It’s been a little more than a year since brewmasters became playable on the MoP Beta. And my, have things turned out differently. We went from using Guard as our primary active mitigation tool, to spending most of our time channeling, to finally kicking our enemies in the face to reduce damage and loving crit. Here is a look back at the changing state of brewmasters.

Timeline

October 22-23, 2011

Blizzcon 2011, where Mists of Pandaria was announced. Low level monks were playable, had no auto-attacks, and managed a resource system that included energy, Light Chi, and Dark Chi.

March 19, 2012

Blizzard released MoP notes to fan sites, including a lot of information on monks. Of course, no one had really played a monk at this point (except at Blizzcon a few months prior), so these notes were often confusing and incomplete.

April 6, 2012

My first post on brewmasters after actually getting into the beta. At this point, Guard was our primary active mitigation and it had little to no cooldown. Blackout Kick was only used when it procced off parries. Dizzying Haze didn’t work on bosses. And our only way to generate chi was Jab and Expel Harm.

April 13, 2012

Keg Smash was introduced. Guard became what it is today, and our new primary active mitigation tool was Shuffle. Shuffle was a channeled skill that simply guaranteed that Stagger would proc for the duration (stagger was random back then). Our basic rotation included standing there Shuffling for 6 seconds, then using Purifying Brew, then fitting in a Keg Smash and Jab to repeat the process.

May 6, 2012

The birth of my Brewmaster guide and it’s when we started to look like the modern monk. Shuffle got attached to Blackout Kick, stagger became reliable, and our mastery was changed to push more damage into stagger, as opposed to reducing that damage automatically.

May 23, 2012

We got Zen Flight, worried about bugs that made Keg Smash not awesome, and Blackout Kick no longer did more damage when the target was in execute range.

June 2, 2012

Level 90 was unlocked, along with our final tier of talents. Which, surprisingly, have not changed much since.

June 19, 2012

Elusive Brew, a way to make crit useful, finally turned into its modern implementation. Mastery was nerfed to no longer increase parry.

Detailed Skill Changes

Jab
Way back before the beta began, the monks previewed at Blizzcon had no auto-attack. Instead, Jab filled that role. That quickly changed when the developers decided it just wasn’t practical. Jab started out with a different name depending on your weapon. The dropped names were: Club (maces), Slice (swords), Sever (axes), Pike (polearms), and Clobber (staves). Now only the icon changes with weapons.

Dizzying Haze

40 Energy, 40 yd range, Instant
You hurl a keg of your finest brew, reducing the movement speed of all enemies within 8 yards by 15%.
Affected targets have a 3% chance to have their attacks misfire and strike themselves instead for 5141 damage. Stacks up to 3 times.

It spent a few weeks with the name “Drunken Haze”, and could stack 3 times. The debuff did not apply to bosses. Early on it didn’t apply any threat, either, and it was our only AoE tool that didn’t cost Chi.

Guard

3 Chi, Instant
Requires Ox Stance
You guard against future attacks, absorbing 38,478 damage for 8 seconds.

Initially, Guard had little to no cooldown and cost 3 chi. It was our primary active mitigation back then. It quickly changed to what we have today.

Stagger

You shrug off attacks, causing 50% of the damage to happen instantly and the remaining 50% to happen 3 sec later.

The idea of stagger was similar to today, but the details were very different. For one, stagger was a random chance, much like block. It went through a few iterations of numbers, but started out shaving 50% of every staggered hit into the after-effect dot. This related to mastery, which reduced the damage of the after-effect dot, not the initial hit like it does today. We also had no way to monitor our stagger damage except for the scrolling combat text.

Shuffle

2 Chi, Channeled
You shuffle around, causing all melee attacks to be staggered. While shuffling, you cannot move, attack, or cast spells.

Shuffle was an actual ability that cost 2 chi and was supposed to be part of our active mitigation rotation. Because we weren’t guaranteed to stagger every hit, this skill was theoretically useful because it guaranteed that stagger for the duration. The downside was that it was a channeled spell and effectively left us doing nothing for the duration. In the beginning, this had a moderate cooldown. Later on, they gave it no cooldown and it spent some time as our primary active mitigation tool (which meant we were actually spending most of our tanking channeling).

Elusive Brew/ Elusive Ale

1 Chi, Instant, 45 sec cooldown
Increases your chance to dodge melee and ranged attacks by 50% for 10 seconds.

It cost 1 chi and simply granted 50% dodge for 10 seconds, with a 45 second cooldown. It was so very boring.

Breath of Fire

2 Chi, 40 yd range, Instant
Breathes fire onto the target, causing 2.385 damage. Damage is multiplied by the number of Drunken Haze stacks of the target.

Breath of Fire started out with no DoT component, and instead it just did more burst damage when Dizzying Haze was on the target. It did decent damage back then, even single target. However, it required 3 stacks of Dizzying Haze to deal maximum damage. Sadly, because the Dizzying Haze debuff did not apply to bosses, Breath of Fire was rarely useful.

Spinning Crane Kick

1 Chi, Instant
You spin while kicking in the air, dealing 218 Physical damage every 1 second to all nearby enemies within 8 yards. Movement speed is reduced by 30%. Lasts 6 seconds.

Cost 1 chi instead of energy like today. Also lasted a whopping 6 seconds.

Tiger Palm
Initially cost 1 chi and buffed your next guard by 5% (stacked up to 15%). It was rarely worth using because you could mitigate more damage by putting all your chi into Guards instead of buffing a single cast. They went back and forth between free and 1 chi during the beta.

Blackout Kick

2 Chi, Melee Range, Instant, 3 sec cooldown
Kick with a blast of sha energy, causing 471 Physical damage to an enemy target. Only usable on targets at or below 35% health. If the target is killed by Blackout Kick, you are refunded 1 Chi.

It started out exclusively as an execute ability, did not provide shuffle, and was purely a dps button. Brewmasters did have a passive ability that gave us a free Blackout Kick after each parry, though our parry was so low that this happened once in a blue moon.

Mastery
Reduced damage taken by stagger by X% and increased the effect of Guard by X%. Remember that stagger was still random and initially reduced a hit by 50%, so this mastery reduced the after effect. This mastery was passive and was actually negated by Purifying Brew. Later, they removed the Guard-improving aspect and added a parry increase, though that too was taken away in time.

Crit
Had no use for a long time, which was very concerning.

Dodge
Nothing all that special, but we did get 5 energy per dodge.

Parry
In the beginning of the beta, we had around 5% base parry and no other way to obtain it, besides reforging. It did increase our dps a tiny bit by giving a chance for free Blackout Kicks. Later on, our mastery changed to increase parry as well, but now we only get it through Shuffle.

Black Ox Statue

Guard (on-click effect)Allies can right-click the Statue to gain the Guard effect, absorbing 12,826 damage. Any healing done by the Monk is increased by 30% while Guard is active. Guard has 10 charges.

Required people to click on the statue, similar to Light Well, to get the shield. It only had 10 charges with a 5min cooldown. Brewmasters could click it too, and it became an important part of our mitigation to keep the statue for ourselves and click it every few seconds.

Leer of the Ox
Now it’s a glyph, but back then it was one of our baseline skills.

Stance of the Drunken Ox

Reduces damage taken by 20% and increases your chance to Stagger damage by 25%.

It’s now called “Stance of the Sturdy Ox”, but I love the image of a drunken bovine. Note that we didn’t have any health increases or crit resistance yet.

Purifying Brew
It used to have a moderate cooldown, which was quickly reduced to 6 sec, and then the 1 sec it is now. Its function hasn’t changed much, though its usefulness has. Back when mastery reduced the DoT after the hit, it was actually counter-active to purifying Brew usage. If you used Purifying Brew, your mastery was entirely wasted.

Keg Smash
We didn’t get this skill for a long time, which meant our chi generation was incredibly slow and Dizzying Haze was our only other AoE tool we could use at the beginning of a pull.

Clash
Used to be called Clashing Ox Charge. It also didn’t have a minimum range, so we had yet another AoE stun at our disposal in melee range.

Avert Harm

15 yd range, Instant, 1 min cooldown You reduce the damage taken by all nearby friendly targets with in 10 yards by 20% and cause half of all remaining damage they take to be re-directed to you. Lasts for 15 sec. Avert Harm is cancelled if you reach 10% or lower health.

Not only did it have a greatly reduced cooldown compared to now, it also had a hidden bonus of reducing all damage the monk took by 20%, making it similar to Barkskin.

Roll
Initially cost 50 energy instead of charges.

Fortifying Brew / Fortifying Ale

Instant, 3 min cooldown
Increases your health by 100%, but you cannot be healed. Lasts 20 seconds.

For a long time, our only big cooldown was this skill that could so easily kill us and in a beginner’s hands (or even an experienced players hands) do more damage than good. It would have required a cancel macro, among other things, because 20 seconds is a long time to tank without any heals. Later into the beta, it changed so that all the heals you took during the 20 second duration were effectively saved up and then healed you after it ended, though that did nothing to reduce the initial danger element. I remember being very concerned about monk’s lack of big cooldowns, and I was convinced they just weren’t implemented yet. Luckily, Fortifying Brew grew into something that filled this role, though I still wish we had a traditional damage reduction ability (not that we need it).

Spear Hand / Spear Hand Strike

30 Energy, Melee Range, Instant, 30 sec cooldown
You jab the target in their throat, interrupting their spell cast and preventing any spell in that school from being cast for 5 seconds.If the enemy is facing you, when they cast, they are also silenced out of all schools for 5 seconds.

The function was the same, but having an interrupt with such a long cooldown proved difficult.

Talents

Some of these talents were not yet implemented before they disapeared, and some I may have just forgotten about.

Intuition

Level 15 Talent
Your roll ability cost no Chi. This effect becomes inactive for 15 seconds after use.

I think this was initially a typo, because even back in beta Roll cost energy, not Chi. But anyway, this would have been near mandatory for any raiding monk if they had not changed Roll to a charge system.

Celerity

Level 15 Talent
Your roll ability will move you at a slightly longer distance, and at a slightly quicker speed.

I think it would have been hard to adjust between a Celerity roll and any other type, though going further would be nice.

Momentum

Level 15 Talent
Every time you roll, you gain a stacking 10% movement speed buff. Stacks up to 3 times.

Not much different. A smaller speed boost that could stack higher, though it doesn’t compare to the modern version.

Level 30 Talents
These were our chi modifying talents. Other than their location on our talent grid, they remain similar to today. Ascension didn’t have the energy boost it does today, but that didn’t happen until after launch. Chi Brew was called Jin’yu Cider.

Leg Sweep & Charging Ox Wave
Surprisingly similar to today, but they each cost 1 chi.

Dematerialize

Dematerialize Level 60 Talent
Channeled, 45 sec cooldown
You escape your Physical form, dematerializing into the ether avoiding all damage for 3 seconds.

This was a talent that cost 1 chi and granted 100% avoidance for 3 seconds. It prevented any other action for the duration. Now it’s a mistweaver-exclusive passive ability.

Beguile

Level 60 Talent
When attacked, your movement speed is increased by 3% and you cause all nearby enemies to move at 3% reduced speed within 8 yards. This effect can stack up to 6 times.

I never used it because Dematerialize was a much better tanking talent.

Tiger’s Lust
Another level 60 talent, but I can’t remember if it was different than today’s instantiation. It looks similar to Beguile, so likely it was another sprint that cost Chi.

Ring of Peace

Level 75 Talent
Instant, 2 min cooldown
Forms a sanctuary around you, causing all enemies to be unable to attack or cast harmful spells while within it. Lasts 10 seconds.

Similar in spirit to the Ring of Peace we have now, though in completely different tiers.

Chi Serpent

Level 75 Talent
1 Chi, 60 yard range, Instant, 2 min cooldown
You summon a ball of chi energy, dealing damage and healing all targets within its path within 60 yards.While it’s traveling, you can discharge the sphere, dealing x damage/healing to all targets at it’s current location and reducing/increasing all targets movement speed by 70% for 3 seconds, but cancelling the sphere.

Chi Serpent sounds like the spiritual ancestor of Chi Burst and Zen Sphere.

Chi Cocoon

Level 75 Talent
Channeled, 2 min cooldown
You encase the friendly or enemy target in a cocoon, shielding them from all outside damage and healing and causing them unable to attack. Deals x damage to enemies and y healing to allies every 1 second for 8 seconds.

This eventually grew into Life Cocoon, the mistweaver cooldown.

Level 90 Talents
The level 90 talents we have today were implemented before we were allowed to reach 90 in the beta, so we never had a chance to test out the other options that were in place before the final change.

Rushing Jade Wind

Level 90 Talent
40 yard range, Instant, 2 min cooldown
You encase the friendly or enemy target in a whirling jade tornado, becoming immune to all damage and healing and traveling at a quick speed in a distance in front of you.

I guess they just liked the name because today’s RJW is nothing like this cyclone-lifegrip hybrid.

Chi Bind

Level 90 Talent
Instant, 1 min cooldown
Binds yourself to your targeted statue with a tether of chi energy, causing any friend or foe caught in its path to take x damage or y healing.

I think Blizzard took the idea of aimed (as opposed to targeted) damage and healing and applied it to other skills like Chi Burst.

Dampen Harm
It didn’t exist at first, then became a talent. Its function was much the same as today except it cost 1 chi, had a 30 second cooldown, and activated for hits > 10% health.

As a brewmaster, you’re most likely going to be kiting bats for this encounter. It’s what you’re good at, might as well embrace it. The downside is that if you fail, it’s a guaranteed raid wipe. So don’t fail (I did – lots of times).

Differences Between Normal and Heroic

• The bats hit much harder and are very difficult to tank. It can be done (especially with a paladin-hunter combo), but most guilds opt into kiting.
• There are pink crystals scattered around the edges of the room. Attacking one will grant you Crystal Shell, a debuff that gives you a shield for 15% of your health. While it’s active, all healing you take will not actually heal you, but will contribute to the shield, similar to Spirit Shell. The shield caps out at 75% of your health.
• The best way to utilize Crystal Shell is to melee it and activate the debuff when your health is above 90%. You don’t want to get the debuff at low health because you cannot get healed up and you’ll die much easier.
• AoE attacks won’t activate it. I couldn’t even get Keg Smash to reliably activate the debuff, so use Jab instead.

Preparation

Consumables

You won’t have much time to do anything other than kiting, so stats don’t matter a great deal, other than stamina. The more health you have, the bigger your buffer before you get destroyed by Drain the Weak and the bigger your shield from Crystal Shell. Use stamina flasks and food.

Trinkets

As I mentioned above, you only care about stamina. Use stamina trinkets if you have them. Otherwise, use mastery.

Talents

Nearly every talent will be important. Some are no-brainers, some will depend on your raid composition.

Tier 1: Tiger’s Lust
The two roll talents are useful, but this sprint on a short cooldown lines up perfectly with each bat spawn. It’s useful for putting distance between yourself and your old group of bats and for getting close to your healers (where the new bats are bound to head).

Tier 2: Chi Wave, Zen Sphere, Chi Burst
I went with Chi Wave to be able to top myself off quickly when my crystal shell fell off, but all three talents are useful. Zen Sphere is good for AoE damage and healing if timed right. Chi Burst is good for ranged pulling and AoE damage.

Tier 3: Power Strikes
I deviated from my usual Ascension for the extra occasional Chi on demand. You won’t really care about chi generation here because you’ll be capped most of the time, but since you’re running around all the time and meleeing the crystals when you get a chance, Power Strikes is a faster way to get that Chi. This is especially important because Keg Smash does not always land on the crystals for some reason (I think because it’s classified as an AoE attack), so Jab is your most reliable way to both activate the shield and get Chi.

Tier 4: Charging Ox Wave
Getting into the melee range required for Ring of Peace or Leg Sweep is a death sentence, so you need your ranged stun. Best used as a new batch of bats are spawning to either control your old group or to slow down the new group before they gib healers.

Tier 5: Healing Elixirs or Dampen Harm
Healing Elixirs is a pretty controversial choice, but it is undoubtably useful if your shield falls off and you need to quickly top yourself off before activating a new one. However, the heal does not contribute to your crystal shield amount. Dampen Harm should reduce the damage done by Quake Stomp. Your choice depends on whether you have more trouble topping yourself off after the crystal shield falls off. If your healers can top you off very quickly, then go with Dampen Harm.

Tier 6: Rushing Jade Wind
A great tool for snap aggro on newly spawned bats.

DBM

Turn off every timer except the one for bat spawns and for turtle spawns. You don’t care about anything else, and it helps to clean up your UI.

Kiting

Before the pull, drop Transcendence and your Ox statue near the middle of the room. Taunting off your Ox Statue should be a last resort because Provoke will make anything hit by the taunt race toward you very quickly. Trancendence is there to help escape a bad situation or to help you get to the center faster when a new group is spawning.

The first group of bats will not spawn for a while, so you can start out dpsing the boss. Pay attention to the DBM warning, and when it goes off it’s time to head for your healers. Ask your healers to head to the middle whenever a new batch of bats appear, just to make it easier for you to pick them up.

The bats will nearly always head for a healer. I had a holy paladin with Righteous Fury active, though bats often ran for the druid healer, too. Because you can’t always predict who the bats will head for, keep an eye out for all of your healers.

To pick them up, get in range and throw Charging Ox Wave, then Rushing Jade Wind, then run away while spamming Dizzying Haze. It helps to have a rogue or hunter misdirect to you.

Once you have a group of bats following you, run around the edges of the room. This will give you the most breathing room and spinning turtles are less likely to find their way to the edge. Spam Dizzying Haze like crazy, and try not to get too far ahead of the bats. If they are far enough behind, they’ll start cutting corners, which makes it difficult to head to the middle whenever you have to pick up a new group.

