BM - log check, lots of space for improvement

[Deleted]

I pugged with a pretty decent semi-guild run today (we did a full clear on normal), which meant I finally got to put in some better gameplay then I do in my own guild (sad but true, cause of that is already in a different thread). I was hoping some people could check out my logs, and point out improvements for better tanking. Please ignore the other players though since it was a pug for me

The logs: https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports...ss=-3&source=6
My armory: http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/characte...%B2ng/advanced
I see now that I'm missing a gem *bad me*. And I'm thinking about swapping my enchants to mastery, since I read on here that mastery is actually better than versa (I took the versa>mastery>crit from Sunniers website, I changed that for myself to versa>mastery>=crit, not sure where versa should end up if I push mastery to most important stat, above or below crit). I also have too much haste on gear, but what can a person do, when that is what drops... No tanking cloak, since none have dropped for me, as soon as one does, I'm getting crafted legs, I guess, since those are still blue.

The things I noticed myself:
- Forgot to swap back to healing elixers from diffuse magic after Brackenspore (bad, bad me).
- I did not use RJW in the stands for Kargath, nor did I use it on Tectus (I don't think I even swapped talents for those fights).
- My overall uptime on Tiger Power was too low.
- I missed out on some shuffle uptime in some fights.
- I pop Elusive Brew way too often, on way too few stacks, at times where I don't even need it, need to become less trigger happy with it
- Miss-timed my Fortifying Brew on Butcher, I thought I would have enough time for the cooldown (which was just a stupid thought)
- Not (pre)potting in practically all fights *slaps fingers*

The good (or at least done on purpose) stuff:
- Good shuffle uptime on the fights where I didn't screw it up
- 83% avoidance on the Cleaver seems to be pretty good?
- My Rot debuff on Brackenspore was planned high (which I probably shouldn't offer on hc), since we taunted after the add died, meaning I took high stacks when it died slowly. I knew I could and would survive it though, which is why I offered to do it like this
- Clearing the raid and getting the achievement

[Deleted]

I have literally no idea why Sunnier is recommending Versatility, aside from the fact that it's entirely passive, but Mastery is much better for mitigation. Your mastery is low as hell so you're more than likely going to get melee'd like a truck.

Anyway, log time.

- You missed quite a few Keg Smashes, but it appears to be mostly in periods of high movement.
- You could definitely be purifying more. You only purified about 60% of your Staggered damage on Butcher; unless you're trying to push DPS, you can have it closer to 75%/80%.
- Mar'gok is another example of this; you only purified 40% of your Staggered damage. Not only that, but because you're gearing for Vers you're not even Staggering that much anyway, which leads to pretty poor physical mitigation.
- Again on Brackenspore, you're sitting at about 50% purified.

Honestly like... It's not bad, but on any difficulty higher than normal, your play will lead to you getting shitwrecked. Normal bosses melee like wet noodles, but fights like Heroic Imperator are going to hurt you bad if you don't start learning to purify. It's not a case of "I'm at a designated amount of Stagger, so I should purify now". If you're running Serenity, the majority of your chi should be going into purifying before the Stagger even starts ticking.

[Deleted]

Lol, and I already purified more than I normal do, since I started reading up on stuff here. Still stuck in the 'must use blackout kick, must build shuffle' which is idiotic with Serenity, I know, habits die hard. Very good point to work on for me!

I'm only 1/7 hc at the moment, going with the same group on a hc run tomorrow though, so hopefully I'll be getting some progress. Definitely changing stuff over to mastery now that I read this, it kinda confirms the thoughts I already had. Luckily I have all professions (6 chars with garrisons, I feel like I'm nuts doing it like that sometimes, but at times like this, it's quite nice), so it won't cost me anything. I felt really annoyed when I found out my food buff was actually haste, meaning I really have way too much haste gear... That's no good at all...

The build I got from Sunnier was the spike mitigation build, by the way. Since I don't want more dps anyways, and my guilds healers asked me to go spike mitigation. Which I kinda understand after your comment about purifying.

edit: Gem/enchants fixed to mastery.

edit2: completely forgot to thank you for the response, so THANK YOU!

- - - Updated - - -

Ok, I swapped around my weapons (back to dual wielding, since they had kind of better stats), changed the stats on my (crafted) waist (because it had haste, which was stupid when I could easily change that), gemmed and enchanted mastery. I think the stats on my armory have improved quite a bit by these actions (haste dropped quite a lot at least, and I got more mastery).

[Kaylisto]

- You could definitely be purifying more. You only purified about 60% of your Staggered damage on Butcher; unless you're trying to push DPS, you can have it closer to 75%/80%.

