The Brewmaster Tanking Guide [5.4]

[Trendy-Ideology]

Yes, world of logs just adds the absorb onto the main hit, so your average melee hit seems high (the same reason wol makes brewmasters look bad on the damage taken tab). The A:some number is indeed the absorb amount, mainly stagger + any other incidental absorbs like paladin mastery/priest bubbles. Assuming you've got 60% stagger, 2p + fort brew averaged in means you're probably taking something like 79k melee hits on average, not 246k

The expression I ran to get my log (I didn't want to bother with any non-melee damage that fight):

fullType = SWING_DAMAGE
AND targetName = "Daught"
AND sourceName != "Nether Wyrm"

Can you explain this a bit more for me?

How can I get WoL to tell me accurately how much damage I ACTUALLY took? (Generally speaking, not specific to your example)

[SurrealNight]

Since WoL tracks a lot of our mechanics really weird I believe this is the right way pulled from an old T14 thread. If this is wrong someone is free to correct me.

To get the real number (and yes, this is non-trivial):
Go to details for your monk.
Step 1: Go to "Damage by Spell". Under "Damage Taken", record total damage taken.
Step 2: Add up the total amount absorbed.
Step 3: Go to "Healing by Spell". Under "Healing taken", add up all the yellow numbers in the Hits - Total column.
Step 4: Your real damage taken is: Total damage taken(from step 1) - Total absorbed(from step 2) + external absorbs(from step 3).

[kaiadam]

Assuming you didn't die, the easiest way to see how much damage you actually took per fight is to look at the healing taken meters. If you did die, add on your full hp total for however many times you died to that number.

The way WoL works for our melee hits (lets use 50% stagger and a 200k base hit for easy examples):

Boss hits you for 100k (100k absorbed)
Stagger ticks 10k
Stagger ticks 10k
Stagger ticks 10k
You cast purifying brew

Expected result: you took 130k damage from that hit, and if you got healed, it registers as 130k healing on the healing taken meters.
Actual result: on damage taken, you took 230k damage. 200k from that melee swing (doesn't count absorbs), then an additional 30k from stagger.


----


I use a slightly inaccurate but way less exhaustive method of calculating average damage taken per swing. See the average melee damage taken on your personal wol page, then subtract what your average stagger is. I estimate 2pT15 gives about 5% more stagger on average and fort brew gives another 3%, so if you have 2pT15, used fort brew and have around 50% base stagger, then if your average hit taken was 200k, I'd estimate your actual incoming damage was around 200k*(1-58%) ~= 84k roughly.

[Trendy-Ideology]

The average inc. damage is good to know for comparing average melee hits taken and I like SurrealNight's tip for getting actual total taken.

I just wish WoL had this baseline.

My healers can be a little ignorant sometimes and mistake monks being spiky occasionally with taking abnormal damage... And I'm sitting here staring at my HP bar going "Nope..."

[SurrealNight]

My healers can be a little ignorant sometimes and mistake monks being spiky occasionally with taking abnormal damage... And I'm sitting here staring at my HP bar going "Nope..."

If they are anything like my healers it's probably related more to our HP pool than our "spiky" damage. When I first joined my current guild they saw my HP pool in the low 500k range and kind of freaked out even though I had been raiding with that base for a while. Lot of them will track % and when we do get hit that % value drops lower than other tanks they watch.

I run with about 100k worth of extra HP in our 25m just to make them feel better and bleed it off for non-progression kills and they never even notice, but hey gotta keep your healers happy right?

[Zonex]

It's more personal preference, and I'd have to say exp cap is easily worth twice its amount of stats as crit/haste.



This sounds about right. Going hard mastery, I'm shuffling about 8k secondary stats into it that I could have funneled into crit, giving me another 20% damage more or less. Sometimes more damage is useful and EH less so (Tortos), sometimes more EH is more important (basically every other fight ).



Totally dependent on the fight ... on Tortos I probably lose over 80k dps, on Dark Animus I'd likely lose like 20. Strange that you think Megaera is a mastery fight, I found it one of the smoothest (and lowest) damage intake fights of this tier.



Believe me, I'd love to do all-out max dps, but dead tanks do no damage Once everything is on farm and we have more gear, I'm totally going full crit and light up the meters (even more so than we currently are, heh). And yes, mastery or no is a fairly personal choice, different for each person depending on their level of progression, healing availability, and tanking setup.



