Mastering tanks, one boss at a time.
I’ve updated my pages to reflect what WeakAuras I have working for Vengeance and Brewmaster. Vengeance is a little bit further along, since I’ve been bringing that to our latest raids, and I plan on doing a little refactoring of the Brewmaster ones in the near future. But I figured people would like to see something working at least!
7.2.5 is coming on Tuesday, and both classes I main are getting some big changes!
Continue reading “7.2.5. Brewmaster and Vengeance Survival Guides”
The second class around took a lot less time, but was still pretty difficult! Where the DH challenge tested my timings and burst damage management, the monk challenge tested my situational awareness and self healing.
Some things, like movement and ranged damage, were much easier on the monk. Some things, like healing and dealing with knockbacks, were much harder.
Continue reading “Mage Tower Tank Challenge | Kruul | The Highlord’s Return – Brewmaster Monk”
For the latest patch in late March.
I’ve cleared all of this raid on both vengeance and brewmaster, enough offer a decent comparison of the two specs I main. Both are roughly the same ilevel, with experience on the same bosses.
For Emerald Nightmare, I started bosses on my DH and took my brewmaster on farm. Originally this was because I am far more comfortable on my monk and I wanted to force myself to learn my demon hunter. It ended up being handy because the way a DH times their AM can more easily apply to the way a monk applies AM than the other way around. I can learn to time my Demon Spikes around an event, and that maps to Ironskin Brew pretty well. In contrast, a brewmaster is much more flexible, and can potentially use Ironskin much more often than a DH could do with Demon Spikes.
Continue reading “Vengeance and Brewmaster in Emerald Nightmare”
Tanking something that hits hard feels so damn good on a monk. When I see my stagger reach really high numbers, and I purify it mostly away, it’s like a drug. I get a little surge of happy brain chemicals, like you get with most games, but it’s built into the class.
On any other tanking class, you can imagine how much damage you just reduced. Maybe you got hit by the same attack without active mitigation up before, and now you see just how much more health you have remaining when you got your timing right the second time. But the feedback is nowhere near as obvious as on a brewmaster. You can see exactly how hard that hit was in how much stagger you have. And then you can see exactly how much damage you’re throwing off with every purify.
I always want more of it. When I see my stagger start to rise, I want to Purify at the highest point, before it goes back down. There’s some gambling there, trying to get the pool high before cashing out, or before losing it all. I crave that big purify.
Whenever I fight weaker bosses, that low level of stagger leaves me unsatisfied. Why should I ever purify such a small number? It’s such a chore, to have to purify in a dungeon when I just faced off against Guarm, a tiny 10% stagger compared to my earlier 110%. It’s like I built a tolerance to it, always craving a stagger that’s higher than the one before.
Throughout Mists and Warlords, our level 75 defensive talents have been exemplary. The choice between the three talents was always compelling and varied; the universally useful (but minor) Healing Elixirs, the strong damage reduction (but restricted uptime) of Dampen Harm, and the impressive magical damage reduction (but situational use) of Diffuse Magic.
But when the tanking paradigm changed in Legion, these talents suffered. In a world where big defensive cooldowns were neutered, and active mitigation was molded to fill that role, Diffuse Magic and Dampen Harm fell into disuse. Compared to Ironskin Brew, both abilities were ineffective. Diffuse Magic could reduce magic damage pretty well, but why waste a talent on it when Ironskin Brew is nearly as good, and most boss burst magic were designed to be countered by frequently usable active mitigation anyway. Dampen Harm could be used to reduce those giant physical attacks, but if it was used at the same time as Ironskin it was unlikely to even trigger. These two talents were built in a time when infrequent defensive cooldowns were necessary, and clung to that ideology even when tanks changed to value frequent defensives much more.
But, in 7.1.5, that’s all going to change!
I’ve been iterating on my auras for both my characters to be more useful to me. The old auras are still available if you look at the WeakAuras.online change log, I just won’t be updating them.
The biggest changes you might see if you import these are:
So brewmasters aren’t so popular anymore, but they’re still as powerful as ever. How can this be? Why am I still playing one? Why does the community at large think they’re terrible? What can be done to fix it?
I’ve said before that if I were making choices solely based on progression, and not my irrational need to experiment with new things, I would be favoring my brewmaster in raids. And truth be told, I’m getting closer and closer to my ideal of playing my monk and demon hunter equally. The deeper we get into the expansion, the more my love of brewmasters grows, and it becomes ever more frustrating to see that not only do people fail to appreciate them the same way I do, but they think their strengths are actually weaknesses!
Maybe I need to do a better job of professing my love for this specialization, and so here it is: a whole lot of words about what keeps me playing a brewmaster and what could make playing one better.