How do you check this on WCL?

[Deleted]

How do you check this on WCL?

- go to damage taken
- hover over your character like so



- look at damage Mitigated/Staggered
- then, compare that to the damage taken from Stagger



- do some math, and enjoy

[Deleted]

If I calculated correctly (please tell me I did) I managed to get about 80% purified on Butcher hc today?
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports...s=-3&source=13

I was focusing a bit too much on the purifying though, and lost uptime on shuffle. Still Progressed two bosses (Butcher and Tectus down), then got stuck on Brackenspore.

My private focus for the day was purifying and proper Elusive Brew usage (which improved, but still needs to improve more). Focusing on that did screw about with my awareness (I think I even killed the other tank on Butcher by not noticing we were not stacked enough *oops* ), and the use of other cooldowns. I felt that I was sometimes purifying so much that I didn't have the chi for guards and actually necessary BOKs. I need to learn to regulate it a bit more, I guess.

[brookllyn]

If I calculated correctly (please tell me I did) I managed to get about 80% purified on Butcher hc today?
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports...s=-3&source=13

I was focusing a bit too much on the purifying though, and lost uptime on shuffle. Still Progressed two bosses (Butcher and Tectus down), then got stuck on Brackenspore.

My private focus for the day was purifying and proper Elusive Brew usage (which improved, but still needs to improve more). Focusing on that did screw about with my awareness (I think I even killed the other tank on Butcher by not noticing we were not stacked enough *oops* ), and the use of other cooldowns. I felt that I was sometimes purifying so much that I didn't have the chi for guards and actually necessary BOKs. I need to learn to regulate it a bit more, I guess.

Yeah you only took about 21% of your actual stagger damage. On most bosses you can take a second to look at your shuffle or health or whatever between melee attacks since you know your stagger won't accumulate in that break and adjust accordingly. You really only need to pay attention to stagger when you are actually getting swinged at. I find it helps to have everything close together in my UI so it doesn't take too much effort to look around the screen for the various things you need to be aware of as a BrM.

Assuming you still want any other help, looking at your heroic butcher kill, you only got off 25 Keg Smashes, when you can get 36 for a 4:50 fight. This is 22 chi that could have gone to easily keeping up shuffle without paying attention or purifying more or guarding.

Your serenities are also late, again a free source of chi and purify spam, you could have gotten barely 4 off even if you wasted 3ish seconds on each one. Your first cast should really be 5 seconds or less into the pull(yours was 11 seconds in) if you want to get the max number in. I usually KS->Jab(for power strikes proc)->TP->Serenity BoK/Purify Spam. You didn't cast keg smash until 10 seconds into the pull, this should be your number one priority(unless you will die without an EH cast) at all times, especially on a pull where you usually aren't threatened. You also do this weird Purify spam in the first ten seconds that really doesn't do much when you could be spending those purifies for free through serenity while also getting your base shuffle time up.

[Deleted]

I definitely still want more help! Thanks a lot! This run was with a pug (again, same pug as yesterday though), so there are some 'getting used to each other' issues going on too.

There actually was a reason for my late serenity in this particular fight: I had to reposition the boss, since he was pulled too much forward. (just checked the replay and this was one of the two pulls where that happened, the first resulted in a wipe). I'm not too good at multitasking, so I repositioned the boss first, and only then started playing properly. That probably explains the first late serenity. I think/guess I also probably panicked because of the sudden need to reposition and that I purify-spammed because I was so focused on purifying enough that it suddenly became my go-to button.

My normal pull is (or should be, I'm quite sure I messed up more often than getting it right, because of my tight focus): prepot (armor), KS, TP (which I tend to forget), serenity, BOK/purify spam and a Guard if needed. Getting the jab in seems a good idea, going to implement that.

I think I lost keg smashes because I lacked energy to use it when kegsmash was up? I remember that happening a lot today, although I can't be positive that was the reason for it here. I think that was caused by jabbing too much (must... have... chi...) and then still using it to purify even when I decided that I needed a BOK just half a second before that. I think I was 'slightly' over-focused on the purifying. I tend to get a bit intense when working on a specific thing.

I tried to set up gnosis for the swingtimer (since I saw that being recommended), but haven't got it working yet, need to spend some time on getting it working.

Really, for my overall playing, I think the first logs were better than todays, because of the (over-)focus I had on purifying, which screwed with a lot of the rest lol.

