I am really loving this healer right now. It’s very different from what I can choose in FFXIV my “main” game, and it has an interesting flow about it. Melee wacking, paralyzing enemies, massive bursty heals.
I am in leveling dungeons frequently out DPSing the DPS while keeping everyone alive.
Really having a lot of fun. Very much happy. <3
Sending some love to the monks here.
Btw. I still have literally no idea how to play a brewmaster…
WoW healers are very different from FFXIV healers, yeah. It’s one of the few things I would say WoW does better than FF14 right now, since each healer feels very distinct where in FFXIV they all feel like slightly different versions of the same class. Plus healing in general is faster paced and you have to actually use healing spells a lot instead of just mainly acting like a watered down DPS who occasionally heals.
Brewmasters are one of the harder to play tanks. The core of it comes down to managing your stagger. Basically whenever you get hit, you take some of the damage up-front and then take the rest as a DoT called Stagger, represented on your UI as a colored debuff. All incoming damage is contributed to the same stagger DoT, so the amount of damage you’re taking from it increases the more you’re getting hit.
If it’s green, you only have a bit of a stagger DoT, nothing to worry about. If it’s yellow, you’re taking a lot of damage from stagger. If it’s red, you’re taking dangerous levels of damage from stagger.
In order to manage it, you use two brews which share charges and cooldowns. Ironskin Brew increases the amount of incoming damage that is put into stagger, while Purifying Brew purges off a lot of the stagger DoT. So basically you use Ironskin Brew near the start of a pull and before a big hit and generally whenever you don’t need to purify a large amount of stagger and you’re going to cap on brew charges, and you use Purifying Brew when your stagger turns yellow and especially if it turns red.
The end result of this system is a tank who has very smooth damage intake and almost never takes dramatic spikes of damage, but also has a lot of room for failure. More than other tanks, the difference between a good Brewmaster and a bad one will be profound. Good Brewmasters are powerful tanks, bad ones are a healer’s worst nightmare.
Also because of how brewmasters work, they rely on their healer more than any other tank, because they have very limited means of self-healing. So a brewmaster will also expose how competent the group’s healer is more than most tanks.
It’s ok nobody knows how to Brew Master. 