The second and any following spawns are where it gets more difficult. You will most likely die if the group of bats reaches you, so you have to maneuver yourself such that your old group is still far away and your new group is within range. Use Tiger’s Lust to gain distance to move to the center. Then you can use your Charging Ox Wave on either group, though I usually used it on the new one just to prevent healer death. It helps if you can coordinate with any warlocks or other classes with AoE control abilities to help with this part. Then Rushing Jade Wind in the general vicinity of the new bats and high tail it out of there, throwing Dizzying Haze barrels behind you.

Whenever you get a new group of bats, avoid kiting them near the other tank until you have sufficient aggro. You’ll have around 10k vengeance if you’re lucky, whereas they’ll have much, much more, It’s easy for the boss tank to pull off you if you’re not prepared.

Save roll for dangerous situations, like to avoid a spinning turtle or to recover if you get caught by one. It can be tempting to use it while kiting, but you generally won’t need it until a mistake is made.

Keep an eye out for the spawn of new turtles. You don’t want to have to cross in front of Tortos as they spawn. If you do happen to hit the spawn at the wrong time, you can try to sneak behind the spinning turtles.

As you run around the room, Jab every crystal you come across. You do this because you need chi for the next bat spawn and to keep your crystal shield active in case it fell off.

If your crystal shield does fall off, Guard, then Expel Harm (or use a healing talent or healing elixirs) to top yourself off as you run to the next crystal. You can also use Expel Harm and your healing talents to increase your shield.

Near the end of the fight, things will get pretty hectic because more spinning turtles will be out and it’s nearly impossible to avoid them all. You can cast Charging Ox Wave and Rushing Jade Wind in the air.

It’s important to keep in mind, especially when things go crazy at the end, that if you get killed by bats it’s an instant wipe, but if you’re slow on picking up a new set of bats, the victim can be battle-rezed and the raid might be able to recover. For this reason, if you have to choose between getting too close to your following of bats or letting a healer die to a new set, choose the latter. I know it’s not a natural way to think as a tank, but sometimes sacrifices have to be made.

So to reiterate, when a new group of bats spawn…

1. Circle toward the center and activate Tiger’s Lust.
2. Locate your healers and face them.
3. When the bats are in range, Charging Ox Wave, then Rushing Jade Wind.
4. Run away while spamming Dizzying Haze behind you.
5. Continue to run around the edges of the room until a new batch spawns.

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.

These trinkets will be categorized and ranked according to what their role is: Survival, Hybrid, and Avoidance/DPS. I’m including some tier 14 trinkets in this list because a couple of them are still quite good. And if you’re unlucky (like me) you’ll be stuck with them for a while so you might as well get used to it.

Survival Trinkets

These are trinkets that purely focus on increasing time-to-live. They usually provide a mixture of stamina and mastery. You should seek them out if you’re running up against heroic content or if you’re getting burst down before healers can top you off.

	Soul Barrier Base: 2201 Stamina On-Use: Absorb Shield Source: Throne of Thunder - Lei Shen This is the best survival trinket in this tier, and you should seek it out if you’re running against hard content. If you want to macro it, it should mesh nicely with Guard.
	Lao-Chin’s Liquid Courage & Jade Warlord Figurine Base: 1619 Stamina On-Use: Mastery Source: 875 Valor and Revered with Shado-Pan, Mogu’shan vaults trash drop These two trinkets were staples of Tier 14, and are still very good now, especially because there aren’t that many stamina trinkets out there. Their on-use effects don’t stack and using one incurs a short 15 second cooldown on the other, but with both equipped you can have around 50% uptime on the mastery buff. Because of the short cooldown, you can get away with macroing them to an ability you use quite often, like Jab, Tiger Palm, or a heal.
	Fortitude of the Zandalari Base: 1467 Mastery On-Use: Temporary Health Increase Source: Throne of Thunder - Council of Elders Fortutude of the Zandalari is a nice trinket, though a bit basic. The hard part about health on-use effects is that it’s often impractical to macro them and it’s hard to see the effects if you’re not always topped off. It is useful against predictable burst. If you forget to use it by itself, macro it to Guard.

Best-In-Slot Survival Trinkets

If you only care about reducing burst and increasing time-to-live, you want Soul Barrier and either Lao-Chin’s Liquid Courage or Jade Warlord Figurine. Fortitude of the Zandalari is still a good trinket, but I find the mastery on-use of the tier 14 trinkets more useful than the health on-use.

Hybrid Trinkets

What I call “hybrid” trinkets are items that provide a mixture of both survival and avoidance/dps. They usually have agility, dodge, mastery, or some other secondary stat that can be reforged. Use these types of trinkets if you don’t have better survival trinkets or you want to both increase your DPS and survival at the same time.

	Rune of Re-Origination Base: 1467 Agility Source: Throne of Thunder - Lei Shen Proc: Re-Origination (Haste), Re-Origination (Crit), Re-Origination (Mastery) Rune of Re-Origination is a tricky item. If you prioritize crit or haste, it can actually hurt you if it procs during a burst event because it decreases your mastery significantly. On the other hand, if you prioritize mastery then you can reach very high stagger numbers during the proc, which can be quite useful if you’re lucky. The base agility makes it less than ideal for increasing time to live, but for a hybrid trinket the proc can make up for that. My advice is to pick it up for mastery builds. It can also be great for your personal dps if you prioritize crit, though you must keep in mind that it will hurt your survival when used that way.
	Bad Juju Base: 1467 Mastery Proc: Agility and Voodoo Gnomes Source: Throne of Thunder - Council of Elders This is my favorite hybrid trinket because it’s got a reliable base stat in mastery, but a fun little agi + gnomes proc. It’s great if you’re leaning toward survival but are bored by the pure survival trinkets.
	Steadfast Talisman of the Shado-Pan Assault Base: 1467 Mastery On-Use: Dodge that decreases over time Source: 1750 valor and Friendly with Shado-Pan Assault The dodge on this reputation-based trinket isn’t very attractive to brewmasters, but the unique proc is interesting and paired with mastery, makes this a very good starter trinket. The proc begins with a high value of dodge, which slowly dwindles into low values. If I was lazy, I would bind the on-use to Elusive Brew. This isn’t one of the best trinkets out there, but it’s solidly in the middle of the pack and it’s great if you’ve had bad luck with other survival trinkets.
	Ji-Kun’s Rising Winds Base: 1467 Expertise Proc: Heal proc when health drops below 35% Source: Throne of Thunder - Ji-Kun The automatic heal can be useful if you regularly drop below 35% health, though obviously useless in less bursty fights. I also greatly dislike any trinket that has a capped stat like hit or expertise because it forces you to rely on that trinket to reach your caps, removing any ability to swap trinkets for different fights. Because we generally don’t have problems reaching our caps through gear anyway, this trinket is solidly in the “decent if you don’t have anything better” category.
	Bottle of Infinite Stars, Stuff of Nightmares, Vial of Dragons Blood Base: 1079 - 1152 Mastery Proc: Avoidance (in the form of agility or dodge) Source: Mogu’shan Vaults - Elegon, Terrace of the Endless Spring - Tsulong These three Tier 14 trinkets aren’t exactly the same, but they’re similar. All give you static mastery plus an avoidance proc.
	Delicate Vial of the Sanguinaire Base: 1467 Dodge Proc: 4% chance on dodge for stacking mastery Source: Throne of Thunder - Dark Animus This trinket sounds like it might be good for brewmasters because of Elusive Brew, but sadly it is not. A four percent chance to proc is incredibly low, and we actually don’t dodge as much as you’d think. For example, on my last heroic Jin’rokh kill (a short, single target fight) I dodged 17 times. If I had had this trinket equiped, it would have procced once if I was lucky. Even for add fights, where you’re dodging much more often than a single target fight, it barely compares to any other trinkets. On my last heroic Horridon kill (where I primarily tank adds), it would have procced around 3 times. The proc provides a huge amount of mastery, but because it’s rare and uncontrollable, it not really worth it. The only time I would recommend this trinket is if you’re face-tanking (as opposed to kiting) bats on Tortos.

Best-In-Slot Hybrid Trinkets

If you can’t decide between pure survival and pure avoidance/dps and you are currently prioritizing mastery, Rune of Re-Origination and Bad Juju are the best. If you don’t mind not being able to swap it out, Ji-Kun’s Rising Winds has a strong proc that can help with low health events.

Avoidance/DPS Trinkets

These trinkets are typically traditional dps trinkets. They usually have agility, crit, haste, or dodge. Use these trinkets if you don’t have to worry about dying or if you want to top the meters.

	Rune of Re-Origination Base: 1467 Agility Source: Throne of Thunder - Lei Shen Proc: Re-Origination (Haste), Re-Origination (Crit), Re-Origination (Mastery) Yes, this trinket again. Like I mentioned earlier, if you prioritize crit, this trinket is good for dps and avoidance through Elusive Brew. Just keep in mind that it will reduce your mastery and haste, which in turn could risk your survival. I would not advise using this trinket if you prioritize haste because it can easily take you beyond your comfort zone of energy gain.
	Talisman of Bloodlust Base: 1467 Agility Proc: Stacking Haste Source: Throne of Thunder - Primordius This is a pretty straightforward trinket. The haste is a decent dps proc as long as it isn’t more than you can handle.
	Renataki’s Soul Charm Base: 1467 Expertise Proc: Increasing agility Source: Throne of Thunder - Jin’rokh the Breaker Another expertise trinket, which I’m not a big fan of. The proc starts with a relatively low 770 agility and builds up to 7,770 agility.
	Vicious Talisman of the Shado-Pan Assault Base: 1467 Hit Proc: Agility Source: 1750 valor and Friendly with Shado-Pan Assault The hit on this trinket may risk putting you over the cap, and the agility proc isn’t terribly attractive all by itself. If you want to buy a Shado-Pan Assault trinket, Steadfast Talisman of the Shado-Pan will help you more.

Best-In-Slot DPS/Avoidance

Rune of Re-Origination if you prioritize crit, and Talisman of Bloodlust.

Best Overall Trinkets

Due to the spread of trinkets, you’ll likely want to mix and match. Here are the different situations I can think of, and the best trinkets for those situations.

Pure Survival, High Health Requirements(e.g. Horridon, Tortos):
Soul Barrier + Jade Warlord Figurine or Lao-Chin’s Liquid Courage

Survival, Moderate Health Requirements (most progression fights):
Soul Barrier + Rune of Re-Origination (mastery) or Bad Juju

Survival, Low Health Requirements(e.g. Durumu):
Rune of Re-Origination (mastery) + Bad Juju

Moderate/High DPS requirements + lots of non-spiky damage (e.g. normal Lei Shen):
Talisman of Bloodlust + Rune of Re-Origination (mastery or crit)

Mostly Magic Damage (e.g. Megeara):
Soul Barrier + Jade Warlord Figurine or Lao-Chin’s Liquid Courage

Sunnier Note: This is a guest post from returning contributer Rotund of Something Wicked, a Windwalker on Whisperwind-US. If you would also would like to contribute to this blog as a guest, I would love to hear from you!

Hi again, I’m back again to muse about the DPS side of the monk triforce. I’m seeing a lot of confusion among Windwalkers since the 5.2 patch, and I’m here to help. Monks are still struggling with representation in raids, and there are a lot of questions out there while the answers are not very simple.

• Why is my DPS so low?
• What stats should I be gemming / enchanting for?
• Should I be using a 2-hander or dual wielding for more DPS?
• What is this Rune of Re-Origination that I am hearing so much about?
• WHY DOESN’T BLIZZARD JUST BUFF MONKS AMG PLZZZZZ!!11!1!one!!?

Ok, that last one isn’t so much a question, but it’s a common sentiment in the monk community. I want to address all these questions/ideas and help out any monks that are struggling to keep up in dungeons and raids.

Why is my DPS so low?

There are a few things that you can do immediately to increase your DPS, and make sure that you are doing the most you can to make big numbers happen.

1. Gems, Enchants, and Consumables

Make sure that your gear is properly pimped before you step foot in that boss buttcrack. Ideally you are using the best gems and enchants, but even cheap enchants like Windsong can do a world of good for your damage output. If superior quality gems are too much gold, go get some green quality ones. Every little bit helps. Flasks aren’t very expensive and 1000 agility is nothing to sneeze at. Great Pandaren Feasts are also in abundance with the 5.2 dailies, so odds are there is a good food buff available for every encounter.

Valor gear is also relatively cheap at the moment, so a week’s worth of valor can easily net you a sweet new piece of gear. Ultimately, boosting your item level correlates very well with damage output.

2. Mash Those Buttons

The windwalker DPS rotation is meant to be faster paced than typical melee classes. As my old sensei told me, the power of your attacks is comprised of two things: speed and strength. Without either, you have no power.

In reality, windwalkers don’t really have that many buttons to push: Jab, Rising Sun Kick, Blackout Kick, Tiger Palm, Fists of Fury, and Chi Wave (or whatever your L30 talent is). Don’t be afraid to make some noise or give your keyboard a workout. I hear if you push your keys harder, your DPS goes up; I have found that you can go nuts smashing buttons, but Fists of Fury is a welcome reprieve in the rotation to recover a little finger energy as well as virtual energy on your character.

Back in Wrath of the Lich King, Method’s hunter Kripparian published a video that explained some very good techniques for maximizing your DPS in raids, and a lot of the concepts are still true today. I would recommend everyone watch his video.

3. Use Tigereye Brew Early and Often.

The most common mistake I made coming fresh out of 5.2, and I see other monks making is waiting until you have 20 stacks of Tigereye Brew before using it. This is the cornerstone of our DPS rotation and using it effectively is the key to optimum damage output. Even if you keep 100% uptime on the TEB damage buff, you are still going to be doing much more damage than if you sit on stacks and don’t use them. Get in the habit of timing it so that you can get two Rising Sun Kicks off during the duration of the buff, and squeeze a Fists of Fury in there if you can.

4. Storm, Earth and Fire

This ability is the monks cleave, but there is some assembly required. Each clone has applies it’s own Rising Sun Kick debuff, and have their own Tiger Palm buff as well; because of these things as well as travel time, SEF is not great for adds/targets that aren’t going to be alive for very long. I will use this ability on Council of Elders (normal mode), and Ji-Kun upper nest adds.

As an aside, I see players in LFR and LFD using Storm, Earth and Fire on a single target. Don’t do this. Your clones will only copy your attacks if you are hitting different targets, and you are going to be doing less damage if all three of you are on the same target.

Secondary Stats – The new primary stats.

Stats are exciting. What is exciting for me is that all the secondary stats for windwalkers in path 5.2 are useful and that you can use them to tailor your playstyle. You can be bursty and stack mastery, or you can have smoother, more consistent output and favor crit, and all the while controlling the pace of your rotation with how much haste you take.

Haste

Haste is a windwalker’s most important stat, even when you aren’t stacking it. Haste increases your energy generation rate, your melee attack speed, and reduces the duration of your Fists of Fury. Additional haste also has the side benefit of giving you more Combo Breaker procs via Jab.

The best analogy I use for haste is that it is your throttle. By controlling haste, you can control how fast or slow you want to play your rotation. In this, every player has their own “haste cap” and their own comfort level with how fast they would like dole out punishment. Ideally you want to stack haste until you notice that you aren’t able to use all the energy that you are generating. This haste soft cap happens typically between 9,000 and 10,000 haste rating.

My advice for windwalkers is to practice, and to keep adding more haste until it becomes uncomfortable to play, and then back off just a little bit. The goal is to be able to use about 55-58 global cooldowns per minute, and not feel like you need to wait for energy to tick in order to use your abilities.

Mastery

As I discussed last time, Mastery increases the effectiveness of our Tigerseye Brew DPS cooldown. The good thing is that mastery and haste interact very well in that the more attacks that you are spending chi on, the faster you will have Tigerseye Brew stacks to use and boost your DPS.

Critical Strike

Unfortunately (or fortunately) crit doesn’t do anything special or interact with any of our abilities other than a chance to deal additional damage. I’m grateful for this, because our rotation has enough procs and stuff going on to be interesting but not overwhelming.

Stat Priority & Gemming.

TL;DR: Haste (to cap) > Agility > Crit > Mastery > Haste (over cap)

Haste is our best DPS stat until you are GCD capped, but after that you have a little bit of flexibility. SimCraft and my own calculations have show crit to be the 2nd best secondary stat followed by mastery. One sidenote about this is that these calculations assume that you are using TEB to cover your whole rotation, rather than using it during trinket/enchant procs or during bloodlust or other raid cooldowns. Try them out and see how you like it on a target dummy. If you prefer a more bursty playstyle, go with mastery, and if you like smoother more consistent DPS go with crit.

Another note is that yellow gems provide twice the amount of secondary stats as primary stats this expansion. I recommend gemming yellow sockets with haste/hybrids until you reach your personal haste cap with gear, and then filling them in with agility as needed. Personally I like to establish a haste baseline with gems that I can tweak with reforging as needed, but your mileage may vary.

Choose your Weapon

The biggest question I see on the forums and monks are asking is “Should I be using a 2 handed weapon, or should I be dual wielding” To preface this let’s take a look in our spellbook:

Way of the Monk

This spell does all of the heavy lifting, and basically normalizes your DPS no matter what you pick, so the answer to this question depends on the item level of your weapons. The DPS of the weapon in your main hand will boost your DPS more than any other stat or piece of gear, so it is very important that you have a weapon with the most DPS equipped in your main hand. A majority of your spells and abilities scale from your main hand weapon damage, so it’s important to prioritize upgrading this first, so use your bonus coin rolls on bosses that drop better weapons.

The main difference between the two styles is that if you are dual wielding, you can take advantage of having two weapon enchants rather than just the one, so in general if you have the same item level choose dual wielding in order to take advantage of twice the enchant procs.