- - - Updated - - -

I looked at casts on the Butcher, trying to make sense of it.
73 casts of PB
51 TP
47 BOK
43 jab
25 ks

I'm thinking that's not quite the way that's supposed to be? :P

- The PB can be explained by the (too high) focus I had on it. Misume said 75-80 percent purified and I hit the 80 (well almost, it's 79) on my first try at that. I think I can go just a tad easier on the purifying tomorrow, I might even have purified nothing at all with some of these casts (although I did try to pay attention to that)?
- TP, well I guess since it is a spam-filler, it might have that explanation to go for that?
- 47 BOK for a 4.50 kill . I actually only had one tiny shuffle hiccup on the Butcher. It would give me 282 seconds uptime on shuffle, for a 290 second fight. Should have been just a tad more, I guess
- 43 jab vs 25 KS. Seems off. Since there are 11 more possible kegsmashes in this fight, and I was pretty much low on energy for the whole fight (except for when I actually managed to stand still and do nothing for a short while during bounding cleave), I think I should have jabbed (way) less.

Do these conclusions seem right?

By the way, do I continue to kegsmash on cooldown during serenity? I never do since it seems to be a waste of energy?

[brookllyn]

I definitely still want more help! Thanks a lot! This run was with a pug (again, same pug as yesterday though), so there are some 'getting used to each other' issues going on too.

There actually was a reason for my late serenity in this particular fight: I had to reposition the boss, since he was pulled too much forward. (just checked the replay and this was one of the two pulls where that happened, the first resulted in a wipe). I'm not too good at multitasking, so I repositioned the boss first, and only then started playing properly. That probably explains the first late serenity. I think/guess I also probably panicked because of the sudden need to reposition and that I purify-spammed because I was so focused on purifying enough that it suddenly became my go-to button.

My normal pull is (or should be, I'm quite sure I messed up more often than getting it right, because of my tight focus): prepot (armor), KS, TP (which I tend to forget), serenity, BOK/purify spam and a Guard if needed. Getting the jab in seems a good idea, going to implement that.

I think I lost keg smashes because I lacked energy to use it when kegsmash was up? I remember that happening a lot today, although I can't be positive that was the reason for it here. I think that was caused by jabbing too much (must... have... chi...) and then still using it to purify even when I decided that I needed a BOK just half a second before that. I think I was 'slightly' over-focused on the purifying. I tend to get a bit intense when working on a specific thing.

I tried to set up gnosis for the swingtimer (since I saw that being recommended), but haven't got it working yet, need to spend some time on getting it working.

Really, for my overall playing, I think the first logs were better than todays, because of the (over-)focus I had on purifying, which screwed with a lot of the rest lol.

- - - Updated - - -

I looked at casts on the Butcher, trying to make sense of it.
73 casts of PB
51 TP
47 BOK
43 jab
25 ks

I'm thinking that's not quite the way that's supposed to be? :P

- The PB can be explained by the (too high) focus I had on it. Misume said 75-80 percent purified and I hit the 80 (well almost, it's 79) on my first try at that. I think I can go just a tad easier on the purifying tomorrow, I might even have purified nothing at all with some of these casts (although I did try to pay attention to that)?
- TP, well I guess since it is a spam-filler, it might have that explanation to go for that?
- 47 BOK for a 4.50 kill . I actually only had one tiny shuffle hiccup on the Butcher. It would give me 282 seconds uptime on shuffle, for a 290 second fight. Should have been just a tad more, I guess
- 43 jab vs 25 KS. Seems off. Since there are 11 more possible kegsmashes in this fight, and I was pretty much low on energy for the whole fight (except for when I actually managed to stand still and do nothing for a short while during bounding cleave), I think I should have jabbed (way) less.

Do these conclusions seem right?

By the way, do I continue to kegsmash on cooldown during serenity? I never do since it seems to be a waste of energy?

TBH, I'm still not sure what the best way to go about the pull or serenity is. I still continue to use KS throughout the buff even if it is a waste of chi because the damage is so high and I generally don't have an issue with damage intake usually. If you want to mazimize chi though, you would use it right after a blackout kick after the serenity buff expires.

Basically, you need to pool your energy more I think. If you don't have energy for a KS as it comes off CD, something went wrong. You want to generally try to be at 40 or more energy in case you need to KS or EH instead of spamming jab all the time trying not to waste energy. If you can't get over not jabbing when you have energy for it, just try to remember that tiger palm by itself does twice the damage of a jab, and you are actually losing damage by hitting a jab. And yeah, TP is basically your go to when nothing is ready/up. TP should consume all of your downtime and makes it so you should have none. You should only really jab to prevent actual energy capping and wasting resources, jab is actually very far from your main priority.

