First, a little update...
This week I am proud to say that our little groups first night of raiding ended with 6 bosses being one shot and then getting VERY close to getting the Shammys down. The second night we managed to progress through a whole 3 bosses! After a shaky and totally messy first attempt, we got the Shamans down on our second try, even though my co tank forgot to take Haromm off me in the beginning when I also had aggro on the two dogs, which of course resulted in a somewhat untimely death (oops!) a quick res from our druid healer saw me back on my panda feet and we got the kill :) General Nazgrim was relatively easy, having done the fight so many times on flex the group were very good at controlling the adds and being a monk certainly helps out during the extra adds at the end!! Malkorok was a very fun fight, an we will pretend I didn't get the entire raid wiped out by telling them to stack for the breath and then managing to get ALL of them hit by it on one particular attempt :D We had a few attempts on spoils at the end of the night, it is my intention to attempt to write a monk guide for this fight at some point, as it is the one fight in SoO I feel I have the experience and knowledge to do so on!!
Different bosses = different builds?
The more I experiment and play around with different stat weights, the more it becomes apparent that with the Brewmaster you can actually (If so inclined) build differently for each different boss. I'm not saying this may not be true of other tanks, however when I compare the Brewmaster to something like my DK who has a respectable enough gear score to face the first 4 bosses in SoO, there seems to be a lot less scope for me to change things up for each fight. I though I would pick these first 4
as an example for just how much maneuverability my Monk has.
Immersius.
For me this fight is a bit of a no brainer, and it's a great opportunity to utilise all our epic magic damage reductions like Diffuse Magic and Glyph of Guard these two spells between them actually mean that as Brewmasters we can do something rather special and take two of the blasts that would normally one shot most other tanks. With this said I will say that when I first attempted this boss with our main group I kept my Dampen Harm,
as my gear wasn't all that great and I felt a little bit squishy.
The Fallen Protectors.
This is an interesting fight, as depending on who I am tanking, I build one of two different ways: For Rook Stonetoe, who deals a high amount of physical Damage I like to up my mastery a little, keep my Guard un-glyphed and make sure to take the Dampen Harm talent, which is awesome as it can actually be cast while stunned. For He Softfoot, who deals a mixture of physical and magical damage, I like to glyph my guard and depending on my mastery score, if it's high enough I will also take Diffuse Magic, as it pretty much negates all the nasty poisons he uses on his tank. I love the fact that by changing my build I can easily tank either one of these two bosses, whereas some tanks will struggle more with one or the other, i think this makes the Brewmaster a very powerful addition to any raid team attempting this boss, purely because they can cope with whatever boss is needed, giving the other tank free choice to pick whatever is easiest for him/her.
Norushen.
This fight took me a while to figure out, the best answer I could come up with was a high mastery build for my first few runs, as the amalgamation does hit pretty hard, and, if you're dozey like me and accidentally get caught in the titanic smash when you're in your mini proving grounds, a high amount of mastery will certainly save your backside from certain death, as that smash hurts!
The Sha of Pride.
Quite possibly one of the most boring fights ever for a tank, however for my first few runs I went with a high stam/mastery build as the raid seems to take more damage than the tanks so I tried to make it as easy on the healers as possible (I'm just nice like that)
I could go on and describe a build for all the other bosses as well, I may end up doing so at some time, but my point here was that for only 4 bosses, I can use different builds to ensure that my job as a tank is made as easy as possible, and that I'm not taking so much damage that my healers are yelling at me! This brings me nicely onto one of our other variables.....
Trinkets.
Yes. Trinkets indeed. As soon as SoO was live, I sat down with my list of trinkets and Ask Mr Robot to decide which two would be for me, simple right? WRONG!!!! I sat there for ages reading through each one, looking at the different builds on Mr R and comparing them, and came away totally confused, and still with no idea what trinkets I should be looking to use. All the other tanks in my guild knew what they were after, and I was sat there 3 weeks into the patch still not knowing what my Bis trinks were. After a while I decided I wanted the Curse of Hubris from Garrosh and the Sigil of Rampage from the Spoils of Pandaria. So I was set and sorted. Luckily for me I picked up the Sigil in one of the normal mode runs with our main group, so i was halfway there, I eventually picked up my Curse from Garrosh on a flex run. Great, so I had my trinkets. It soon became apparent that because of the amount of crit i was running from my gear and gems (around 40%) I found myself never needing to use the Curse of Hubris, also it messes with the cd on my Synapse Springs, so...I was back to the drawing board again. Over the past few weeks I have been incredibly unlucky with trinket drops, however I have come to the conclusion that there are no two "staple" trinkets I should be looking for, and that I need to pick up a few of them, to interchange depending on the fight. On the whole I must say that personally I am quite disappointed in the tanking trinkets this tier, none of them really jumped out at me and said "ME!! You want ME!!!!" The one trinket I am particularly interested in trying out if it ever drops for me is the Juggernaut's Focusing Crystal, ok so the dodge isn't really a stat that I want but the healing would be fantastic for high damage fights. I am currently running with the Sigil of Rampage and Rook's Unlucky Talisman, I am really hoping Mr Blizzard decides to be kind to me with drops soon so that I can pick up a few of the others :)
Raid Progress
I am currently a tank for the second group in the guild Midlifecrisis on Darkspear EU, I have helped out with some of the progress runs that the main group were doing, my crowning moment being present for the first Spoils of Pandaria 10m normal progress kill!! However my glory was short lived, Siegemaster Blackfuse quickly saw to it that my (at the time) 530 ilevel ass would have to go get me some more gear before I could have any hope of tanking the last 4 bosses. At first I thought it was me, but then after checking all my logs and seeing that all my buff up-times were as they should be, and I was using all the skills I should be, the absolutely insane amounts of damage I was taking were just outrageous, and quickly brought home the message that Blizzard had not intended the last 4 bosses for the under geared! Since then I have managed to get my gear to an acceptable level, and recently got my 4 set bonus which I do like very much.