The tricky part is if you have a 2 hander and a 1 hander with the same weapon DPS, but you have a crappy offhand weapon. My rule of thumb is that if the offhand is more than 10 ilvls difference than your mainhand, it’s probably better to use a 2hander.

Rune of Re-Origination: Hold on to your butts.

This trinket is the weirdest I’ve seen in a long time, but it is incredibly powerful:

Rune of Re-Origination

The trinket proc will take all of your secondary stats, buff them up, and then shove them all in your highest secondary stat for 10 seconds. Ghostcrawler explained it in gory detail while it was on the PTR:

At proc time, it checks how much crit, haste, and mastery you have (yes, this is a snapshot, and does NOT include the mastery raid buff). It finds which is the highest of those 3 (tie breaking rule: crit trumps haste trumps mastery), and gives you a buff of +[sum of lowest two stats] to your highest stat, and -[lowest stat A] and -[lowest stat B]. For example, if you have 6000 mastery, 3000 crit, 2000 haste, and the proc goes off, it gives you a buff that provides [+5000 mastery, -3000 crit, -2000 haste]. It does not continue adjusting that buff as stats change during its duration. Yes, this means that if you have a temporary buff to a stat that is not your highest (even with the temporary buff), and that temporary buff falls off during Re-Origination, you *could* end up with negative rating. In this obscure edge case, negative crit does reduce your crit chance, negative mastery does reduce whatever it normally does, and negative haste is ignored.

This trinket is broken, and overpowered, and will make everyone in your raid jealous of you. Beg, steal, borrow, maim, and push down old ladies in the street to get one.

Monks are currently stacking mastery in order to use this trinket optimally. Ideally you want your secondary stats to be as equal as possible with mastery being slightly higher than the rest. When the trinket procs, all of your secondary stats will be reallocated into mastery. When the Re-Origination buff is about to expire, activate Tigereye Brew and all the mastery that the trinket proc gave you will be snapshotted even after the proc expires. The next 15 seconds are a rocket ride to the top of the DPS meters.

It takes a bit of practice, and I have a weakaura that tells me when the buff is about to fall off so that I can use Tigereye Brew at the very last second and do unspeakable DPS.

It’s also viable to use crit as your chosen stat, and the trinket proc will boost your crit chance incredibly high. I don’t recommend using haste in this manner, as you will be energy capping whenever the trinket procs.

Rogues are still beating me! What now?

Sorry to say, that’s just the way the dice rolled at the moment. Right now in patch 5.2 rogues, warriors and death knights are kings of the melee pile. Windwalker monks are a little behind the 8 ball in damage output, and raid benefit. Monk playstyle changed significantly between Tier 14 and 15 and Blizzard moved the nerf slider a little too far. Fear not though, we are getting some of that damage back in 5.3 when they buff our Rising Sun Kick debuff:

Rising Sun Kick now causes all targets within 8 yards to take an increased 20% damage from the Monk’s abilities, up from 10%.

So we are getting a little love, in addition to our shaman and paladin buddies. Another common sentiment in the windwalker community is that we don’t have competitive raid cooldowns that are as powerful as other classes. I agree that Zen Meditation doesn’t hold a candle to warrior banners, paladin hands, DK grip/AMZ, druid roars, shaman totems, or rogue smoke bombs. What we do have are amazing personal survival cooldowns that all but negate incoming damage, and that is a valuable raid asset. While this is the case, I feel like Blizzard has something even more powerful in the works for us in a future patch.

When we got Storm, Earth and Fire this patch, it felt very well done and something that they had been working on for a while and probably wasn’t just quite ready for MOP launch. I’m guessing Blizzard still has a trick up their sleeves that will make people’s jaws drop and say, “Damn, I want to play a monk.”

-Rotund

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.

It’s just an experimental phase

Progressing through normal and heroic Throne of Thunder, it’s easy to see what the big killer of tanks is: physical burst. Usually it’s predictable, along the lines of Horridon’s Triple Puncture, though often a boss’s regular melee attacks are deadly, too. This typically means we need more health smoothing, which are traditionally the job of mastery and stamina.

However, the additional 12% stagger linked to Elusive Brew from our two-piece bonus also contributes to damage smoothing. It’s a bit less reliable, but often stronger than base mastery. If we were to prioritize crit, that could potentially aid in smoothing by increasing the uptime of the Staggering buff. That, plus the total damage reduction that comes from Elusive Brew’s dodge and the damage bonus, makes crit seem like the clear winner.

I spent the last three or four weeks (and about 10k gold) experimenting with mastery/stamina priorities and crit priorities. Crit clearly provided the best total damage reduction and dps, but the problem remained: I was still dying. The Staggering bonus proved to be not so easy to control, even with a macro to cancel Elusive Brew early. My guild was wiping because I couldn’t survive an unlucky string of hits, not because the healers ran out of mana healing me or because we hit the enrage. This experiment only proved what we’ve known all along: total damage reduction looks good on paper, but it’s not reliable and it’s not going to fuel progression.

And somewhat reluctantly (though that quickly passed), I crawled back to stamina and mastery. Nothing beats the reliability of an always-on damage smoother and good ol’ maximum health.

Smoothness is all the rage

Around this time, Theck released his blog post on the smoothing effects of stamina. It’s written for paladins, but the ideas often translate well to other tanks. Specifically, he reiterates the effect of healer reaction on keeping tanks topped off. A tank with spiky health causes healers to panic and use expensive, fast heals. Therefore, to best work with our healers, we tanks should increase that buffer (i.e. maximum health) so that they can continue healing us with their normal hots or smart heals.

Now brewmasters are going to approach this a little differently. Unlike paladins, we actually have a secondary stat that has a near identical function to stamina: mastery. Not only is it always “on”, but it reduces damage – something stamina does not do. But how does it scale in comparison?

A while ago, Taser on the EJ forums actually did a rough analysis of that very question. Read the full post for details, but it essentially boils down to this: mastery will soon surpass stamina as the best stat for time-to-live. The most interesting conclusion is that mastery scaling is akin to armor penetration in days of (c)old – the more you have of it, the better it is. There’s no built-in diminishing return.

There are some details that shouldn’t be left out of this understanding. First, stamina will always be superior in fights with mechanics that aren’t mitigated by stagger (magic, dots, etc). Second, it’s not a linear scale, so 10,000 mastery is more than twice as effective as 5,000 mastery. This means that if you prioritize it, you should go all out.

Finally, even the best tanks around suggest survival stats, at least while you’re learning new encounters. At this point, not only has my own experimentation demonstrated that stamina and mastery are the way to go, but a bandwagon is forming.

That’s cool and all, but please just tell me what to do

Gems

Gem for hit / expertise, then mastery / stam. Hit and expertise are useful no matter what secondary stat priority you’re following, so gem for those first so that you’re free to reforge into other stats later. Personally, I’ve stopped gemming for hit because in my current gear I’m actually at risk of going over the cap, even after reforging. Because gems provide double secondary stats, after caps it’s best to focus on mastery. A little bit of stam isn’t bad if you’re already hit capped and you need a blue socket filled.

As always, I like to meet the socket bonuses because the stats are almost always useful for brewmasters. Far more importantly, the anguish I experience at seeing a missed socket bonus is not worth the small stat gain.

• Meta: Indomitable Primal Diamond if you have the legendary gem, Austere Primal Diamond otherwise. The dps legendary, Capacitive Primal Diamond is also ridiculously strong for tanks at the moment, but the tanking meta is very good as well and for now we’re focusing on survival.
• Yellow sockets: Fractured Sun’s Radiance
• Red: Precise Primordial Ruby
• Blue: Puissant Wild Jade if you’re at risk of going over the hit cap, Sensei’s Wild Jade otherwise.
• Prismatic: Precise Primordial Ruby

Reforging

Reforge priority: This is pretty straightforward since I’ve been implying it throughout this article. Reach your caps, then mastery. I’m not a huge haste fan because I’m always pooling energy anyway, and I like the synergy crit provides with our tier 15 bonus, which is why it comes after mastery. However, feel free to swap those two stats if you just can’t live without high energy regen.

1. Hit to 2550.
2. Expertise to 5100.
3. Mastery
4. Crit
5. Haste

Trinkets

For pure survival, we want either stamina or mastery trinkets. I will do an in-depth trinket comparison in the future, but for reference here are the contenders:

• Lao-Chin’s Liquid Courage: Tier 14, 1619 stam + mastery on use
• Jade Warlord Figurine: Tier 14, 1619 stam + mastery on use
• Bottle of Infinite Stars: Tier 14, 1079 or 1218 mastery, agility proc
• Stuff of Nightmares: Tier 14, 1152-1300 mastery, dodge proc
• Vial of Dragons Blood: Tier 14, 1079-1218 mastery, dodge proc
• Bad Juju: 1467 Mastery + agility (i.e. crit / dodge) proc
• Soul Barrier: 2201 stam + on use absorb
• Fortitude of the Zandalari: 1467 Mastery + health increase
• Ji-Kun’s Rising Winds: (after reforging): 586 mastery + 881 exp + auto heal
• Steadfast Talisman of the Shado-Pan Assault: 1467 Mastery + dodge

Lao-Chin’s Liquid Courage and Jade Warlord Figurine are good places to start. Soul Barrier is the best if you have it.

But I spoke with my healers and they think I’m fine with haste/crit

That’s good! Your healers know their styles better than I do, and if you’re not struggling with your current set up there’s no real reason to change it around. I simply want to encourage mastery and stamina, as stats traditionally neglected by brewmasters, for those of us who are struggling or need guidance.

Other reasons that you might want to avoid a damage smoothing set up are:

• 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.

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.

Damage or Survival?

For most guilds, there are two phases to learning a new boss fight: learning and executing. When you’re in the learning phase, anything you can do to prolong the fight is better for the raid. During this phase I would advise and emphasize survivability. For brewmasters, this is generally maximum mastery/stamina. Once your guild learns how the fight works, and knows what to do in every portion to continue to the next, then it’s a matter of execution. At this point, you may consider gearing for additional damage to help meet any dps checks, or to simply make the fight shorter and decrease the number of mistakes. If you’re in a heroic raiding guild, however, the learning phase and the execution phase are often entwined - you’re learning as you’re executing and there’s no clear divide telling you when it’s okay to redo your gear. Furthermore, it’s quite expensive and time consuming to continuously regem and reforge for each encounter.

For these situations, my advice is to simply go with your maximum survivability gear all the time until you’re on farm. I personally reforged every stat I could into mastery and gemmed mastery + stamina all the way until this week when we killed heroic Lei Shen. Depending on your level of gear, content, healing situation, and whether you raid 10 or 25m, you may opt to start swapping out survivability stats earlier, but I firmly believe that in almost every situation you find yourself in, survival gear will almost always ensure a faster kill on your current progression target than dps gear. A quick look at some of the heavier hits tanks sustained during our first kills:

[21:37:44.629] Horridon hits Daught 258582 (A: 424991)
[21:37:47.344] Horridon hits Daught 253712 (A: 382930)
[23:16:04.205] Horridon hits Daught 333226 (A: 5290648) !!! - Berserk

[22:26:56.179] Frost King Malakk Frigid Assault Daught 84093
[22:26:56.179] Frost King Malakk Frigid Assault Daught 84093
[22:26:57.198] Frost King Malakk hits Daught 49309 (A: 100224)
[22:26:57.198] Frost King Malakk hits Daught 101794 (A: 206906)

[01:47:00.143] Ji-Kun Talon Rake Daught 193698 (A: 804356) (2 stacks)
[01:49:07.327] Ji-Kun Talon Rake Daught 126903 (A: 594727) (2 stacks)

[22:38:16.052] Durumu the Forgotten hits paladin tank 400896
[22:38:20.552] Durumu the Forgotten hits paladin tank 326034

[01:41:07.297] Primordius hits Daught 161413 (A: 244737)
[01:41:08.407] Primordius hits Daught 177124 (A: 268557)
[01:41:09.279] Primordius hits Daught 159964 (A: 303775)

[02:00:31.613] Massive Anima Golem hits Daught 239281 (A: 465963)
[02:00:37.659] Massive Anima Golem hits Daught 201522 (A: 500509)
[02:00:47.409] Massive Anima Golem hits Daught 271916 (A: 391167)

[23:59:33.942] Lei Shen hits Daught 161384 (A: 562411)
[23:59:35.506] Lei Shen hits Daught 159368 (A: 555384)

Given the size of these hits, I may very well have died multiple times during these kills if I had emphasized crit over mastery. Again, if you are raiding 10s instead, you may find that all-out survival is not the best option.

Gone are the days where tank damage was irrelevant except the necessary minimum to hold threat. Tank damage is now a very real and very important element of your overall dps breakdown. This is still true for 25 man raids and even more true for 10 man ones. Brewmasters in particular excel in aoe damage, and is a huge percentage of the raid’s dps on targets such as Horridon adds, Tortos bats, Durumu ice walls, Twins’ lurkers, and Lei Shen ball lightnings. It is vitally important to every tank who wishes to be the best they can be to maximize their damage in this current tanking paradigm. Furthermore, brewmasters in particular do more healing with more damage going out as well.

Damage Tricks

There are generally two ways to improve damage, as most dps players can attest. One is to simply tailor your gear towards more damage and increase your damage potential. In our case, this means cap expertise and hit, then maximize crit. However, this comes with the downside of making us more vulnerable to tank damage. The other method is to increase the level of play - fulfilling higher percentages of that damage potential. While this is definitely trickier to pull off, it will not only improve your damage at no cost to survivability but most likely will even improve tanking elements such as shuffle/power guard uptime due to the greater emphasis on mechanics.

How much damage would a tank expect to pull off for Throne of Thunder encounters, you might ask. Well, here are some representative meters for our first/early heroic kills in this zone. Now, I don’t claim to be the best damage brewmaster ever, and these numbers will most certainly be beaten (if they aren’t already) by those attempting to rank on these fights, but I think these logs are indicative of what tanks can do for their progression kills, in a 25m scenario at least, by a fully survival oriented tank (Rough stats - ilvl 525, 11k mastery, 5-6k crit, 3-4k haste, expertise/hit hardcapped):

As you can see, tanks do a truckload of damage even in full survival gear.

Some basic damage advice – obvious, but important nonetheless:

• Use the right talents for the right fight. Zen Sphere/Chi Burst for Tortos, Chi Burst for Lei-Shen, Chi Wave for everything else. Rushing Jade Wind for Horridon, Tortos, Megaera, Durumu, Primordius, and Lei-Shen, Xuen for everything else. Note: of those, I only chose RJW for Megaera, Durumu, and Primordius solely because Xuen is currently bugged on those fights to rarely/never use his special attack. When/if that bug is fixed, Xuen will be the superior option.

• Hard cap expertise and hit. Accuracy stats are great for both offense and defense, there is really no reason to not raise them to cap. Doing so also reduces the RNG factor on the most important role in the fight. In terms of rough dps values, 1 exp/hit = 1.5 agi = 2 crit = 6 haste.

• Always be attacking something. If you’re about to pull aggro over the offtank after a taunt swap, ask for a Hand of Salvation instead of stopping your attacks. If you need to move somewhere for a mechanic, rush back into range with Tiger’s Lust (which, incidentally, I run with almost all the time now - it’s the best raiding movement talent for us).

• Don’t cap out energy or chi. This one is obvious but somehow tricky in execution especially when using Spinning Crane Kick. For example, when you’re aoeing, make sure to use Breath of Fire or Blackout Kick as you’re spinning to avoid capping out on chi. This is something that even I need to work on as often times I realize that Keg Smash just came off cooldown and I have to delay it because I have 4 chi already. Possibly also bind /cancelaura Spinning Crane Kick into Keg Smash as well.

• Fill up every gcd with something to do. In the Brewmaster’s case, this basically means spam Tiger Palm. Too many brewmasters simply wait for the next 40 energy to use their ability and only use Tiger Palm when their Tiger Power is about to fall. Don’t do this - Tiger Palm should be your most often used ability in most fights.

Advanced Damage Tricks

• Get a vengeance meter to game vengeance as much as you can, as essentially every trick to increase tank damage beyond the basics relies on vengeance manipulation. Here’s the basic outline of how vengeance works: when you take targeted damage (many aoe pulse effects don’t affect vengeance), a percentage of that damage is converted to attack power. Every time you take such damage, your vengeance is constantly refreshed: old vengeance - decay + new vengeance. Decay is 5% per second. There is also a complex mechanism that raises your vengeance to a high percentage of the vengeance you would have after tanking a boss for 20 seconds on the initial hit or two instead of a gradual ramp-up.

• On tank swap fights with more than 20 seconds between swaps, do a mini-swap every time vengeance is about to drop. This involves taunting, taking a hit or two, then having the current tank taunt back all without any tank debuffs being applied. This ensures you always have vengeance all the time - it may not be as high as actually tanking but it’s fairly close. Warning: do not do this often enough to cause an immune DR for taunt.

• After a tank swap and you’re not actively tanking, avoid as many secondary effects as you can. Anything that updates your vengeance is bad. For example, on Lei Shen, after the other tank taunts, I avoid soaking bouncing bolts or being hit by thundering crash. My 120k vengeance instantly dwindles to anywhere between 10-50k if I am hit by one of these abilities. Warning: do this only if you are sure you’re not needed to soak such spells - executing a mechanic correctly trumps damage in nearly every case.

• Use Fort Brew, Diffuse Magic and Zen Meditation to survive high damage abilities that would otherwise kill you to shoot your vengeance up to a high degree. There aren’t many such mechanics in this tier, but try surviving a giant sand trap on council after the melee mobs are dead or zen-med’ing a decapitate on Lei Shen.