[Rockets]

That's pretty much accurate. Ideally you would trade 11 jabs for KS like you said, which would give you 11 more chi -- that's your 1 missing BoK and another 10 PBs.

Try and break yourself of the "must... have... chi..." mentality that pushes you to Jab all the time. We aren't GCD-locked, so it doesn't matter whether you jab early or late -- you'll get the 1 chi either way. As long as you don't actually hit the energy cap, the only way improve your chi throughput is to work on hitting KS right on time, which actually means easing off the Jab button so you aren't drained dry when KS comes up.

It's been said before but basically you shouldn't jab unless you're over 70 energy, and ideally you should leave it until 90-99. At the baseline regen rate of 10 E/s, that will always leave you with 40 energy for the next GCD so you can KS if it's up. Also, keeping a big pool of energy around will let you EH more in a Desperate Measures emergency.

The one exception is Serenity; even with no haste you'll naturally generate 100 energy over its 10s duration, so any energy sitting in your bar at the time you push the button will be wasted. So ideally you'll drain your pool down first with a KS right before Serenity (or Jab+KS if needed) and then KS again as soon as it finishes. You'll lose whatever energy you couldn't drain (and whatever you get from haste during that 10s, another reason why haste is bad) and delay KS by 2s, but that's the best you can do.

Ideally you shouldn't KS during Serenity; it's a complete waste of energy, since you'll get 2 chi refunded by spending that GCD on BoK anyway. You might have to anyway to hold threat on adds, but that's the only special case I can think of.

I've been using Comergy as my energy meter; it's really designed for rogues, so is a little wonky when it comes to monks, but it lets you split up your energy bar into different-colored segments. I put in a split at 40 and another at 70, which makes it easy to tell when I have enough to KS and when I should start thinking about using Jab. You could probably build something similar using WeakAuras but Comergy does it out of the box, which is nice.

[Deleted]

The pug group is going to hate me when I attempt to implement this during tomorrows raid (or not if I actually manage to get it right of course). I guess some pre-raid practising is due this time.

So what I basically am supposed to do/get through to my -stubbornly set in old/wrong patterns- mind:

-KS on cooldown, except for during Serenity
-Replace most jabs with TP (the thought of replacing it like that really helped me get my mind around the change, thanks!)
-BOK/purify spam during serenity and then only BOK enough to keep shuffle up (including some extra shuffle -15 secs?- for breathing space in emergencies)
-EH still on cooldown I guess?
-Purify, a lot
-Elusive Brew (Aiming at 10+ stacks - with an absolute minimum of 5)
-Maybe get a jab in (when energy>70)
-Use other cooldowns where necessary
-Switch to HE/RJW for now on all fights to not complicate stuff even worse with cooldowns . Should be ok in HC, I think (although I might miss my DM at Brackenspore).

Using expel harm practically on cooldown won't make sure I don't miss out on any Power Strikes though (PS 15 sec, EH also 15 sec)? Or should I be jabbing enough with this improved rotation anyways to always trigger it?

I'm trying to uncomplicate it a bit for me, so I can actually implement it immediately tomorrow, without causing (too many) wipes and getting replaced (or getting told to improve my gameplay when not in that group :P ). I'd really like to be invited back whenever I don't have a lockout, like I am now.
The way I see it now, this is actually easier/gives more breathing space than my jabbing all the time though?

[Rockets]

-EH still on cooldown I guess?

If it isn't an emergency, just treat EH as a better Jab. ie. any time you would jab, use EH instead if it's up. Like yeah use it as often as you can, but don't delay KS for it. You'll avoid more damage through PB than you'll heal with EH in the long term, I think. In the short term EH is better though, so definitely mash it if you're in danger.

-Replace most jabs with TP (the thought of replacing it like that really helped me get my mind around the change, thanks!)

Wellll.... it's more like just changing the priority. TP by default, and only Jab/EH when you have to in order to not energy cap. You won't end up doing that many less total really, and the ones you lose will be replaced by KS, not TP. It's just trying to leave yourself breathing room so you actually have the energy to KS when it comes up.

One way to think about it is that you get a fixed amount of energy over the course of a fight. Maybe more or less depending on your gear and the encounter and stuff, but every attempt on the same boss in a night is going to be about the same. You want to dedicate 5 energy/sec towards KS so you have 40 energy for it every 8s, and then whatever's left over goes into jab. You can math it out and go "ok I have X% haste so over a Y minute fight I should do Z casts of KS and W casts of jab" but that doesn't actually help you in the actual moment where you have 1 second to decide what to do with your next GCD. Pooling energy makes it much easier to make decisions in the moment, you can just go "energy > 70? ok jab" and not have to try and guess how much energy you'll regen by the time KS comes up 4 seconds from now.

