(BrM) I thought I was doing it right...

[Baristan]

Hi all. My guild has 2 10 man groups in it. Each group has a BrM tank (one being me). I thought I was being a good brewmaster tank until I started comparing logs of myself to our guilds other BrM.

I'm not the best at reading logs though and was wondering if someone could help me improve myself by looking at my log and see what I could improve.

My Armory is: http://us.battle.net/wow/en/characte...drogo/advanced

The only log I currently have of us is our almost Thok kill (0.4% wipe). I'll try to post a whole run after my guild come back from the holiday next week.
http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/f...?s=6510&e=6964
My toon is Khaldrogo.

what i'm compared to:
http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/1...?s=2013&e=2421
his toon is Mynxx

Any help at all is appreciated, because it looks like i'm taking almost double the damage he takes on the same fight.

[Deathzero]

1) You have quite a few breaks inyour shuffle.
2) He is using dps cloak you are not.
3) He gains stormlash totem during BL. You do not.
4) You let tiger palm fall off.

I am not sure if you are keg smashing on cooldown either. I do understand that there are kite periods so its understandable.

Anyway that is what i picked up here quickly before work.

[Deleted]

Hi,

in the first place, you should not compare total damage taken. Let me not explain this, if you don't know what I'm talking about, please, read the following blog post! :P
sunniersartofwar.com/blog/2013/08/23/why-you-shouldnt-compare-total-damage-taken

I quickly ran through your logs and what I found is his EB and Shuffle uptime is way higher than yours, and thats what (under many other factors) may cause you to take a lot more damage.

Your EB uptime was only 33.6% on the fight, wich is extremely low even considering the time spent only DPSing the boss.
Your Shuffle uptime was ~10% lower, than his, but I think it may only come from the downtime caused by kiting phases.

Well, from the first quick peek-in these are the things I noticed. :P And don't worry, total damage taken means like nothing. You may have spent 2x the time on the boss he did, took way more stacks etc etc etc.

Adam

[Daemonsoul]

The first thing i noticed is raid DPS.

your raid is doing 1,091,423.1 over the course of 7:34
his raid is doing 1,227,243.8 over the same fight thus ending it in 6:48

which means he is going to be taking a decent amount less just based on time in the encounter.

your shuffle uptime is 76.6% on the fight. his shuffle uptime is 82.6% that would lead to a little less damage taken, but it also looks like he never hit a heavy stagger once (so his total damage taken from Stagger is 3,494,352....while yours is 9,835,075). This could be 3 things. Either He purifies more, He spent far less time actually tanking the boss than you (looks like you guys may be pushing P1 longer than the other raid), or his raid rotated cds much better (looking at overall damage taken though, your whole raid took an additional 60k ish damage per second for the whole fight which makes me think they are getting out of p1 faster and spending more time in p2)

if its any consolation here is our kill from last week (Keep in mind, we do the whole fight 2 minutes faster than you guys, and i think im pretty bad at Brewmastering)
doing the same comparison as above,
my shuffle uptime is 76.5, my total damage taken from stagger is 9,366,858 (apparently im bad at purifying, i took almost as much damage from stagger as you did in 2 min less time)

a little more detail about our raid. I tank him first, and first for EVERY transition from p2 to p1. i spend by far more time tanking the boss than my cotank, and usually we swap twice in the very first phase (i cant remember for this one, i think we only made one swap), so i think he is the 2nd tank, where it looks like you spend more time tanking and thus taking far more damage

[Baristan]

Awesome, thanks for the super fast replies everyone!
I didn't even notice the length of the fight difference.
Next time I'll be more conscious of my EB uptime and also purify more. I just picked up the LFR tier pants last night which will give me my 4piece, so purifying more (and at better times) should help out too.

Thanks again. It's really nice knowing there is such a helpful community on here that we can turn to for advice.

[Deleted]

NoooOOOOooooOOOOoooOOO .....

Don't purify more. That's the totally wrong thing to take away from this thread.

