Brewmaster (Tank) Basic Discussion - Page 7

Venyasure · 08/08/12, 8:32 AM

Here is the Excel version of my program :

http://www.filedropper.com/brewmastergear_1

Excel will probably disable the macros, and ask you whether you want to enable them. You will have to do so if you want to run the program.

Enter the stats in the second line, press OK, and see the results. You may have to wait for 4-5 seconds before the graph is updated. Remember to press OK after you modify some stats, otherwise the results will not be updated with the new values.

I checked that the results are the same as those i get on Maple. But they are slightly different (really slightly) from what you would get if you entered the stats of my previous screenshots. Indeed, while I was rewriting the program for Excel, I noticed two small mistakes :

- I increased stamina by 5% due to the 5% stats buff, yet I had chosen not to include the buff in the program, but rather to enter values for agi and stamina that were already modified by the buff

- 5% mastery buff was not taken into account

Unfortunately, these results will soon turn out to be out of date :

Expel Harm healing was increased

We changed how Vengeance works.

Vengeance is intended to let tanks generate additional damage and threat as content levels rise, despite not gearing for it (or at least not primarily). We're changing the design to let Vengeance play better with active mitigation, but the new design has some other advantages many of you will like.

As most all of you know by now, the idea of active mitigation is that the buttons a tank presses directly contribute to mitigation and survival. In some cases, this is timing-centric, such as Death Strike. In others, it’s both timing-centric and also involves balancing how you spend your resources among multiple abilities, such as Savage Defense vs. Frenzied Regeneration or Shield Block vs. Shield Barrier. In the latter case, it’s important that both abilities are compelling and compete well with each other. We are changing Vengeance to let those abilities be balanced.

I'm going to use Savage Defense (a short duration large dodge buff) and Frenzied Regen (a large instant heal) as examples. Getting the balance between SD and FR right is challenging. We want SD to win on average, but you’re limited on how often you can use it, and it’s not necessarily reliable -- sometimes you really need a heal NOW, and so FR is the right button. SD should win, but FR shouldn’t be too far behind, and they should scale similarly.

SD scales with the incoming damage: if BossA hits you for 60k, and BossB hits you for 120k, then SD is twice as valuable (in absolute terms) on BossB than on BossA. FR scales with your attack power: even a few 5man trash mobs will cap out your Vengeance, so your AP will be the same on BossA as on BossB. FR isn’t any stronger on BossB than BossA.

On top of that, AP and boss damage scales differently as ilevel rises. We tried a solution to that problem where FR scaled exponentially with AP in the last build. That has worked fairly well, but still failed at keeping SD and FR balanced when boss damage was significantly different from the baseline we used as a tuning point. For example, 25-player raid bosses hit twice as hard as 10-player raid bosses, which makes SD twice as valuable.

But wasn’t this post supposed to be about Vengeance? Currently, Vengeance increases your AP by 5% of the damage taken, stacking up to the cap, which happens quickly. We are changing Vengeance to increase AP equal to 5% of the damage you take for 20 sec. This buff will "roll" so that as it gets refreshed the unused part is added to the new buff, similar to how Ignite or Stagger work. The net result will be that Vengeance stacks by the amount of DPS being thrown at you over 20 sec. There is no cap.

Additional nuances:

-- Avoidance will not count against you. Avoiding an attack will extend the current Vengeance stack back to 20 sec (as if you were hit again for the same DPS).
-- Blocks, absorbs, Stagger and Shield of the Righteous will also not count against you. The damage before these effects is used for the Vengeance calculation.
-- To reduce ramp up time, we bump you up to halfway to whatever your average Vengeance level would be based on each individual hit. Essentially, we skip the first 10 sec of ramping.
-- Tank damage in 5-player groups will decrease. We think this is a good chance because it is weird and demoralizing when tanks consistently top damage meters in dungeons.
-- Tank damage in 25-player groups will increase. We think this is a good change because it makes tank DPS as relevant in 25-player raids as it is in 10-player raids.
-- With this change, Brewmaster damage will be extremely overpowered. We will fix it, but you may get a build where they are ludicrously good.

The rest of this post is nitty gritty details for theorycrafters. You do NOT need to read or understand this in order to effectively play a tank.

