The Brewmaster Tanking Guide [5.4]

[Deleted]

Looking at Normal Mode trinkets, I'm thinking TED and Haromm's Talisman (Xuen-faithful) are the best drops for this tier for a BrM, no? I need to establish it because of having an Enh Sham and a WW Monk in the raid team too.

[Oka555]

So for learning the basics for now the crit build would be fine?

[Deleted]

So they nerfed our damage even further which makes our 2 piece even weaker.
When is it worth to dropp the T15 4pc?

And is there still a tradeoff for playin' the most complicated tank?

[Protozoa7]

Looking at Normal Mode trinkets, I'm thinking TED and Haromm's Talisman (Xuen-faithful) are the best drops for this tier for a BrM, no? I need to establish it because of having an Enh Sham and a WW Monk in the raid team too.

That is correct.

[britishbubba]

So they nerfed our damage even further which makes our 2 piece even weaker.
When is it worth to dropp the T15 4pc?

I personally dropped my 4pc as soon as new gear dropped. Never felt the free purifys were worth that much as I wasn't purifying nearly as much as it was proccing. At least for me, the extra stats on the gear outweighed the free purifys I was getting.

[Kroni]

What would you guys use (sorry for my loot luck...)

2x Garrosh Heirloom Axe 561

1x Immerseus Heroic Staff 574

normally the itemlevel on the staff would shine, but i would lose so much crit rating by swapping, im really not sure here and dont wanna spend the valor for upgrading the staff before deciding.

pros/cons?

Thanks

[kaiadam]

2H weapons > DW for this tier. Immerseus staff is our BiS. The staff has a ridiculous amount of crit rating (1800 ish? It's higher than any two 1H's).

[britishbubba]

2H weapons > DW for this tier. Immerseus staff is our BiS. The staff has a ridiculous amount of crit rating (1800 ish? It's higher than any two 1H's).

Wouldn't garrosh staff be better due to the mastery (unless you need the expertise in BiS, haven't look at Bis gear tbh)

[kaiadam]

My logic basically goes: if you've killed Garrosh, then it's time to pad some dps, so who cares about mastery. Also, expertise is essentially equivalent to mastery anyway - the more you have the less you need to gem and reforge, resulting in more mastery. It's also on a boss that most raiders are likely going to kill in heroic, versus one that most raiders aren't ... so availability + stat equivalence makes the staff pull ahead for me.

[Kroni]

2H weapons > DW for this tier. Immerseus staff is our BiS. The staff has a ridiculous amount of crit rating (1800 ish? It's higher than any two 1H's).

Staff has something like 18xx upgraded and 1 socket, so 21xx with a crit gem. The 2 1H have 561 crit each and a total of 4 sockets, so 2402 crit.. now that i write it its less than i thought lol

whats your reasoning for 2H being better? the stats alone? im so used to 2x 1H because i like the style, i never really played with a staff.

thanks

[kaiadam]

Ah, yeah, I didn't notice the heirloom weapon having two sockets. However, the second socket comes at a price of agility. The 2H has 848 more agility if you choose to ignore the socket bonuses if you go for crit, so I think the staff will still give you more overall crit, even after dancing steel has been factored in, partially due to freeing up some expertise.

2H is better this tier because it has more stats on everything (I think I calculated a 574 2H beating 574 DW weapons by about 200 agi, 500 stamina, 125 secondaries compared to an extra dancing steel), and is less affected by white hit crit soft cap. We can't use the eye of the black prince on our weapons anymore, which used to mean DW also got a free gem socket, but not anymore.

[Leblue]

Keep in mind there's a slight weirdness with Heroic Warforged weapons though. Those heirloom weapons only account for their nonwarforged, double upgraded version. There is no warforged variation of these weapons (I think, but I'll probably eat my foot on this eventually). I'd argue (from someone favoring mastery > crit > haste) that heroic warforged axes off paragons would be BiS if you could somehow get a hold of of two of them. Otherwise I'd personally go for the BoA axes that're also crit/mastery w/ two sockets.

If someone could confirm if there are warforged versions of the heirlooms or not that'd be great cause now it has me wondering.

[SurrealNight]

If someone could confirm if there are warforged versions of the heirlooms or not that'd be great cause now it has me wondering.

wowhead has them capping at 574 and displays the normal loot to include HC and HC WF so it either escaped data mining or doesn't exists.

I have the 553 trident but also a 559 wf axe/553 sword. Probably skipping the first few HC tridents to our feral/bear droods so have to see how drops go at least with weapons.

[Leblue]

So this would put heroic warforged weapons at the top if the loot gods smile upon you, but otherwise looking at the garrosh weapons. Be interested to see how droprates for those shake out.