You could just simply save EB for when Frigid Assault is about to hit in either build. A better argument would be that it's a moderately tight dps check to kill Sul before his first possession, and if you need a BrM's 300k dps vs 250k, then go crit.

I dont see myself saying the EB pooling has anything to do with the build, that was just an additional comment to taking as little Frost (cold?) dmg as possible. And yes, if you don't stack mastery, you'd generally go Crit (if youre doing Council you know that) there aren't any fights this tier that force you to go haste above 7k, i can do them fine with 3k haste.



Pro tip to the general public for both Hc and normal Council, when you aren't tanking Malakk, and you're tanking Mar'li, go ahead and sit in overlapping quicksand with Zen Med followed by DM, pop Tiger's Lust, use Xuen, watch your DPS/cleave skyrocket. Much funner on Hc, since quicksands collapse in on each other.

[SurrealNight]

Pro tip to the general public for both Hc and normal Council, when you aren't tanking Malakk, and you're tanking Mar'li, go ahead and sit in overlapping quicksand with Zen Med followed by DM, pop Tiger's Lust, use Xuen, watch your DPS/cleave skyrocket. Much funner on Hc, since quicksands collapse in on each other.

Not sure I get how this works, do you still build vengeance even though the dmg is being negated by ZM/DM?

[lebowski]

Not sure I get how this works, do you still build vengeance even though the dmg is being negated by ZM/DM?

Vengeance is based off of damage prior to mitigation.

[SurrealNight]

Vengeance is based off of damage prior to mitigation.

Bah sad I went all this time without realizing that =/

[lebowski]

Bah sad I went all this time without realizing that =/

Haha if only it was just you. I started tanking again for the first time since Wrath/Cata and was boggled Vengeance was getting so high when I was dodging everything.

[Hinalover]

Haha if only it was just you. I started tanking again for the first time since Wrath/Cata and was boggled Vengeance was getting so high when I was dodging everything.

Yea they changed it during Beta for MoP. Originally Armor got calculated into Vengeance and Dodging/Parring/etc would "sideline" I guess you can say Vengeance amount (Vengeance would not increase if dodged, blocked, or parried, but instead refresh the latest tick of vengeance). Only this meant that Guardian Druids would be at a loss in terms of mitigation since higher mitigation meant less Vengeance, thus less Frenzied Regen amounts. About a week or so later they changed it to pre-mitigation.

[Rockets]

Any suggestions for training healers to not lose interest? We're slowly making our way through 10M normals, and we have a couple new healer recruits. Their total HPS numbers are pretty good, but I keep dying because I'll use Guard or EB or something, and when they see me not taking damage for a while they switch away to raid healing and forget to come back.

It's not even surprise damage spikes, this is like... normal boss damage. I've had cases where I've died to Mar'li's smite spam; she'll come out of interrupt, burn through (glyphed) guard 2-3 casts later, and then I've gotten no heals and died before interrupt came up again. They'll leave hots running, but I've seen deaths where there were 15+ seconds of zero direct heals. On 10m, with a specific healer assigned to each tank.

I get the feeling that they might have had a DK tank in their previous guild or something, and they're going "oh, tank is at 30%, that's still a ton of health, it doesn't matter".

The raid leader and healing lead have been shouting at them, but it hasn't seemed to help much. Is there anything I can personally do to help mitigate the situation?

[SurrealNight]

I get the feeling that they might have had a DK tank in their previous guild or something, and they're going "oh, tank is at 30%, that's still a ton of health, it doesn't matter".
The raid leader and healing lead have been shouting at them, but it hasn't seemed to help much. Is there anything I can personally do to help mitigate the situation?

Get new healers? Sorry not more insightful but trust me no healer should think it's ok for any class of tank to sit at 30% and they are ok. Tank dies and raid wipes, if healers are "forgetting" about you they are just bad...

You can explain you are a heavy avoidance based tank and that you will go through periods where you aren't taking much damage but it doesn't mean you are safe, but I have the feeling it wont work based on their current behavior.

[Deleted]

If they are anything like my healers it's probably related more to our HP pool than our "spiky" damage. When I first joined my current guild they saw my HP pool in the low 500k range and kind of freaked out even though I had been raiding with that base for a while. Lot of them will track % and when we do get hit that % value drops lower than other tanks they watch.