Many Brewmasters especially newer/more inexperienced ones purify too often. This leads to less Shuffle uptime and more damage taken overall.
First, make sure your Shuffle uptime is as close to 100% as possible. There are no valid excuses for Thok BTW ... I just checked my kill from last night: 98.8% and didn't drop once. So it's definitely possible.
Ticking Stagger will not kill you, so don't worry too much about it. Total damage taken is not the most important metric to look at. Slow steady damage (like Stagger) is not what kills you ... spikes are! The Shuffle mechanic exists to smooth out spikes. Worry about Purifying, when your Stagger is above 100% (some BRMs in 25 mans only start purifying above 150%). This will hardly happen until you hit HCs.

Also, try to hit Keg Smash on CD. Your Time in between KS was above 13 seconds ... that's way too much. As a comparison, mine was around 10s. Even that could be better, but sometimes there's just nothing to hit on this fight ... ;-). More Keg Smashes means more Chi means more Shuffle ... and more Damage of course!

Those are the main issues ... everything else is just sugar on top.

[Xade]

The nail has been hit on the head ^^

[The Madgod]

NoooOOOOooooOOOOoooOOO .....

Don't purify more. That's the totally wrong thing to take away from this thread.

Many Brewmasters especially newer/more inexperienced ones purify too often. This leads to less Shuffle uptime and more damage taken overall.
First, make sure your Shuffle uptime is as close to 100% as possible. There are no valid excuses for Thok BTW ... I just checked my kill from last night: 98.8% and didn't drop once. So it's definitely possible.
Ticking Stagger will not kill you, so don't worry too much about it. Total damage taken is not the most important metric to look at. Slow steady damage (like Stagger) is not what kills you ... spikes are! The Shuffle mechanic exists to smooth out spikes. Worry about Purifying, when your Stagger is above 100% (some BRMs in 25 mans only start purifying above 150%). This will hardly happen until you hit HCs.

Also, try to hit Keg Smash on CD. Your Time in between KS was above 13 seconds ... that's way too much. As a comparison, mine was around 10s. Even that could be better, but sometimes there's just nothing to hit on this fight ... ;-). More Keg Smashes means more Chi means more Shuffle ... and more Damage of course!

Those are the main issues ... everything else is just sugar on top.

I absolutely can't stress this enough.

Purifying is not going to be saving you if your shuffle uptime is 20-30ish% lower than maximum. You should focus on getting more keg smashes out and focus on getting that shuffle buff to as close to 100% as physically possible. If shuffle is off, that means you are at your weakest point and THAT's where the problematic damage is going to come in.

[Promdates]

Sometimes I actually forget to purify, and end up with rather large chunks of stagger ticks. I think on our kill of 25H Thok, I had a high tick of 245k, which is roughly about 25% of my hp before I remembered.

[SurrealNight]

Thok is really a poor fight to use when comparing trying to gauge skill (Unless you think tank errors are causing wipes) there is just to much variance between any groups kills and I didn't see any logs for the other BrM for fights you have cleared recent so just going to look at your individual stuff.
- Malkorok: Good shuffle, TP, and EB uptime. 28 out of 34 possible Keg Smashed, Chi Wave could be higher. This mostly shows on mostly patchwork fights you have the fundamentals down at least.
- Spoils: Shuffle/TP drop to 70's and EB drops in half. Keg Smash use looks good but need to not loose attention to your buffs.
- Nazgrim: Shuffle and EB are low here which will be bad if you make heroics if it's down for Execute. TP is solid.
- Shamans Shuffle/TP in 80's and EB is low but better than others.

Just looking at this quick sample size I would say the main issue is your rotation starts to fall apart a bit as more raid mechanics are introduced to deal with. Usually this can be handled by properly crafted UI's I would highly recommend looking up the Weak Aura threads and implementing the key buff/CD rotation UI. I'm really not that great a player myself but my WA is very good at making it really in my face when abilities are off CD or buffs are about to fall off.

- - - Updated - - -

Sometimes I actually forget to purify, and end up with rather large chunks of stagger ticks. I think on our kill of 25H Thok, I had a high tick of 245k, which is roughly about 25% of my hp before I remembered.

