The amazing and hilarious Rawrcast podcast interviewed me and it was very exciting! This happened more than two weeks ago, but I was away in China and I’m pretty sure I was on an airplane when this was published.
Hafrot interviewed me because brewmasters are the new best thing and it was very enlightening. All the questions are fantastic and we spend a lot of time going over my post “Some Quick Brewmaster Tanking Tips“.
My interview starts about 44 minutes in and lasts another 45 minutes, though you can always listen to the whole podcast if you want. Sadly, the guild information is already out of date, but that can’t be helped. (Still looking, by the way! Doing research on all the great guilds who’ve expressed interest so far.)
Here are the upcoming changes that may happen in the next major patch, 5.1. These are subject to change. There’s also a chance some of these are errors in datamining, but I hope not because I think most of them are good.
I know a lot of people are worried about brewmaster viability out there. I want to take this moment to reassure you that brewmasters are good tanks right now, and completely capable of clearing current raid content alongside other tanks. They are also very new tanks, and no one out there is a true expert at the class. I believe most of the worry can be traced to a general lack of knowledge of the class. We haven’t figured out many of the subtitles that come with tanking as a monk in the same way that warriors, who have had seven years to master their craft, have had.
Another culprit is that monks fly in the over-emphasized and often incorrect convention that good tanks are ones that reduce the most damage. Once you and your raid team accepts that monks take more damage over the course of a fight than other tanks, but have more control over their survivability, you will feel much better.
Monks also require more micromanagement than other tanks, and it’s very true that an afk druid will take less damage than an afk monk. That comes with the package, but it’s also not all that important because most of us are at our keyboards while tanking. You’re trading passive damage reduction for control, and if you don’t like that then you should probably play another class. Or acknowledge that mastering a monk will take more effort than mastering a more passive tank.
To help out, here are my tips for struggling monk tanks:
As brewmasters are starting to settle down into our niches and the MoP release date draws ever nearer, the theorycrafters fire up their Mathematicas (do theorycrafters use Mathematica? I wouldn’t know). This gives us regular folks an opportunity to squeeze their mind grapes and make a delicious alcoholic beverage from whatever tastiness we can gather.
In this week’s edition of mastering the way of the brew, we will cover optimal Shuffle uptime, Avert Harm paradoxes, and why monks are going to be super overpowered in niche cases.
I hate doing these patch note updates because they’re boring and if you read this blog you’re probably reading MMO-Champion or Wowhead News as well. But I have some cool pictures and I want to share them.
Brewmasters have experienced next to no change in the last few weeks, even though we still have some broken systems and our rotation felt oddly…rotational (as opposed to how I think active mitigation is supposed to work, where we use different skills depending on the situation and not just because it’s available and we sort of have to).
However, it seems we won’t be stuck in this rut anymore. Several significant changes are in the works, though we don’t know when we will be able to test them. (I hope it’s soon, and I hope a fix for Keg Smash damage is coming down the tubes as well.)
With minor glyphs moving toward more cosmetic options, I figured some people out there might want to see what they look like.
I’ve compiled a video of the glyphs that change the look of some of your core spells, and I’ve included pictures in this post as well. I didn’t do all the minor glyphs — just the ones that aren’t super obvious. The video itself is pretty short (honestly, I got bored of making it), but I’ll probably remake it once all monkilicious things are set in stone.
Another week, another patch. The most exciting change is raising the level cap to 90, which means access to level 90 talents and we will get to start testing heroic dungeons soon.
I primarily log into beta these days to see if pandaren have any more customization options or access to the barber shop (no, not yet), but today was a special build day and I wanted to see if Zen Pilgrimage worked yet (it does). Thankfully, lady pandaren also keep their hair when the UI reloads and that’s pretty cool. Then there were some other things I noticed, but one at a time please!