• If your cooldowns are available, feel free to “fail” mechanics that make you take more damage. Running through the anima rings on Dark Animus or tanking Lei Shen with the decapitate buff still up are such examples - if you ensure you can survive them and your cooldowns are not needed elsewhere, then the extra damage is welcome.

• Save Xuen, and possibly hold Keg Smash/Chi Wave/Chi Burst/Rushing Jade Wind for when your vengeance is high instead of low. Remember, you have about 30-40k attack power baseline. If you’re at 0 vengeance, it’s often better to hold a big damage ability for a few seconds than to use it immediately if you know you’re about to shoot up to 100k+ soon.

• For those who have the legendary meta-gem available, the dps version is ridiculously overpowered as it scales with attack power and as tanks play with a ton of vengeance, even without a high proc multiplier, it’s around 10% of our overall damage on single target fights. I would heavily advise using the dps gem on any encounter you feel confident enough to survive without the tanking meta-gem, which is also very good in its own right.

The question I get the most often is not “How should I prioritize my stats” or “Can you write this Weak Aura for me”, it is “How do I tank Horridon as a Brewmaster?” There’s no doubt that it’s a difficult fight for most tanks, and monk tanks face their own unique challenges. But it’s also my favorite fight this expansion, explicitly because it’s requires mastery of two basic tank skills: add pickup and predictable damage mitigation.

My own experience for this fight includes: wiping on normal many times before we got it, then wiping on heroic many, many more times. We’ve finally downed it, but it took a lot of experimentation and practice.

Tanking Horridon

Horridon occasionally attacks (as Threehorns are wont to do) with Triple Puncture. Besides dealing moderate damage, it also inflicts his target with a stacking debuff that increases the damage of the next Triple Puncture. In most cases, you will have to take this debuff to 8 or 9 stacks before the other tank has a chance to taunt or a paladin can cast Hand of Protection on you. Horridon uses Triple Puncture roughly every 10 seconds, and the debuff lasts 2 minutes.

At first, the Triple Puncture attack deals deceptively little damage. However, the danger actually comes from the melee swing before + Triple Puncture + the melee swing after. These three attacks can happen in less than two seconds and can often take you from 100% health to 0% with hardly any time to react.

So how do you deal with this massive physical burst? First, we need to gear for it. The best stats to smooth your damage intake are mastery and stamina, and you’ll need both. If you often die in the blink of an eye, first try using two stamina trinkets, a stamina flask, and stamina food. If that’s not enough, reforge to mastery (use this priority: hit/exp to cap > mastery > crit > haste). Mastery is becoming an increasingly amazing stat in Throne of Thunder, and it will be useful for most of the other fights in this raid. The one downside is that, unlike haste or crit, it does not increase your damage output. But you should worry about surviving first.

Next, plan out your cooldowns and active mitigation.

• Shuffle should be up at all times, especially before a Triple Puncture.
• Use Purifying Brew often. However, if you have to choose between keeping Shuffle up or Purifying a Stagger, keep Shuffle up. Burst is the true killer here.
• Save Expel Harm and Chi Wave for after the Triple Puncture. Try to avoid the temptation of using them at other times, even if your health dips low. Horridon hits slow and hard, so your health will often dive even when a Triple Puncture is still a few seconds away, but this in-between damage is easily covered by your healers, so you have to trust them to keep you topped off. The one exception is if you’re not topped off immediately before a Triple Puncture.
• Elusive Brew can’t prevent the Triple Puncture, but it has the chance prevent the melee attacks that frame it. Use it a few seconds before Triple Puncture and you will hopefully dodge one or two of those dangerous melee swings.
• Save cooldowns like Guard, Dampen Harm, Fortifying Brew, and Zen Meditation for high stacks of the debuff (6+).
• Hand of Protection can remove these stacks, so you can coordinate with any paladins in your raid if you want to remove stacks early. Remember that this leaves Forbearance, which prevents any other Hands for 1 minute.

One other thing to keep in mind are to watch your vengeance. You’ll have a huge amount of attack power while tanking Horridon – much more than your co-tank on adds. Try not to pull off your co-tank because they have a hard enough time already. Also, if a dinomancer appears next to you, interrupt it.

Finally, when all four doors have collapsed, War-God Jalak will appear. He melees hard, but is not quite as dangerous as Horridon. I’ve heard reports that he is disarmable, so use Grapple Weapon and Ring of Peace on him. Tanking him is pretty straightforward, but once he dies Horridon will hit twice as hard and much faster, so you need to chain cooldowns until the end of the fight, and possibly call for help from your healers.

Picking up the Adds

Add management is one of my favorite tasks as a tank, and sadly it does not appear often outside of five-man dungeons. Brewmasters often have a hard time of it because we don’t have any instant ranged attacks except for taunt, but we have enough tools to make do.

First of all, remember to not panic. The adds that spawn from the door usually don’t hit very hard, so it’s not the end of the world if one of your ranged dps pulls them.

Here are those tools:

• Dizzying Haze: Has a travel time and requires aiming, but deals a decent amount of threat and doesn’t require you to move around to pick up adds.
• Provoke: Our taunt is the most reliable way to pick up adds, but you have to use it wisely. Save it for times a dps or the other tank pulls off you.
• Provoke off of Ox Statue: As long as it’s placed far enough from Horridon (you don’t want to accidentally taunt the boss and he has a deceptively large hitbox), you can use it to pick up more than one add. Sadly, using it as an AoE pickup tool means you can’t use it again to pull off of unruly co-tanks, which makes it more situational.
• Chi Torpedo: We don’t normally have many uses for this skill, but it is excellent at picking up regularly spawning trolls, especially because you’re likely to be moving around a lot anyway. It has an effectively short cooldown (since it’s tied to roll) and deals a decent amount of damage.
• Rushing Jade Wind: This is our fastest ranged pull tool, though unfortunately it requires good aim and two chi. The spell effect is wider than the visual, so your aim doesn’t have to be perfect. It deals a large amount of damage, which makes pickup near-guarenteed. I prefer this over Chi Torpedo, but Chi Torpedo is especially nice if you’re having trouble picking everything up.
• Charging Ox Wave: This skill doesn’t generate threat and it only works on trolls that spawn out of the doors (as opposed to the trolls that jump from above), but it can delay those enemies long enough for you to run over and Keg Smash or aim a Dizzying Haze.
• Clash. This charge / death grip combo is usable on the door adds, but not the adds that jump from above.

Weaker Tools:

These skills aren’t ideal, but good to keep in mind.

• Spinning Crane Kick: It can be rough using this tool because you have to move nearby and it prevents any other actions for a few seconds, but sometimes it’s your only option if the other abilities are on cooldown. It’s usefulness comes from it’s lack of cooldown.
• Chi Burst / Chi Wave: Both healing talents can be targeted at range, but Chi Burst has a long cooldown and a cast time, while Chi Wave has only a 20 yard range.
• Tiger Palm: If you are too busy to check what’s off cooldown and you don’t have time for a full cast of Spinning Crane Kick (it happens to me…), Tiger Palm is always usable and often deals enough damage to get initial threat.

Now, keep those in mind while I talk about troll spawn patterns. Each door follows the same pattern, though obviously each group has their own special abilities. Knowing the patterns can help with timing your ranged pulls and plan your taunts.

Spawn 1: One to two troll adds (depending on the gate) come from the door. These guys are stunnable and usually don’t deal much damage. If there’s more than one, they are still close to each other and easy to pick up with just a Keg Smash.

The blue circle represents Horridon and the pink square represents your co-tank. Your guild may choose to put Horridon in a different spot, and that spot may even vary at different gates, but you’ll still have to worry about adds dropping on top of your co-tank. The turquoise star represents where you should stand.

Spawn 2: A single special troll drops from above. These are usually the highest priority targets, so you need to pick them up before a damage dealer pulls it. Since it’s just a single spawn, it should be easy to pick up with your regular attacks or a taunt.

Spawn 3: More trolls spawn from the door. Pick them up with Dizzying Haze. You should prepare for spawn 4 by moving near where they drop down.

Spawn 4: Two special trolls drop from above. This is the most difficult pull. First, use one of your best pick up tools (Keg Smash if you’re in range, Rushing Jade Wind if you’re not) on the add the drops near the raid. Second, use your taunt on the add that heads to the other tank. You often have to use a taunt on the add that’s close to your co-tank because none of your other skills will be able to overcome the vengeance lead they have on you, even if you’re Keg Smashing and they’re just doing incidental cleaves.

Spawn 5: Dinomancer spawns. If you have to pick it up, then taunt it over. It will likely head for your co-tank, but it’s the last big thing to spawn so you should be safe to use taunt.

Spawn 6+: No more special trolls or dinomancers, but the spawns at the door will continue until Horridon destroys the gate. Continue to throw Dizzying Haze at them when you see them run out the door.

Gate-Specific Hints

Gate 1 - Desert Trolls: The basiliks that spawn from the gate can stun you. You can either interrupt their cast, run behind them, or break the stun with Nimble Brew. Stay out of the sand on the ground.

Gate 2 - Poison Trolls: Try to pick up the green, semi-transparent Venomous Effusions. There’s usually many mobs up, so it’s not worth it to taunt unless you can do an AoE taunt off your statue.

Gate 3 - Ice Trolls: You only need to pick up the Frozen Warlords, but you can use your AoE taunt to pick up other mobs momentarily. Warlords hit very hard and apply a healing debuff, so this is a good time to use cooldowns as well. Also, kite them along the wall so that they drop their Frozen Orbs away from the raid.

Gate 4 - Bear Trolls: The bears cleave, so don’t move around too much and keep them facing away from the raid. Once the bear dies, its rider will drop and you’ll have to reestablish aggro. A well-timed Spinning Crane Kick will usually do the trick.

Talents

Here are the talents I chose.

• Tier 1: All are useful.
• Tier 2: Chi Wave, primarily for the self heal.
• Tier 3: All are up to personal preference.
• Tier 4: Charging Ox Wave, for ranged pick-up and AoE stun. Ring of Peace is also a good choice.
• Tier 5: Dampen Harm for Horridon’s big Triple Punctures.
• Tier 6: Rushing Jade Wind, for ranged add pick-up and AoE dps. Chi Torpedo is also a good choice while learning the fight.

Other Miscellaneous Things

Transcendence is very useful for this fight. You can either drop it on various spawn spawns for fast pick up, or near the boss in case you get targeted by Charge.

You will have to replace your Ox Statue at every gate due to range. You can place it within the gate semi-circle to help with AoE taunts or just a distraction for those adds, or you can place it where one of the special adds will drop down.

In heroic mode, the boss will occasionally spawn a Direhorn Spirit. As a tank, you don’t have to worry about this until the very end. If you do get one, you can knock it back with any attack, including taunt. I preferred to occasionally throw a Dizzying Haze or Rushing Jade Wind at it because I was worried I’d accidentally taunt the boss.

Video

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.)

Shuffle

First, I’ve moved and minimized the two most important auras: stagger and shuffle. I realized that the timer bars didn’t convey much useful information, especially given the screen real estate provided them.

The most important information from the shuffle aura was knowing whether it was missing or about to fall off, so I implemented an icon that changes color to red when it’s fallen off, yellow when it’s low (ending in a few seconds), and green when the remaining duration is very high. This color trigger mirrors stagger, and the green version is a reminder that I should probably be Purifying or Guarding more.

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Stagger

Stagger has also lost its duration as well. Since stagger is usually updated all the time, duration doesn’t make a big difference to your purifying brew usage. I’ve also change the formula behind the number displayed – instead of showing your current stagger tick, it displays the percentage of your health the total stagger will deal if left alone. (This is a modified formula from BrewsLeeArrakis; go check out his auras if mine aren’t your style.) I find this information is the most useful when it comes to deciding when to purify, and the percentage means that even if your health scales (either up with gear, or down with challenge modes) you can still react to the same numbers.

Unfortunately, removing the timer bars takes a lot from the visual prominence of these two important auras. To compensate, I’ve made these two icons larger compared to the rest.

In addition to that base change, I’ve added auras for Brewmaster Tier 15 bonuses. Two-piece provides a timer for when the Staggering buff is active. Four-piece makes the Stagger icon glow when the free Purifying Brew proc activates.

And finally, if I’m specced into Healing Elixirs, a small icon will appear when it is available (since Purifying Brew activates it).

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Keg Smash and Energy Bar

The Keg Smash aura saw the most significant changes. Instead of an icon, it is only a progress bar that is tied to my energy bar. I made this change because my UI was getting too cluttered with icons and there were too many visual similarities between all the auras that it became difficult to make decisions based on them.

With this new aura, while Keg Smash is on cooldown a small progress bar and timer will appear directly above the energy bar. When it is off cooldown, the energy bar will glow. This positioning also provides the surprising benefit of encouraging me to pool energy, probably because the visual similarity between the Keg Smash timer and the energy bar makes me want to keep them both high.

The energy bar itself has been cleaned up a bit, but otherwise has not seen any big changes. Because it relates so closely to the new Keg Smash aura, it now belongs to the same group.

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Chi Bar

The chi bar has seen some subtle but significant changes. I wanted to encourage pooling chi (which is a practice that all brewmasters should do, since you want to always have chi on hand for emergency Guards or Purifying Brews). To do this, I made your available chi slightly transparent when you have two or less, and normal opacity when you have three or more. The eye tends to pay less attention to transparent data, so you’re (hopefully) less likely to feel like you need to spend it.

Just like the older version, this aura changes depending on whether you have Ascension, Power Strikes, or Chi Brew talented.

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Guard

I’ve moved Guard to a place of secondary prominence and size. The rest of the aura is the same as before, with a shield amount when it’s activated, cooldown count when it’s not available, and dimming when it’s off cooldown but you don’t have enough Chi.

Many people request an aura for the Power Guard buff from Tiger Palm. The reason I don’t have one is because my UI is already busy enough, and the absence of Power Guard usually doesn’t play into my decision making. Power Guard is incredibly easy to keep active if you just use Tiger Palm during the lulls in your rotation, so monitoring the buff isn’t worth extra brain cycles.

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Elusive Brew

This aura has not changed much, either. I’ve moved it to what I think of as the “active mitigation row” and it now glows when you reach 15 stacks to remind you to use it. Just like the Stagger aura, it also gains a Healing Elixirs icon when talented and available.

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Level 30 Healing Talents

The healing talents became an integral part of brewmaster rotations in 5.3, so it is now important to monitor these abilities as well. Each icon only appears when you have the respective talent selected.

The Chi Wave aura will glow when it’s available and show a cooldown when it’s not.

The Zen Sphere aura will glow when the spell is available and the HoT is not active on you. Otherwise, it will show the cooldown.

The Chi Burst aura will not glow like the others because we Brewmasters tend to spec into this only when there are certain encounters that benefit from grouped up heals, and not when we need to use it on cooldown.

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Expel Harm

Nothing has changed except the location.

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Cooldown Group

This is simply a grouping and consolidation of the many defensive cooldowns available to brewmasters. It shows the icon and remaining cooldowns of the following abilities: Dampen Harm (when talented), Diffuse Magic (when talented), Fortifying Brew, Zen Meditation, and Healthstone. It’s a dynamic group, which means that the icons move around to make space for the rest of the auras in the group.

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Notice Group

This is a very simple dynamic group that displays an icon for Ox Statue when it’s not active and Touch of Death when it’s usable.

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This is a basic guide for tanks in Throne of Thunder, specifically from the perspective of normal 10 mans (if the 25 man strategies happen to vary significantly from those listed, please let me know). It isn’t intended to be a strategy guide or a resource for raid leaders. Instead, it just provides tanks with the information they will need to know in any given fight, like how many tanks are required and how many debuff stacks they need to swap at.

Table of Contents

1. Jin’rokh the Breaker
   1. Trash between Jin’rokh and Horridon
2. Horridon
3. Council of Elders
4. Tortos
   1. Trash Between Tortos and Megaera
5. Megaera
   1. Trash between Megaera and Ji-Kun
6. Ji’Kun
7. Durumu the Forgotten
8. Primordius
   1. Trash between Primordius and Dark Animus
9. Dark Animus
10. Iron Qon
11. Twin Consorts
12. Lei Shen

Jin’rokh the Breaker

Encounter Journal

Two tank fight. Swap immediately after Static Burst / Static Wound (even if you still have your debuff active). Position the boss so his rear is near or sitting inside a “good” puddle (i.e. one that is not charged with lightning) so melee can benefit from the buff it provides. Tanks must stay out of puddles themselves because the puddles amplify the damage done by Static Wound. During Lightning Storm, pull the boss to the middle and stay out of electrified puddles.

There’s lots of ticking raid damage, so use skills that help out raid healers if you can. As long as you taunt in a timely manner, there is not a significant amount of damage on the tank.

Trash Between Jin’rokh and Horridon

The floating trolls surrounded by blue light will bounce you back and into the air if you venture into their circles. They cannot be killed, so just avoid them. The first bridge pushes you to the right, so you have to run at an angle to avoid falling off. There are safe zones where the wind is blocked by torches. Pull one Tormented Spirit at a time from max range. They have a healing debuff that goes up to 90% reduced healing pretty quickly. Pull each one to the nearest safe zone and have your raid wait for you there. If the nearest safe zone is in the middle of the path of a floating blue circle guy, you’ll have to move when they come near. There are two you have to avoid, and sometimes you have to move a bit out of your way to avoid both.

Once past the first bridge, there’s a big stone boss who shoots lasers. We didn’t have a chance to really understand this mechanic, so we just let people die. It was still easier than the bridge.

The next bridge pushes you back and the safe zones are located at the sides (again, behind torches). These blue floaties path in a figure 8 and will run through safe zones, so pay attention to them when they get near and be prepared to move if they head for your safe zone. Again, continue to pull one Tormented Spirit at a time.

