I just learned a healer can’t heal stagger damage on brews. When the heck do you heal a brew? I used to think hots were good for them but is seems like direct heals like an hpal or hpriest would be best until they can clear their own stagger? It would seem like disc would be the worst except for near one shot mechanics with pain suppression and a shield etc. Playing a brew on lemix. I swear nobody knows monks well except monks.
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stagger is your problem, not the healers, press purifying brew when it lights up (beginner advice), that means your stagger is at the highest level
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The easiest answer is to heal them when they need it and their stagger is high. You as the healer have no agency over how much they are managing/clearing it though. Purifying the stagger is entirely on them like mentioned above but when it is high the icon turns red, so you have some indication of when they might need healing.
If you keep an eye on the tank’s Stagger icon it will turn red when they are staggering lots of dmg. ( meaning that dmg is at it’s highest ) This is usually be a good time to shield them and keep an eye on their health while still maintaining your HoT’s/etc as needed. Be ready to help out with a quick Single Target heal if they take a huge chunk of dmg while stagger is high.
Keep an eye out for tank bleeds and Magic effects on them too - magic dmg isnt staggered for as much as physical iirc. Depending on when those are up and what they are doing you might want to give the tank a bit of extra love.
Disc doesnt have it any worse imo, shields/Pain Supp are actually decent to use on Brew tanks and we have 2 charges. When the tanks Stagger is highest if they seem to be falling behind or are about to be ( or have been ) chunked for a large portion of their health I usually throw up a Pain Supp, life cocoon(, etc) on them - esp if we are pugging no comms and the pull is early/fresh or things are dying slowly. Lets them catch up if needed. I dont think things like pain supp will reduce the stagger dmg unless the original hit was reduced before it goes to stagger. Not 100% on that though. Absorb effects like Life Cocoon will still absorb stagger ticks though.
Generally it is a good idea to also be in voice chat when possible, that way if a tank needs some kind of external they can bug us for it. For pugs just watch the icon, if it stays red for an extended period of time and they are not able to purify it for some reason but keep losing health that is when you probably want to send some extra healing on them.
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I start pumping healing on them when they hit red stagger and stop when they leave. Once they’re in the red they’re (generally) no longer mitigating damage through stagger. They are taking the full damage. They might even be taking more because they’re taking the full hit of blows and then dot ticks from stagger.
It helps that I dabble in brew and other tanks, so I develop knowledge for which fights will be the most troubling, ergo which will have brew in red stagger for the entire fight. For these I will pre-cocoon or even external a tank busting hit.
It’s simple enough to almost treat a brew like some versions of prot warrior that had less or no self healing. Think of their stagger bar as a reverse shield block. Rather than trying to keep it up, they’re trying to keep it down (generally.) Just like how you might external a prot warrior when shield block or shield wall has fallen off, or when it’s about to fall off without anything else to rotate after, you might apply this idea to brew masters when they’ve overcapped stagger and have spiky intakes of damage.
Some seasons brews are really self sufficient and this can be an over reaction, and sometimes they’re completely dependent on the healer for periods of time where stagger isn’t effective enough (damage intake is too low to build or offload significantly to stagger bar; death by a thousand paper cuts,) or when damage intake is too high and too frequent to purify out of red quick enough to stay green-yellow. S1 TWW was a lot like the last example in many pulls, like with bosses in NW.
Your defensive rotation is mostly guided to play around stagger, so you need to look at how your kit reduces stagger and how to weave in CDR through your rotation to reduce the CD of brews in furtherence of your defensive rotation.
I’m not an expert brew though, so my observations may only be surface level. I’m an okay MW though.