Hello, despite knowing brew is in very bad shape, I find it fun and gear one up. I am curious about pros and cons of harmony and shadowpan as wowhead is recommending playing this. And when I checked mordrim on raiderio, he’s oddly using harmony as well.
I am also interested in stacking crit mastery over crit vers. We have some strong passive dodge talents (+10% and +5%). A nelf adds 2% to the passive which makes 17% in total. Combined with agility, that would give brew quite big number of dodge.
What do you guys think ?
My understanding for Verse over Mastery:
With talent bonuses, Elusive Brawler, and Shuffle, you get so much Dodge just from those.
Verse is a good stat because it gives damage and damage reduction to help out in general making it more of a prio.
As for ShadoPan and Harmony, it really just depends on what you like.
I go Harmony for the Double Celestial Brew and on demand damage from using CB. I also mostly PuG where you cant always rely on your group to help mitgate damage (inturrupts, stuns, etc)
ShadoPan is great for regular bursts of damage and the extra Vivify healing
You can play either builds they do just fine. Brew feels really good with gear so don’t be surprised if we are actually good in the future
I like the burst of pan more than the defensive options of MoH but I might start testing out MoH and spending my BoC on BoF.
A lot of little things to master on this spec which is what makes it fun. Just be careful because sometimes you blink and you’ll have stagger at the wazoo and your health will be zooming around like lightning McQueen
MoH damage is as good as shado pan, it’s just spread more as a dot than flurry. The dot itself does more dmg than flurry strikes if you can manage the vitality right. Also don’t hold chi burst. That’s often my 1 or 2 damage in a key.
Don’t forget that overwhelming force in the harmony tree gives palm and rsk linear damage up to 5 mobs.
Honestly to me the biggest difference between the 2 is purifying more stagger (I prefer that) or taking 10% less damage. The 2 celestial charges is neat but it makes me feel like I need to press it more often. Smaller shields that way.
They’re both fun.
Mordrim and any top 50 brew is running solid big defensive builds that normal players will not need for 11’s and below
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Shado paner here.
Since the recent Flurry adjustment, it has become a very significant chunk of my damage. In some runs, it’s my 3rd highest damaging ability, sitting at around 12-13% of my overall damage.
I’m 625 ilvl only. But I’m full Versa itemization. You won’t find a single non Versa/Crit items on me, except for tier pieces and 1 of my weapons. With food/flask, I’m 22k versa (28.2%) and 13k crit (30%)
Our mastery dodge is a 1 time dodge thing. It’s a stacking % until next 1 time dodge. So yeah, you will be dodging some more, as the stacking % will go up, but I remember reading on discord, and the theorycrafting was that it’s a rather minimal increase in the actual number of dodges. But you’d be giving away additional 7-8% of straight damage mitigation.
Magic damage is also our weakness. We stagger far less of magic damage, hence last boss in NW is actually painful for us. WIthout versa, you’d be taking even more damage.
Shado Pan has a lot of other insane perks that are often over looked
First off, it gives 35% increase keg smash damage - and it pairs nicely with our tier bonus. We already suffer from being lowest dps tank, as well as threat generation is a little bit harder on brew due to that. So having that bonus damage is huge.
And giving up on versa, you’d be giving up on like extra 20-25% of damage.
Secondly, having additional CDR to Weapons of Order is insane. It’s a very powerful cooldown. Having it on a roughly 1:30 CD is really good.
Then you also get insane agility procs with Flurry Strikes (depending on your stacks).
Those are the biggest. Basically, everything is good in Shado Pan imho.
To me, a well timed Flurry is like a blessing. Oh it feels so good. I’ve capped out at like 2 mil DPS once or twice on a big pack, as my Flurry just went BRRRR against like 12 mobs. Ah it was glorious. But my overall damage per key now sits at about 700-800k consistently. I hear all other tanks sit at over 1 mil.
This is very much a play what you want situation. SP is a much more passive play style but with the charred passions and scalding brew talents, mismanaging your initial keg smashes during the gather can leave you scrambling for threat since SCK is God awful. This is only exacerbated at higher keys where dps are fully geared and looking to min max damage from the jump.
