Brewmaster Talents

Classes Monk
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What do you guys think?

Light Brewing vs Black Ox Brew?

High Tolerance vs Black Out Combo?

I decided to take matters into my own hands with my last two keys for KSM: Halls of Atonement and Sanguine Depths, so I went brewmaster because of how stupid easy it is to get into groups compared to mistweaver.

However, the guides online mostly recommend Light Brewing and High Tolerance. Personally, I’ve given those a good try but I don’t think that Light Brewing and High Tolerance work well in higher keys.

Being able to use Black Oz Brew for back to back Purifying Brew x2 -> Celestial Brew is incredibly strong. I think that black ox brew is much better situated to realistic damage patterns (moments of very large damage followed by periods with relatively little damage). Light Brewing just doesn’t give you the extra shields and purifying brews when you need them.

As for High Tolerance vs Black Out Combo, I’m actually surprised that the guides say that Black Out Combo is bad. If you do it right, you can use Black Out Kick before any major ability and gain all of the benefits of Black Out Combo for every cast of Breath of Fire, Keg Smash, Celestial Brew, and Tiger Palm. 5% stagger and 8-15% haste just don’t seem that strong to me compared to being able to have 100% uptime on 5% reduced damage done and being able to pause stagger damage for 3 seconds (thus letting your purifying brew come off cool down and making it so you can purify more stagger total). I don’t think the cool down reduction from haste from high tolerance is a significant improvement over the cool down reduction from Black Out Combo, if you are making sure to use Black Out Kick before keg smash. I also don’t see how the guides say that there is a timing issue, because it’s really easy to get into a flow with weaving Black Out Kicks before your normal abilities and not delaying their timing. Plus, if you use the double Keg Smash legendary, it’s okay for you to delay a keg smash because you have up to the second charge worth of time before it becomes a true delay.

Anyways, what do you guys think?

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I’m a fan of defensive blackout combo. It’s a 6 second reduction on your brews, and combined with light brewing, thatvmeans a lot of celestial charges. I’ve never really played around with black ox because it just feels like another cooldown to manage and my bars are full enough, but yes, I can speak for Boc as an active mitigation tool.

Boc is especially good if you’re running charred passions on tyrannical, because that reduced CD on bof means more pump on bosses.

I think the reason boc isnt recommended is because it doesnt sim well. It’s too variable and choosy to run through a simulator, and I guarantee that sim is just wasting it on tiger palms.

Also, sims cant sim for survivability, that’s all thinkdome talent right there.

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The typical approach I use to theory craft talents is to somehow quantify the value of each talent on the row (sometimes taking into account other rows if there is an interaction) and then choosing the one with the most value. Even with just some basic napkin math you can see that black out combo is probably better than high tolerance.

For High Tolerance, a 5% increase to stagger may sound like a lot, but you can only purify half of your stagger damage at any time, so it amounts to a 2.5% overall damage reduction, IF and only if you are able to perfectly purify all damage, which you can’t. So in reality the real damage reduction provided by High Tolerance is even less than 2.5%. Realistically I think you can only purify maybe 50%-75% at most of all stagger damage. So that puts the damage reduction from high tolerance to around 1.25-1.75% in a best case scenario. The rest of the value of the talent comes from haste. Haste reduces the cooldown of Keg Smash and Purifying Brew, creating a positive feedback loop.

If you assume maybe an average of 12% haste, that’s roughly 1 extra purifying brew and 1 extra keg smash per nine uses of their respective abilities. What this amounts to basically (purifying brew CD+3) seconds of CDR on purifying brew. The question then becomes does the CDR from Black Out Combo amount to more CDR in the same time number of casts? In the same time, we would cast 9 keg smashes instead of 10, at 2 seconds extra CDR each for a total of 18 seconds of bonus CDR. If you are using Light Brewing, than that is only 1 fewer second of CDR with Black out combo than with high tolerance. In other words, if you are using light brewing, then you will only get 1 more purifying brew per 20 casts of purifying brew using high tolerance than with black out combo. If you use Black Ox Brew, it will be a little harder to calculate and I won’t do that now, maybe later lol. I would estimate it to be somewhere in the same ballpark.

Next, if you do it right, you can have 100% uptime on 5% reduced damage from flame breath. With High tolerance, your resulting damage is (12/15)*5= 4% average damage reduction compared to (12/12)*5=5% damage reduction with Black Out Combo. So blackout combo is 1% damage reduction, which puts it on par with the medium-low end of High Tolerance’s damage reduction.

Now the hard part to quantify is the 3 second delay on stagger from using celestial brew from Black Ox Combo. At minimum, I would model this as a 3 second CDR on Purifying Brew, but it has more value than that. In another post me and some warrior were talking about celestial brew, and how stagger still builds during the shield. The shield therefore absorbs a portion of upfront damage and a portion of stagger damage. The 3 second delay on stagger shifts the proportion of shield absorb to heavily favor upfront damage absorption (3 out of 8 seconds, almost 50% of your shield will therefore solely absorb upfront damage, and you won’t take any stagger damage during those 3 seconds either). What this means is that the shield is much better at mitigating damage. It will last longer and give you a chance to purify more damage over all. We really don’t want the shield to be eaten by stagger damage because we would rather purify the stagger and use the shield for mitigation on the upfront portion of attacks. Just make sure you don’t use any purifying brews for the first 3 seconds of Celestial Brew until your stagger resumes again. It’s hard to say exactly how much damage reduction this amounts to, however, even if we give it a very very low estimate of 1% average damage reduction (in reality probably more) and 3 seconds of CDR on purifying brew, this puts Black Out Combo ahead of High Tolerance with Light Brewing. (Again, Black Ox Brew is another story, but I suspect is it likely the same).

Overall, I definitely think there is merit to Black Out Combo, and recommend you brewmasters to try it out.

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The way I theory craft is: Does this button feel better than the other button? Hell yeah, dude B)

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Wel then you should definitely play around with Black Ox Brew.

I will agree that brew has a ton of buttons to handle, but like, Black Ox Brew is that button that you really wish you had but didn’t know you could have lol.

It’s like the button you want when you’re taking too much damage and have no more cool downs and you’re all out of roll charges.

Great for emergencies and even better for preemptive mitigation. I basically tried it out because of the third boss in sanguine depths on tyrannical (the iron spikes were just wrecking me), and then I realized it’s incredibly useful. Being able to have that extra shield and purifying brews for raging or really whenever it’s necessary is amazing.

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I should try it out until I can get a decent (not 194) blood spattered scale. SCALE 2 GUD 2 JUICY