The Brewmaster Tanking Guide [5.4]

[Deleted]

Heroic fights where you might want to consider swapping out depending on strat:

Will of Emp - Depending your healers.
Wind Lord - If single tanking.
Empress - Must swap out regardless.
Protectors - I didn't in our 1st 10 or so attempts, but will be in our next go around since single tanking it.
Lei Shei - I am going to assume this is a must as well since you cannot avoid Spray.
Sha - Lots of damage in Sha as well, so going to assume the same.

I did not swap for Garajal, Elegon, etc as I didn't have to really.

With my current gear, I could use Ascension, be at my hit/exp caps and have just a smidge under 14 energy regen which is enough to keep shuffle and purify as needed. Being able to withstand a 1 sec interval of 600k+ damage was necessary unfortunately. While I avoided more with a Haste/Crit (gemming Agilty) setup, I couldn't live because Health was just a tad too low.

I have started to become concerned about the normal way of gemming reforging etc, part of the problem is all our healers are used to healing warrior tanks (warrior main tanked for about 2 years +) so they aren't very good at healing an avoidance tank. I am finding myself getting trucked quite alot because they are not precasting or decide to throw a heal on the raid and don't top me back up quickly enough. This has brought me to consider changing my approach (as it's alot more realistic than expecting a healer team that is very stuck in their ways to change).

What are you advocating on the above fights? Are you just talking about gemming stam and using stam trinkets with normal reforges, or are you aiming for a certain regen level and then pushing mastery instead of crit? I am keen to test out different approaches but as of yet have no experience with a mastery build so to speak.

[Deleted]

I have never regemmed away from haste in the current tier and I wouldn't recommnd anyone else to (10man).

I can maybe understand if you playing 25man and you want to smooth out damage by going stamina/mastery because your healers are bad but in 10man you should never ever have to replace haste gems with anything else than crit (when you have 'enough' haste)

If you are gemming stamina/mastery for 10mans you're doing it wrong.

This comes from a monk currenly progressing on Sha of Fear heroic


edit: I don't even know if 25man bosses hit harder than 10man? If they don't, there's no reason to gem stamina/mastery for 25mans either I would think but since I haven't played it I can't say for sure.

[Deleted]

Nevermind.. Found what i searched for :P

[Deleted]

I have never regemmed away from haste in the current tier and I wouldn't recommnd anyone else to (10man).

I can maybe understand if you playing 25man and you want to smooth out damage by going stamina/mastery because your healers are bad but in 10man you should never ever have to replace haste gems with anything else than crit (when you have 'enough' haste)

If you are gemming stamina/mastery for 10mans you're doing it wrong.

This comes from a monk currenly progressing on Sha of Fear heroic


edit: I don't even know if 25man bosses hit harder than 10man? If they don't, there's no reason to gem stamina/mastery for 25mans either I would think but since I haven't played it I can't say for sure.

I should have been clear, I am tanking 25 mans and starting to push heroic content, just cleared terrace normal and will be heading back to Vaults to progress on Feng and beyond.

25 man bosses definately hit harder, how much harder i'm not in a position to state, but a simple look at WoL would show the answer. We generally have at least 2 healers assigned to a tank at all times, the problem I think I am having is that I can go for periods where I take no damage, but then Guard wear's out and if I get a drop in EB rng, then I can be open to some spikes, if the healers don't land a pretty strong heal during or directly after and I eat another melee, it often kills me. Whilst I am aware this is my healers failing, I am far enough into this expansion to appreciate that if they were going to change they would have by now. So my answer to this is to "force" them to heal me by allowing stagger to keep their interest and gear to cope with spikes to give them that extra GCD to react.

So whilst I appreciate the norm is not to go this way, my question is, if I want to test out a "spike resistant" build, what is the best way to go?

[gynshon]

I have never regemmed away from haste in the current tier and I wouldn't recommnd anyone else to (10man).

I can maybe understand if you playing 25man and you want to smooth out damage by going stamina/mastery because your healers are bad but in 10man you should never ever have to replace haste gems with anything else than crit (when you have 'enough' haste)

If you are gemming stamina/mastery for 10mans you're doing it wrong.

This comes from a monk currenly progressing on Sha of Fear heroic


edit: I don't even know if 25man bosses hit harder than 10man? If they don't, there's no reason to gem stamina/mastery for 25mans either I would think but since I haven't played it I can't say for sure.