Survivability wise, I think the 10% DR is nice but I much prefer the double celestial Brew. Smaller shields or no, to me it’s about stemming the inc DMG long enough for me to either expel harm, vivify or let the healer catch up. With how swingy our hp is, having more control over our health helps pug healers not overreact and use a defensive when they needn’t. A few 100k worth of shield could be that safety cushion to help manage external cds, preventing defensive overlaps or overreactions. That’s my 2 cents. So MoH for higher keys for me, SP for lower farm keys and when I just want to slam meters.
Crit vers is more reliable to me imo. More mastery seems nice but we have a lot of talents that provide dodge anyway so too much mastery seems inconsequential, flat DR is nice.
That boss deals physical dmg, it can be blocked/dodged/parried. It does negative dmg on my war.
Mastery increases attack power. Hence, it also increases dmg and healing like vers. The only things it doesn’t power up are trinkets.
That cd increases 8% mastery and some % dmg increase. It’s more like an offensive cd than defensive. In big pulls, I find i spend my energy on SCK than tiger palm, thus I am testing PtA over WoO with MoH. It’s given WoO is mandatory for Shadow Pan.
I find another annoying thing about prot war is they are too tanky against bosses that it make other tanks feel paper.
Passive DR: 15% (defensive stance) + 8%( thunder blast) + 8% (3-5 stacks of shield slam) + 3% (tier) = 34%. I know they aren’t additive but I am too lazy to make the correct math.
Like the first boss of CoT, I feel so squishy on my other tanks. I get oneshot if I don’t have def cds on, but on my prot war I have never had a problem anywhere except the shreders in SoB, who deal absurd bleed dmg.
The boss does some physical but it’s mostly frost.
Oh yeah, you’re right. It is pure physical. Well, there are plenty of other bosses that to do magic.
Which makes it even worse for you going full mastery.
You will never get your dodge up enough to actually dodge them, and with zero versa those bolts will absolutely demolish you.
I mean, dude, you re keen on fighting me.
Go full mastery then. idk what to tell you. Not a single brew does it. But you go ahead and do it. idk what to tell you.
25% or something like that of your stager is offset buy Niuzao. It’s a huge defensive cooldown.
CoT first boss? That boss deals zero damage what you talking about?
The only 3 bosses that do any substantial tank damage are:
- NW last boss
- SV first boss
- COT 3rd boss
For reference, in 9 Tyrannical keys, I can’t think of any boss that has killed me, outside of SV first boss a few weeks ago. The only boss were I have to work “hard” on NW wake last boss due to back to back tank buster shard cast. But even so, self vivify’s and Expel Harm usually get back up, as well as rotating my cooldowns.
If you’re not using Refracting Aggression trinket - you should. It’s insanely powerful.
For Fortifying brew btw, I have it talented into lower CD, rather than bigger mitigation. But again, I only run 9’s.
https://raider.io/characters/us/area-52/Peexify
With 30% versa, I face tank everything.
Per run, I get about 450M self healing/mitigation. Healer does about half of that on me.
I did some custom simming on mastery and it scales pretty poorly for dodge. The higher your mastery is the less value you get per point for dodge but it loses value massively the higher your base dodge is.
https://imgur.com/a/DWFojYJ
Was bored and work and coded a little sim for it
In terms of raw damage output with the 11.0.5 patch due to the changes to energy threshold needed to proc Flurry Strikes; Shado-Pan has once again pulled ahead. They are however roughly equivalent defensively.
I recommend visiting Peak of Serenity’s website for more explanation on stat distribution but…
TLDR;
Crit and Vers are recommended both offensively and defensively because not only do they scale extremely well for us, but Crit itself increases our self healing by a significant margin due to the way Celestial Fortune functions. “You have a chance equal to your critical strike chance to be healed for an additional 70% of the amount healed.”
One thing to note is that this doesn’t just increase self-healing, it is ALL incoming healing.
The value of this is enormous, being able to crit heal yourself for 50-60% of your health could absolutely make all the difference in the world.
