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Vengeance and Brewmaster in Emerald Nightmare

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.

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Tank Comparison: Patterns Emerging from the Legion Previews

[wowheadrename]

With the simplified versions of tanking specializations that we had the privilege to preview a few weeks ago, we now can compare each class and analyze the patterns that emerge. For this round, I’m focusing on the resources and utility of active mitigation abilities, primarily from the information provided by Blizzard and excluding talents and artifact bonuses.

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Tank Comparison: Cooldowns

This is the second in an MoP series on tank comparison. I’ve asked several tanks for improvements to this list, but it’s still possible that I’ve missed something. Please comment if I’ve forgotten or improperly evaluated something. Next I will cover passive bonuses and masteries.

My plans for this series are as follows:

  1. Active Mitigation
  2. Long Cooldowns
  3. Passive Bonuses and Masteries
  4. Strengths and Weaknesses in all of the above

In this post I compare defensive abilities for all tanks, which I define as situational skills with long cooldowns (greater than 30sec) that keep you alive through extreme damage. Raid utilities are included if they help keep the tank alive as well, though it should be noted that they cannot always be used this way. Also, passive cooldowns like Purgatory are included because they have internal cooldowns and can normally be depended on just like a traditional cooldown.

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Tank Comparison: Active Mitigation

This is the first of an MoP series on tank comparison. I’ve asked several tanks for improvements to this list, but it’s still possible that I’ve missed something. Please comment if I’ve forgotten or improperly evaluated something. Next I will cover long cooldowns.

My plans for this series are as follows:

  1. Active Mitigation
  2. Long Cooldowns
  3. Passive Bonuses and Masteries
  4. Strengths and Weaknesses in all of the above

In this post I compare active mitigation for all tanks, which I define as rotational skills with short cooldowns (less than 30sec) that keep you alive through average damage (i.e. melee hits or spells that are used very often), or consume resources that would otherwise keep you alive. Some of these abilities are more situational than others, but my goal is to include everything that fits the above definition.

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Comparing Brewmasters and Guardians

(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.

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Tank Comparison: Low Level Abilities

Even with the upcoming changes to Swipe, I still believe that bears are way too weak at low levels. Their passive and active defenses are frighteningly low, and they have very few tools to do the job until later in the game. In this post I will compare the rate druids learn tanking skills to the rate other tanks learn them, and show exactly where low level druids fall behind.

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A Tank Comparison: Cooldowns

Today I’m going to look at tanking cooldowns. This is not supposed to be an argument over who has the best cooldowns or who is overpowered or blah blah blah. This is a learning exercise so that everyone can better understand their tanking teams. Remember that cooldowns are not balanced in a vacuum; Blizzard takes everything into account when they balance tanks, not just your damage reduction cooldowns.

All pictures are from Wowhead.

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