Sunnier Note: This is a guest post from Daught from Midwinter-Sargeras, one of the few brewmasters who has claimed a victory against heroic Lei Shen. If you would also would like to contribute to this blog as a guest, I would love to hear from you!

Hey everyone, I’m Daught from Midwinter-Sargeras, and I’m here to talk a little pontify about tank damage, specifically, brewmaster dps in heroic Throne of Thunder.

Historically – up to and including the last expansion – tanks have never been terribly high on the damage meters except for specific aoe encounters. But in MoP where vengeance has been effectively uncapped, tanks are often competitive dps for most fights. This leads to a slight conundrum, especially for the agility tanks: should I gear for dps or survivability? There is no easy answer to this question, but it’s a topic that is worth exploring.

The question I get the most often is not “How should I prioritize my stats” or “Can you write this Weak Aura for me”, it is “How do I tank Horridon as a Brewmaster?” There’s no doubt that it’s a difficult fight for most tanks, and monk tanks face their own unique challenges. But it’s also my favorite fight this expansion, explicitly because it’s requires mastery of two basic tank skills: add pickup and predictable damage mitigation.

I’ve updated my Weak Auras to be more visually efficient and to help me clean up my play in a few areas that I’m lacking. My auras are never really “finished”, but it’s time to share what I have with the rest of the world. (I’ll continue to update the current weak auras, since they’re basically the same on the inside.)

This is a basic guide for tanks in Throne of Thunder, specifically from the perspective of normal 10 mans (if the 25 man strategies happen to vary significantly from those listed, please let me know). It isn’t intended to be a strategy guide or a resource for raid leaders. Instead, it just provides tanks with the information they will need to know in any given fight, like how many tanks are required and how many debuff stacks they need to swap at.

Sunnier Note: This is a guest post from Rotund of Something Wicked, a Windwalker on one of my previous home realms, Whisperwind-US. If he gets enough encouragement he might start his own Windwalker blog, which we all know is something our damage dealing friends sorely need. If you would also would like to contribute to this blog as a guest, I would love to hear from you!

With every patch, things change. Classes get balanced, numbers get moved around, people get new toys, and everything feels a little weird as everyone rubs the sleep out of their eyes, or blows the dust off their add-ons if they are coming back to the game.

Things feel a little bit different this time around though from the monk perspective. Starting a fresh class is rough. Blizzard and the developers are trying new things and polishing, always polishing. Monks have been relatively unchanged as this expansion has progressed, so patch 5.2 has brought a lot of balancing and a lot of changes to help windwalker monks integrate into PVE and PVP.