Yeah I'm only more diligent about clearing during high damage periods when I know healers aren't just babysitting me but for tank damage only periods I'll let stagger tick rather fierce as I trust my healing team (and what else they have to pad some meters with?).

[Ooshraxa]

A brewmaster without shuffle up is equivalent to a warrior or paladin tanking without a shield (base damage reduction).
Keep this in mind, and plan accordingly

[Shamanberry]

I almost hesitate to say it because a novice brewmaster may misread it, but people put too much focus on shuffle uptime.

Forgetting to purify can actually result in taking more damage than letting shuffle fall off. All it takes is your stagger ticks being 20% of your average damage taken per second (or per hit, if you're only concerned with burst) which often isn't a whole lot, and the damage spike you just took is effectively bigger than the one you would have taken had you purified and let shuffle fall off. It doesn't matter if you take a 600k melee swing, or a 500k melee swing and 100k stagger tick, you still took 600k damage within 1 sec.

Granted, on most fights these days (moreso with all the stat points we have to play with), shuffle is sitting at 20+sec all the time anyway. I had it up above 1min (in a full mastery build) as the fight progressed on paragons last time without really trying, just because there are so many periods where I'm not tanking anything because Ka'roz is flying around doing something else, but there are times when it comes down to a choice.

Shuffle uptime is important, but the way people focus on it, it's far too easy to slip into a trap of thinking "good shuffle = good tanking", which is pretty far from the truth. You can have 100% uptime (or whatever passes for 100% uptime given fight mechanics), and still feel like you're made of paper. The way to get yourself there isn't to focus on your shuffle uptime (which comes naturally if things are going right, unless you're doing something silly like spamming Breath of Fire), and focus instead on two things:

- Chi Generation. If you're using Keg Smash properly and using Jab to avoid ever energy capping, you're going to have so much chi you don't know how to get rid of it all. Most problems I've seen come from this - people continue to spam TP when they're at full energy or are spamming Jab and having to wait 3-4 sec every time Keg Smash comes up, and then don't feel like they have enough chi to purify and keep shuffle up. If you find out that this is still a problem, increase haste - in fact, if you're new to the class or feel like you have some things to learn (or are on a fight with lots of mechanics and need a saftey net), go heavy on haste (as high as 7k) -- but more importantly, watch that Keg Smash, and always have 40 energy ready BEFORE it comes off CD, unless it's an absolute emergency and you need Chi NOW.

- Self-healing. If you're doing things right, on most fights, you should be near the top of your own healing taken meter. Brewmasters are as much a self-healing tank (like DKs) as we are an avoidance tank (like druids). Chi wave uptime, picking up Gift of the Ox orbs, making sure your statue is down (people forget more often than you'd think from logs I've looked at - weakauras, people!), proper use of Expel Harm (I highly suggest a weakaura for < 35% health, and spam that EH button if you get it - EH with Vengeance when you're at low health is almost always a more powerful "active mitigation" than anything else you could do), using Guard properly (pop it when your damage is unstable unless you're saving it for a known burst of damage, guard is nearly always better than shuffle). And most importantly, as others have said, learn to Purify properly. Don't obsess and hit it as soon as you go red, particularly if you have a mastery build, but don't forget about it and obsess over getting your shuffle buffer to high numbers - either way you're hurting yourself.

[britishbubba]

Forgetting to purify can actually result in taking more damage than letting shuffle fall off. All it takes is your stagger ticks being 20% of your average damage taken per second (or per hit, if you're only concerned with burst) which often isn't a whole lot, and the damage spike you just took is effectively bigger than the one you would have taken had you purified and let shuffle fall off. It doesn't matter if you take a 600k melee swing, or a 500k melee swing and 100k stagger tick, you still took 600k damage within 1 sec.

I get what you're trying to say, but that's not how stagger works, and the purpose of shuffle isn't to make you take less damage (even though it will due to the 20% parry and the 20% stagger making you purify a higher % of your dmg intake), but it's there to boost your stagger to the point of your damage intake being smoothed out enough to not go kersplat.

