mythic but Guard tends to break A LOT easier than in BrF. I know that it's been discussed but most of the discussion relied on how the trinket would be in relation to BrF (iirc HFC M testing wasn't available when you mentioned the trinket in an earlier post), not so much HFC. Adds do hit harder in HFC and ontop of that there is loads of magic damage going around.

So just mentioning WUE being bugged = derailing a discussion? Okay, if you say so. How did you get the impression I'm dismissing it? Obviously it's a great trinket, especially taking into consideration the design decisions they've decided to take with BrMs. Also, again, BrM - together with the PTR changes - relative to how HFC mechanics are is very different to how BrF is.

[Deleted]

From a pure survivability standpoint, the Class trinket is terrible.

[Totaltotemic]

Who has said anything about 6.2 BrM and how that relates to BRF? Seriously, I'd like to know where a single time anyone has referenced a comparison with BRF when talking about the Archimonde tirnket. Unless you're suggesting that we are wholly incapable of talking about HFC and therefore we must be talking about BRF, which is just silly.

I mean, none of your points about the Archimonde trinket make any sense whatsoever. You've stated twice now that adds automatically mean your health spikes more frequently but with no reasoning or rationalization for why that is. Only more damage makes your health spike faster, and there isn't a single instance in HFC I know of where the adds hit harder than the boss does. Why don't you give some kind of example or reason for that instead of restating a baseless claim?

Secondly, what does "Guard breaks a lot easier" even mean? Faster compared to what? The 10% uptime I've said the trinket gives assumes you cross the health threshold every 10 seconds. Are you suggesting that you go from 100% health and a 600k Guard down to 70% health (losing about another 200k health) every 10 seconds? Do you even have any logs or anything of this occurring in Mythic testing or do you even know? It seems like you're basing your opinion off of vague feelings and not making any real comparison.

Finally, you can have 100% "effective uptime" in many different situations without that trinket. This is a worthless statement as it is neither comparing to anything (100% uptime compared to what without the trinket?) or any kind of value statement about the trinket. In what situation is this good besides "adds"? It doesn't even make sense to be providing better uptime on adds because almost every example of adds in HFC are somewhat short-lived that if they are as dangerous as you seem to think they are, you should be going in with 15 stacks anyways.

Your point is basically that you would use the trinket in the specific situation of an "add heavy fight" but with no reasons why its effect has anything to do with adds at all, no statement about why it would be better than any of the other trinkets in that situation, or even a vague statement of what the trinket itself provides. I've already done all of these things to show why it's not good, and your response is an extremely vague "HFC is different" without any connection to why that would make this trinket any better. I didn't just ask why adds automatically mean your health spikes to be cute, I asked because if that's true it would change things but I can't see any reason why that would be true.

[Deleted]

The 4 Piece bonus makes the Class Trinket completely useless. Having tested every boss available in HFC on my monk so far, I really have no idea what you're talking about when you say "Guard breaks easier."

Aside from the fact that we're taking more upfront damage, this is countered by the huge increase in AP we gain from the higher gear available in HFC. My Guard uptime in testing was nearly double that of live, due to the 4 piece bonus. I'm sorry, but in any actual progression content the Class Trinket is dogshit.

- - - Updated - - -

Anyway, regarding basic builds, Mastery > Crit still at top, but I would honestly place Haste above Vers and Multistrike with 4 Piece. Multistrike sitting at the bottom of the pile due to the Tiger Strikes change.

Trinkets are definitely Warlord's Unseeing Eye and Anzu's. Even though it's not functioning as intended, the trinket is huge mitigation when you need it most. Anzu's is just flat out Mastery Proc with a ridiculous uptime.

This is just what I've gleamed from my time actually testing though; there's always chances of things undiscovered coming to light before the patch drops.

[Gothmog]

I'd like to make class trinket work and like the idea of controling your health... I have to agree with Misume, I don't think it'll get used very much.

Frequency and power of Guard... It's such that we really ought to introduce a new concept of Guard-health or however we want to call it. Tanks traditionally use health resource to stay alive. Monks now use health and Guard. It's just become that big of a deal. I'm not expressing this clearly, I imagine it'll get thrown around until Total puts in an eloquent form.