At the end of the second bridge is a mini-boss. He’s really easy and all he does of note is drop rain storms on random players. If you’re afflicted by a rain storm, stand away from the group. Once this boss dies, the wind on the bridge is gone. When you wipe on the next boss, you’ll still have to run through the bridges and avoid the blue floaties, but you can mount up and you don’t have to worry about wind pushing you off or Tormented Spirits.

Horridon

Encounter Journal

Two tank fight. One tank for the dinosaur and one for the adds that spawn from the gates. The dinosaur will put a stacking debuff, Triple Puncture on its target that increases the damage of the next Triple Puncture. Paladins can bubble this debuff off, but otherwise you’ll have to switch tanks. The ideal time to swap is after you bring down a gate and move on to the next, which should occur around 8 to 9 stacks.

When you’re on the boss, you should save big defensive abilities for high stacks of the debuff. The first few times he casts Triple Puncture don’t hurt, but near the end it gets a little dangerous.

When you’re picking up adds, keep in mind that there are two spawn points: one at the gate and one from the stands above. The adds that jump down from the stands are usually a higher priority for dps so try to pick those up first. You will likely need every ranged pulling ability and control tool at your disposal. Adds are susceptible to silence and disarm effects.

When the Dinomancer spawns, he just needs to be interrupted and can be picked up by either tank.

• Gate 1 - Farraki: The basilisks cast a stun so interrupt them. They have low health. Avoid sand pools.
• Gate 2 - Gurubash: This group does a lot of raid damage. Dispel the poisons if you are able. Interrupt the poison volley.
• Gate 3 - Drakkari: Warriors and champions are untankable, so you can ignore them. Pick up Frozen Warlords (who jump down from the stands). Warlords have a Mortal Strike that hits very hard, so you might need cooldowns once two or more are hitting you. Avoid Frozen Orbs.
• Gate 4 - Amani: Bears cleave so face them away from raid members. Interrupt Chain Lightning and Fireball. Avoid Lightning Nova Totems.

War-God Jalak

Whoever is not tanking the dinosaur should pick this guy up. Once he dies, you just have the dinosaur left. The dinosaur deals more damage, so swap more often if your stacks fall off.

Brewmaster Specific

Here are the talents and skills I used to pick up adds.

• Chi Wave - For burst healing and ranged pulling.
• Ring of Peace - All the troll adds can be disarmed and silenced. Remember that you can cast this on your co-tank while they’re picking up adds, as well.
• Dampen Harm - Primarily for the Drakkari Warlords’ Mortal Strike, but also useful for high stacks of the boss’s debuff.
• Rushing Jade Wind - For picking up ranged adds and AoE dps. Chi Torpedo would probably also work for add pickup.
• Transcendence - Useful for escaping dangerous ground effects or returning to a gate to pick up a fresh wave of adds.
• If you’re having trouble surviving the dinosaur attacks, try reforging to mastery.
• Detox - The Gurubashi and Drakkari cast poison and disease on the raid and you have access to a cheap dispel. This really helps out the healers.
• Ox Statue - Place at the gate or in the middle of the raid so that you can AoE taunt off of it when adds spawn.

Council of Elders

Encounter Journal

Two tanks. One tank should be on Kazra (priestess) full time and one should be on Sul (sand guy) full time. Malakk (frost guy) should be tanked by the Sul tank most of the time, but swapped when Frigid Assault reaches around 10 stacks. The two tanks need to be on opposite sides of the circle in the middle of the room to give damage dealers more time to kill Loa Spirits summoned by the priestess.

Frigid Assault is a buff Malakk places on himself that gives his melee attacks a chance to afflict his target with the Frigid Assault debuff. After 15 stacks, the target will be stunned for 10 seconds (I was not able to remove this stun with any stun removal abilities). Avoidance abilities reduce your chance to be afflicted by one of these stacks, so save your dodge or parry active mitigation for this skill. You can also kite this boss to avoid stacks, if necessary.

You should try to organize an interrupt rotation on Sul’s Sand Bolt. The tank on Kazra should try to interrupt her Wrath of the Loa ability as well.

Tortos

Encounter Journal

This fight can probably be single-tanked, but it’s much easier to use two. One tank on the boss, one to pick up bats. The boss tank has to worry about Quake Stomp, which deals 30% of your health in damage, and Snapping Bite, which deals significant tank damage. Snapping Bite damage is reduced by armor. The bat tank needs to maximize their health pool (stamina trinkets, stamina flask, etc) to reduce their chances of dropping below 550k health and dying from Drain the Weak. The bats deal light damage when you’re above 550k, but will very likely kill you if you drop below that number.

For the boss tank, the only thing you really care about is minimizing damage taken by Snapping Bite. For the add tank, you have to pick up adds quickly and keep your health high. Self healing, AoE stuns, and ranged AoE tools are great for this.

Brewmaster Specific

• Charging Ox Wave - Useful for picking up bats. They often are at range and later in the fight they spawn too quickly to be able to use Leg Sweep on every pack.
• I found both Zen Sphere and Chi Wave useful so that choice is up to you.
• Glyph of Breath of Fire - For disorienting bats. I’m not 100% sure this was effective, but you don’t really have any other necessary glyphs on this fight so it’s worth a try.
• Clash - Another ranged stun for bats. Sometimes it’s hard to land because of the minimum range, but it’s really useful if you manage to catch the whole group with the stun.
• Use a target macro (/targetexact Vampiric Cave Bat) and Crackling Jade Lightning to find the bats. They spawn from the ceiling and slowly fly down, which makes it difficult to spot their angle of approach.
• I found Healing Elixirs more useful than Dampen Harm as the bat tank, though both are viable.

Trash Between Tortos and Megaera

Kill the 3 Eternal Guardians (transparent mogu) and click bells behind them. They are located around the edges of the busiest level of the cavern. The stone worms hit really hard so they should be prioritized. The mushrooms also deal damage once you step on them, so as a tank it’s your responsibility to step on all the mushrooms before the rest of the raid does.

Megaera

Encounter Journal

Two tank fight. There are basically two phases: in the first phase, there are two heads up and each one should have a tank; in the second phase, the heads can’t be tanked and deal raid-wide AoE damage.

Each head breathes in a cone and must be faces away from the raid. These breaths have different effects depending on the head:

• Venomous Head: Rot Armor. Nature damage that increases all damage taken. Stacks. Due to the debuff, deals increasing physical damage.
• Flaming Head: Ignite Flesh. Fire damage that leaves a DoT. Stacks. The DoT is quite a lot of magical damage and is dangerous at high stacks.
• Frozen Head: Arctic Freeze. Ice damage that has no side effects until you reach 5 stacks, at which point you’re stunned for 20 seconds. This boss deals the least damage because its debuff is only dangerous at 5 stacks.

You can swap tanks after 2 or so stacks of each debuff, but we found it easier to swap only after a head died and the phase changed or if dps was slow and the tank on blue was at 4 stacks (because 5 would leave them stunned for a long time).

At the end of the AoE healing phase, you have to note both tanks’ debuffs and be careful not to tank a head that you already have debuffs from. We also put me (a brewmaster) on the Red head as much as possible because I was much better at handling magic damage than my co-tank (a DK). Sometimes, due to debuffs remaining from the previous phase, we would let the DK take one stack of fire and then swap.

The dangerous damage in this fight is almost entirely magical, so glyph and talent in any way you can to reduce magic damage. I used stamina trinkets and flask. The non-tank phase is heavy on AoE damage, so you also want to bring raid heals and raid cooldowns.

Brewmaster Specifics

Depending on your raid’s dps, you can use a cooldown for nearly every breath. This is the priority I followed:

• Guard for every other breath.
• Diffuse Magic when Guard was not available.
• Fortifying Brew if Guard and Diffuse Magic weren’t available. Most effective on Green Head.
• Zen Meditation if Guard and Diffuse Magic weren’t available. Most effective on Red Head.
• If you have to skip a cooldown, do it on the first breath of a phase because that’s the easiest to survive with just self heals.

Here are some other tips:

• Glyph of Guard because of the heavy magic damage.
• Chi Burst is incredible for raid healing. You can afford to use it early as a self heal as well, but when the AoE phase is approaching you should save it to use on the raid.
• Transcendence and even Glyph of Transcendence are useful for quick tank swaps.

Trash between Megaera and Ji-Kun

The snails will one shot you at a moment’s notice, so don’t bother trying to damage them in melee range. You need to spread out for the spiders because their web attack hits everyone in a small range and it’s not good when the whole raid is webbed. The swarms of insects can’t be tanked and deal more damage the further away you are. There are roving pockets of pollution that will damage you if you’re caught inside.

Ji-Kun

Encounter Journal

For tanks, this fight is Blade Lord Ta’yak 2.0. Two tanks, swap after two stacks of Talon Rake. The boss casts Talon Rake immediately after Quills and Down Draft and it has a castbar, so keep an eye out and be prepared with active mitigation or cooldowns. She also applies Infected Talons but that DoT is fairly insignificant. Outside Talon Rake, the boss deals very little damage to the tank. The raid is usually very spread out, so any raid heals or cooldowns need to have a wide range and reduce physical damage to be effective.

Down Draft pushes you back very quickly and threatens to push you off the edge, so you need movement abilities to combat it. If you’re tanking after a Down Draft, you need to be the first player to return to melee range or else the boss will Talon Rake whoever gets there before you.

If you’re bored while not tanking the boss, you can soak up Feed Pools on the ground. They deal a fair amount of nature damage, so make sure this is okay with your healers or you have a magic-absorbing cooldown up first. This just helps keep the platform clear and is not necessary.

Durumu the Forgotten

Encounter Journal

Two tanks. Boss will not move from the middle of the room. Swap at around 5 stacks of the debuff Hard Stare or when your debuff has fallen off. In addition to hitting very hard, it applies two debuffs: Serious Wound, which reduces healing taken, and Arterial Cut, which is a stacking bleed that falls off when you’re healed to full. Once you reach 4 or 5 stacks you may need cooldowns to survive. Abilities that heal you quickly are useful, as are proactively-used absorbs. You have to rely on your healers to quickly top you off before the bleed becomes too dangerous, but try to help them out as much as possible.

The boss has a ridiculously huge hit box, so if you are the target of Lingering Gaze, try to run to max melee range and drop the void zone in the middle of the room. Also be aware of the purple stuff on the ground, Force of Will because it will knock you back and kill you.

When the rays of light appear, tanks will need to help soak them because three people need to be in each of the three beams. The boss still needs to be tanked in this phase.

During the Disintegration phase, stay out of the bad stuff on the ground (easier said than done). The boss is untankable in this phase, so this is a chance for your stacks of Serious Wound to fall off. The Disintegration maze can be difficult to master, but there are some things you can learn beforehand: 1. While the boss is charging his laser, purple sparklies will appear on the ground. These indicate the save zone you should head for, and you should go for the far edge and wait. 2. Especially early on in the phase, you have to be very patient and not move into dangerous Eye Sores if you worry about getting hit by the laser. A safe path will not appear until the laser looks like it’s about to reach you. Don’t panic.

After the first Disintegration phase, the boss will start to cast Life Drain. The current off tank should help soak these, and it’s best if you rotate 2 or 3 people in and out. You will get stunned once you intercept the beam, so the current main tank should avoid these. He will continue to cast this, even into the next Light Spectrum phase, so be aware that you need to intercept it even while soaking beams.

Primordius

Encounter Journal

Two tanks. Swap at around 6-8 stacks of Malformed Blood, except for the beginning where you want to swap at one stack so that you can send a tank out to kill oozes with the damage buff it provides. This debuff applies a stacking nature damage DoT that gets quite dangerous at high stacks, so magic or damage-over-time mitigation is helpful. Other than that, the boss will cleave with Primordial Strike so he needs to be pointed away from the raid.

Occasionally, ooze adds will leave behind purple Volatile Pools that slowly move toward the boss. They heal Primordius so they must never reach him, and you’ll have to slowly move the boss around the room to avoid them. Also, sometimes Primordius will not move quickly because he is casting, so keep him far enough away from the Volatile Pools that he won’t soak them up even if he stops to cast. To avoid spawning Volatile Pools very close to the boss, you should be careful not to kill oozes that are about to reach him and watch your cleave damage.

When you’re not currently tanking the boss, you should be killing Living Fluids and absorbing the red pools they drop. (Do not absorb the purple pools). Your goal is to absorb 5 pools so that you can become Fully Mutated before your Malformed Blood stacks fall off. Once you are fully mutated, dps the boss and taunt once Malformed Blood falls off.

Trash Between Primordius and Dark Animus

In Dark Animus’s room, you’ll see six mogu channeling. Three have glowing hands, and three have normal hands. One tank should pick up the glowing hand mogu and the other should pick up the remaining three and each group should be separated. The glowing-hand mogu will cast a spell that deals damage to everyone more than 30 yards away and the rest will cast a spell that deals damage to everyone less than 30 yards away. The raid should stack on the long-range, glow-hand, casters and kill them first before moving on to the short range casters. These spells can be silenced and interrupted.

Dark Animus

Encounter Journal

Two tank fight. Strategies vary greatly for this fight (especially for 25 man), but generally both tanks will pick up two small Animal Golems and pull them next to a critically damaged medium-sized “Large Anima Golem” for the dps to kill. When you have two small golems on you, they will deal significantly increased damage and it’s a good idea to use a big cooldown once they start attacking you. Be careful not to cleave too much damage into the critically damaged golem that you’re dropping anima into.

Once two small golems are killed and have given their anima to the nearest deactivated medium golem, taunt a spare small golem off of another player and pull it to the big Massive Anima Golem. This golem will activate and start attacking you once a single small golem has dropped its anima into it, but it will still need many more golems to be “full”, and you want it to be full before activating the boss. The Massive Anima Golem applies a tank swap debuff, Explosive Slam, and you should try to swap around 5 stacks. Explosive Slam is an AoE effect that is centered on the current tank, so the tanks should be more than 9 yards apart. To fill up the Massive Golem, taunt small golems off of other players and the raid should kill the small adds once they reach the Massive Golem. Once all the active smalls are dead, start pulling the Massive Golem to critically damaged golems and kill those when it’s near. Once the Massive Golem is full, kill the critically damaged golem closest to the boss and he will activate.

To be clear, the strategy should follow these guidelines:

1. Kill two small golems next to two critically damaged Large Golems (for a total of four)
2. Pull and kill smalls to a single Massive Golem and use that Massive Golem to soak up remaining active and some inactive smalls (for a total of 8). DPS should only ever kill smalls.
3. Once the Massive has a full 32 anima, activate the boss by killing a single small golem near it.

Both the Massive Golem and the Dark Animus will be active for the rest of the encounter, and your raid should put all its damage into the boss. Tanks will continue to swap around 5 stacks of the Explosive Slam debuff, and continue to stand at least 9 yards away from each other. The key ability the boss uses that tanks need to worry about is Anima Ring. He will spawn a circle of orbs around the main tank that quickly converge on the tank. A damage dealer should run in and soak some of those orbs, otherwise they will hit the tank and the boss will deal deadly melee damage to him. You can use Transcendence or other teleportation skills to escape it as well. You should also be aware of Interrupting Jolt, which the boss starts casting at 75 anima and will require your healers to stop casting for a few seconds.

Iron Qon

Encounter Journal

This is the most boring encounter for tanks since Cata, but it still requires two. Swap around 4 stacks of Impale, or whenever your stacks fall off. You can also easily single-tank it if you are a paladin or have a paladin raid member who’s specced into Clemency. Beyond the swap, you’ll have to do the same things as the rest of your raid: stack with your assigned group at the appropriate times for Unleashed Flame, avoid the elemental lines on the ground, and run away from tornadoes.

If the tornado phase is your most difficult one, you might want to talent into speed increases and teleports (though Transcendence, even glyphed, seemed to be too short range to work properly). The tornados deal nature damage and reduce healing done to you by 80%, so absorbs and magic-reduction cooldowns are useful.

If you want to spice things up a bit, you can try to game Vengeance while not tanking and stand in the elemental lines with a cooldown or absorb active. However, be aware that the storm spear lines will stun you after 3 stacks and the ice spear lines will reduce your attack speed by 25%.

Twin Consorts

Encounter Journal

Two tank fight. For the first phase, only Lu’lin, the blue one, is truly active. A minute or so into the fight she will spawn a Beast of Nightmare on her current target, which should prompt a tank swap. If anyone heals the afflicted tank, they will receive a stacking debuff, Corrupted Healing. This will kill your healers, so let them know to not heal you. Death Strike heals will not trigger this effect, but other heals like Expel Harm and Chi Wave will trigger it, so try to avoid them. Instead, use avoidance and absorbs to keep yourself alive while killing the add. Only the afflicted tank can target and kill their add.

Eventually, Lu’lin will disappear and Suen, the yellow one, will be the only tankable boss. She will apply the Fan of Flames debuff to her current target and you should tank swap around 3 stacks. While tanking, you need to pull her to the blue Ice Comets that spawn around the room to remove Blazing Radiance, a stacking damage buff the boss applies to herself. You can also try to stand in the Icy Shadows of the comet to reduce fire damage done to yourself (the application of Fan of Flames hurts quite a bit), but it’s not necessary.

After the day phase, both bosses will be tankable. Neither applies their tank swap mechanic (Beast of Nightmare or Fan of Flames ), so you shouldn’t need to swap and each tank should just stick to one boss. You will need to move Suen around to ice comets, like before. Lu’lin will occasionally become immune to damage and won’t need to be tanked, so if you’re tanking her you can put damage into Suen at this time.

Once Suen dies, the rest of the fight is just like the first phase, and she will start casting Beast of Nightmare again.