As for stagger not working the way you illustrated, if you take a 600k swing, and stagger 100k of it (as per your example) you're taking 10k ticks for the next 10 seconds, not 100k ticks.

I don't think you can place too much importance on something that is balanced around the idea of having 100% uptime on it. Brewmaster's w/o shuffle are just too squishy for it to be in anyway intended for them to tank without it up.

Stagger management really only matters at higher amounts of stagger. I've let 150% staggers tick for a few seconds before because there was no reason to clear it. Telling people that shuffle isn't the most important thing, and that purifying can sometimes be more important will likely end badly. You'll end up with people that will just purify anytime they see a yellow stagger or something.

- Chi Generation. *snip*

Everything you said in here though is very important. I was helping a brewmaster on my server try to get better (sadly it hasn't worked) and the main issue I was seeing was that on average he was only hitting keg smash every ~18 seconds. He wanted to stack haste because "I don't have good shuffle uptime right now so I need more haste" at which I pointed him to my logs and said "if I can have 1+ stacks of shuffle with 3.3k haste, then it just means you have to actually hit kegsmash more than 3 times a minute.

I think I've yet to look at logs of an underperforming brewmaster, where they actually hit KS on CD.

[Shamanberry]

As for stagger not working the way you illustrated, if you take a 600k swing, and stagger 100k of it (as per your example) you're taking 10k ticks for the next 10 seconds, not 100k ticks.

That's not what I mean.

One hit isn't going to get you to 100k stagger ticks (unless it's a pretty big hit) - however, you can quite easily get there over the course of tanking. Once you are there, if you're focusing too much on your stagger uptime and let those 100k ticks go off, you'll end up taking more damage than if you had purified -- even if shuffle fell off in the process.

It's why I hesitate to bring it up, because as I said, it can be easily misunderstood as "shuffle isn't that important", which is obviously not something you want to even imply. But I do try to caution people against Brewmaster becoming a one-button-wonder, which is what I get from a lot of replies people make to threads like this one. Shuffle uptime may be a big part of survivability, but focusing on shuffle and going from 90% to 98% uptime on the fight as a whole isn't going to be much of a difference for most people, whereas paying more attention to having chi/energy so you don't run into ugly situations, and keeping yourself alive through healing abilities can help most anyone.

[britishbubba]

That's not what I mean.

One hit isn't going to get you to 100k stagger ticks (unless it's a pretty big hit) - however, you can quite easily get there over the course of tanking. Once you are there, if you're focusing too much on your stagger uptime and let those 100k ticks go off, you'll end up taking more damage than if you had purified -- even if shuffle fell off in the process.

It's why I hesitate to bring it up, because as I said, it can be easily misunderstood as "shuffle isn't that important", which is obviously not something you want to even imply. But I do try to caution people against Brewmaster becoming a one-button-wonder, which is what I get from a lot of replies people make to threads like this one. Shuffle uptime may be a big part of survivability, but focusing on shuffle and going from 90% to 98% uptime on the fight as a whole isn't going to be much of a difference for most people, whereas paying more attention to having chi/energy so you don't run into ugly situations, and keeping yourself alive through healing abilities can help most anyone.

Fair enough, simple misunderstanding.

I think overall though it's just better to advocate 100% shuffle uptime before you bother to get into the finer things like perfect stagger management. Once you get to the point of managing your chi properly in terms of shuffle, your shuffle timer should be high enough that it's never a trade off between dropping shuffle, and purifying a high stagger. Anytimes I talk to someone making a BrM alt, I don't bother to tell them any particular amount to purify at because there's a lot of factors that go into it, and it pretty much just seems to work out better to say "hit KS on CD, and don't energy cap, spend your chi on boK". In most situations that will work out well for a BrM, and only once you move into raiding does it actually start to matter when you purify, and you kinda just learn as you go as to when you should purify, and when it's ok to let the damage tick for a bit.

i mean think of it in terms of malkorok tanking. During blood rage if you're solo soaking, or duo soaking the cleaves, you're going to purify after every swing or you're going to eat 300k stagger ticks eventually. If you're not managing shuffle properly up to this point, you're not going to have the shuffle uptime to ride you through the swings while you spend all your chi on purifying. it's situations like that which make high shuffle uptime so important, because there will be times where your chi generation/expenditures change, which causes you to start losing shuffle time instead of gaining it.