As much as I know it'll destroy my current playstyle of "between dead and topped" HP fluctuating, I don't think it'll be worth the risk of playing that in progression, not when you can have something silly like 40% Guard uptime.

[Yesil]

Who has said anything about 6.2 BrM and how that relates to BRF? Seriously, I'd like to know where a single time anyone has referenced a comparison with BRF when talking about the Archimonde tirnket. Unless you're suggesting that we are wholly incapable of talking about HFC and therefore we must be talking about BRF, which is just silly.

I mean, none of your points about the Archimonde trinket make any sense whatsoever. You've stated twice now that adds automatically mean your health spikes more frequently but with no reasoning or rationalization for why that is. Only more damage makes your health spike faster, and there isn't a single instance in HFC I know of where the adds hit harder than the boss does. Why don't you give some kind of example or reason for that instead of restating a baseless claim?

Secondly, what does "Guard breaks a lot easier" even mean? Faster compared to what? The 10% uptime I've said the trinket gives assumes you cross the health threshold every 10 seconds. Are you suggesting that you go from 100% health and a 600k Guard down to 70% health (losing about another 200k health) every 10 seconds? Do you even have any logs or anything of this occurring in Mythic testing or do you even know? It seems like you're basing your opinion off of vague feelings and not making any real comparison.

Finally, you can have 100% "effective uptime" in many different situations without that trinket. This is a worthless statement as it is neither comparing to anything (100% uptime compared to what without the trinket?) or any kind of value statement about the trinket. In what situation is this good besides "adds"? It doesn't even make sense to be providing better uptime on adds because almost every example of adds in HFC are somewhat short-lived that if they are as dangerous as you seem to think they are, you should be going in with 15 stacks anyways.

Your point is basically that you would use the trinket in the specific situation of an "add heavy fight" but with no reasons why its effect has anything to do with adds at all, no statement about why it would be better than any of the other trinkets in that situation, or even a vague statement of what the trinket itself provides. I've already done all of these things to show why it's not good, and your response is an extremely vague "HFC is different" without any connection to why that would make this trinket any better. I didn't just ask why adds automatically mean your health spikes to be cute, I asked because if that's true it would change things but I can't see any reason why that would be true.

Guard breaking faster in HFC compared to BrF M, at least for me. In those terms, yeah, taking an effective 800k damage inside 10 sec window. I might could have been missplaying mechanics. Oddly I didn't see any indications in our logs. (I can try to make them public and link if you'd like that)

Correct me if I'm wrong but doesn't having 100% effective uptime on EB mean that you'll be dodging 60%+regular dodge% of melee swings?

On the add heavy fights I tried out the trinket I felt like I was getting loads of EB, even having 15 stacks before the previous EB went off. I'm not arguing that the trinket is superior survivability-wise compared to the other tank trinkets, I was just stating that it might be useful on some fights where the physical damage comes in droves and the extra EB might be helpful.

What I mean by taking more damage on adds is that adds do hit quite a bit, especially if there is loads of them. But it might have been a case of having both adds+boss on me.

Sorry for being vague, I'm not good with words.

- - - Updated - - -

The 4 Piece bonus makes the Class Trinket completely useless. Having tested every boss available in HFC on my monk so far, I really have no idea what you're talking about when you say "Guard breaks easier."

Aside from the fact that we're taking more upfront damage, this is countered by the huge increase in AP we gain from the higher gear available in HFC. My Guard uptime in testing was nearly double that of live, due to the 4 piece bonus. I'm sorry, but in any actual progression content the Class Trinket is dogshit.

- - - Updated - - -

I must have been doing something very wrong then because my Guard uptime was a lot worse than on live. So you would still ignore the class trinket in a Patchwerk fight?

[Totaltotemic]

Anyway, regarding basic builds, Mastery > Crit still at top, but I would honestly place Haste above Vers and Multistrike with 4 Piece. Multistrike sitting at the bottom of the pile due to the Tiger Strikes change.

Trinkets are definitely Warlord's Unseeing Eye and Anzu's. Even though it's not functioning as intended, the trinket is huge mitigation when you need it most. Anzu's is just flat out Mastery Proc with a ridiculous uptime.

This is just what I've gleamed from my time actually testing though; there's always chances of things undiscovered coming to light before the patch drops.

