Is mastering a BrM Monk worth it?

[Hellkung]

hmm strange, Paragon and Method seem to disagree with you here... you can clearly see them using Serenity in their kill vids

It's because Mythic is all a numbers game for the most part.

Your tanks are either getting clobbered (which most of the time they are regardless of everything else)

Or you're hitting enrages. Of course some bosses are push overs but when it matters, it usually comes down to surviving by the skin of your teeth. I reckon their DPS is amazing so they want their tanks to be more self sustainable.

I'd be surprised if they didn't switch to Chi Ex for farm, save for the few bosses where Serenity is just the better choice.

[Inuyaki]

Even in hc you should try to take as less dmg as possible during progress...
Most of the time! a boss won't die because of your 5k dps more, but because your healers can focus on other things.

For farm it is obviously another thing, but even then you could argue, why take the risk? Your raid dps won't be weaker than at your first kill (most likely).
So you kill a boss 5sec faster? But one healer getting a dc and you are screwed

Anyway, people can play with ChiEx if they want, but saying here that Serenity isn't superior for not even one fight in BRF is just hilarious

[Just Another Monk]

On progression, sure, Serenity has a use. But once you get familiarized with the fights and are geared, there are zero fights in BRF where it's more useful.

[Fragnance]

Never face palmed as hard in my life as when the guy claims brm monk is the hardest class in game

[Kenzai]

Windwalker, I still absolutely f##king HATE Fist of Fury with a passion. I was able to ignore it and still keep my DPS up as I remember in Mists ,but now, it does so much damage I'm pretty much forced to use it, and can't even be used on the move. I hate it. So. Much.

There is a glyph to make Fists of Fury usable on the move and it takes away the stun component.

[Raugnaut]

Incorrect. Armor does not scale linearly. Even though Paladins do have around 1k armor more than a BrM, it equates to less than 10% increase in physical damage reduction. Furthermore, higher armor also diminishes the value of block/SotR, also favoring Stagger. Monks with roughly 680 gear should be sitting around 2.7k armor, which is about 42% damage reduction. Paladins should have 1k over that, and it's about 51%.

The problem with Paladins is *exactly* spike damage. Paladins might even take lower damage over the course of an entire fight, but the fact that you might take a full unmitigated hit somewhere in the fight makes it a lot less reliable than a Monk that will NEVER take a hit to the face because of Stagger. This is why Monks are so strong, and why Mastery scales so well for them (combined with roughly 100% Shuffle uptime).

Ah, I was taking a look at WW monk armor, w/o bonus armor. Woops.

[saboya]

On progression, sure, Serenity has a use. But once you get familiarized with the fights and are geared, there are zero fights in BRF where it's more useful.

What's the point of discussing class balance in overgeared farm scenarios? Progression in relevant gear is the only time that matters. That's why I see no point in discussing outside of mythic raiding, because it makes little to no difference.

[Bodakane]

What's the point of discussing class balance in overgeared farm scenarios? Progression in relevant gear is the only time that matters. That's why I see no point in discussing outside of mythic raiding, because it makes little to no difference.

I legitimately just don't think that's fair. You are making the smallest percentage of use THE most important and you're doing it for no other reason then you are a part of that extremely small minority.

Mythic may be all that matters to you, but it is the smallest amount of people playing wow, and I see no good reason for Blizz to screw with 97% of its clients for the other 3%. It just makes for poor logic and business sense. ESPECIALLY when that 3% always switches classes for even a .5% dps/hps/damage mitigation increase. Hell, that's all part of the allure of cutting edge mythic progression.

[saboya]

I legitimately just don't think that's fair. You are making the smallest percentage of use THE most important and you're doing it for no other reason then you are a part of that extremely small minority.

Mythic may be all that matters to you, but it is the smallest amount of people playing wow, and I see no good reason for Blizz to screw with 97% of its clients for the other 3%. It just makes for poor logic and business sense. ESPECIALLY when that 3% always switches classes for even a .5% dps/hps/damage mitigation increase. Hell, that's all part of the allure of cutting edge mythic progression.

Well, no wonder you don't think there's 50% to 0 scenarios in the game. I respect everyone's choices on how to play the game and picking the content they want to, but all the points I made are relative to the highest difficulty of the game. Comparisons between mythic and heroic raiding are pointless when it comes to class balance and strength.

[Shamanberry]

On progression, sure, Serenity has a use. But once you get familiarized with the fights and are geared, there are zero fights in BRF where it's more useful.

You'll always take less damage playing Serenity vs ChiEx. You'll always do more damage playing ChiEx vs Serenity. (Presuming, in both cases, you're playing them correctly).