[SurrealNight]

Well the 3 out of 25 people that got their N mode hierlooms last night for us were all druids so based on a sample size of 1 I can say Garrosh hates non-druid people =P

[Deleted]

Hello. I´d like to ask about Bm stats priority. I played Winwalker monk as my main whole Mop, till now when i changed to Hunter.
However im still playing my monk as an alt but i changed spec to Bm. I still got some enchants/reforges from my Ww spec but now when i got some upgrades from flex i started to wonder what i should gem?

I am mostly raiding flex on this chat but might do some 10m raids too. I used mrrobot after i got these new items and it shows me that i should gem Crit, crit crit and crit.
Is that right? I tought agility is pretty good stat and i should go Agi + crit instead of crit?

Here is my armory, i have not gemmed yet since im not sure about that crit
http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/characte.../Lushan/simple

[Vasilisa]

Ok, guess it's time to ask me if "I'm doing something wrong".

I'm taking with a dk and until recently he had problems with catching me in terms of dps. Though after he got riposte (http://www.wowhead.com/spell=145676) his dps is way better then mine.

So here comes the Garrosh problems (11% yesterday qq). My dps is way lower then him - what can I do to improve it? I guess I should get back to roro (would lfr shaman trinket be dps upgrade as well?) Last night I was using Bad Juju (543) and Renataki (543). I have 530 Roro available as well.

Here are logs from tuesday http://worldoflogs.com/reports/7iatq6mh9j23c1pb/ and from yesterday http://worldoflogs.com/reports/ke4h7qgfokagxz2u/

I'd be grateful for help in terms of my tank dps.

[Deleted]

Hello. I´d like to ask about Bm stats priority. I played Winwalker monk as my main whole Mop, till now when i changed to Hunter.
However im still playing my monk as an alt but i changed spec to Bm. I still got some enchants/reforges from my Ww spec but now when i got some upgrades from flex i started to wonder what i should gem?

I am mostly raiding flex on this chat but might do some 10m raids too. I used mrrobot after i got these new items and it shows me that i should gem Crit, crit crit and crit.
Is that right? I tought agility is pretty good stat and i should go Agi + crit instead of crit?

Here is my armory, i have not gemmed yet since im not sure about that crit
http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/characte.../Lushan/simple

Nope, agility gems are terrible (well exaggerating here). Crit is way better because it builds into elusive brew and scales much better with vengeance. Considering you get double the amount of secondary stats in gems than primary (so 320 crit vs 160 agility) crit is a pretty clear winner.

You should aim for a comfortable amount of haste (get at least 6k if you're new to tanking I'd say) then crit>mastery>haste. If you have trouble surviving flex or normal you could swap mastery and crit (although improving your rotation and playstyle would probably be much better).

- - - Updated - - -

Ok, guess it's time to ask me if "I'm doing something wrong".

I'm taking with a dk and until recently he had problems with catching me in terms of dps. Though after he got riposte (http://www.wowhead.com/spell=145676) his dps is way better then mine.

So here comes the Garrosh problems (11% yesterday qq). My dps is way lower then him - what can I do to improve it? I guess I should get back to roro (would lfr shaman trinket be dps upgrade as well?) Last night I was using Bad Juju (543) and Renataki (543). I have 530 Roro available as well.

Here are logs from tuesday http://worldoflogs.com/reports/7iatq6mh9j23c1pb/ and from yesterday http://worldoflogs.com/reports/ke4h7qgfokagxz2u/

I'd be grateful for help in terms of my tank dps.

Our first Garrosh kill was last week. I'm on a similar progression than you, so you can take everything I say with a grain of salt.

I don't think you're doing something wrong "per see" (well, shuffle uptime could be higher), but there is a lot of little things you could improve. First let me start off that I wouldn't risk going crit RoRo on this fight until you are extremely confident. If you want more dps while sacrificing (a little) survival I think dps cloak would be the way to go.

I'll only analyze try 6 from tuesday but other attempts seemed similar. I'll assume you use weak auras/tellmewhen/some other kind of notification addon (if you don't, you should).

-The simplest thing you could improve is more keg smashing. Under buffs cast you can see the power gains. You gained 116 Chi from keg smash, which means you cast it 58 times during a 11min fight. That translates to roughly one keg smash every 11.4 seconds. That could definitely be improved to below 10 seconds with better timing. I also found it really easy to stay on boss during his whirling corruption (provided I had the vengeance to make it worth it) with just a guard or a minor cd (or zen meditation). One thing that helped me find a rythm was make a weak aura that plays a sound every time KS comes of CD

-Shuffle uptime should easily be 100%. Considering how RJW allows you to continue doing your single target rotation you should be able to build a nice lead during phase one, even more so during intermission phases when you're just hammering away at the boss and running circles around him. That's more of a survivability concern but shuffle also gives you a small dps increase thanks to swift reflexes (which is huge when tanking multiple adds in phase one).

