Mastering tanks, one boss at a time.
On March 2, 2011, I published my first blog post to “A Sunnier Bear”, which makes this close to my two year blogging anniversary.
My goal when starting this blog was to write timely boss guides for tanks. That goal has sort of fallen by the wayside because this recent tier was so huge and my progression has been unstable and not exactly where I want it to be anyway. Instead, I spent the last year writing about topics that interest me, like Brewmasters and active mitigation.
Recently ArenaNet put some cool hair colors in the cash shop. Charr normally only have access to earth-toned hair so I really wanted to see what blue, pink, and purple hair looked like on my favorite race. Unfortunately, the internet didn’t seem to share my curiosity so I was unable to find images of these unnatural hair colors on Charr.
Luckily, I had some spare gold to satisfy that curiosity for myself and the rest of the world.
Continue reading “[GW2] New Blue, Purple, and Pink Hair Colors for Charr”
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++.
Here it is, my interview. For the next hour or so, you can listen to me chuckle nervously, lose my train of thought, and try to avoid swear words. I ramble a bit about this blog, too. It was a fun interview.
More thoughts:
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”
These are the two transmog sets I’ve used lately. The first is inspired by traditional Chinese Buddhist monks, and the second is inspired by those dark and reclusive martial artists that I’ve seen in movies.
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.
Also known as “Four Kings”, in Mogu’shan Vaults.