Monk tanking hard?

[Steve the Sloth]

Except I'm not trying to downplay it as a factor, I'm trying to downplay it as hard to keep up. It's as simple as you either have the EB stacks to hit it while you're tanking or you don't. That's based on a few things.

1) Gemming/gearing for crit.
2) RNG being nice to you and giving you the crits that you should get.

It's just a fact that good EB uptime is completely out of your hands unless you just decide to not hit your EB button ever.

EB hasn't become any easier from when I was 520 ilvl. I've just been given more stacks so it's higher uptime. I understand that RNG happens and sometimes you get shafted on EB generation. Even at crit cap I've had streaks of funky RNG where I just miss/glance a long string of autos at sit at 1 stack of EB. That doesn't make it hard to hit EB when I'm tanking something and I have the stacks to use.

It's just like I consider shuffle as a nonfactor in the difficulty of the spec. Maintenance buffs aren't hard. If you're going to suck at keeping shuffle up, you're going to suck just as much at Rage gen on a prot warrior, HoPo Gen on a prot paladin, DS usage on a DK, Rage gen on a guardian druid. The notion that BrM is for some reason hard for doing the same things that other tanks do (gain resources to spend to increase active mitigation) is just a dumb notion. BrM isn't any different other than without shuffle, we're paper. But even on that note it's not hard to gain and spend 0.33 chi/second on BoK in order to keep shuffle up. Just like it's not hard to hit SS and Revenge enough to gain 10 rage/second in order to keep Shield block or barrier up as much as possible.

I personally don't see shuffle as a difficult aspect, no. You have to BK ever 6 seconds, like you said, but when I said Stagger is a minor part of BrM tanking, I was referring to the ease of maintaining it's uptime.

As for EB, it's not that it's a "difficult" mechanic, it's just one thing more to keep track of and it does indeed become much easier at higher ilvl's. While it's just "pressing a button", you're gonna have full stacks at 570 almost always and much, much less at 520 which will lead to a consistent +30% dodge increase thus giving the impression that you're a competent tank and not a pita to heal.

I don't have much experience tanking on other classes so I can't really speak to those but I agree, if you can't keep shuffle up then you're most likely going to have a hard time with any tank spec and their mechanics.

[britishbubba]

I personally don't see shuffle as a difficult aspect, no. You have to BK ever 6 seconds, like you said, but when I said Stagger is a minor part of BrM tanking, I was referring to the ease of maintaining it's uptime.

Please elaborate on what you mean here. I'm actually lost at what you mean by maintaining uptime on stagger o.o

As for EB, it's not that it's a "difficult" mechanic, it's just one thing more to keep track of and it does indeed become much easier at higher ilvl's. While it's just "pressing a button", you're gonna have full stacks at 570 and much, much less at 520 which will lead to a consistent +30% dodge increase thus giving the impression that you're a competent tank and not a pita to heal.

The difference is actually not that large, as you start to effective EB cap (generate enough that you cover most of your tanking windows through having a bank of it before you start tanking). I mean yeah, it was less uptime in ToT gear, but in the end you just compensated through more mastery. As you get more gear, you shuffle out more mastery because you have higher EB uptime.

With how frequent tank swaps are this expac, it's really not that important to always be riding these huge stacks of EB. I mean sure, in lfr where it's very likely that you'll end up with another tank that won't actually taunt at the right time it *might* start to matter. But this is more about the actual gameplay of the class and no the outside effects of other people's gameplay on you.

I don't have much experience tanking on other classes so I can't really speak to those but I agree, if you can't keep shuffle up then you're most likely going to have a hard time with any tank spec and their mechanics.

Which is pretty much my point in this thread. People for some reason like to act like BrM is a special snowflake when it's just not. Which was actually the last line in my first post here

What actually matters is the skills that makes someone a good tank, and those skills are universally applicable to all tank specs in the game.

So I'm glad we're on the same page.


Anyway. To op

http://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/...cs-of-survival

Read that if you want to learn the basics of BrM, and see if it suits what you want. It's a VERY well written intro to the basics of BrM tanking.