-Not very important, but you are also a bit over the expertise cap but that might just be your WW gear (damn, I envy your gear btw)

-If you wanted to go really deep, you could use RJW on a single target (no Chi gained). I think it's a dps increase over using Jab+half a BoK (too lazy to do the math right now), but I wouldn't do that until you have a comfortable 99% shuffle uptime.

-You might also be purifying a little to much, not every red stagger was created equal. I shy away from purifying 70% staggers in the first phase (adds are always on me), your healers should be able to deal with this and you will soon hit 100%+ staggers anyway.

-Also I have a slight feeling from the logs that you might get energy or chi capped from time to time (or you are not constantly attacking something, which even in intermission phases shouldn't be hard to do). I don't know if this is true, but I would definitely recommend making an weak aura (or something) with a terrible loud sound each time you get energy capped. Chi capped is a bit more complicated, but you could make an aura that kicks in every time you are at 5 chi and cast Jab or KS.
The reason I am saying that is I am comparing your logs to mine from last week.

http://worldoflogs.com/reports/4xwx5...?s=7782&e=8334

Even though our kill was nearly 2min shorter than your try6, we cast: the same amount of KS, I cast more Jabs and EH and you cast more 2 more RJW than me (but I was using SCK)

That's all I can think of right now, hope it was helpful. If you need anything else feel free to ask.

[Grubjuice]

Just wanted to re-post this from the Interface & Macros forum,

I asked for someone to build weakauras string that would recreate the stagger-bar that appears in a brewmaster's character panel (the bar that fills up and maxes out when remaining stagger damage is >/= 100% of the tank's health) and someone did indeed make such a string.

this is not meant to simulate the debuff icon that by default appears on the right handside of the screen butrather it recreates the very teeny-tiny little bar-disply that appears under your Health/Energy/Chi frame, and here it is:

I don't really play Brewmaster so I haven't seen it, but I looked through the FrameXML code for it.
Here's the basic version of it, hopefully there are no bugs with it:

d0JsfaqyI2LKk3Js1(KuYmrjwKkQzlQhlXnfHFrPKUncDzL2jG9cTBc7N0OqQ6Va9BPggfAOQidwy4i4GO4uOuDmr6RiLfIOwkLSyKkTCv9qKkEkvltsrphvnrjLAQu0KrftxXfLKRkPQNrPuUoiBusHpRsTzuPTJs6JQqZcjnnkLQVJe1iPuIFQcgnfmEr0jrcNfjYPb15rKvQsElLI7IszmfnrNi6CqNdAI(8W337JMOpKiSOxG4NMi6fi(PjwBOxoWTaDUqIYa3c6zxV0qdn0Ggdi)iVV33E9c4Xh599(0FMqwsA)ZSRxAOHgAqJb0WkZJHeYK2jktsF9c4XwwzEmKqMK(ZeYss7FMDQPSRxAOHgA87a9cnOXaYpY779PsJb0WkZJHeYKuNhA1RvWb9ce)0ebnaZzrVaXpnr0lq8tteDUqIYa3c6xwxXqfsapSRxAOHgA87a9cnwwxXy3(5tSWqPklqwoCKcGZA0Vgqc4XU9ZeYss7FwVwbh0xwxXWJ(jwyOuLfilhosba16bOWeKPElg0lq8tteCiryrFzDfdoONBjh0e9VZlAIorO8aJM4GdoOlfWeLdClqt05h5pOj6q8lyPZ9JKrV05(TqGu05a9YbUfOJEseWi68fzEjHaPOlZemiraJOZxK5njcKIojeWi6Lo3pzeif9sN7)icKIEPZ9BsIWIEbIFAIOx6C)1asuq)3b6fAG(3JCweWi6Lo3pdcKId6eLWc0eDi(fS05(rYOx6C)wiqk6CGE5a3c0tnI(qIWIEbIFAIONebmIoFrMxsiqk6YmbdseWi68fzEtIaPOtcbmIEPZ9tgbsrV05(pIaPOx6C)MKiSOxG4NMi6Lo3FnGef0)DGEHgCHeLbUf0dsfKkivqQs21ln0qdnYDrM1GW(LvmuHfCB70ya5h599(2kngqdRmpgsitQxAOHgAaZvdc7xwXul3K54XklqRQAdAAXa4uysXbangdRqV0qdn0qdn0qdyb32(PMY7tw(0PZ9BdzRkAjyCZklWthOvzbsMXceGjrfB2yBSPxAOHgASz(fMRge2VSIPwUjZXJvwGuQIfwoqd00IbWPWKIdaAmgwHEPHgAOHgAOHgWcUT9tnL3NS8PtN73gYwv0sW4MvwGNoqRYcKmJfiatIk2SPMSPxAOHgASz(vV0qdn0qdn0qdyb32(PMY7tw(0PZ9BdzRkAjyCZklWthOvzbsMXceGjrfB2KYMEPHgAOXk4OxAOHgA87a9cnGfC76EQWcUDD3uHfC76OlvPETcoO)9iNfbmIEPZ9ZGaPOZb6LdClahsew0)nlhywxCWbD4slq6I(V3WTWKeHfDj0lPR8rhMd6(iVV3xdYYhDberZh((EFEeifh05rVM1zeDwrGuBp1ioic