During the fight, if one of your teammates manages to summon aid from the Crane, a dozen or so spectral cranes will run across the room and you should try to put the boss’s in their path because they deal damage.

Lei Shen

Encounter Journal

Two tank fight. Each phase has a different tank swap mechanic. There are three phases separated by two intermissions. Besides the debuff swaps, tanks also need to be aware of most other mechanics as well as moving the boss at the right time.

Phase 1

Swap immediately after Decapitate is applied. The tank with the Decapitate debuff should run away once the swap has happened: the further away you run, the less damage you take from the impending Decapitate. You don’t have to go very far, 30 or 40 yards is fine, and you can return once you take the hit. The debuff also increases melee damage taken, so don’t bother swapping until the next application. The boss also puts bad stuff on the ground near melee, which is easy to avoid. If the blue circle denoting Thunderstruck is close to you (less than 20 yards away for tanks), you should move further away. It’s not a huge concern for tanks and it will usually be far enough away that you don’t have to worry. All of these skills will continue to happen throughout phase 1.

There are four pillars in the room, and each one gets charged by Lei Shen when he is near. Most raids will want to start on East and let it get the closest to full without actually filling, then go clockwise to south, west, and finally pushing the boss while at north. To do this, tanks need to be on their toes and move the boss at the right time. To fill up East pillar to around 90 energy, start moving toward South at 75-80 energy. For the other pillars, start moving around 65-70 energy so that they will be around 80 when the boss leaves their range.

Each pillar grants the boss a unique ability, though most of these abilities do not target tanks. The one you do need to look out for is South’s Overcharge, which stuns you unless you can run to the safe zone. The stun is short and dispellable, so if you are too far away to reach the safe zone you can just use some active mitigation to eat it or dispel the stun yourself. For West platform, you can help your raid soak Bouncing Bolt, which leaves a blue circle on the ground that needs to be intercepted before the projectile lands. If one of these projectiles hits the ground, you should pick up the adds that spawn.

Once the boss reaches 65%, the first intermission begins. The boss casts all of his special pillar abilities, but none of them effect tanks so you have it pretty easy. Your raid will likely assign two people to each corner and you should focus on intercepting Bouncing Bolts and taunting adds should people fail to intercept their bolts. You should also stand on top of nearby raid members should they be inflicted by Overcharge.

Phase 2

Much like Phase 1, but Decapitate is gone. Instead, you want to swap immediately after the application of Fusion Slash. Fusion Slash knocks you back a long distance so you should have your back to the center of the platform. If you get knocked off the platform, it’s a very embarrassing death that your raid will not be able to recover from. You will also have to look out for Lightning Whip, which is a cone effect that deals deadly damage. It’s easy to avoid, though it often occurs a few seconds before Fusion Slash so don’t put yourself in a place where you can get knocked off the platform.

There’s also Ball Lightning that spawns on all non-tanks. You don’t have to worry about it except that you should try not to stand on other people when it’s about to land (because it deals splash damage). These adds charge randomly and cannot be tanked.

The next intermission is much the same as the first, except it’s easier because you have one less quadrant to cover.

Phase 3

Tanks should swap around 10 to 12 stacks of Overwhelming Power. This ability is a stacking nature DoT, so any magic reduction is useful. The boss casts all of his abilities that were not specific to a pillar during this phase: Thunderstruck, Ball Lightning, and Lightning Whip. In addition, he will periodically spawn wind that threatens to push you off the platform. The wind is not terribly hard to master, just stay away from the edges.

Sunnier Note: This is a guest post from Rotund of Something Wicked, a Windwalker on one of my previous home realms, Whisperwind-US. If he gets enough encouragement he might start his own Windwalker blog, which we all know is something our damage dealing friends sorely need. If you would also would like to contribute to this blog as a guest, I would love to hear from you!

With every patch, things change. Classes get balanced, numbers get moved around, people get new toys, and everything feels a little weird as everyone rubs the sleep out of their eyes, or blows the dust off their add-ons if they are coming back to the game.

Things feel a little bit different this time around though from the monk perspective. Starting a fresh class is rough. Blizzard and the developers are trying new things and polishing, always polishing. Monks have been relatively unchanged as this expansion has progressed, so patch 5.2 has brought a lot of balancing and a lot of changes to help windwalker monks integrate into PVE and PVP.

Overall we are in the same place on the meters, but are better equipped to deal with more situations than the single target focused DPS that we were in Tier 14. Windwalkers were buffed in a lot of ways, but were also dealt some pretty hefty nerfs in others, but let’s get into the details:

The Good:

Windwalkers changed in some pretty significant ways that refine their own uniqueness, while allowing them to perform better in gameplay situations.

Combo Breaker: GONE!

Well, not quite.

The windwalker mastery that we were given at launch was intended to add some randomness to our rotation in addition to helping leveling and low geared monks by giving us a button to push when we were low on energy and chi. On paper that sounds like a good idea, but in practice it ended up being too random, and not very interesting as a mastery stat. Once gear started to scale, windwalkers could not get rid of it fast enough in favor of other stats.

In 5.2 this ability was integrated into the windwalker spellbook, but at a lowered chance to proc (12%); it still serves its original purpose, but now at a much more manageable rate:

Combo Breaker “You have a 12% chance when you Jab to cause your next Tiger Palm or Blackout Kick to cost no Chi within 15 sec.”

Enough about old news. Behold the new 5.2 mastery:

Bottled Fury “Grants an extra (1.6 + %Mastery) damage per stack of Tigereye Brew”

Tigereye Brew “For each 3 Chi you consume through use of abilities and attacks, you gain a charge of Tigereye Brew. Use Tigereye Brew to consume the charges, granting you (1.6 + %Mastery) increased damage for 15 sec. Tigereye Brew can stack up to 20 times, but can only consume up to 10 stacks at a time.”

In patch 5.1 Tigereye brew was a flat % increase per stack, stacked less often and less high. The new Tigereye Brew comes more fast, more furious. This addition will allow monks to throttle their damage as needed based on the encounter. This change makes mastery a much more useful and interesting stat for windwalkers, because it puts more of the control back into the players hands rather than relying on a chance for their rotations to be effective.

Storm, Earth, and Fire (heed my call!)

One of the major problems that confronted monks in Tier 14 was the lack of an effective cleave. Many encounters favored classes that could to damage to many targets at a time, while monks had limited options. We have Fists of Fury, but damage would be shared evenly between all targets, in addition to rooting you in place, and costing 3 chi.

Storm, Earth, and Fire “The Monk splits, summoning an elemental spirit to attack the target. The Monk can split into up to 2 elemental spirits at a time. The spirits will attack their targets and mirror your damaging abilities. However, for each elemental spirit summoned the Monk’s own damage will be reduced.

1 Spirit Summoned - Monk and spirit deal 60% of the Monk’s normal damage.
2 Spirits Summoned - Monk and spirits deal 45% of the Monk’s normal damage.”

Rather than glyphing or changing Fists of Fury, Blizzard gave monks a very cool tool to help with multi-target fights. I think it’s a very elegant ability that gives monks a unique advantage to use rather than giving monks a bigger hammer to seek out nails.

Chi and Zen, Windwalker Friends:

Our level 30 talents have always been a little neglected when it comes to Windwalkers. While they make fun noises and are bright and shiny, they didn’t really fill the role of a solid damage ability. Each option consumed chi, and didn’t do as much damage as we needed it to in order to offset that cost. This patch, each ability had its damage tweaked and it’s chi cost removed, both things that were needed in order to bring them into our rotation.

I mean, what good is it to have a talent that you don’t use? Am I right, or am I right? Whose blog is this anyways?

Ehem, sorry. Moving on.

The Not So Good:

Being monks, we understand balance. There is yin and yang. With every good there is an equal amount of discomfort that follows. While the Blizzard developers understand this, they decided upon some pretty hard hitting and last minute nerfs to our damage output:

Rising Sun Kick - “Causes all targets within 8 yards to take an increased 10% damage from your abilities for 15 sec.” (Was 15%)

Stance of the Fierce Tiger – “Increases damage done by 10%” (Was 20%)

Ouch.

Looking at the numbers, these two adjustments reduce our damage by 15%. Doing a little math:

Damage / (Old RSK) * (New RSK) / (Old Stance) * (New Stance)
= Damage / 1.2 *1.1 / 1.15 * 1.1
= 0.876

In reality, these adjustments brought our damage down by about 12.3%, still pretty significant.

Keep Calm, Keep Punching.

I will admit though, I was not happy when these were patched in. The sha of anger was strong in me. I was mostly upset at how these were not communicated to the players very effectively, and the reasons given for the nerfs did not make sense; Ghostcrawler tweeted that these adjustments were being made because of how the level 30 talents were performing. To me, that says that rather than fix the level 30 talents, they reached for the biggest hammer they could find and adjusted our damage with it.

After thinking it about it for a few days, and doing some math on my own it is not as big as a nerf as it feels. Remember, windwalkers got some pretty substantial buffs in terms of mastery and our level 30 talents being usable for damage. I sat down, wrote a spreadsheet, and did the math:

Patch 5.1: 116,677 DPS
Patch 5.2: 116,360 DPS

So ultimately, less than 1% nerf.

Does it feel bad, you bet. Does everyone want to be big and strong and blow up the meters, of course.

Let me explain what happened.

Blizzard gave us the opposite of the retribution paladin treatment; instead of taking away all of our burst they gave us more. They made us more reliant on timing our burst with our abilities in order to do effective damage. What’s different about this is that via the changes to our mastery we have more control over that burst, and we can throttle it as needed. The problem is that they lowered our baseline damage to compensate, and maybe a bit too much and too bluntly. Last patch we could provide a steady stream of damage to a boss with not much variation, but now the peaks are higher and the valleys are lower.

Lots of monks are complaining at the moment that they don’t do enough damage and can’t compete with other melee in raids. Believe me, I empathize. I was sat on our realm first Lei Shen kill, because the other melee in our raid were just outpacing me, so the answer was to sit low damage melee for ranged. That stung, but I knew the officers were right.

Are monks undertuned, or are the other classes overtuned? That’s the question. Don’t freak out, or threaten to quit the game. Look at your numbers, do some experiments, give blizzard developers some good data to work with so that they can adjust us to where they think we need to be.

I wrote a spreadsheet that helps me make sense of my stats, and estimate my own personal DPS targets and what stats I should be using. I’ll leave a link to it here and hopefully you can find it useful too:

Windwalker Spreadsheet v5.2

Keep calm, keep punching.

-Rotund (Roh-tund)

A new raid, new dailies, and a couple of Brewmaster changes are coming in today’s patch.

Table of Contents

1. New or Changed Skills
2. Mastery Changes
3. Tier 15 Bonuses
4. Weak Auras
5. Throne of Thunder
6. New Factions and Rewards
7. Loot
8. To Do List

New or Changed Skills

Miscellaneous Changes

New! Nimble Brew. Removes all stun, fear, and root effects, and reduces the duration of those effects if they are reapplied by 60% for 6 seconds. It has a 2-minute cooldown.

This may sound like a PvP ability, but Brewmasters are incredibly susceptible to stuns and this ability deserves a spot on your bars so that you can break out occasionally. Stuns, fears, and roots are surprisingly common in raids.

Path of Blossoms has been removed.

I’m sad to see this ability go, even those I only used it a handful of times for pre-pulling and kiting. I loved dropping little flowers on the ground. Maybe you can put Nimble Brew in its place.

Paralysis is now a physical, non-magical effect, can no longer be dispelled, grounded or reflected, and its base range has been increased to 20 yards. The paralysis effect lasts 40 seconds (was 30 seconds) for non-player targets, 4 seconds when used against other players, and lasts 50% (was 200%) longer when used from behind a target.

The most important change is that Paralysis had a 20 yard range by default, so you can use it from range without needing a talent. The talent that increased range of Paralysis has been removed.

Glyph of Path of Blossoms is now Glyph of Paralysis. This glyph causes the Monk’s Paralysis ability to remove all damage-over-time effects on the target.

My Paralysis always gets broken by DoTs. Though I’m not sure it’s worth a major glyph spot to fix.

Spear Hand Strike, used on a target that’s facing the Monk silences them for 2 seconds (was 4 seconds).

A slight nerf to the silence aspect of this ability, though in PvE it’s mostly used just as an interrupt. Four seconds was really nice for pulling those caster mobs into the group, but two is enough to position them.

Tiger’s Lust no longer has a Chi cost.

Tiger’s Lust is that Level 15 talent that Brewmasters rarely took because we do not often have spare chi just hanging around, and a sprint is only so useful when you have a multitude of movement abilities to begin with. Now that this talent is free, it’s much more competitive with Momentum and Celerity. It can still be cast on others, though usually I like to be selfish.

Dampen Harm can now be used while stunned, and its cooldown will now begin when used, not when the effect ends.

This is not a terribly game-breaking change, but the cooldown starting when the ability is used rather than when the effect ends makes it much more predictable when planing how to time cool downs for a specific fight. Also, you can take advantage of the cooldown by using Dampen Harm a minute or so before you pull, giving you more opportunities to use it (though the odds of getting hit by an attack that consumes it are still pretty low).

Healing Elixirs now heals the Monk for 15% of maximum health (was 10%).

It’s no secret that I have a soft spot for Healing Elixirs. It’s not very strong, but is much more versatile than Dampen Harm and Diffuse Magic. I have around 600k health in a raid, which means Healing Elixirs will heal me for around 90k. That’s pretty significant, especially at low vengeance, and with four pieces of tier 15 we will have even more opportunities to trigger it. My general conclusions on Tier 75 talents remain the same: use Dampen Harm for fights that deal significant burst damage, Diffuse Magic for fights that deal predictable magic damage, and Healing Elixirs for everything else.

Chi Torpedo now deals 15% more damage.

Chi Torpedo is another talent that brewmasters rarely take. Unfortunately, a damage buff is still not enough to make this talent competitive for us tanks. Xuen still deals much more single target/cleave damage and Rushing Jade Wind is still better at AoE damage. I have used Chi Torpedo before to help pick up adds or for fights where I don’t need any AoE dps, but a small damage buff isn’t enough to make me use it more often.

Ox Statue: The damage requirement to activate Sanctuary of the Ox has been increased by 100%.

Sadly, this is the one major nerf in this list. We now have to deal twice as much damage to activate our raid utility bubble. Our Ox Statue shields were incredibly effective where there was constant raid damage, and I was getting close to the healers without really trying on fights like that. However, there are many fights where a shield on a random player doesn’t help at all. Overall, this isn’t a nerf to cry about, only to be vaguely sad about.

Windwalker Monk PvP 2-piece bonus now also increases the range of Keg Smash.

I don’t PvP anymore, but it is nice to see that Brewmasters who run flags or whatever can now benefit from PvP bonuses.

Level 60 Talents

These skills have been reevaluated so that Leg Sweep is no longer the only reasonable choice for Brewmasters.

New! Ring of Piece. Forms a sanctuary around the friendly target, causing all nearby enemies within 8 yards to be disarmed and nearby enemy players unable to auto-attack. In addition, enemies who cast a harmful spell within the ring become silenced for 3 sec. Ring of Peace lasts for 8 sec. 45 second cooldown.

This new talent replaces Deadly Reach, the talent that increased the range on our crowd control ability, Paralysis. Note that the description specifies that “nearby enemy players” will be unable to auto-attack, implying that npc enemies will not be effected. This skill will still be useful in PvE as an AoE silence and disarm that lasts 8 seconds. Note that disarm typically only works on non-boss humanoids with visible weapons and silence only effects non-boss casters (usually). It’s a similar effect to Leg Sweep, except it’s a longer duration with a less predictable effect.

Changed! Charging Ox Wave now has a 30-second cooldown (was 60 seconds).

This modification makes Charging Ox Wave competitive. Now it has a shorter duration stun when compared to Leg Sweep, but a shorter cooldown to match. It also continues to be ranged and I look forward to using this ability for kiting. The downside of this ability is that you have to aim it well.

Level 30 Talents

All our healing talents have had their numbers adjusted and chi cost removed.

Chi Wave now does 100% more damage and 14% less healing, and no longer costs Chi, and has a 15-second cooldown.

It’s understandable that the healing was nerved because this skill was absolutely ridiculous at high vengeance. The nice bonuses of Chi Wave continue to be the same: good at healing spread out raid members and the smart heal is decent for healing yourself. Also a nice ranged dps tool. Unless you need to save it up for something, it will be most useful to use this ability on cooldown.

Zen Sphere now has a limit of 2 (was 1), detonates when either the recipient reaches 35% health or the Zen Sphere is dispelled, no longer costs Chi, and has a 10-second cooldown. Its periodic damage has been increased by 22%, periodic healing has been reduced by 61%, its detonation healing has been reduced by 62%, and detonation range has been increased by 40%.

Zen Sphere has a 10 second cooldown with a 16 second duration, so you can keep it up on yourself at all times if you want. Note that you can no longer detonate Zen Sphere on command: it will only detonate when certain conditions are met. The heal is pretty small, but constant should you need a HoT, and the detonation is alright AoE healing on a short cooldown.

Chi Burst now does 69% more healing, no longer costs Chi, and has a 30-second cooldown.

Chi Burst is now a mini-raid healing cooldown that excels when the raid is stacked. If you can position yourself so that the raid is between you and your target, it will be a good chunk of healing. Unfortunately, that can be difficult for a tank to accomplish. It will be useful for us in the right circumstances, but not as versatile as Chi Wave or Zen Sphere. The 30 second cooldown limits its uses as a ranged tool.

I am working on a set of Weak Auras for the new healing skills, since they will become a much more integral part of our tanking rotation. If you’re having trouble deciding, go with Chi Wave. My analysis could likely change once I get a chance to use this in a real raiding environment, but for now that skill looks the best for tanks.