Can you link your Heroic Empress 10 man parse? Armory? Wowprogress? I would be curious to see because I didn't reforge out, regem until we got to Empress. Night and day in terms of survivability between the two. P2 I would get trucked, literally. Swapped over and 4 attempts later it was dead with zero P2 issues on tanks.

Are you Larra? Ran a compare. I definately want to know if it is a healer issue, because I thought it was from the get-go when we started our debate. Perusing the logs, I still think I am right it was a healer issue and the changes they wanted me to make while allowing us to kill it, is ass backwards and detrimental as a whole.

[Deleted]

Can you link your Heroic Empress 10 man parse? Armory? Wowprogress? I would be curious to see because I didn't reforge out, regem until we got to Empress. Night and day in terms of survivability between the two. P2 I would get trucked, literally. Swapped over and 4 attempts later it was dead with zero P2 issues on tanks.

Are you Larra? Ran a compare. I definately want to know if it is a healer issue, because I thought it was from the get-go when we started our debate. Perusing the logs, I still think I am right it was a healer issue and the changes they wanted me to make while allowing us to kill it, is ass backwards and detrimental as a whole.

http://worldoflogs.com/reports/rt-x2otrgapxzwzyp6e/

Yes.

I only tank the two Reaver adds + 1 Windblade

Also I got 3 heroic set pieces after killing it heroic (1 from the boss, 2 from Terrace) so my gear wasn't as good when we killed it as it is now. I think I was at 498-500ilvl

I died a few times in the beginning, mostly because we hadn't sorted how to pick up the adds in the correct way but when we got that sorted it was no problem. I recommend saving at least 1 cd (dampen harm/guard/symbiosis cd/FB) for when/if they use Toxic Slime at the same time, it can hurt

[kaiadam]

To give an idea about the damage difference between 10s and 25s, Grand Empress' average melee during our last kill was 259k in 25m. Her average melee during Larrabee's link was 160k. Both groups used a brewmaster & prot paladin as the Sherkzeer main tanks (the 25m brewmaster was also stacking mastery).

Extrapolation: bosses hit ~60% harder in 25s vs 10s.

[Deleted]

To give an idea about the damage difference between 10s and 25s, Grand Empress' average melee during our last kill was 259k in 25m. Her average melee during Larrabee's link was 160k. Both groups used a brewmaster & prot paladin as the Sherkzeer main tanks (the 25m brewmaster was also stacking mastery).

Extrapolation: bosses hit ~60% harder in 25s vs 10s.

You can't compare it like that

Link me to your logs and ill have a look at the difference

[kaiadam]

How exactly would you compare it then? You gave a parse of a nice, hard single target hitter boss. I simply dug up one of our logs to compare. http://worldoflogs.com/reports/rt-m4...?s=7679&e=8560

Anyway, mastery is most likely the way to go for 25H progression content. Overall damage intake is even more insignificant than it is in 10s and the increased damage spikiness values reduction rather than avoidance (I know it was fairly annoying tanking sha thrashes as a bear. 650k hp with mastery stacking and I'd still get literally 1-shot without a cooldown up -_-).

[Deleted]

How exactly would you compare it then? You gave a parse of a nice, hard single target hitter boss. I simply dug up one of our logs to compare. http://worldoflogs.com/reports/rt-m4...?s=7679&e=8560

Anyway, mastery is most likely the way to go for 25H progression content. Overall damage intake is even more insignificant than it is in 10s and the increased damage spikiness values reduction rather than avoidance (I know it was fairly annoying tanking sha thrashes as a bear. 650k hp with mastery stacking and I'd still get literally 1-shot without a cooldown up -_-).

I wouldn't compare it - I am pretty confident that bosses+mobs hit for pretty much the same amount in 10 and 25man as the tanks 'should' have similar gear in both brackets.

If you look at the logs and compare damage of windblade adds they seem to hit for double the damage on 10man, I doubt thats correct. (Unless I've completely missed something with WoL)

Either way - the damage the boss does doesn't really matter compared to the damage the adds do


I still believe that if you gem stamina/mastery you're doing something wrong(10man) - if you go for pure haste/crit you have more than enough survivability as a monk. For monks raiding 25man I simply don't know because I haven't tried it.

edit: If you "NEED" to gem for less spiky damage you should gem stamina - not mastery.

[gynshon]

Which was my argument the entire time, but my guild forced me to switch. My guess is to make up for their shortcomings...

[Deleted]

Which was my argument the entire time, but my guild forced me to switch. My guess is to make up for their shortcomings...