I agree completely, and WUE has the distinct advantage of also mitigating magic damage. The only thing wrong with the trinket is that it contributes almost zero DPS, putting it on kind of the opposite end of the Archimonde trinket which provides almost no survivability but quite a lot of DPS.

Something interesting I noticed with Multistrike is that when I started testing the 4p out I actually didn't want to use my GotO orbs hardly ever. I'd rather Expel Harm twice than Expel Harm once and eat orbs, and just the orbs from Tiger Strikes is enough to top back up after Guard comes up. I was frequently letting orbs expire because I was either at full health with Guard up or at low health and mashing Expel, so extra GotO is just not very useful. Versatility is mediocre as always, I don't know where it lies because it's just a numbers stat that doesn't actually do anything except give a very minor power increase. I suspect that 1.44% haste is probably better than 1% Versatility, but it's so hard to know for sure.

Frequency and power of Guard... It's such that we really ought to introduce a new concept of Guard-health or however we want to call it. Tanks traditionally use health resource to stay alive. Monks now use health and Guard. It's just become that big of a deal. I'm not expressing this clearly, I imagine it'll get thrown around until Total puts in an eloquent form.

Hah, well, I've been thinking of Guard with the 4p in terms of what essentially amounts to a Limit Break from Final Fantasy that charges up over time but faster if you're getting hit and when you activate it, it shields for all your maximum health. You know how in JRPGs sometimes the bosses have multiple health bars because they have so much health? That's kind of what BrM is like, but the other health bars come back. It looks something like this:



That's like a BrM at the start of every fight, with a nice ~1.8 million effective health (did I mention that this also serves as an illustration of how stupidly OP Guard is?). That eventually all gets broken through and you get to the only point at which a BrM is actually capable of dying: when Guard is on CD, where the real game begins. For other tanks, the game is to live... indefinitely. For BrM, we play a different, much shorter game where we only need to live until the next Guard.



What is our real objective in this state? It's not to live forever, just to live for the next ~8 seconds. When Guard is ready, it takes over for a few seconds and health returns to 100% just through passive healing. This is where people get it wrong when they say Guard is like Lay on Hands, because it's not. It's Lay on Hands... plus a Lay on Hands-sized absorb. You might not immediately return to 100%, but functionally you will anyways barring one-shot scenarios.

What the 4p does though is make it so that in this situation, you've already won. If you drop below 50%, you Expel, and your Guard is here now anyways. The game is no longer to live until the next Guard CD is up, it's to live until your Guard CD is less than the number of Expels you can pump out in a row x5. You may not have a Guard CD, but you're still functionally unkillable for a while because you secretly do have a Guard CD ready.

You're not concerned with how much damage you take over time or how much healing you do over time because BrM is all about surviving until the next Guard and you can blow all of your resources to do that because they will come back during the Guard period. It's not so much that Guard is a resource as much as Guard creates a cycle where we alternate between invulnerable and vulnerable and the goal of the spec is to live through the vulnerable period until Guard comes back. The 4p is so good because it shortens the vulnerable period without shortening the invulnerable period.

[thedr8993]

You're not concerned with how much damage you take over time or how much healing you do over time because BrM is all about surviving until the next Guard and you can blow all of your resources to do that because they will come back during the Guard period. It's not so much that Guard is a resource as much as Guard creates a cycle where we alternate between invulnerable and vulnerable and the goal of the spec is to live through the vulnerable period until Guard comes back. The 4p is so good because it shortens the vulnerable period without shortening the invulnerable period.

Shit that's good. I felt like I had a rough idea but this really paints a picture. My question is how does shuffle and purify come into play with this cycle? Are we still shooting for ~100% uptime, despite the removal of the stagger bonus? Or are we looking to balance those "vulnerable" periods with shuffle plus GotO EH and EB, and our only concern during the "invulnerable" period is Guard maintenance (and PB so that stagger doesn't eat our guard I imagine), and energy pooling for EH?

On a separate, random, note: would you guys rather have Guard in it's current state (which it seems will go live since we likely won't see many more changes to 6.2 before it goes live), or Shuffle in it's current state (as in some ridiculous 60-70% dmg staggered or w/e people are hitting)? Obviously the combination of both, in addition to BRF mechanics, made the nerfs inevitable (and frankly welcome, since it's better for the overall health of the game). I'm just curious what you all think would have been better to go after, Shuffle (as blizz chose to do) or Guard (which is still basically broken OP lol)?

