Help with understanding Stagger

Classes Monk
1

Looking to add another tank to pair with my druid.

I’ve enjoyed playing the class so far this expansion and wanted to try my hand at BM.

The mechanic itself I still find puzzling, as I’m never sure when to actually use pur. brew.

Some people state use it on CD, while others state when stagger moves into the red spectrum. A few guides actually say to the goal is to create a stagger flow, so that the damage evens out over time.

And that’s where it loses me basically.

If I was to pull a boss or large pack of mobs, would I stagger on initial impact? Or, when I start to take serious damage and my HPS drops below a certain threshold?

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2

The rough cut guide for Purifying Brew usage is keep one charge on CD (usually pop it after you take a moderate amount of damage so it gets some value) and then bank the second charge for when your stagger becomes too high to handle. There’s no definitive values for this, just when it starts to noticeably move your health bar. Keep in mind with Gai Plin’s you also get a heal from your stagger (and a pretty large one at that) so try not to stagger at full health. There are some tankbusters that are purely physical, so you can pop Celestial Brew beforehand and immediately purify after to mitigate most of the damage and get a large heal (EDNA’s tankbuster if you’re getting dispelled on time, Blightbone’s tankbuster, etc)

If you’re running Black Ox Brew you’ll ideally want to burn both charges of purifying brew and celestial brew before popping BoB as well. If you’re doing this take care not to immediately use the new celestial brew (if you need it in that moment) and to allow the current one to be fully absorbed.

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3

Usage can change wildly depending on key level, the healer you have, and the pull.

The general idea of it is, brew gets increased healing taken because of crit, allowing you to take more damage. Stagger allows brew to be squishy (low armor) and take a ton of DMG without being outright one shot like a bdk who lost bone shield. Then the increased healing matches the increased dmg.

So basically you can let stagger rot as long as maintenance healing from yourself and the healer can sustain it then purify when you need to cool things off. For most cases. Think of it as you’re constantly melting to varying degrees and your job is to just stabilize it when needed.

Conversely when doing higher keys where dmg intake is huge, you constantly get stagger equal to 100-200% of your max health, then purifying is not only “death striking” a massive amount of staggered dmg, but also actually death striking and healing your HP pool a large amount. So stagger becomes a resource you can heal off of.

You then also start to accumulate lots of little sources of sustain based on taking more damage. Orbs proccing based off dmg intake, doubling if expelling at low HP.

You start proccing elixir of determination more often, and gets bigger based on bigger purifies.

You get more celestial brew stacks from purifying red often.

The lower HP you get and/or higher key level you go the more Ox Stance charges get consumed to stagger more.

Training of Niuzao starts sitting at max more often, increasing attack power by a large amount meaning even bigger celestial brews, orbs and vivify’s, etc. You really feel the struggle when starved of stagger.

Assuming you have solid maintenance healing from a healer and dmg intake is fairly high/moderate I would go by this:

  • let stagger sit red (60% minimum) for mastery boost
  • purify if on 2 charges and know you won’t be in danger soon, ideally wait til 100-120% stagger so you can stay at minimum red when purifying (purifying on 2 charges gives special delivery dmg and gets brew CDR value)
  • celestial brew when an expected spike of DMG will happen to buffer it
  • purify right after spikes of DMG
  • pop defensive for spikes of DMG if you actually need to (more of a higher key thing)
  • pop defensives typically for on pull because that’s when it’s most dangerous
  • expel 5 orbs when low HP and/or after spikes of dmg

With reliable incoming healing, you don’t need to panic purify even when you’re over 100% stagger. You can assess the situation and if it’s safely sustained you can wait until it gets too intense then cool it off with purify.

The goal with this is to allow yourself to rot from stagger safely and get a dmg/healing boost from it, and using the bullet list above to smooth out dmg spikes and make yourself an extremely smooth/stable tank to heal. Think of it like you’re actively parrying/blocking dmg.

A big however though: there is a phenomenon where at lower keys 8 and below let’s say. You rely way more on flat healing and external healing because your dmg intake isn’t high or fast enough to get a fat stagger pool to heal off of.

When stagger is consistently huge you become like a blood dk and gain a ton of self sustain. When deprived of high stagger, your sustain becomes really weak and you just need external healing to love, and start putting CB and vivify on cooldown and efficiently use orbs.

For example: I tanked a massive tank dmg pull in dawnbreaker 13, when healer died for whatever reason, I’m still sustaining myself completely til they come back, I don’t actually need that a ton of external healing

When I go to solo m0, suddenly I’m struggling to keep myself up and it’s ironically kind of harder.

4

Stagger:
Green you’re clean
Yellow is still mellow
Red purify or dead

You can purify at yellow or green if you really want to be more efficient and not burn PBs. Usually between packs or on a small pull. Any healer will easily handle this.