One ballpark estimate that might help is that, since with 0 haste you get 10 E/s, and KS consumes 5 E/s, you're going to spend about half your energy on KS and half on jab/EH. So you're typically going to do 1 jab between each KS, and maybe every minute or so your haste will be enough to fit a second jab in there.

In that simple model, fitting in EH is also easy; EH is a 15s cooldown, nearly twice that of KS. Most of the time you'll do KS -> EH -> KS -> Jab -> repeat, with BoK, TP and your T30 talent filling in all the other GCDs. Every couple of minutes EH will come up early and you can skip a jab.

Using expel harm practically on cooldown won't make sure I don't miss out on any Power Strikes though (PS 15 sec, EH also 15 sec)? Or should I be jabbing enough with this improved rotation anyways to always trigger it?

I'm trying to uncomplicate it a bit for me, so I can actually implement it immediately tomorrow, without causing (too many) wipes and getting replaced (or getting told to improve my gameplay when not in that group :P ). I'd really like to be invited back whenever I don't have a lockout, like I am now.
The way I see it now, this is actually easier/gives more breathing space than my jabbing all the time though?

You'll still be using plenty of jab/EH; like I mentioned above, you're still going to be hitting jab once every 8s or so. If you do find yourself in a situation where you can either KS or miss a PS window, you should absolutely use KS; you'll get 2 chi either way and KS does better damage. But it won't happen often, if at all.

[Deleted]

Ok got it. More tweaking then actually replacing stuff, then. I think I can do that. I hope.

[brookllyn]

Using expel harm practically on cooldown won't make sure I don't miss out on any Power Strikes though (PS 15 sec, EH also 15 sec)? Or should I be jabbing enough with this improved rotation anyways to always trigger it?

Actually, power strikes works differently than how you think it does. It is essentially fool proof in that if you are using jab/EH once every 15 seconds, you won't ever miss out on it's benefit(unless you like hit jab at 4 chi but even then you still get an orb). Think of it as a clock that is always running that will give you the buff every 15 seconds no matter what. So if you consume that buff in the last 15 seconds, you will get it, if not you will still get the buff, but it doesn't stack so you are just keeping your old one.

[Deleted]

Well today was slightly disastrous, raiding 3 days in a row costs me my focus, I guess. And the best part, raiding again tomorrow :P We did get Bracken and Twins down, so in 1 lockout time, I managed to get from 6/7N and 1/7HC to 7/7N and 5/7HC. Not too bad. There's not much use to posting todays logs, since it was simply not good and I know it

[tachycardias]

Why use power strikes when w care so little about chi with Serenity? I find chi brew much more valuable.

[Deleted]

Why use power strikes when w care so little about chi with Serenity? I find chi brew much more valuable.

Curious as to where you're getting the idea that we care so little about Chi when running with Serenity.

If anything, we care about it more, as we're able to dedicate more chi directly into purifying. Just because we can spam BoK and Purify during serenity doesn't mean we just Tiger Palm until Serenity is back up again. Chi Generation is as important as ever.

[Deleted]

Proud of myself! Todays goal was energy pooling (and getting more purified if possible), it wasn't perfect yet, as soon as things get hectic, I forgot about the pooling and just did whatever I could to stay alive. The results (First some HC kills, then going Normal for gearing up the lower geared people, because we weren't going to get any further). I think it's wise to just ignore the Normal kills, lol.:
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports...ss=-3&source=1

Points I saw (but am ok with since I was focusing on other stuff and can't fix it all at the same time):
- Purifying got worse than when I fully focused on it, but it wasn't my top focus today, so I guess I can forgive myself
- Keeping shuffle up during movement/chaos still needs some TLC
- Really everything needs TLC during movement/chaos
- Whilst my energy pooling seems way better, my KS usage was not better :P Unless I compeltely miscalculated, but I don't think so
- Tiger Power still had some hickups

Besides that I got Pol's Blinded Eye, and had no real clue of how I'm actually supposed to use it... So I used it for Impales, for Butchers Frenzy, for Brackenspores breath (which is stupid, because I didn't use Soul Dance, so it does nothing for the breath) and in the 5-mob part of Tectus.

And the bestest best part of the day: No aggro issues!

And I use Power Strikes because it's passive :P

[brookllyn]

Well brackenspore does still melee during breath so it still does something, just not that much compared to using it on a high stacked up add. Just use it as an extra CD, or macro it to serenity for DPS purposes or use it with Fort Brew for hugee DR.