Mastering tanks, one boss at a time.
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.)
A new raid, new dailies, and a couple of Brewmaster changes are coming in today’s patch.
This guide is pretty simple, but the methods aren’t obvious to newbies and it makes reforging so much easier. As a Brewmaster, you have the option of reforging quite often. First of all, we have both hit and expertise caps to reach. On top of that, most of our secondary stats offer unique playstyles and that you can change around depending on the fight.
In this guide, I’ll primarily focus on the addon ReforgeLite, which makes ingame stat optimization and hitting caps a breeze.
Sunnier Note: This is a guest post from Manníx, a Brewmaster on Shadowsong-EU. It will be (hopefully) part of a continuing series on experimenting with secondary stats. If you would also would like to contribute to this blog as a guest, I would love to hear from you!
One of the hardest things when you begin Brewmaster tanking is working out which secondary stats are best. Part of the problem is that many people come from a history of DPS classes to try tanking perhaps for the first time and expect there to be a clear and simple stat priority. Well unfortunately when it comes to the Brewmaster there isn’t, whilst mathematically you can attempt to simulate a fight and work out which stats produce the best results the simple truth is that almost all the off stats on the Brewmaster are useful if used in the correct manner. So what should you be stacking? I’m going to go over the most popular stats and try and give some insight into how each works and how your playstyle may have to adjust to use them correctly. I am not going to go into the maths in any of these examples and rather give you an idea of how you would play using them so you can pick the one that suits you the most, and in my experience the best tanks are the ones that are playing comfortably and feel in control of the situation.
Valentine’s Day is today, so it is the perfect time to express my love for an inanimate skill that exists in distant databases and C++.
Brewmasters are a complicated class, there’s no denying that. It’s an enjoyable complexity, and not without reward, but there is a learning curve. I don’t want people to be scared away from the class because of that learning curve. In this post, I will break down the complexity of monk tanks into small steps so that you can master the spec.
If you’re just starting out with a brewmaster, then this is the post for you. If you’re already progressing through normal and heroic raids, then you probably already know the basics but maybe you’ll learn something.
Continue reading “Brewmasters for Beginners: The Step by Step Learning Program”
Heroic Elegon is very similar to normal mode. In fact, if you can clear normal without anyone dying then you should give heroic a try.
There seems to be a lot of confusion over the value of expertise, so I’m going to lay out the facts and then finish up my thoughts on that ever-prevalent question:
“should I hard cap expertise?”
Sometimes I get these trains of thought about brewmastery stuff. They have no real conclusions, so I avoided turning them into blog posts, but maybe if I get them out of my head they could turn into something.
Between all the new progression and patch 5.1 (live today), it appears Blizzard’s purpose in life is to prevent me from writing timely boss guides.