Stagger is a way of moving damage to a damage over time pool. Shuffle moves 100% of your physical damage to your stagger pool. You take the stagger damage over 10s. By just using keg smash, blackout kick and spinning crane kick you can maintain 100% on shuffle. So it’s pretty passive.
As you accumulate stagger, the default UI shows a green circle for light, yellow for medium, and red for heavy stagger damage. In other words the DOT chunks get really big and become hard for healers to keep you alive.
To start and become comfortable I would use Purify Brew on yellow and red stagger. Purify drops your stagger pool by 50%. This is how we mitigate. We take the damage and then decide how to mitigate the most by pooling it efficiently. We have limited self healing.
We have other tools to mitigate some damage but managing your stagger pool is the best way to reduce your overall damage. We traditionally take more damage than other tanks but with proper usage of Purify we aren’t that far off from other tanks that mitigate up front.
Celestial brew should be used after Purify Brew to empower it putting a strong shield on you for tank buster hits. Niauo the black ox also takes some of your stagger damage so you can take even more. I use on big pack pulls.