We had the disc priest on healing me 100% of the time in P2 (he plays shadow as main) and he called for someone else to heal me when he had to kite. I assume our holy paladin had beacon on me or the other tank so I received healing from holy paladin + disc priest.

The damage can be a bit spiky from the adds but if you save your cd's for the right moments(aka 2x Toxic Slime) you should be able to do it without gemming for bad stats such as mastery/stamina.

[siccora]

sorry for interfering but do u always tank 2 reavers, 1 windblade and the other tank takes the other windblades? i'm on normal right now and they told me, i have to take one group and the other tank takes the other group. or is normalmode different?

and another question to the hotfix 28.11
"Gaining Power Guard will once again light up the alert on the Guard hotkey."
it isn't right?

[Kisho]

No idea how it is on heroic, but on normal my guild just did 1 tank on left, 1 tank on right. Without swapping around who tanks what. Works just fine for normal.

And no, I haven't seen it lighting up since the hotfix. That said I always found that kind of annoying, so I'm glad it isn't. I'm also using Bartender which may be affecting it somehow (though it never used to prior to 5.1).

[itsyaboy]

So, I had a haste build stacking agi+haste hybrid gems and was around 8200 haste or so and with 5.1 I swapped out power strikes for ascension and dropped haste for crit while still maintaining 14 energy/second. I like it and I seem to be taking less damage, but I'm curious if I should stack pure crit gems or go hybrid agi+crit or stay with the delicate gems.

[Kisho]

Gemming agility is a loss. While 1 point of agi is worth more than 1 point of haste/crit/whatever secondary stat you can think of, it is NOT worth more than 2 haste/crit. So gemming hybrid agi gems is actually losing you mitigation/survivability.

If you're regularly speccing Windwalker during raids, then fine, keep going with the agi gemming and you won't see a huge difference. But if you're almost always Brewmaster, then you're going to want to switch to either pure haste or pure crit gemming.

As for your specific question, if you're happy with your haste levels (i.e. have enough chi to keep Shuffle up effectively 100% of the time, have enough for PB and the T30 healing talents), then sure, start gemming crit.

[itsyaboy]

yea 3500~ haste with ascension is more than enough to keep shuffle up with having to purify/chi wave. I thought pure crit would be the right direction but wanted to test out a week with pure agi (went better than haste IMO, so I guess pure crit will only be an improvement)

[Yorgl]

Larrabee. If you don't mind, I'd like your opinion as you stated you did all T14HM in haste gear.

I use that as well but for some fights I switched to stam/mastery trinket, and even had a hit/exp (~2300) > haste (~14 en/s) > mastery for some fight (for example I used that for our first Will heroic tries). But in haste gear against Mel'jarak heroic I got litterally murdered. :-/

Obviously I was doing something wrong. I thought it was my lack of mastery reforging but according to what you said, i might not be the problem.
Eventhough there ALWAYS room for improvment, I think I managed my rotation pretty well : keeping Shuffle up as much as possible (as it's a multitarget tanking I try to aim 100%), purifying as soon as it gets above 15k per tick (thanks to Sunnier's weak aura ♥), and using wisely my CDs especially Guard while on high Vengeance.
How did you manage this fight ? (Did you solo tank it ?)

Thanks (and sorry for my english which is not perfect).

[gynshon]

Larrabee. If you don't mind, I'd like your opinion as you stated you did all T14HM in haste gear.

I use that as well but for some fights I switched to stam/mastery trinket, and even had a hit/exp (~2300) > haste (~14 en/s) > mastery for some fight (for example I used that for our first Will heroic tries). But in haste gear against Mel'jarak heroic I got litterally murdered. :-/

Obviously I was doing something wrong. I thought it was my lack of mastery reforging but according to what you said, i might not be the problem.
Eventhough there ALWAYS room for improvment, I think I managed my rotation pretty well : keeping Shuffle up as much as possible (as it's a multitarget tanking I try to aim 100%), purifying as soon as it gets above 15k per tick (thanks to Sunnier's weak aura ♥), and using wisely my CDs especially Guard while on high Vengeance.
How did you manage this fight ? (Did you solo tank it ?)

Thanks (and sorry for my english which is not perfect).

I solo tanked Wind Lord with a pure Haste build. Basically my healers and myself rotated cooldowns on me when I didn't have Guard up because I was regularly putting up 700k+ guards on myself on cd. I did use the Ox trinket for that fight for an additional buffer of health, and dodge.

[Ragethorn]

4536 haste rating with Ascension and Ox stance will give you 14 energy per second. I would shoot for that, then start going for crit.