Vers is a very helpful flat damage reduction on ALL attacks, not just physical. It also increases ALL damage you do, including gear and item damage such as cantrip weapons/trinket damage.
Mastery does scale well too, but it is rare for anything but auto attacks to be able to be dodged. Blizzard does not like us force dodging. It does however reduce the incoming damage from one of our biggest sources in M+ in trash; autos. This, along with doing a bit worse in other areas than Crit and Vers are what make it the tertiary stat we value in our current state.
It can be said that Mastery does in fact increase our self healing, and a decent amount. That amount just pales in comparison to what Celestial Fortune actually does for us.
Haste isn’t worth taking right now, it doesn’t do any of the things it does for us well at all so it can be left as an after thought.
The first boss in cot does a ton of tank damage.
See I don’t feel this boss does a ton of damage outside of tank buster. Last boss NW is my problem child.
Very bad choice. Versa and Crit is the core of brewmaster.
Bad
Peak of Serenity is also a bad discord. Full of theory crafters that dont actually play the game lol. If you want a real monk discord go to equinox discord.
Also if you want builds and tips, check equinox’s google doc guide and youtube. He has a google docs with every single tips and insights. He’s the brewmaster monk wikipedia.
Good luck.
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Try as hard as you can to not overlap defensives and not pop diffuse magic as your first defensive
Since your playing Master of Harmony you have 2 Celestial Brew charges, and since youre using Blackout Combo, you need to be hitting Blackout Kick ebfore each for the 3 extra stacks… you should ideally be able to make it through with 1 celestial + expel harm + vivify per cycle but you have 2 shields if you need, and then use Black ox brew and CDR to have 2 more celestials for the next wave
Additionally, you can move a point around to Zen Meditation to eat a cycle of Bolts
Also youre not using Celestial Flames so youre missing 5% more DR on your Breath of Fire (15% total DR, very strong)
Also communicate with your healer about which cycle they will be using their external on you
Yeah for sure. I mean I’m doing the boss just fine but in terms of brain power this one takes the cake.
Edit: I mean all this to say that I can make it through every boss this season just fine. None of them really give me a lot of trouble except this one. I’m not dying to it, it’s just a lot more work.
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Can you elaborate why ?
The best players doesn’t mean he knows the best about the game.
The best car racer doesn’t know about the car better than the engineer.
Tbh, I don’t care which discord is better, I care more about who can elaborate their thoughts and maths than “because I say so” or “because that guy plays it, so that must be it”.
People keep parroting crit is good, mastery is bad, except for one guy who actually simulated mastery scaling. Though I don’t 100% agree with him, but at least, he is worth listening to.
Everyone knows crit increases self-heal, vers increases heal and dr, haste gives more cdr, and mastery increases self-heal and white dmg intake dr. So what makes you think crit scales better than other stats ? Every scaling will reach a point where that stat become worse than others. What is the break point of crit ?
I can also back up that using crit and vers made me way more durable when I was doing m+ as a BRM. I previously had a lot of Mastery, swapping to crit was huge for me.
One thing to note about stacking dodge is that the more dodge you have the less you actually mitigate, so it’s a bigger jump going from 1% to 2% or 3% to 4% than it is from 20% to 22%. I don’t have the eloquence to articulate this right now, but this is a known effective HP thing across RPGs. That could be one reason for not wanting to stack dodge and presuming the amount we have is already good enough.
I felt like I continued taking about the same amount of damage, but my HPS went up significantly from Celestial Fortune.
Dodge/parry is a form of damage reduction. These type of stats have exponential scaling.
For instance, if you have 0% dodge, 1 % dodge = 1% damage reduction against white hits. However, if you have 50% dodge, additional 1% dodge = 2% damage reduction. And if you have 99% dodge, additional 1% dodge becomes 100% damage reduction. This makes crit a strong stat for prot pally and VDH thank to their hight crit chance from talents. We have passive +15% dodge base on top of mastery also further increasing our dodge chance. This makes me not understand why mastery is a bad stat.