Which one is "more useful" comes down to which of those two things is more beneficial to your raid. Sure, there are some fringe situations, such as ChiEx to pick up an add spawning 40 yards away -- but 99% of the time, the question is do you want to do less damage or take less damage?

When we did a 3 tank strat on Gruul, I switched to ChiEx because we were wiping to enrage, I was in 0 danger of dying, and the raid needed all the DPS they could get. When we were on Kromog, I went serenity because every bit of self-preservation I can squeeze out is more healing that can be focused on a DPS that's dipping low from breath.

Tank DPS can be useful, but let's not pretend ChiEx is anything but a DPS talent.

[Deleted]

Mainly because SOTR doesn't mitigate magic damage while guard does.

This isn't new...some tank are better to mitigate magic damage than others on specific encounters.

Monk or stagger aren't OP but guard absorb is a bit too powerful atm.

You do realize that on Mythic nobody gives a singular fuck about the magical portion of the Inferno Slice, right? It's the at-3-stacks 1 mil+ hit before mitigation that makes people pucker their buttholes, and Stagger trivializes it COMPLETELY. My co-tank literally eats it with a Hand of Sacrifice and a Guard. I have to SotR it, stand in a Barrier, and pop either AD or GoAK - and the times where I use AD, it usually procs the passive.

So yeah, basically what I'm saying here is that to make monks remotely balanced they need to be the lowest-HP tank, and they need to be the lowest-HP tank by A LOT. That probably also means Soul Dance needs to be buffed to 100% of Stagger to not make them simply roll over to magical damage, but right now the situation where monks have Stagger AND higher HP than paladins and warriors is grade-A retarded shit. They would literally be completely fine and balanced if they buffed Soul Dance and then nerfed their raw HP into the fucking ground so they weren't effectively immortal in terms of physical damage.

[Hellkung]

You do realize that on Mythic nobody gives a singular fuck about the magical portion of the Inferno Slice, right? It's the at-3-stacks 1 mil+ hit before mitigation that makes people pucker their buttholes, and Stagger trivializes it COMPLETELY. My co-tank literally eats it with a Hand of Sacrifice and a Guard. I have to SotR it, stand in a Barrier, and pop either AD or GoAK - and the times where I use AD, it usually procs the passive.

So yeah, basically what I'm saying here is that to make monks remotely balanced they need to be the lowest-HP tank, and they need to be the lowest-HP tank by A LOT. That probably also means Soul Dance needs to be buffed to 100% of Stagger to not make them simply roll over to magical damage, but right now the situation where monks have Stagger AND higher HP than paladins and warriors is grade-A retarded shit. They would literally be completely fine and balanced if they buffed Soul Dance and then nerfed their raw HP into the fucking ground so they weren't effectively immortal in terms of physical damage.

Why do you keep bringing up Inferno Slice? It's the same example over and over again. I think Promdates put it perfectly. Our gear reaches a certain threshold and so does the damage output by raid bosses and our prowess as tanks skyrockets. This is what stagger does. The exact same thing happens with DK's at the start of expansions. Everyone's in blues and severely under geared and they're by far the best tank because healers have no mana and they can pretty much take care of themselves.

Guard is fcking stupid and needs a change, think everyone realizes that. But if they design another raid like Foundry, especially because it'll be t18 (prob Grom)...unless there are some big changes to monks we'll run into the same problem.

Right now in Foundry, almost everyone boss has a big tank 'killing' mechanic (physical) that monks can just bypass; the only ones that don't are Operator, Beastlord, Flamebender, Furnace...

Guard fills that gap for all of these.

[Deleted]

Why do you keep bringing up Inferno Slice? It's the same example over and over again. I think Promdates put it perfectly. Our gear reaches a certain threshold and so does the damage output by raid bosses and our prowess as tanks skyrockets. This is what stagger does. The exact same thing happens with DK's at the start of expansions. Everyone's in blues and severely under geared and they're by far the best tank because healers have no mana and they can pretty much take care of themselves.

Guard is fcking stupid and needs a change, think everyone realizes that. But if they design another raid like Foundry, especially because it'll be t18 (prob Grom)...unless there are some big changes to monks we'll run into the same problem.

Right now in Foundry, almost everyone boss has a big tank 'killing' mechanic (physical) that monks can just bypass; the only ones that don't are Operator, Beastlord, Flamebender, Furnace...

Guard fills that gap for all of these.

You're not getting my point. What makes Stagger unbalanced isn't Stagger as a mechanic - it's Stagger combined with an unreasonably large HP pool. Given the same raw damage intake, whether that be something predictable like Inferno Slice (which is currently the most egregious example and why it keeps getting brought up; every other tank needs a shit-ton of cooldowns to survive it and Monk just laughs in its face) or simple steady boss melees, monks simply take much less damage relative to their total HP pool than any other tank.