Mastery Changes

Mastery: Elusive Brawler now provides 25% more Stagger per Mastery rating.

This is a slight buff to our mastery, but not significant enough to change your gearing. If you need a refresher: all our secondary stats are good, but each excels in a different environment. Haste is a good all-around stat that gives you more chances to use your Chi-consuming active mitigation. Crit is good against physical damage and reducing total damage taken. Mastery is good against physical burst and smoothing. You can read more about it here. If you’re not sure which priority to follow start with this: Hit/expertise to cap > Haste > Crit > Mastery.

Tier 15 Bonuses

Our tier 14 bonuses are pretty good, but worth dropping for tier 15, once we get it. Tier 15 bonuses emphasize Stagger, so hopefully you’re pretty good at using Purifying Brew by now.

Two Piece

After Elusive Brew expires, the amount of damage you Stagger is increased by 12%. This effect lasts 1 sec per stack of Elusive Brew consumed.

If you use Elusive Brew at 3 stacks, you will have increased dodge for 3 seconds and then increased Stagger for 3 seconds. The buff itself is called ”Staggering”. You can no longer use Elusive Brew while the dodge buff is active, which has the added benefit of never having to worry about overwriting a Staggering buff. If you cancel Elusive Brew early, then Staggering will appear immediately after it is canceled. And in case you were wondering, you can have both Elusive Brew and Staggering active.

Generally, this bonus shouldn’t change the way you Elusive Brew. Just keep popping it when you want to smooth your damage intake or avoidable special attacks are coming up. A dodged attack is still more avoided damage than a staggered attack, so don’t worry about “wasting” the Staggering buff by having Elusive Brew up at the same time.

Now, it is possible that there will be abilities that are not avoidable but are staggerable (like Blade Lord’s Overwhelming Assault). In these cases we might want to time Elusive Brew so that it ends right before this theoretical special ability or to cancel it prematurely so that the Staggering buff can help us survive. Time will tell if this is a helpful tactic.

The awesome benefit of this bonus is the health smoothing it provides. One of the downsides (if we can even call it that) of high avoidance is that when you do get hit, you get hit pretty hard and your healers might be taken by surprise. This bonus smoothes that damage we don’t avoid by pushing more of it into the stagger debuff, thus making us easier to heal and less likely to die from burst.

Four Piece

Each time you take damage from Stagger, you have a 10% chance to make your next Purifying Brew cost no Chi.

This buff is called ”Purifier”, and it’s pretty straight-forward. The free Purifying Brew will be available for 15 seconds. If the proc appears, you have the choice of using it immediately or saving it for a dangerous near-future event. In most cases, you should use it sooner rather than later because it does not stack and you don’t want to waste procs.

Soon I will make some Weak Auras to track Staggering and Purifier buffs.

Weakauras

As mentioned a few times already, I’ll soon have an updated set of Weak Auras for our healing talents and our tier 15 bonuses. I’ve tested my current auras on the PTR and they function correctly, so you shouldn’t need to update. However, if you do find an error please let me know. Lots of brewmasters depend on my stagger aura and I can’t let them down!

Throne of Thunder

Upon logging into 5.2, you will get a quest that leads you to the new quest zone and raid. (I didn’t know this, and after spending some time searching the internet for how to get to the Isle of Thunder, I noticed I had a new quest in my log that showed the way. So maybe telling you will save time.)

If you want a quick walkthrough of the new bosses, check out Tank Raiding’s boss Tips and Tricks. I haven’t done any fights yet, but I’ll post a Quick and Dirty guide once I get the chance.

New Factions and Rewards

There are two new factions in 5.2: Kirin Tor Offensive (Alliance) / Sunreaver Onslaught (Horde) and Shado-Pan Assault.

If you are a raider, you’ll want to focus on Shado-Pan Assault and spend your valor there. Shado-Pan Assault reputation is gained only in the Throne of Thunder. They offer ilevel 522 gear in every slot, starting with a neck at neutral (which isn’t a bad place to start if you have 1250 VP). Here are the items from Shado-Pan Assault that look good for Brewmasters:

• Neutral - Neck - Flanker’s Battletags
• Friendly - Ring - Seal of the Shado-Pan Assault
• Friendly - Tank Trinket - Steadfast Talisman of the Shado-Pan Assault
• Friendly - Agi Trinket - Vicious Talisman of the Shado-Pan Assault
• Friendly - Wrist - Willow-Weave Armbands
• Honored - Hands - Daggerfinger Clutches
• Honored - Legs - Legguards of Hidden Knives
• Honored - Back - Longshot Forestcloak
• Revered - Waist - Darkfang Belt
• Revered - Chest - Roofstalker Shadowwrap
• Exalted - Shoulder - Wallwalker Spaulders

If you cannot or do not raid much, the Sunreaver Onslaught or Kirin Tor Offensive will unlock through daily quests and offer 476-496 loot. This gear is better than Tier 14 LFR, but not by much, and Tier 15 LFR beats it.

• Honored - Waist - Skumblade-Tooth Girdle / Skumblade-Tooth Girdle
• Revered - Back - Thunder-Chaser Cloak / Thunder-Chaser Cloak
• Exalted - Ring - Refurbished Band of Jin / Refurbished Band of Jin
• Exalted - Dinosaur - Reins of the Golden Primal Direhorn / Reins of the Crimson Primal Direhorn

The New Raid and Loot

Here are my preliminary gear rankings. As usual, I’m lazy and use wowhead to rank most things for me.

• Head
• Neck
• Shoulders
• Cloak
• Chest
• Bracers
• Gloves
• Belt
• Legs
• Boots
• Rings

Weapons and trinkets need to be evaluated manually. Generally, sha touched weapons are very good for us tanks and it might take a while to find a decent upgrade. If you care more about dps, than you can upgrade sooner. On the bright side, this tier has no shortage of agility weapons: 2 fists, 1 axe, 2 maces, 1 polearm, 2 staves.

I haven’t put much thought into ranking the new trinkets, but be sure to check my Brewmaster Gear List in a few weeks. For now, here’s a preliminary list:

• Talisman of Bloodlust – This looks like it will be our best general use trinket.
• Rune of Re-Origination – If this was an on-use trinket I’d be much more excited. As it is now, for a standard geared brewmaster it will raise your haste and lower your crit and mastery.
• Renataki’s Soul Charm – This trinket has good stats, but with expertise as the static stat, you will depend on it for your expertise cap. I like to be flexible with my trinkets.
• Bad Juju – Mastery remains situational, but the proc is good and you can always reforge to a stat you like better. (I just like the voodoo gnomes.)
• Soul Barrier – I like this trinket because both the static stat and the on-use effect increase your resistance to burst. Stamina is always good for fights that require a bigger health pool and even though 11,206 absorption doesn’t sound like much, it contributes quite a bit to smoothing out bursty damage.
• Fortitude of the Zandalari – Another burst reduction trinket. The temporary health increase is pretty standard. Not exciting, fairly useful.
• Ji-Kun’s Rising Winds – I like the automatic heal, though this is another trinket with expertise, and that makes it difficult to swap out trinkets.
• Delicate Vial of the Sanguinaire – With Elusive Brew, we can have a very high dodge rate, and I imagine this trinket scales well on multi-target encounters (where you are getting many chances to dodge), but the 4% chance to proc means you’ll see it two or three times a fight (at least according to my logs).
• Vicious Talisman of the Shado-Pan Assault – Another stat with a cap, which means if you use this trinket you can’t swap it out. Besides that, it’s a strong, if boring, trinket.
• Steadfast Talisman of the Shado-Pan Assault – Mastery again, and this time paired with dodge, which is a conflict of interest. It’s a good choice if you get to that reputation level, have the VP, and don’t have anything better yet.

To Do List

1. Update addons.
2. Put new Nimble Brew on your bars.
3. Reevaluate level 30 talents: do you want the HoT from Zen Sphere, the ranged heal and attack from Chi Wave, or the mini-raid heal cooldown from Chi Burst?
4. Reevaluate level 60 talents: if the adds can be disarmed or silenced, Ring of Piece; if you need a AoE stun on a short cooldown, Charging Ox Wave; if you need a long AoE stun, Leg Sweep.
5. Do new dailies, at least to unlock the new factions and find the Thunder Isle.
6. Buy valor neck from Shado Pan Assault (if you have enough valor and you want it).
7. Buy a new gem socket from Wrathion if you spent yours on a weapon you’ve already replaced. Start new legendary quest line. The tank meta is totally awesome!

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.

In the last year, the biggest change was moving my blog from Blogger to my own hosted site. The name changed from “A Sunnier Bear” to “Sunnier’s Art of War”, and I gained the ability to tweak minute aspects of my site. I’ve also rerolled, transferring my focus from bear druids to Brewmasters.

I miss some things about my old site, like that banner, but overall I’m happier with moving my blog and focus.

In the future, I’d like to push out boss guides incrementally so that I’m more likely to actually publish them. If I really wanted to increase my viewership I should also be more active in forums, but we all know that won’t happen. I also want to introduce some cool dynamic styling in my guides because plain old HTML is so 2005, but I have to learn how to do that first.

And now for some stats for the last year (actually the last 11 months, because that’s when I swapped over to Google Analytics):

Most Popular Posts

1. Brewmaster Guide
2. Guild Wars 2: How to Get To Arah, Complete Orr, and the Conclusion of Your Personal Story (a triumph in naming your posts after what people google)
3. Brewmaster Weak Auras
4. The Quick and Dirty Guide to Tanking Mogu’shan Vaults Normal
5. An Early Guide to the Will of the Emperor Dance (a guide I now regret posting because I still get lots of comments about how bad I am because I got hit a lot, with no one looking at the date of the post or realizing this dance has one more step than the one on live)

Most Popular Traffic Sources that Aren’t Google

1. MMO-Champion Forums
2. WoW Insider
3. Restokin
4. Elitist Jerks

Most Popular Search Terms

1. “sunnier’s art of war”
2. “brewmaster tanking”
3. “sunnier bear”
4. “brewmaster stat priority”
5. “guild wars 2 arah”

My Personal Favorite Posts

1. Brewmasters for Beginners: The Step by Step Learning Program
2. A Sunnier Musing: Healing Elixirs
3. Some Quick Brewmaster Tanking Tips
4. Things I Found in China that Reminded Me of MoP
5. Guild Wars 2: An Interesting Relationship with Femininity

Number of Published Posts

From March 2011-March 2012: 70
From March 2012-March 2013: 61
Total: 131

Posts per Week

1.17

Number of Subscribers According to Google Reader

A Sunnier Bear RSS: 125
Sunnier’s Art of War RSS: 20

Browsers of Visitors

And to see how many miserable people are stuck using the bad versions of IE where my website looks horrible:

Operating Systems of Visitors

I’m really surprised to see that iOS is so popular. I hope my site doesn’t look horrible on mobile Safari because I can’t test it.

Countries of Visitors

Flow

I find visitor flow charts really interesting. It documents where users go after they first land on the page. People that come to my site directly are usually the ones to investigate additional pages. People that come from google tend to land on my Brewmaster Guide and then check out the other links I have in my navigation bar (resources, weak auras, etc). My average bounce rate (i.e. the percent of visitors who leave my site after the initial landing) is 78%.

Pageview Growth

I feel pretty good about my growth, especially given that I moved my website, rerolled to a less popular class, and have been pretty bad about keeping up my most popular type of post: encounter tanking guides. Growth has been stagnant the last three months, but that will likely go up once 5.2 is released and I post more Quick and Dirty guides.

What Sunnier Looked Like in March 2012

What Sunnier Looked Like in March 2013

Number of Twitter Followers

March 2012: 286
March 2013: 555

Number of Tweets

March 2012: 2,226
March 2013: 4,167

Number of YouTube Channel Views

March 2012: 25,000
March 2013: 58,042

Number of YouTube Subscribers

March 2012: 39
March 2013: 109

Number of Emails to my Blog Address

March 2013: 32
March 2013: 70

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.

Amethyst	Black Sea	Clear Sky
Deep Turquoise	Midnight Ice	Midnight Sky
Spring Dew	Thistle	Turquoise

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.

Step 1: Download and Install ReforgeLite

1. Go to the Curse download page and click “Download Now”.
2. Unzip the file and copy it to your World of Warcraft addons directory.
3. To open ReforgeLite, log into the game and talk to a reforge NPC or type /reforge.

Step 2: Configure

You only need to do this once, and then you can modify it slightly to change your priorities.

Disable items you don’t want to reforge, like trinkets or gear that’s shared across specs, by clicking on the icon on the left side. I prefer to reforge trinkets manually because I swap them out all the time and I don’t want my to depend on my trinket for hit or exp cap.

Load the Brewmaster Preset.

Change target level to Raids(+3), or whatever target you’re using this gear for.

Set Caps. The default should already have these defined, but it’s good to double check. I have hit capped at 2550 and expertise capped at 5100. If you use elixirs to reach these caps, subtract the value of the elixir (750 for non-alchemists, 990 for alchemists) from whatever cap you want to reach.

Change the priority of the remaining stats using the up and down arrows. I move Haste, Crit, and Mastery up and down in priority depending on what fight I’m preparing for. In this example, my priority is haste > crit > parry > dodge > mastery, so after reaching hit and expertise caps, ReforgeLite will try to reforge the remaining gear to haste, and if the item already has haste it will reforge to crit, and if the item already has crit and haste it will reforge to parry, etc.

If you want, you can check the “Advanced mode” box and define numerical stat weights and whether you want to go slightly over or or slightly under hit/exp caps. I personally prefer the non-advanced mode because it’s easier to change priorities on the fly.

Step 3: Time to Actually Reforge

Click on the “Calculate” button. This can take a few seconds because it’s trying to find the most efficient way to reforge your gear so that you meet caps without going too far over, and then maximizing your stat priorities.

Once it’s done calculating, the table below the button will update with the changes to your stats. Glance over the numbers and double check that they look they way you want (i.e. your hit and expertise are near caps, your favorite secondary is high).

Now click “Show”. A smaller window will appear with the reforge plan and cost. Any item that is unchecked will be reforged. This is a good way to make sure you’re not reforging any items you don’t want to reforge, like trinkets.

Click “Reforge” on the Show window and it will run through all your gear and reforge according to the plan.

And we’re done! If you made any changes you want to remember (like caps or stat priorities), save the reforge profile using the “Save” button at the very top. If you’re a stickler for perfection, you’ll be reforging every time you get an upgrade or want to change your stat priority. Luckily, ReforgeLite takes the time sink out of the equation.

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.

Expertise

Sunnier wrote a really good post with regards to expertise so I am not going to go into it here, what I will add is that it is very important you get your head around there no longer being a soft and hard cap on expertise, you either have 15% expertise or you have a chance of the ability you used not hitting and not generating chi. Now, pushing hard into any of the stats below may mean you sacrificing some of your expertise until you have higher levels of gear. This means that you will have to get used to good chi and cooldown management as if you miss with a Keg Smash you need to be able to survive without the 1 or 2 chi it would have generated long enough to generate them again.

Haste

Haste increases how quickly you attack and how quickly your energy regenerates. This means that you will be able to use abilities like Jab more and generate more chi thus enabling you to use abilities like Blackout Kick more. Due to the increased attack speed you will also gain extra charges of Elusive Brew, gain extra guard procs from your Ox statue, and generate more healing spheres through Gift of the Ox.

Pros

The extra energy you gain means that you will easily have Shuffle up 100% of the time. If you make a mistake spending your chi then you will soon have the energy to generate more. In addition, you deal extra DPS which is always a nice edition to a raid.

Cons

Energy Capping. Energy constantly generates up to 100, however if you already have 100 energy you can no longer gain energy, so any you would have generated is now being wasted; this is called energy capping. If you have high haste then your energy bar will fill much faster; this means you need to be able to press abilities more and understand what is on and off cooldown. It also means that if you use an ability like Spinning Crane Kick you will need to have lower energy as you cast it because it channels for 2 seconds and during that time you will continue to gain energy. Due to this, finding time to use Tiger Palm can actually be difficult! Additionally, hits will do more damage to you. Monks have the lowest natural mitigation of damage of all tank classes – we have the lowest armour and our mastery only redistributes our damage via stagger meaning we still have to deal with it. Due to this you will need to be able to anticipate large hits with abilities like Guard to help take the pressure of your healers.

Mastery

Mastery dictates how much damage is absorbed by stagger; our stagger amount is a combination of mastery and Shuffle, which adds 20%. For instance if a boss hits us for 100,000 damage and we have 10% mastery and shuffle up we would take 70,000 of that damage immediately and then stagger 30,000 as a DoT. The important part of stacking mastery is that you have to use Purifying Brew effectively. If you don’t use Purifying Brew you will still take all that damage it’s just that some of it will be delayed.

Pros

Bosses won’t hit you as hard! It’s fairly simple but very important. At higher content levels this becomes vital to survival. Smoother health is key to your healers. Brewmasters, due to the way they work, have very up and down health. They have high avoidance but if something hits them it hits them hard. You will often see when a monk is tanking that they will have periods where they take virtually no damage and then there health suddenly drops as their Guard and Elusive Brew runs out. Mastery really helps stop that from happening and can help you feel calm whilst under pressure. You can use Tiger Palm as a filler when you are waiting for your energy to rise so won’t have to worry about the buff for your guards.

Cons

Due to lower energy generation you will need to manage your buffs, such as Shuffle, a lot more. You will also need to be able to know when abilities like Keg Smash are coming off cooldown as you will want to use them as soon as possible to generate more chi. You will have to purify more due to the higher amount of damage staggered. This is also one of the reasons mastery isn’t rated as highly as it should be as it doesn’t actually mitigate any damage it rather buffers it into a dot. If you don’t purify it then effectively you’ve wasted your stagger ability.

