A Sunnier Musing: Stat Apathy

Some may wonder why I no longer have stat priorities in my guides. When I released the new Legion class guides, I instead opted to link to other guides for that information. (Excluding the brief period where each stat priority was that picture in the header.) The short explanation is this: in Warlords I got overwhelmed by all the stat priority questions from random people, to the point where I now cringe whenever any stat topic comes up. Getting asked the same question a million times by a million strangers expecting a million different answers wore me down. In an effort to avoid a similar situation in Legion, I’m delegating.

But there’s a longer answer, having to do with how I find stat priorities in modern WoW boring (and I’m okay with that).

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Brewmaster 6.2 Survival Guide

The short version of this week’s patch:

  • Brewmasters will not be able to survive quite so easily due to reduced stagger.
  • Shuffle and Purifying Brew are not nearly as important to survival as they used to be.
  • Nerfs to Serenity and the reduced importance of Shuffle and Purifying Brew mean you should probably spec into Chi Explosion more often.
  • Get Tier 18 ASAP. It’s really good.
  • Stat priority is roughly the same as before.
  • We’re still in a great spot, despite nerfs.

And now the details…

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The Brewmaster Tier 15 Crit Gearing Paradigm

A few weeks ago I wrote about the smoothing paradigm. You may remember that I finished off that post with a list of reasons not to prioritize mastery and stamina:

  • You’re on easier content and are never in danger of dying.
  • Your guild is hitting enrage timers or missing dps requirements.
  • You do just fine with haste or crit.

Those bullet points may have been a bit understated (after all, the post was about mastery and smoothing), but the truth is those situations happen all the time. Today I’m going to elaborate on how to gear if you are running into those issues, and more specifically, the crit stat priority.

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Tier 15 Trinket Comparison for Brewmasters

Trinkets for tanks are no black-and-white matter. There are trinkets that are good for burst reduction and time-to-live, while others are good for avoidance, total damage reduction, and DPS. Trinkets are the best way to change your stats for what you need at a moments notice, and because of that, there is no true best-in-slot pair. Ideally, you should collect a handful of trinkets with various specialties and swap them in depending on fight requirements.

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The Brewmaster Tier 15 Smooth Gearing Paradigm

I’ve spent a lot of time this tier experimenting with stat combinations. On the surface, not much has changed. Mastery received a slight buff and haste got a subtle nerf when the healing talents became free, but nothing huge. However, the inclusion of many physical, bursty fights has give us Brewmasters much to consider regarding our secondary stats.

These are my gearing decisions, based on experimenting, browsing logs, theorycraft, and the input of other brewmasters. As is always the case with brewmasters, there aren’t many wrong ways to gear yourself, but there are good places to start, especially if you’re struggling or just looking for some guidance.

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[Guest Post] Dealing Damage as a Brewmaster

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.

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Brewmaster Reforging Guide

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.

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