Its not bad but personally I dont like its lack of cooldowns.
Its not bad but personally I dont like its lack of cooldowns.
As soon as they make stagger effect all forms of damage, monks will always be sub-par when it comes to magical encounters.
Other than that monks are pretty good. Good mobility, a good amount of CD's (Could do with 1 more maybe) and a nice active mitigation ability.
Shuffle is hardly a cooldown, its preemptive mitigation.
Elusive Brew is random and not a guarentee. I prefer predictable damage intake over random spike damage. Its useful when it works, pointless when it doesnt.
I think Brewmasters need a 20% reduction 1 minute cooldown like every other tank has, then they would be fine.
It doesn't matter what shuffle gives you, it is supposed to have 100% uptime so therefore it is not a cooldown, it is static mitigation. A tank cooldown is an ability that can be used on demand X times a minute to deal with situational damage intake.
Elusive Brew can be used as a micro avoidance cooldown (Sha's Thrash), a major avoidance cooldown (keeping it stacked to 15 until you need it) or used as a medium uptime avoidance source.
Guard can be used as a short absorption cooldown (saving it for dragon breath) or as a regular absorption shield.
Now, what Brewmaster is missing is a short cooldown which smooths damage taken over a period of time, guard can be used as part of that role, but only for one big hit or so, so if you're fighting your boss which has regular spikes which involve a series of attacks and you can't rely on avoidance (Sha when you have bad avoidance luck, Lei Shi tank swaps below 20%), the healers will find a brewmaster very spiky.
They're good on heroic progression. Some fights they suck on, others they shine on, pretty much like all tanks. I'd say BM is in a good spot, but the issue is that their skill cap is very high. Therefore most BM tanks you'll meet will, in fact, not get the most out of their mitigation.
I think our EH CD is amazing. Big hits you can usually see coming, so hold off using energy, take the hit then heal up, PB and heal some more. I personally don't think a big cd is what we lack. As someone said our cd's we have can be used in many different ways to either mitigate consistent intakes of damage or used to soak bigger hits when used correctly.
We're not missing anything. Anything more they would give us would have to have a corresponding nerf b/c we are in a good place. Avoidance becomes better the more you have of it. A linear increase gives geometric results in less damage taken. We scale phenomenally well with gear, and if anything we are going to get a nerf sometime before this xpac is over or we will become unhittable by T16.
If you're playing for fun, treat yourself to a Brewmaster tank.
On top of incredible tank DPS, they have absurd mobility, a fun and fluid rotation, decent utility (they're no Paladins, mind you!) and an all-around impressive toolkit.
Steve Irwin died the same way he lived. With animals in his heart.
Why so? Unless we started putting reforging/gemming into dodge and parry, we'll always have ~28% parry and I don't believe we'll ever have more than 60% dodge. (Shouldn't Diminishing Returns start kicking in if it goes that far apart, anyway?) Otherwise our Guard will always have a 30s cooldown and magic damage is never going to get any less severe as long as we can't stagger it.
Soothing Mist:"Healing them for a minor amount every 0.5 sec, until you take any other action."
Jade Serpent Statue: "The statue will also begin casting Soothing Mist on your target. healing for 50% as much as yours. "
[What's half of minor?]
"Statue casts Soothing Mist at a nearby ally for toddler healing."
Agility my friend, agility. The dodge you gain from agility does not have diminishing returns. You can already get up to about 80% paper doll avoidance in current BiS gear while Elusive Brew is up. Throw an on-use avoidance trinket and laugh for 10-15 seconds at bosses pathetic attempts to hit you. More ilvls mean more agility which pushes that up still higher. Yes you can't get more parry from shuffle, but you will be getting more crit, which means higher EB uptime, and more mastery even if you reforge out of it, which means smoother damage when we do actually get hit.
Hold up. What? In ilvl485 gear I peak just under 47% dodge and that's during agility procs from both Xuen Relic and (LFR) Bottle. Screenshots and math or I'm going to stay in the dark here.* (Also, I didn't mean just our base getting DR, I meant DR while EB's buff is on, if that's not exempt.)
* I forgot to add Parry and Dodge together.
Soothing Mist:"Healing them for a minor amount every 0.5 sec, until you take any other action."
Jade Serpent Statue: "The statue will also begin casting Soothing Mist on your target. healing for 50% as much as yours. "
[What's half of minor?]
"Statue casts Soothing Mist at a nearby ally for toddler healing."
EB is not affected by diminishing returns either. At least in the sense you're thinking. There is a point at which we have so much crit that the chances to cap before the 9 seconds is up becomes too large to ignore, but I don't believe that is realistically attainable.
So 50%(55% with 2-set) avoidance through Shuffle and EB isn't going to increase. You'll have higher EB uptime though. Dodge from agil is going to keep going up linearly though.
It certainly takes more effort to be good with that some of the other tanking specs, but once you get the hang of it, it's awesome.
I did Wind Lord today, tanking the adds.
I was top Dps, top healing and took less damage than the guy tanking the boss.
I think Brewmasters are okay
True they require a little more... micromanagement than some other tank specs, but I'd say if you're willing to get some addons, put in a bit of time to REALLY learn your spec they are more than viable tanks, they're also crazy fun to play .
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