Our group is working on the Dark Shamans 10m normal at the moment, we're progressing quite nicely, had a night of fun wiping on Galakras, though the next time we tried him we one shot him - go figure :) Here is a video I made of our Juggernaut kill, Weak Auras I am using are all from Sunnier that link will take you straight to her Weak Auras page.
Food Glorious Food
As this is the first time I am experiencing any of the holiday festivals you will have to bear with the inevitable squee's and oooh's that I will be spurting whenever one comes along. As a Panda and loving my food in general I am really enjoying the Pilgrims Bounty, absolutely loving the turkey shooters and am doing all my dailies so that I can terrorize people with them for weeks to come. (Particularly one of the hunters in our guild who thinks its incredibly hilarious to shoot me with his turnip paint gun on cd).
One of the may reasons I love being a panda is the food buff, especially with the new feasts from 5.4, also being a real life "foodie" helped when I leveled my cooking :)
This week for me will mostly be spent eating may bountiful feasts, and possibly getting my rogue to 90...maybe.
I've spent quite a bit of time trying to compose this first post, first impressions and all that....In fact it took me so long to compose this I have been sat here for half an hour with a written post and no title....I'm sure one will appear eventually!
Welcome to my world, my name is Cat and I play a Pandaren monk, Brewmaster to be more specific. I started playing World of Warcraft in March 2013, and originally rolled out a destruction Warlock. Now, I'm not sure what possessed me to do this, as when I think of my ideal gaming toon, a caster is not what springs to mind, in actual fact when I think of this toon, Brick from borderlands is the first character I come across, anything that can pile drive into a bunch of mobs with fists blazing and making the biggest mess possible is ideal for me. Never-the-less, the Warlock is where I started. (I have to admit though, the chaos bolts are pretty good). I leveled Snoopkitten with my husband, he was on his second toon at the time which happened to be a Tauren Paladin, which he leveled as a tank. All the while we were leveling together, particularly in dungeons, I couldn't help thinking that tanking looked way more fun that what I was doing.
After getting the lock to 90 I soon decided that I wanted my own tank, and I had also decided that the Monk would be the best possible tank I could use. Despite a few friends telling me that this was totally bonkers as monks were NOT easy to learn and even less easy when you take into consideration that I would also be learning the tanking role, I had made up my mind and created a rolypoly Panda, then named Thedarklady. The name actually came from a Heroes of Newerth character, of course I didn't at this point realize that the space wouldn't show up, and after a few months I got so fed up with it looking pants and none of my titles fitting me properly, I renamed her Darklády.
My early experiences of tanking on the monk were, well, shocking. I was awful, I got kicked out of way more dungeons than I care to remember (one of the best ones was me running through the entire first hallway of Utgarde Keep without waiting for the rest of the group and promptly suicide at the end after pulling all the mobs with me), needless to say, it was bad. Very very bad. How I made it to 90 I will never know, most likely with a thick skin and blind luck. Anyhow, the guild I was then in had no need for a tank at that time, so I stuck to raiding on my lock and through sheer despondency of not being able to use my tank properly, she was left to idle while I began leveling other toons.
After a while I decided I wanted to use my tank, and turned to various guides to try and learn it, unfortunately for me, most of these were just an information overload and made little sense to me, until one sunny day (see what I did there) a guildy pointed me in the direction of this wonderful lady's site Sunnier's Art of War. Here I learned the basics, the step up from the basics, and finally moved on to the advanced bits, it's a fantastic guide and I would highly recommend it to any budding Brewmasters or Brewmistresses out there. If you want clean, simple advice, with some fun thrown in, this is the place for you. Also Sunnier herself is totally lovely and has been my inspiration for some months now :)
Let me be clear, this blog will not be a guide, not intentionally, if any use can be made from my ramblings then that would be wonderful, my only hope is that anyone wanting to learn the ways of the brew can read this and realize, it's okay to be Somewhat "rubbish" at the beginning!! We all have to start somewhere. A lot of my little Pandas journey has been one of self discovery, like starting out with a massive agility build...yes, I know....just....we've all been there I'm sure. (This is what i will keep telling myself anyway). Then after reading Sunnier's blog I discovered that I actually needed this magical thing called Mastery. This is just one example, I plan to make a few more posts over the next week, detailing my own progress and the builds I currently like to use.
Congratulations if you have made it this far! Bear with me, and hopefully I can fill this little blog with the adventures of my beloved panda.