[Vasilisa]

Nope, agility gems are terrible (well exaggerating here). Crit is way better because it builds into elusive brew and scales much better with vengeance. Considering you get double the amount of secondary stats in gems than primary (so 320 crit vs 160 agility) crit is a pretty clear winner.

You should aim for a comfortable amount of haste (get at least 6k if you're new to tanking I'd say) then crit>mastery>haste. If you have trouble surviving flex or normal you could swap mastery and crit (although improving your rotation and playstyle would probably be much better).

- - - Updated - - -



Our first Garrosh kill was last week. I'm on a similar progression than you, so you can take everything I say with a grain of salt.

I don't think you're doing something wrong "per see" (well, shuffle uptime could be higher), but there is a lot of little things you could improve. First let me start off that I wouldn't risk going crit RoRo on this fight until you are extremely confident. If you want more dps while sacrificing (a little) survival I think dps cloak would be the way to go.

I'll only analyze try 6 from tuesday but other attempts seemed similar. I'll assume you use weak auras/tellmewhen/some other kind of notification addon (if you don't, you should).

-The simplest thing you could improve is more keg smashing. Under buffs cast you can see the power gains. You gained 116 Chi from keg smash, which means you cast it 58 times during a 11min fight. That translates to roughly one keg smash every 11.4 seconds. That could definitely be improved to below 10 seconds with better timing. I also found it really easy to stay on boss during his whirling corruption (provided I had the vengeance to make it worth it) with just a guard or a minor cd (or zen meditation). One thing that helped me find a rythm was make a weak aura that plays a sound every time KS comes of CD

-Shuffle uptime should easily be 100%. Considering how RJW allows you to continue doing your single target rotation you should be able to build a nice lead during phase one, even more so during intermission phases when you're just hammering away at the boss and running circles around him. That's more of a survivability concern but shuffle also gives you a small dps increase thanks to swift reflexes (which is huge when tanking multiple adds in phase one).

-Not very important, but you are also a bit over the expertise cap but that might just be your WW gear (damn, I envy your gear btw)

-If you wanted to go really deep, you could use RJW on a single target (no Chi gained). I think it's a dps increase over using Jab+half a BoK (too lazy to do the math right now), but I wouldn't do that until you have a comfortable 99% shuffle uptime.

-You might also be purifying a little to much, not every red stagger was created equal. I shy away from purifying 70% staggers in the first phase (adds are always on me), your healers should be able to deal with this and you will soon hit 100%+ staggers anyway.

-Also I have a slight feeling from the logs that you might get energy or chi capped from time to time (or you are not constantly attacking something, which even in intermission phases shouldn't be hard to do). I don't know if this is true, but I would definitely recommend making an weak aura (or something) with a terrible loud sound each time you get energy capped. Chi capped is a bit more complicated, but you could make an aura that kicks in every time you are at 5 chi and cast Jab or KS.
The reason I am saying that is I am comparing your logs to mine from last week.

http://worldoflogs.com/reports/4xwx5...?s=7782&e=8334

Even though our kill was nearly 2min shorter than your try6, we cast: the same amount of KS, I cast more Jabs and EH and you cast more 2 more RJW than me (but I was using SCK)

That's all I can think of right now, hope it was helpful. If you need anything else feel free to ask.

I played a bit differently on Thursday at least in my talent choices. I took diffuse magic for whirls and used xuen instead of RJW.

My not so perfect shuffle uptime (like 85% on our longest try) is because mainly during visions (shirines) I'm focusing on dps / aoe instead of survival.

As for Xuen, mine did like 6 mln less then yours. Could you tell me at what moment you use yours?

As for my hit/expertise, I logged out in my tank gear now. And I have to admit - aside from trinkets I was really lucky

I've noticed that with RJW we do shirines faster then when I had xuen talented. Not sure though if the difference is huge enough to make it worth as xuen take a nice chunk of Garrosh hp.

As for Keg Smash - must be the time in shirines, but I'll look closer in to.

Thanks. Hopefully I'll be able to pull bigger number during our next raid