I decided to main Brew this tier but always play the other tanks just in case. Tank balance is pretty solid this time around with the exception of Brew lagging behind in the defense department. I’m hoping Blizzard will put through a couple more tuning passes and reduce the amount of healer babysitting that the Brewmaster needs compared to the more mitigation based tanks like Prot war and guardian.
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+1 (Wanted to leave just that but have to reach 10 characters)
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It’s a lesser played tank but I do enjoy it versus guardian and Prot war. I hope they can make the necessary tuning passes to make Brew less squishy.
A lot of people love playing this class spec but it’s been in the dumpster for awhile now.
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It’s still paying for crimes committed in BfA.
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The damage and feel, at least of shadowpan is SOOO GOOD! It feels like they just need to hit it with some flat %'s at least like they’ve been doing with other classes. I genuinely feel bad tanking for these M+ healers even though i’m maximizing every single button press or i’ll wipe the group. Perfect mechanics are a requirement.
Master of harmony felt a lot safer, but the damage was bad enough that giga geared dps were robbing me of threat. Green shoulder wings are also a lot less exciting overall.
Stagger is a difficult mechanic to balance, as long as its exist brew has to be a little weaker.
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I think magic damage weakness is their answer to stagger. That said, you don’t even need to touch stagger. Adjusting the frequency we can access our defensive cd’s would be plenty to get us viable in the meantime until a more thorough adjustment can be made.
Ultimately, you have got to think the class design team would look at healing needed vs other tanks. They’d see the same data we are seeing and it feels skewed right now in favor of other specs.
Yes this would be my suggestion too, if you feel squishy master of harmony feels better. I would also say aggro is a bit iffy on every tank, some dps simply burst too high right now.
In one of recent dev feedbacks, they clarified that they intentionally made brew take more healing supports than other tanks due to stagger privileges.
Is a tradeoff, in raids you will hardly ever get one-shoted as a Brewmaster and there is so much aoe/passive healing going out that the extra healing required rarely matters.
On paper the idea behind taking more damage overall but smoothing with stagger sounds cool but in practice we often end up with one or two tanks way ahead of everyone else and either: their hp appears to not budge ever or they self heal almost all the damage they take
Similar to how they said their goal was to reduce all tanks self sustain but to raise our defenses in return. I like the idea of slowly losing hp but requiring outside help to heal, I just don’t know if balance is right yet.
Tanks have been in a weird spot for mythic raiding in a while, is a lot more important what utility you bring than how is the tank balance.
The best example of this is how little are warriors played as a tank, they are one of the strongest ones right now, but they don’t bring anything in the form of utility when you already have 2 warriors dps.
You also always need to have a dk as a main tank or an alt just in case there is a fight that requires mass grip and that is almost always the case.
Hello Prot paladins, how is experience of getting beat down to the floor ?? 
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To be fair there’s prot paladins in the top keys as the meta hasn’t been defined. It’s definitely right now one of more skilled tank to play with the big payoff of being able to interrupt so many spells which can be a problem with how so many mobs chain cast. If prot paladins were as tanky/easy to play as other tanks they would simply be ahead for M+.
i played a Brewmaster through all of BFA, and the start of SL (Till I quit the game until last month), and it was fun back then, but even then I felt like I had to do extra work over other specs. I loved it though and was pretty damn good at it.
I tried it again last night after leveling my Monk up and something just feels… REALLY off. I know my gear isn’t great, but neither was my gear on other tanks I recently leveled and my lord I have never had so much trouble just holding Aggro in a normal dungeon. I have been tanking for many years in WoW and it was the first time I felt like I was just absolutely doing something wrong and just couldn’t figure out what it was.
I honesty feel like I’m still missing something. The spec doesn’t FEEL much different from last I tried it, but it feels weak as heck.
I feel like with the recent changes shifting more responsibility for tank health on healers makes monks worse, not just because of the fact they might be a bit underpowered but because others cannot know when you need heals through Unit Frames / Weakauras, or API calls.
I attempted to write some weakaura’s or Grid2 changes to express how many Ox Orbs a Brewmaster monk had, because yesterday in 9/10 keys I felt like healers were unnecessarily spamming every GCD they had on me.
When I am 2 or 3+ Ox Orbs, C_Spell.GetSpellCastCount(322101), I want to:
- build as much stagger as possible to about 50% health (or less 3 is a full heal for me ATM).
- Heal myself with Expel Harm consuming all these orbs.
- Purify a larger stagger pool optionally with Celestial Brew.
- Optionally Purify an additional time, and resetting with Black Ox if I used CB.
However healers will just dump everything they have into me because I am “dying”. They are fighting against the DTPS I am preparing to resolve. The problem is that information cannot be made available to other players because Ox Stance Orbs are NOT an Aura and these aren’t cooldowns and the information also does not appear in the combat log.
This is also exacerbated by the growing popularity of Cell unit frames which has less support for Brewmaster information such as stagger than Grid2 had.
I love healing brew by far the easiest tank to deal with in keys for pres.
Yep, I started brew as my main, and quickly shelved it for my VDH/War. Been terrible, still terrible, and at this point, always gunna be terrible.