Crit

Higher Crit rating means you Crit more, a fairly simple concept. This has two effects on a Brewmaster; the first is that you will do more damage which in turn will produce more guards on your raid through your Ox statue. The second and more important effect is that every time you Crit with a normal (white) attack you will gain charges of Elusive Brew, meaning that you have this powerful cooldown on demand more of the time. I have met Brewmaster tanks who have stacked Crit and swear by it but it does require a lot of knowledge of the fights you are tanking and being able to micromanage your resources very well. Elusive brew should generally be used between 9 and 14 stacks and when used can give you a total of up to 80% avoidance, which is phenomenal.

Pros

As stated above the total avoidance you can gain with elusive brew is around 80% depending on gear, this means you have around a 1 in 25 chance of taking 2 hits one after another. With high enough Crit rating you can keep Elusive Brew at incredibly high uptimes meaning your total avoidance for a fight will be incredibly high.

Cons

There is an element of RNG to using this system, even with such high avoidance there is a chance you will be hit two or even three times in a row. It is very unlikely but so is winning the lottery and people still play that. Once again due to lower energy generation you will need to manage your buffs such as Shuffle a lot more. You will also need to be able to know when abilities like Keg Smash are coming off cooldown as you will want to use them as soon as possible to generate more chi. Also, as with stacking haste, when you do get hit you will get hit hard so you will need to be able to use abilities such as guard after taking a large hit and heal yourself with expel harm to help take the pressure off your healers.

Conclusions

Those are the main stats that are recommended for stacking, again there aren’t really any right answers. I’ve spoken to monks who swear by them all and they’ve all been very good tanks. Various fights can also benefit more from some stats than others, for instance on Lei Shi almost all damage is magical so neither Crit or Mastery are overly useful whereas on Will of the Emperor you have time during the combo strikes to hit the boss and stack up Elusive Brew and chi meaning that Haste and Crit aren’t really as useful. I have been as low as 3000 haste and have easily kept Shuffle up and been able to purify whilst even being able to throw out the occasional Chi Burst to assist the healers, so don’t panic that you will suddenly find yourself with no energy or chi. My two pieces of personal advice are if you are new to tanking and monks then go for haste and expertise to begin with. It gives you the most room for mistakes whilst you get used to how the class works.

The second thing to do is ask your healers how they find healing you compared to other tanks. I stacked haste during all normal mode progression and then switched to mastery when we moved to Heroic Will of the Emperor because, even with high avoidance, when I was hit I was hit hard and my health would drop like a stone which put an awful lot of pressure on my healers. Remember, it is your job to try and mitigate as much damage from yourself as possible. Everything you can do to reduce incoming damage means that your raid will be having an easier time.

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++.

Dear Guard,

Love,
Sunnier

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.

Listen Here

More thoughts:

1. I’ve seen one episode of “It’s Always Sunnier in Philadelphia” out of obligation to my name, but everything was out of context so I didn’t understand much.
2. My anxiety-purifying brew of choice was some cherry wheat beer. As a pandaren brewmaster, dumb jokes and alcohol are always acceptable.
3. A few years ago when I was in my podcast-maniac time of life (lots of bus commuting), I always wanted to be a guest on a podcast and thought it’d be terrifying. Now I’ve been on three and it’s like “dude, what’s the big deal, it’s just saying the stuff I talk about all the time except now it’s getting recorded.”
4. My mom, dad, and brother listened to this one. They were pretty excited because I told them this one would be a little more understandable for non-WoW players than my previous interviews. My mom fell asleep halfway through because it was past her bedtime. I forgive her.

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.

1. The Basics: Five Mans
2. Understanding Your Tools: LFR
3. Situational Abilities: Raids and Beyond

The Basics: Five Mans

Below I lay out the stages for brand new brewmasters to learn. Try to stick with one stage at a time. Once you feel comfortable with one stage, move on to the next and incorporate more complexity. To practice, you can start out in a level appropriate 5 man (by yourself) and pull the first pack of trash. This is a really good way to get acquainted with your skills in a low pressure environment. You might have to zone out or die, but no one is there to judge you, and you’ll learn from your mistakes quickly. Once you feel confident, queue for a normal 5 man and test your skills with a team. (You’ll also do just fine queueing for a normal 5 man right away, but I know some people, like myself, would rather not risk being judged right away.)

It might also be helpful to install a few of my Brewmaster Weak Auras, which are basically compact little addons that will display prominent skills, buffs, and more on your interface.

Talents

You can always change these talents around if theres something you feel more comfortable with. The only talent that I’d call a “must have” is Leg Sweep, though that too will have worthy contenders in the next patch.

• Tier 1: Momentum or Celerity
• Tier 2: Zen Sphere (it’s not a big deal at this stage because you won’t be using heals much, though Zen Sphere is the most straight forward choice)
• Tier 3: Ascension (you can choose the others, but Ascension will make Chi management easier)
• Tier 4: Leg Sweep (to control damage from AoE groups)
• Tier 5: Healing Elixirs (the cooldowns on this tier are extremely situational, and Healing Elixirs is much easier to utilize)
• Tier 6: Invoke Xuen (It’s a good cooldown, both defensive and offensive, and easy to use)

Glyphs

None of the brewmaster glyphs are necessary, and most are situational at best. These three are good starter glyphs:

• Glyph of Breath of Fire
• Glyph of Spinning Crane Kick
• Glyph of Zen Meditation

Stage 1

Ranged pull with Dizzying Haze, open up with Leg Sweep to stun all your enemies, then launch into this rotation:

1. Generate Chi by using Keg Smash and Jab.
2. Consume Chi by using Blackout Kick. Try to keep this buff up all the time.
3. Expel Harm when you need a heal.

These spells make up your core rotation, so get used to using them. In the future, these abilities will become second nature.

Stage 2

All of the above, and add:

1. Elusive Brew when you have 6 to 15 stacks.
2. Guard when it’s available.

When you work in these skills, you’ve got the basics of our active mitigation down.

Stage 3

In addition to the above, try to wiggle your monk side to side to pick up little green Gift of the Ox orbs when you need additional heals. AoEing generates a ton of these.

Review

At this point, you should know the basics, and can tank normal dungeons and probably even heroic dungeons. To recap, here are the skills you need to keep track of:

Spend energy on:

1. Keg Smash, whenever it’s available.
2. Expel Harm when you need a heal.
3. Jab.

Spend Chi on:

1. Blackout Kick. The buff it provides should be active almost all the time.
2. Guard whenever it’s available.

Other things to look out for:

1. Start AoE pulls with Dizzying Haze and Leg Sweep.
2. Elusive Brew when you have many stacks.
3. Pick up Gift of the Ox orbs for healing.

Homework

Try to survive the first pull of Gate of the Setting Sun (or another normal 5 man) or go run a level-appropriate dungeon (normal or heroic) with a group.

Understanding Your Tools: LFR

Now that we’ve warmed up our tanking muscles, it’s time to learn how to use all of our tools intelligently. Most of our skills are situational and will be the most effective if we use them at the right time (instead of whenever they’re off cooldown).

Stage 1

Use Guard intelligently, instead of on cooldown. Think of it as a traditional defensive cooldown like Shield Wall, except it has a short cooldown and a resource cost.

Here are some good situations to use it:

• If the boss is about to use a big ability, like a dragon breath.
• If your health is dipping low.
• If your healer is unable to heal you (like if they are stunned).

Stage 2

Use Elusive Brew intelligently. Because dodge isn’t a reliable way to reduce damage, you can’t use it like a traditional defensive cooldown, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a useful ability. Think of it as a health stabilizer.

Here are some good situations to use it:

• Before a boss’s big ability. Usually it won’t let you avoid the big ability, but it will help keep your health high before the ability lands, so your healer will be better able to keep you topped off.
• If you’re taking a flurry of physical damage. Some bosses like to Frenzy or buff their melee attacks in a similar way.
• When your Vengeance is low, like at the beginning of a pull. Most of your active mitigation scales with attack power, but Elusive Brew will always be powerful even before you take damage.
• When you’re near the maximum (15) number of stacks. No point wasting the buff (unless you know you need to save it for later).

Stage 3

Just like there are periods of predictably high damage, there are often periods of predictably low damage. Once you become familiar with your damage mitigation, you can pinpoint times that you can sacrifice some resources for offensive abilities.

Tiger Palm doesn’t have a cost except for a global cooldown, so now that you’ve got the basic defensive rotation down you should try to squeeze it in whenever you don’t have another button to push.

Breath of Fire when you want to deal some additional AoE damage / threat instead of a Blackout Kick. When glyphed, Breath of Fire can even provide some defensive utility in AoE groups, though it should still be used carefully.

Spinning Crane Kick when you have two seconds to spare. This skill is great for AoE damage / threat, and generates a huge amount of Gift of the Ox orbs. However, the trade-off is the approximately two second cast that prevents you from doing anything else. Try to squeeze this spell in when you have a decent duration remaining on Shuffle and your health is high. It’s best not to open up with Spinning Crane Kick, because you have no defenses active and no way to put those defenses up during the cast. If you need AoE threat, rely on Keg Smash, Dizzying Haze, and even glyphed Breath of Fire before risking a Spinning Crane Kick.

Review

Now you should be able to hold your own in a heroic dungeon and LFR (just try to read some basic strategies first, it helps).

Spend energy on:

1. Keg Smash, whenever it’s available.
2. Expel Harm when you need a heal.
3. Jab.
4. Spinning Crane Kick for AoE situations, as long as you’re not in a dangerous situation.

Spend Chi on:

1. Blackout Kick. The buff it provides should be active almost all the time.
2. Guard when you need a cooldown, such as if your health is low or you’re about to get hit hard.
3. Breath of Fire for AoE situations, for threat and defense if it’s glyphed, otherwise just as an AoE dps tool.

Other things to look out for:

1. Start AoE pulls with Leg Sweep.
2. Elusive Brew when you have many stacks.
3. Pick up Gift of the Ox orbs for healing.
4. Tiger Palm when you don’t have anything else to do.

Homework

Queue for a Mogu’shan Vaults LFR. You can read my guide for the normal version of MSV to get an idea of the strategy (though the first boss is different - you can just tank them in one big group in LFR).

Situational Abilities: Raids and Beyond

Finally time to start thinking about Purifying Brew. I left it for this late because when you’re first starting in 5 mans and normal raids, you will rarely even reach moderate stagger. It’s just not that useful for beginner content, and makes learning how to brewmaster more complicated than it needs to be.

Stage 1

To get used to the feel, start using Purifying Brew when you reach moderate (yellow) or heavy (red) stagger. The faster you can purify a yellow or red stagger, the better, so practice saving one or two Chi in situations where you are taking significant physical damage so that you can use Purifying Brew quickly.

Stage 2

Once you master the above, you can try to use Purifying Brew more intelligently. You don’t need to Purify all yellow staggers because yellow stagger represents a very broad range of damage and your stagger will be moderate almost all the time once you start the more difficult normal raids. Eventually, you will reach content where you just don’t generate enough Chi to purify every yellow stagger and keep up Shuffle, so you’ll have to make decisions.

Use Purifying Brew when:

• You have red stagger.
• You have high yellow stagger (30k+)
• Shuffle has a long duration remaining and you don’t need to Guard.
• Your healers are having trouble keeping you up through the sustained damage plus the stagger DoT.

Also, understand how Stagger builds. If you know you’re going to take a big melee swing soon, it’s worth it to sit on a moderate stagger and get hit again, then quickly purify, instead of purifying twice and using up two Chi. (Sha of Fear’s Thrash ability is a good example of predictable bursts of physical damage that you should save Chi and Purifying Brew for after Thrash.)

Stage 3

That should cover all of our “active mitigation” tools. There’s a lot more to brewmastering, but the remaining skills are all situational and depend on whatever you’re fighting at the time.

First off, you should get used to swapping out your level 75 talents: Healing Elixirs, Dampen Harm, and Diffuse Magic. Healing Elixirs is the best default, Dampen Harm is fantastic when you’re taking very large hits (though worthless if you only take small hits, even if there are many small hits), and Diffuse Magic is a lifesaver in heavy magic fights (though worthless when there is little predictable magic damage).

You can also try to throw in your healing talents, Zen Sphere, Chi Burst, and Chi Wave. Zen Sphere is best when you need single target healing or HoTs, Chi Burst excels when the raid is grouped together, and Chi Wave is great for AoE healing when the raid is spread apart. Keep in mind that it is almost always more worthwhile to spend your Chi on tanking abilities (tanks are very mediocre offhealers), so when in doubt, just Blackout Kick. These talents will be changing significantly in the next patch (5.2), but for now, try to throw them in during the following situations:

• You’re not currently tanking and healing is more important than dps.
• You have a very long duration remaining on Shuffle and you won’t need to Purify or Guard any time soon.
• The boss you’re tanking does very little physical damage and almost entirely magical or raid damage.

Brewmasters lack giant Shield Wall-type cooldowns, but we still have Fortifying Brew, which you should get used to popping in scary situations. Zen Meditation, though it sounds like it’s a raid cooldown, actually works best as a personal one. Use it for magic attacks or predictable physical attacks (since it will disappear after you’re hit by a single melee). Invoke Xuen will taunt any non-raid-boss creature off you (and give you vengeance / threat for it), so it’s also a good defensive option for AoE trash or dungeon monsters.

For the details on the more obscure skills, you can read through my Brewmaster Guide.

Review

I know it feels like we’ve covered a lot of stuff here, but that’s just because I’m trying to be thorough.

Spend energy on:

1. Keg Smash, whenever it’s available.
2. Expel Harm when you need a heal.
3. Jab.
4. Spinning Crane Kick for AoE situations, as long as you’re not in a dangerous situation.

Spend Chi on:

1. Blackout Kick. The buff it provides should be active almost all the time.
2. Guard when you need a cooldown, such as if your health is low or you’re about to get hit hard.
3. Purifying Brew when you are taking a lot of stagger damage.
4. Breath of Fire for AoE situations, for threat and defense if it’s glyphed, otherwise just as an AoE dps tool.

Other things to look out for:

1. Start AoE pulls with Leg Sweep.
2. Elusive Brew when you have many stacks.
3. Pick up Gift of the Ox orbs for healing.
4. Tiger Palm when you don’t have anything else to do.
5. Fortifying Brew or Zen Meditation when you need a big cooldown.

A Few Additional Tips and Tricks:

1. Keep at least one of the following abilities active at all times: Shuffle, Guard, Elusive Brew.
2. If your health suddenly drops low, use one or more of: Guard, Expel Harm, Fortifying Brew, Zen Meditation, or Gift of the Ox.
3. Avoid spending energy or chi until you absolutely have to. It’s always good to have a buffer of some energy (for a quick jab, or to save up for Keg Smash if it’s coming off cooldown soon) or some chi (for a quick Purifying Brew, Guard, etc).

Homework

Go forth and be awesome.

I’ve been invited to join the fine people of the Twisted Nether Blogcast this upcoming Sunday, February 3rd. That’s Superbowl Sunday, but the interview will start at 8pm Pacific (9pm MST, 10pm CST, 11pm EST), so you should still have time to stop by.

For the unfamiliar, Twisted Nether specializes in the WoW community and they cover various blogs and podcasts and other fan-driven resources. I might be asked some questions pertaining to brewmasters or monks, but most of the interview will remain in strictly blogging territory.

You can join us live at the aforementioned time, where you can participate in the live chatroom audience.

Click here Feb 3 at 8pm PST

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.

Dawn

This set is based on Buddhist monks, who often wear simple orange robes. It’s hard to stay simple in World of Warcraft, but this combination of vanilla and MoP keeps the spirit alive. This transmog goes well with two-handers.

• Head: Murkblood Cover, or any other headdress with orange feathers. Can be found on the AH if you’re lucky, but also through quests.
• Shoulders: Red Crane Spaulders (N), or any other normal monk tier 14. Drops from normal Lei Shi.
• Chest: Flamestrider Robes. Drops from Pyromancer Loregrain in Blackrock Depths.
• Hands: Elven Spirit Claws, or any other orange gloves. Can be found on the AH.
• Belt: Brown Belt of Precarious Balance, or any other blue belt you get from the monk class quests. Orange belts work too.
• Legs: Warbear Woolies, or any other legs that skimpy enough not to show. Crafted by leatherworkers.
• Weapon: Key to the Planes. Crafted by scribes.
• Boots: Anything dark and / or simple.

Wowhead Comparison

(Click on the tiny dropdown arrow to view in 3D on a race of your choice.)

Dusk

This set is inspired by the many rogue figures we can see in martial arts movies. Unfortunately, some pieces are Alliance only. There are two variations on this transmog. This set goes well with dual-wielding.

• Head: Rifle Commander’s Eyepatch, or any other eyepatch. Most of them are obtainable through quests.
• Shoulders: Shadow Heart Spaulders (LFR), or any other blue rogue tier 14 lookalike. Alternative is: Duskstalker Shoulderpads, or any other rogue tier 9 lookalike. Sold for 591 justice points.
• Chest: Knightbane Carapace, or any other rogue tier 9 lookalike. Crafted by leatherworkers.
• Hands: Greyshadow Gloves, or any other blue rogue tier 14 lookalike. Crafted by leatherworkers.
• Legs: Warbear Woolies, or any other legs that skimpy enough not to show. Crafted by leatherworkers.
• Boots: Anything dark and / or simple.
• Belt: Brown Belt of Precarious Balance, or any other blue belt you get from the monk class quests.
• Main hand: Scourgebane’s Slicer, or any other long, narrow sword. Obtained through Winterspring quests.
• Offhand: Fist of the Deity, dropped by Heroic Moorabi in Gundrak.

Wowhead Comparison

(Click on the tiny dropdown arrow to view in 3D on a race of your choice.)