At this point, to even remotely attempt to balance survivability between the specs, they have 2 "real" options:

A: Don't touch monk HP, but nerf the conversion rate of Mastery -> Stagger into the ground, thus devaluing Mastery. Incredibly fucking stupid since it upsets the balance of secondary stats as a whole.
B: Slash raw monk HP to a point where taking Stagger into account, damage is actually threatening. Like said, Soul Dance probably needs a buff to compensate, or Monks become way too vulnerable to magical damage where having a large HP pool is much more beneficial than it is vs physical damage. Shouldn't touch secondary stat balance and might make monks actually give a fuck about stuff like using stamina trinkets at least once in a while.

I'll repeat for clarity: The issue isn't Stagger. The issue isn't Guard. The issue is that monks simply have an inappropriately large HP pool when you take those two mechanics into account. Neither need an actual nerf - monks just need to have much less HP so their EHP is on par with every other tank rather than being 50-100% higher.

P.S: Would slashing monk HP make monk even more unforgiving for sub-par players? Absolutely. Is that acceptable collateral? Absolutely. The basic game is so simple (and by God is Shuffle the easiest mechanic in the world, considering Serenity) that if you can't pull off the absolute basics of any class then either you don't give a fuck and you're not trying or video games just aren't for you, man.

[Hellkung]

You're not getting my point. What makes Stagger unbalanced isn't Stagger as a mechanic - it's Stagger combined with an unreasonably large HP pool. Given the same raw damage intake, whether that be something predictable like Inferno Slice (which is currently the most egregious example and why it keeps getting brought up; every other tank needs a shit-ton of cooldowns to survive it and Monk just laughs in its face) or simple steady boss melees, monks simply take much less damage relative to their total HP pool than any other tank.

At this point, to even remotely attempt to balance survivability between the specs, they have 2 "real" options:

A: Don't touch monk HP, but nerf the conversion rate of Mastery -> Stagger into the ground, thus devaluing Mastery. Incredibly fucking stupid since it upsets the balance of secondary stats as a whole.
B: Slash raw monk HP to a point where taking Stagger into account, damage is actually threatening. Like said, Soul Dance probably needs a buff to compensate, or Monks become way too vulnerable to magical damage where having a large HP pool is much more beneficial than it is vs physical damage. Shouldn't touch secondary stat balance and might make monks actually give a fuck about stuff like using stamina trinkets at least once in a while.

I'll repeat for clarity: The issue isn't Stagger. The issue isn't Guard. The issue is that monks simply have an inappropriately large HP pool when you take those two mechanics into account. Neither need an actual nerf - monks just need to have much less HP so their EHP is on par with every other tank rather than being 50-100% higher.

P.S: Would slashing monk HP make monk even more unforgiving for sub-par players? Absolutely. Is that acceptable collateral? Absolutely. The basic game is so simple (and by God is Shuffle the easiest mechanic in the world, considering Serenity) that if you can't pull off the absolute basics of any class then either you don't give a fuck and you're not trying or video games just aren't for you, man.

I actually like your solution, it kinda fits as it's the role we played in MOP. Everyone was hovering around a 1mill HP and monks had around 800kish.

PS: FYI, I meant solution B.

[Bodakane]

Well, no wonder you don't think there's 50% to 0 scenarios in the game. I respect everyone's choices on how to play the game and picking the content they want to, but all the points I made are relative to the highest difficulty of the game. Comparisons between mythic and heroic raiding are pointless when it comes to class balance and strength.

Mythic balance is pointless when it comes to class balance and strength and what Blizz should do about it. All classes can complete Mythic content with varying degrees of difficulty.

Again, not only is this group incredibly small but they will switch classes over one talent being better at X mechanic over another class. So what's the point of balancing the classes at all for mythic content? None.

[Nikkej]

I am not at mythic yet, we are just killing BH HC.

But, I just went Brew instead of Prot Paladin. And all I can say is that its so much less "stressful" playing the Brewie then my Paladin - And I can say that with just ~13h played at 100 (only cleared HM HC tho, but still). I could Solotank Twins in 656 gear from 26% - Kill in my PuG I did. There is no way I would have done that even with my 681 Prot Paladin. It just feels like I take 0 damage, And to be honest I am not 100% what I do at times, use Cd;s at the wrong time etc.

With that said, Brew is a hell of a lot more fun to play, and I hope I can try play WW some as well.

[Killface1]

the BrM/WW combo is the most fun set of class/specs in the game. BrM's are the most fun tanks, and WW is the most fun dps.

Healing is for women though

[keqe]

the BrM/WW combo is the most fun set of class/specs in the game. BrM's are the most fun tanks, and WW is the most fun dps.

Healing is for women though

Well, we already went through the pissing contest. Why not a feminism thread now?