Originally Posted by
NRL1515
Like people have said before, monk is a pretty high skillcap. Most people that raid with brewmasters (or have at least grouped with them) and think that they are 'squishy' and 'hard to heal', those monks are not being played properly.
I play a brewmaster and am MT in our 10m guild and we're stuck on horridon (we've had a solid 9 man roster, but spent way too much time to help gear up our 10th only to have them mysteriously disappear off the face of the earth 3 weeks later... but that's a different story). However, the amount of abilities we have at our disposal are probably more than other classes, and using these abilities at the right time separates the great from the mediocre.
For monks, we have several abilities to deal with self healing depending on the fight and situation. Expel harm is a wonderful ability that allows us to heal ourselves every 15 sec (for the most part, should be used on CD). With high crit, this can easily heal us for 50% of our health. When we drop down below 35%, the cooldown is dropped and we can spam this ability, provided we have enough energy... this makes us nearly impossible to kill.
- As a monk, we have several talented heals that we can use. Zen Sphere is a ball of healing Chi energy that we can place over any person in the raid (obv including ourselves) and does ticking healing and aoe damage in the immediate vicinity. This scales with vengeance, and if our health (or our targets health) drops below 35%, it explodes, doing extra healing and damage. 2 can be up at any time.
We also have Chi wave, which bounces 8 times back and forth from a hostile target to a friendly target or vice versa. It does a decent amount of damage, and is very useful (for the tank) if there are no raid members nearby. However, you cannot control where it bounces, but it can help out raid healing if your health is solid.
Our last talented heal is Chi burst, which fires a healing/damage burst in a line in front of you to your target which heals and does damage to any allies/enemies in the path. Due to the targeting and movement requirements, zen sphere and chi wave are used more with brewmasters.
- This is probably one of our weaker areas as a monk, as our raid CD's aren't as robust as other classes, but that doesn't mean what we have is useless.
Fortifying Brew - increases our health and damage reduction by 20% for 20 secs. Very useful, and can be glyphed to provide an extra 5% dmg reduc at the cost of giving 5% less health. Basic shield wall.
Diffuse Magic/Dampen Harm - Diffuse magic reduces magic damage taken by 90% for 6 seconds, very useful for fights such as elegon (breaths/annihilation) and lei shi (spray). Dampen Harm allows you to take next 3 attacks within 45 sec that deal damage equal to 20% or more of your total health are then reduced by half, 1.5 min CD for both.
Avert Harm/Zen Meditation - I include these both together even though they are separate spells because most people use them in conjunction with one another. Zen Meditation reduces the damage done by the next attacks done in the next 8 seconds by 90%. It breaks on melee attacks, but still reduces the damage of that melee attack by 90%.
Avert Harm allows you to receive 20% of the damage done to raid members within 10 yards, which can then be staggered.
Popping both together really reduces damage during stack and aoe healing phases, such as lightning storm on Jin'rokh and rampage on Megaera.
We also have mini-CDs which aren't really CDs but work to reduce the amount of damage we take. The stagger mechanic allows to take a certain percentage of the damage of an attack up front, but the remaining percentage will be dealt as a dot. We can purify this damage at the cost of 1 chi at any time we see fit. We also have Guard (which scales with vengeance) which is a shield that absorbs damage and increases our self-healing by 30%. We can glyph this to increase the amount of damage absorbed by 10%, but it will only absorb magic damage (again, useful for fights such as elegon and lei shi).
- We have clash (not very reliable) which is a cross between charge and death grip, grapple weapon (disarms and allows the monk to deal extra damage to disarmed target due to temporary weapon upgrade), roll, transcendance (like a warlocks teleport), we can place healing spheres on the ground for people to pick up later, and we can summon a guardian to help off tank an add if need be.
Personally, I've never had as much fun playing this game as I have with my monk, because it requires me to know most of the abilities in my toolkit and apply them at the right time. I was in the same dilemma as the OP at the beginning of 5.0, I rushed my pally to max level once MoP hit, but kept my monk on the back burner. Our raid group started a little late, but our other tank was a pally as well, so to help with gearing I switched to my monk and I've never looked back. Meter-wise, I've been top dps for quite a lot of fights, my raid heals (+ raid guards) are ridiculous and have out-healed our 2nd and 3rd healer - depending on the fight - many times.
Placed in the right hands, I believe a Brewmaster monk can be a very devastating tool, and can allow your raid group to overcome certain challenges and obstacles (or cheese certain mechanics) that other classes could hope to come close to achieving. Yes, there are some things we don't do as well as other classes, but usually we have an ability or two in our toolkit to allow us to solve that problem in a different way. I don't see myself changing classes ever again.
Putting up our Black Ox Statue allows us to place Guard on any random raid member every time we deal a certain amount of damage.