It’s more of a “feel” of your incoming damage and when to expect to go to red stagger. In many cases as the previous poster said, you intentionally take a ton of damage knowing you’re going to drop to 30-40% overall health only to purify, CB, expel harm healing back with all your orbs, and then finish with an insta vivify.

5

Thank you!

This was extremely useful and informative.

Hope all have a lovely day.

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6

Sitting in red stagger doesn’t necessarily mean you’re dead. There are many times where you can sit well into red stagger and be fine, and once you get high enough in keys you can easily sit in red stagger for the majority of some pulls. It’s all about how much your health bar is actually moving and if you have the tools to recover (purifying brew w/ Gai Plin’s being one of said tools)

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7

I know. I was just trying to be clever. But purify is most important during red stagger and then managing it based upon the damage coming in. In kost keys 11-12s I’m in red stagger a good portion of the pulls.

8

It is tricky like ideally you want to always have 1 charge up so you can gulp it after tank buster on bosses on ads it will be pretty much on cd depending on how big of pull you do. I use it around 60-80% stager most of time, i will let it get close to 100% if i have celestial ready for beefed up bubble.

9

Its pretty simple.

First, find serenity. Your stagger is not your health bar. Repeat. Your stagger is not your healthbar. If it goes red, don’t panic. Pay attention to your health. As long as shuffle is up you will not get one shot. Stagger cannot kill you. The last thing you want to do is be in red stagger without a purifying brew available.

The absolute worst case scenario for a Brewmaster is to burn up your PB’s and then get into some very heavy stagger (>1million per tic) and then you fall over. This is where people get into the “Brewmaster is so squishy” aspect.

Now that you’ve calmed yourself, look at your health bar. Is it ticking down rapidly or staying pretty steady? if its steady it means your healer is bursting right now and you’re safe to hold off purifying.

If it starts to tick down, wait a little bit and then hit purifying brew. Gai Plins will heal you for a metric buttload and you’ll be safe again.

This is what they mean by stagger flow, so that your health bar is just sorta casually ticking down and then it goes back to full, then ticks down and back to full.

Think of it like playing a Blood DK who doesn’t get one shot.

As a note, you want to purify as much as possible, so make sure a charge is always rolling and use it when it’s about to come off CD or within 5 seconds. Make sure you’re using keg smash and keeping that rolling as much as possible. Make sure you’re using Blackout Kick and Tigers Palm for the TP CDR. You’ll get the hang of it and it’ll start to feel like you’re basically immortal in pulls. As long as you get cleave healing from your healer you won’t ever be in trouble.

In larger pulls, its not uncommon to see a Brewmaster spike to 1-1.5m HPS through Gai Plins, Gift of the Ox, Celestial Brew and Vivify. Your healers will also note that they think your much “safer” on monk because you just sort of hover around 50-70% HP and don’t really go any lower than that. If you ever do start to get low, then elixirs will start proccing, ox stance will go off, and you’ll take even less damage.

Happy brewing!

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10

Let me take advantage of this thread to ask a question.

As a healer I don´t know how to heal stagger.

If, for example, a tank is full hp but has red stagger, should I spam big heals even if it is full hp? or just wait until stagger damage starts to star to heal?.

I always put a HoT if the brewmaster has green stagger and use big heals if the brewmaster has red stagger, but I don´t know if I´m actually healing or just overhealing.

11

I’m lazy and retarded and I just purify whenever it goes red and I tank mythic palace and 10s with no trouble.

12

Keep your hots on at all time and pop larger heals on big group pulls ,in general brew should be ok with tank busters if it does not screw up with brew management and ends up not having purifying /celestial for tank buster. Resto druid is one of best healers for brew masters imo.

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13

On a blood DK, if the DK is low health but has lots of runic power, they’re fine and will probably ZWOOP to full HP or close to it with death strike. You know they need healing if they’re low health and don’t have any runic power, cause it means they’re spent.

For brewmasters, you can just pay attention to their HP. HoTs on them at all times, and go from there. It’s good to keep an eye on stagger so you can tell when they’ve taken some big hits, as their health bar won’t exactly reflect that immediately, but it isn’t a ‘imminent death if the stagger bar is red’ type deal. The BrM is only really in danger if they’ve taken a huge chunk of damage, their health is ticking down, and they don’t have any brew charges to cleanse the stagger. When this happens, you’ll see their health start falling as if they have a huge DoT on them (because they kinda do). That’s when you want to spam heals.

But red stagger and full health doesn’t necessarily mean you need to spam heals.

In short: No, don’t spam heal at full health. just keep HoTs rolling all the time, but wait until stagger damage starts to pump heals if need be. They’re not really in danger of being 1-shot so you can trust their HP bar much more (unlike bdk where you can’t just trust the HP bar, but also need to look at runic power).

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