i just don’t get it. when do i use Purifying Brew and when do i use Ironskin Brew? i’ve just been spamming both of them randomly and it seems to be working but then again i’m only lvl 97 atm.
Stagger delays the damage you take and turns it into a story of dot. The amount it staggers is equal to your Stagger rate. For example mine is 85% Which means when I’m hit I take 15% of the damage up front and 85% over the next few seconds. Your Stagger meter fills up and the higher it is the more damage you take per tick.
your Stagger meter is the same amount as your health. So if you have 10k hp you can stagger up to 10k damage. If the meter fills and you take additional damage you take the full amount up front. That’s where purifying brew comes in. It immediately reduces your current stagger amount by 50%.
Iron skin increases the amount you can stagger and should be up 100% of the time. As you take damage your Stagger meter rises. Iron skin lasts 7 seconds and stacks duration with each user up to a max of 21 seconds.
So tldr, keep iron skin up at all times, and only use purifying brew when your Stagger bar is nearly full. When it’s near max you will have a debuff called heavy stagger and the spell icon for purifying brew will glow. Use it then.
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hey thanks man u explained it perfectly this is gonna help me so much
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I don’t believe this sentence is correct. Stagger occurs no matter how much you’re currently staggering.
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That makes two of us.
Its funny when the healer isnt used to a Brewmaster. You barely survive some insane triple pull, mob mess accident, and after combat ends You’re standing there spam healing Yourself waiting on Purify to come up because the healer is drinking. Stagger is neat.
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The part about going over stagger and taking full hits is wrong. Staggered cap is 1000% your hp. Its virtual impossible to get it that high.
Did Blizzard break it again? Because your Stagger is supposed to clear once combat ends.
It’s also useful to note that no matter how high your Stagger is, the Stagger DoT itself can’t kill you. If you take no other damage, Stagger will never drop you below 1 HP.
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If you’re familiar with blood DK at all OP, brewmasters are pretty similar:
- ISB is roughly the equivalent of Marrowrend/Bone Shield. You want to keep it up as close to 100% as possible while wasting as little as possible due to overcapping.
- PB is the rough equivalent of Death Strike. You want to use it ASAP after a big hit, or whenever your healer’s struggling to take care of your stagger for you.
Despite that parallel, there are a couple of key differences:
- Unlike Marrowrend and Death Strike, brews are a shared resource. This means that maintaining ISB inherently reduces the number of brews you have available to purify. This causes there to be a small amount of decision making, but unlike blood DK we’re slightly more forgiving if you make the wrong call. While you’re learning BrM, it’s perfectly acceptable to aim for 100% effective uptime on ISB rather than 100% overall uptime. This basically means you only ISB while you’re actively tanking something, generally giving you a full complement of brews to work with when you taunt and slightly increasing the number of purifies you have while tanking.
- Stagger isn’t as likely to be noticed by you because you aren’t taking the damage straight to your health bar like a DK, so purifying may not feel impactful compared to a well timed Death Strike. Your healers will definitely notice though because they’ll be changing from using smaller, more mana efficient heals to their emergency heals if you’re letting stagger sit too high for too long.
I would suggest you get a stagger tracking WeakAura, because this is completely incorrect. Blizzard’s default UI stops tracking stagger at 100% of your max health, but the actual cap is 1000%. It’s virtually impossible to reach without intentionally trying to, but we wouldn’t be viable if we could only stagger 100% of our max HP.
This is bad advice. Heavy (aka red) stagger is not inherently dangerous, and purifying the instant the button glows actually works against you by reducing your brew generation. If you’re using High Tolerance (which you should; Blackout Combo is only viable for parse chasing and Guard is pathetic), you gain up to 15% extra haste based on your stagger level. In order to maintain the maximum benefit, which is also a significant boost to brew generation, you want to be in heavy stagger as often as possible. Blizzard defines “heavy” as 60% of your max HP, and purifying brew clears half of your stagger pool. This means that ideally you shouldn’t ever be purifying below 120% stagger.
Note the word “ideal” in that last sentence, though. There are times where holding PB is dangerous, such as M+ where you only have one healer or fights like Rastakhan where you have a debuff that reduces your amount of healing received. Learning when to purify and when it’s safe not to is the hardest part of learning brewmaster. You’ll likely go through phases where you purify too much or too little, and eventually you’ll find the sweet spot that both you and your healer(s) are comfortable with.
Stagger ticks off over the course of about three seconds after combat ends. It doesn’t clear instantly, but it does clear itself quickly.
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Simple rules:
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Do NOT SPAM THEM RANDOMLY
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Ironskin has to be up 100% of the time.
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Purify when stagger DOT is high, yellow/red as a general rule for a beginner, but try a weakaura or other addon to help track stagger.
Stagger works as such. You take 100 damage, you take 50 damage let’s say upfront, and the other 50 damage as a damage over time. Each hit you take is a seperate DOT with an individual duration that rolls into your overall stagger bar that tells you how much of your health you are taking every second.
Your mastery and more importantly Ironskin Brew increases your stagger, reducing all upfront damage, and causing more damage to be put onto that DOT. Brewmaster mitigates damage by deleting 50% of the damage currently ticking down on your rolling DOT.
I recommend reading an icy veins guide on BM for the basics, or even better is peakofserenity(dot)com, which is a dedicated monk resource, as well as a weakaura to better represent what stagger actually is doing to your healthpool every second as the blizzard UI can be misleading.
The only part from this I would recommend not following is the yellow/red stagger indicator. You don’t want to purify at yellow or red using the in game ui. As they are extremely bad and you will be wasting brews doing this.
You want to purify when your healer has to switch to a more focused style healing on you. This is a good indicator that you need to purify.
I should probably bolded that part in my post, but I only reccomended this from a beginners perspective. In my last few sentences i mentioned how the UI is misleading but an alright start to grasp exactly what stagger is, but a WA or something is more helpful
Oh? I did not know that my apologies. I have learned something today as well! Thank you.