Hey all,
I recently made a thread asking about WW Monk or BM Hunter as a solo play character. The results were… fairly conclusive. 
Except for one person, Hunter was the universal winner. The holdout posited that having the Black Ox Statue available as a tank could make solo-clearing things viable.
Any thoughts? All input is valued and appreciated.
Does the HP of Black Ox Statue scale correctly? HP adjusted when every class had HP buffed?
Asking cause it only has 100k HP and dies so fast in M+
I could be wrong since I haven’t tested it as a 70 WW, but I don’t think black ox statue can hold threat very well at all anymore (though it could at various points in the past I believe). It’s not like a hunter pet using growl and I’d guess worse than misdirecting your pet with AoE even. You’d have to let it pulse for a bit to not instantly pull off it as soon as you start AoEing and it doesn’t have the life to live that long against a lot of mobs I don’t think. If you cast it after you’ve already been attacking something it’ll never pull aggro off of you unless you stop attacking for awhile. It seems like mostly just a pulling tool to group mobs at this point.
I do see farming groups asking for monks sometimes, possibly using the statue to gather mobs at a hyper spawn or something? Not relevant for soloing though I guess.
Depending on what you’re soloing, touch of death with all of the talents as windwalker can be pretty neat. They do seem a bit squishy though. I leveled my monk partially in dungeons and did some as WW just for fun since double tap ToD cleave is amusing.
I have a 70 Hunter as an alt that has about 12 lower ilvl than my Monk. BM Hunter is so much better at soloing than WW Monk it’s crazy. But neither can really handle packs of elites, however with Monk you can always swap over to BrM, which doesn’t quite do WW damage but is far more survivable. That being said, I still feel squishier on BrM than you might expect a tank to feel - in Shadowlands I played a Holy Paladin, I would solo on Prot and felt essentially immortal in a way that Brewmaster does not feel. Still, for almost everything you’re going to do, WW offers high single target and AoE burst. It’s only really elites that it starts to feel dicey. Even at 382 ilvl I feel like I have to throw out CDs to deal with the elites at the Obsidian fortress and whatnot.
Edit: to address Black Ox Statue itself, I used it briefly in my solo build. It died so fast against anything I needed it to tank that it was basically irrelevant.
This writeup is amazing. Thank you!
quote=“Styling-proudmoore, post:4, topic:1456482”]
Prot
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This was another thought in my mind.
I haven’t played my Paladin much in DF - Windwalker is just a far more fun and engaging DPS spec than Retribution (in my opinion) and I’m DPS for my group this time instead of healing. That being said, my buddy is bouncing between an Evoker, a Prot Paladin, and a Prot Warrior (don’t ask.) He has been super into the Prot Warrior for soloing, he pulls large groups of elites and mows them down with his absurdly high damage, and takes basically no damage himself, and he can chain Impending Victory (or whatever it’s called) using Victory Rush procs when he kills mobs to heal himself for 30% of his max hp. It’s actually kinda nuts.
I am trying to decide if i think i can make a Devoker into a soloing character.
A friend asked me to go with him into Tomb 25 M the other week, and i figured “Eh, sure lets see how fragile i really am.”
Since, you know. Devoker = squish.
I singlehandledly rolled the entire place.
I am a seasoned brewmaster. Have been since MoP. With a lot of crit and mastery and the vivify talents i have no issue soloing content. I can pull 3-4 mobs and be fine. Am I at max HP the whole time, no. Am I worried, also no. With my rotation and timing i keep a consistent HPS to deal with the damage. Its just the skill floor to skill ceiling with brew is significantly higher than any class. If i had been brand new to brew it wouldnt be doable. It takes a ton of practice to just be good and far more experience to be great. But i’ve been playing it long enough that all the doom and gloom isnt scary.
I struggled with elites on my WW when I hit 70, and was in the 340-350 ilvl range, so just swapped over to BrM for all the hard stuff. I’m now around 370 ilvl (I don’t do dungeons or raids and don’t pvp much and enjoy playing up alts) and I can solo 2M hp rares and pull 3-4 elites at a time in most hard places provided I’m paying attention and watching my hp for spikes.
I frequently make the most of my CDs and have a bit of an odd spec to help with self healing, but it’s fun. And it kept me from wanting to leave my monk as my main.
This is my monk FYI no idea why I’ve been posting on an old warrior all this time.
I was playing a different monk as an alt during late SL (I stopped playing about eight years ago, kids…) and came back around 9.2 but had no real BrM experience in SL, just leveled this guy up from the 40s right before DF came out and have been simply re-learning the class on the fly in DF.
Pretty sure I’m doing things right but if not folks are welcome to suggest as much.
I think the Black Ox Statue is a tool for emergencies. Every 10s, your Provoke becomes an AoE provoke.
If the Black Ox Statue dies almost instantly, that’s too bad. I think it’s better if the Black Ox Statue’s cooldown is increased to 30s but survives 3x better.
Does anyone think Black Ox Statue should survive much better but have a 30s cooldown?
All excellent feedback, and thank you!
I had wondered if the BOS was an easily killed emergency. I guess it is.
Unless they changed it when they made it into a class tree talent, this taunts everything onto you from the statue, it doesn’t taunt onto the statue.
Potentially useful for Brewmasters when tanking since it’s like having a short cooldown challenging shout you can target at range, but it wouldn’t help you soloing.
I’m so cute! Haha! I thought if you taunt the statue, the statue will AoE taunt everyone around it onto itself!
In my opinion, the 3 Statues should be a little more useful or powerful than now, since they are the final talents in the tree.