[Promdates]

One hit isn't going to get you to 100k stagger ticks (unless it's a pretty big hit) - however, you can quite easily get there over the course of tanking. Once you are there, if you're focusing too much on your stagger uptime and let those 100k ticks go off, you'll end up taking more damage than if you had purified -- even if shuffle fell off in the process.

Just to clarify, you will NEVER take more damage from boss swing+stagger dot than you would just from a boss swing normally as long as you purify once within the stagger dot.

Doing Thok 25H last night, the highest stagger dot tick I had was 305k (one tick total). Then again, I do stand in front of the boss the entire first phase and get to 8 stacks of pain before we push to kite phase, and generally try to purify once I reach 150% (over a 1.5m total stagger dot). Shuffle is the most important thing to have up.

The real issue is people's energy/chi management. As long as you use a Keg Smash/Jab/Expel Harm to make sure you don't energy cap, and you can save 1-2 chi for "oh shit" moments, you should be in a good situation.

- - - Updated - - -

I mean think of it in terms of malkorok tanking. During blood rage if you're solo soaking, or duo soaking the cleaves, you're going to purify after every swing or you're going to eat 300k stagger ticks eventually. If you're not managing shuffle properly up to this point, you're not going to have the shuffle uptime to ride you through the swings while you spend all your chi on purifying. it's situations like that which make high shuffle uptime so important, because there will be times where your chi generation/expenditures change, which causes you to start losing shuffle time instead of gaining it.

Exactly this. Solo tanking malkorok, to me, is the most important part of proper shuffle uptime and chi/energy management. It's the one time in the fight you don't want shuffle to drop, or you're going to be take a 6m smash to the face instead of a 600k.

[Leblue]

Considering it actually takes a LOT of damage to make stagger really and truly noticeable to where HoTs and shields simply aren't enough to make it basically non-existent damage wise, too much focus on purifying could certainly gimp your chi generation. Right now the only two bosses that hit me really hard enough to where I actually take time to stare at my stagger tracker is solo tanking bloodrages on H Malk and during H Thok Progression (I'm solo tanking it).

I really don't stress (personally) purifying until I'm hitting 1.5 mill+ staggers because outside of 5+ stacks panic or fort brew going down during Bloodrage, the boss can't hit me hard enough to make an almost 200k stagger seem lethal, especially since if you're getting hit hard enough you can put up 1 mill+ guards and your expel harm has become a lay on hands. Purifying should really only be concerned if passive HoTs/shields aren't enough from keeping a boss swing or two + stagger from killing you, which you won't really see until heroics anyway. You're much more likely to die to healer inattentiveness and purifying a stagger that's ticking for 75k is probably not going to be the thing that kills you, its the previous 3 melee swings or boss ability you didn't have a cd for that will kill you.

TL;DR stress that shuffle uptime. Its been said before, spike damage kills tanks not smoothed out damage.

[SurrealNight]

I almost hesitate to say it because a novice brewmaster may misread it, but people put too much focus on shuffle uptime.

1) Give me a reason that keeping +20% Parry / +20% Shuffle up should not be stressed?
2) Low shuffle uptime is always the first symptom of much deeper issues in all aspects of BrM play, usually means low BoK use, not using KS on CD, probably not using Chi Wave on CD, dropping TP and not using the free GCD for more DPS, forgetting to use Expel Harm when low life.

Basically I look at shuffle % and if I see gaps in coverage I go "ruh-ruh better look deeper at what else they are doing". My analysis above proved just that as OP does well on patchwork fights like Malkorok but starts to fall apart a bit in the more complicated fights. Basically what OP really needs is tips on how to keep up solid BrM play when lots of raid s**t is going on. I'm going to guess he finds the above discussion less than helpful.