Mastering tanks, one boss at a time.
There hasn’t been much going on in the Mists of Pandaria world for me lately, thanks to Diablo 3 and my new position at work. However, in the last week there have been two patches with some interesting monkalicious tidbits. I’m going to talk about the best tidbits today.
Most of these changes aren’t very game changing, and most of them are tooltip clarifications of sorts. I’m going to start with the slightly older changes first.
I’ve been working on a guide for brewmasters. It’s still very much a work in progress, but I guess you can check it out.
They’re starting to get their own distinct feel and they’re very fun so far, though not without their problems.
I was planning on getting more testing in before posting this, but the beta was pretty much MIA yesterday. I did do a dungeon run the day before, but I’m still far from good at this class. Brewmasters play much more chaotically then before, but with a few changes they will be playable.
Monks went through a lot of changes since my last post. Guard is on a much longer cooldown (30 sec), Shuffle has no cooldown, and Purifying Brew has a much shorter cooldown (6 sec). Brewmasters got a couple of cool new abilities: Keg Smash, Clashing Ox Charge, and the talent Dampen Harm. Dizzying Haze generates a large amount of threat and monks finally have increased health while in their tanking stance (still no increased armor).
I got into the beta a few days ago and quickly transferred a monk premade. I still can’t find a way to get a premade to Stormwind to test on a dummy, but I was able to find the first five man dungeon, Temple of the Jade Serpent, where I spent about two hours learning the brewmaster spec and soloing the first boss.
(That aren’t related to balance or mechanics.)
1. I get to see my transmog. Transmog is the coolest thing to happen to WoW in years, and it’s a bit disappointing to spend all this time making a set for my druid only to hide it under a furry coat.
(With very little information to go on.)
In an attempt to better understand Brewmaster monks, I’ve compared them to Guardian druids. I tried comparing similar abilities side-by-side, but many skills do not have a direct correlation between classes. A couple skills fit into more than one category, so they’re on this list more than once. I probably also missed some skills, so if you find any mistakes, please let me know.
Bears will still be the only offensive tank. That is, Guardians benefit from haste and crit, and will probably have more reasons to cap hit and expertise than other tanks. These stats will increase our rage generation, which leads to more frequent Savage Defenses and Frenzied Regenerations. Brewmaster monks, on the other hand, don’t appear to benefit from these offensive stats. I think they will love dodge, since each dodge gives them a huge amount of Chi (their primary resource). Parry will make their rotation a bit more dynamic and probably increase their damage.