I run with about 100k worth of extra HP in our 25m just to make them feel better and bleed it off for non-progression kills and they never even notice, but hey gotta keep your healers happy right?

Story of my life. Less Crit at the moment than I'm happy with, but hey, the Healers have stopped bitching about my health being below 550k. Now I just shout at them when they don't heal me enough.

[Renface]

Any suggestions for training healers to not lose interest? We're slowly making our way through 10M normals, and we have a couple new healer recruits. Their total HPS numbers are pretty good, but I keep dying because I'll use Guard or EB or something, and when they see me not taking damage for a while they switch away to raid healing and forget to come back.

It's not even surprise damage spikes, this is like... normal boss damage. I've had cases where I've died to Mar'li's smite spam; she'll come out of interrupt, burn through (glyphed) guard 2-3 casts later, and then I've gotten no heals and died before interrupt came up again. They'll leave hots running, but I've seen deaths where there were 15+ seconds of zero direct heals. On 10m, with a specific healer assigned to each tank.

I get the feeling that they might have had a DK tank in their previous guild or something, and they're going "oh, tank is at 30%, that's still a ton of health, it doesn't matter".

The raid leader and healing lead have been shouting at them, but it hasn't seemed to help much. Is there anything I can personally do to help mitigate the situation?

Well, I started tanking just as this raid came out - prior to this, I was a Holy Paladin, and had been ever since I started playing WoW.

I can tell you now, for healers to completely stop healing you because you pop your CDs is not good enough!

Sure, they can chill a little bit on you but you're still going to get hit - therefore you still need heals.

Replace them IMO - you shouldn't have to explain you're a avoidance tank, they as healers should know their job and every good healer knows that during a fight, there's ALWAYS healing to be done!

[Deleted]

I was in a raid tonight and helped out as second tank. Though I haven't tanked anything besides LFR yet, we did quiet well and downed Dumuru in normal mode. They asked if I could help out a little more and maybe you guys can give me some advice on gear etc.

This is my monk: http://eu.battle.net/wow/de/characte.../Miyaku/simple

I tried askmrrobot and reforgelite and they both want to cap my expertise at 15%. But I look around here and it seems like nobody's brewmaster has 15% exp, some not even 7.5%. What up with that?

I also have two pieces of 483 tank gear, chest and gloves. Should I switch for the set bonus or are the 496 pieces better statswise?

[Wreckage827]

I was in a raid tonight and helped out as second tank. Though I haven't tanked anything besides LFR yet, we did quiet well and downed Dumuru in normal mode. They asked if I could help out a little more and maybe you guys can give me some advice on gear etc.

This is my monk: http://eu.battle.net/wow/de/characte.../Miyaku/simple

I tried askmrrobot and reforgelite and they both want to cap my expertise at 15%. But I look around here and it seems like nobody's brewmaster has 15% exp, some not even 7.5%. What up with that?

I also have two pieces of 483 tank gear, chest and gloves. Should I switch for the set bonus or are the 496 pieces better statswise?

You can change those stat weights and what reforge cap you want. Don't just go for what ever it tells you.

15% and 7.5% are totally up to the individual. I swap my reforges and gems often, it depends on the specific fight you are looking at.

[Pazx]

i have a Monk alt and its at 490 ilvl with just 2 blue things left , i've gone hit/exp to 7.5% and then Haste > Crt > Mastery .. is there some point i should stop with haste? at the moment i have 15.57% "6,618" im specced into Ascension aswell.
i would post my armoury but i havent posted enough to be allowed

[Deleted]

Basically you would want to stop stacking Haste as soon as you reach a comfort zone where you can keep Shuffle up the whole time while still purifying/using Guard on CD etc. For some people that is already the case on 5000 Haste, others prefer 6000...there is no breakpoint besides personal preference.

[SurrealNight]

I tried askmrrobot and reforgelite and they both want to cap my expertise at 15%. But I look around here and it seems like nobody's brewmaster has 15% exp, some not even 7.5%. What up with that?

You have to delete the 0.85 after cap stat weight or it will push you past 7.5% expertise. So just put that + what ever % value of haste you are comfortable with and it should get you where you need to be.