Sidenote: I started messing with an Arcane Mage alt, and I like the cyclical nature of Mana burn phase and Mana conserve phase, which is similar in idea to what we will be doing with our health and resources in 6.2

[Totaltotemic]

Anything that reduces damage taken makes Guard last longer as well as makes it easier to live until Guard is available again, thus reducing damage taken is always good (so, EB, PB, and Shuffle always help). It's not that you don't care about damage intake while Guard is up, but rather that you are guaranteed 100% never going to die for a little while after you press Guard unless something goes horribly wrong, so if you have to blow everything to get to Guard that's better than saving it for a more optimal moment (e.g. spamming PB or using EB even if the boss AAs less in the period) because Guard is like a giant reset button where everything comes back for the next cycle.

So it's not that you wouldn't care about reducing damage taken during Guard, but that if you know super-mega-LoH is coming and that's the finish line then you're more concerned with making the optimal play in regards to the next few seconds than you are the next 20-30 seconds. To put it another way, you wouldn't bank or pool any resources if you're at 50% health when you know you're going to get an ability that will shoot you up to 200% health regardless soon; you blow everything to make it to that point. Not dodging or Purifying is safer up at 200% health than it is at 50% because you're not going to die regardless of what happens. Down at 50%, an unlucky double melee into 30-50k Stagger tick can be fatal.

This whole concept is only really relevant to the micro level of decision making from second to second; you will want to take the least amount of damage you can so stats don't really play that much into it. It does re-frame the stats into a different light though than the standard TMI focus or DTPS focus. Crit and Mastery are the best at reducing total damage, but Mastery makes the Guards bigger so it's pretty clearly superior in this model. Versatility is just a much worse version of Mastery (as it also affects Guard). Multistrike is HPS which normally is only good outside of Guards but GotO allows banking so it actually gets better the shorter the vulnerable window is (because you can condense 30s worth of HPS into 10 or 15 seconds). Haste would normally be trash but now it shortens the vulnerable period in addition to providing meager GotO/EB/Chi gains.

The reality isn't nearly as complicated as I might seem to be making it out to be. This is just an elaboration on the what-if scenario that a tank has double the normal health pool but also LoH on a 30 or less second CD, which is essentially what BrM is these days. I'm really just describing how BrM has played the entirety of 6.0 and 6.1, but most people probably don't think about the fact that this is what their health pool is actually doing over the course of a fight.

______

As for what needed to happen to BrM, Stagger needed to be lowered definitely. When a simple Mastery proc or on-use trinket on top of passive stats means you can have 70% Stagger fairly regularly, the exponentially scaling value of additional Stagger spirals absurdly out of control and just makes BrM OP. Stagger will literally always be OP at the end of every expansion as long as it is balanced at the start but retains exponential scaling.

20% was probably too much though because it prevents Guard from being lowered as that is the only thing keeping BrM viable, but it works in such a toxic way to tank balance that if Guard is the only thing keeping a tank afloat then it creates this cycle I've just described (it exists in 6.1, it's just irrelevant because you won't die even without Guard anyways due to Stagger). The correct answer is still what everyone said here months ago: 10% Stagger nerf and 25% Guard nerf.

[Mac223]

If they want to fix the exponential scaling of mastery for BrM, they should apply diminishing returns to masterys effect on stagger.

[Deleted]

So I finally got around to playing around on PTR with the Mythic Tank Dummy and realised a few things:
1. Mythic Tank Dummy is my new favourite way to spend my time.
2. The 2 set is even more brokenly good than I thought. I had no idea it also reset the cooldown on EH when you drop below 50.
3. Brewmaster is going to be unkillable again.

Seriously though. Sustained 90k hps for 3+ minutes? A vulnerable period like Total describes, except EH itself is can basically heal you to full as often as you need it? I just don't understand how Brewmaster can be so hideously strong. Again. Surely it cannot go live like this? I cast guard on average every 13s over 10 minutes, and had over 50% uptime.

I really hope something changes. Most bosses in BRF were dull after a while because you essentially could not die, but I really don't want to see gameplay where a viable strategy is to macro EH into every ability...