-- Whenever you get hit, Vengeance is added based on the damage of the hit before block, crit block, absorbs, stagger, and Shield of the Righteous.
-- Whenever you avoid an attack from a mob where MobLevel>=TankLevel-3, your existing Vengeance is extended to 20sec remaining.
-- Based on how hard you’re hit, we estimate how high Vengeance’s equilibrium point will be: DamageTaken / 1.5.
-- If you’re not at least half that high on Vengeance, we bump you up to that amount
-- The new Vengeance value is calculated as: 0.05 * DamageTaken + OldVengeance * OldVengeanceSecondsRemaining / 20
-- Frenzied Regeneration and Shield Barrier’s formulae have changed to:
Frenzied Regeneration at 60 rage: max(2*(AP-Agi*2), Sta*2.5)
Shield Barrier at 60 rage: max(2*(AP-Str*2), Sta*2.5)
-- Yes, these do mean that it uses your AP without base AP from Str/Agi (but does still slightly include AP from Agi/Str when you’ve got the 10% AP raid buff or other +%AP buffs).
-- Please feel free to ask any questions you have about the mechanical details of this

This will (I think) diminish the impact of stamina on attack power, and it might change the proportion of damage prevented via healing and damage prevented via avoidance and Puriying Brew, which, unlike the current healing, depends on boss damage. Besides, considering how they're changing a Druid's Frenzied Regeneration, if they apply a similar formula to the AP scaling of Guard, only AP from Vengeance, and not from Agi, will influence the efficiency of Guard.

Originally Posted by qwas

Did anyone test if Keg Smash is only affected by hit chance? I think that it cannot be parried or dodged

Are you sure ? Well, that's not written the tooltip. Are you not making a confusion with a Death Knight's Death Strike which cannot be parried ? If you're right, I would have to modify a couple of things, and it's probable that expertise would indeed be far less valuable.

Tsuki Ko · 08/08/12, 9:45 AM

I just tested it, still doesn't have any kind of protection.

http://i.imgur.com/dgSXe.png
http://i.imgur.com/UQA2W.png

Maikro · 08/08/12, 11:48 AM

Ven, thanks for the clarifications. This changes things dramatically from what I was expecting. It's really interesting to see the extreme interactions between threat stats and survivability. This may prove yet to be a more exciting expansion as a tank, especially with this recent Vengeance change announcement as well.

I've always been a proponent of QoL with Hit/Expertise (prot paladin, missing a HotR on a big AOE trash pack -sucks-) but there was never room for those stats with the need to min/max avoidance. I am looking forward to having the ability to have my cake and eat it too.

It's also good to see they've finally acknowledged the value of tank damage in 10s vs. 25s. Long time coming.

I'm curious as well how these stat values change based on the frequency of boss damage, considering your baseline of a boss doing 100k DPS. We recently tested the Sha of Fear in the Terrace of Endless Spring, and he uses Thrash (its actually a triple hit, not a double) which promotes tanks having extra avoidance (think Chimaeron, Baleroc). Those hits are nasty and were occasionally just gibbing our tanks outright. I'd like to see the interactions on this based on more frequent boss damage as opposed to just larger hits.

Mackeyser · 08/09/12, 12:23 AM

Tsukiyuri reposted Mione's Googledoc spreadsheet modeling tank balance using the Sha of Fear heroic fight as an example.

Beta Class Balance Analysis - Forums - World of Warcraft

Mione's conclusion was that that specific *type* of fight was one where a HEAVY Mastery build for Monks seemed to model as much, much stronger than any other tank build.

I would encourage a full read as it's pretty long and I think pretty insightful.

I realize much of the theorycrafting is trying to model which stats are best.

The answer may be that there are two answers. Active mitigation may be creating multiple foci rather than a singular focus for our best stats and that focus will be dependent on the fight, i.e. the boss dmg, the mechanics, target swaps, etc. Specifically, we very likely will have have an Agi/Stam/Hit/Haste ring that's generally BiS, but also have an Agi/Stam/Mastery/Crit ring that's BiS for "Stagger Fights". From what I've been gathering, the active mitigation model will require Brewmasters to maintain two gear sets. One gear set will be for trash and the typical boss fight (or even the atypical boss fight). The second set will be for those "super heavy hitters" or for those with thrash type mechanics that require tons of Mastery above all else to slide the scale to Stagger as much damage as possible.

Based on the posted info thus far, it seems with the tremendous power of Stagger on certain Active Mitigation fights, we're likely to have multiple "optimal stat sets".

lairpie · 08/10/12, 12:40 PM

Stat values swapping dramatically for tanks based on the mechanics of a fight was true long before active mitigation. To use something of an extreme example: tanking (not kiting) bloods on spine, sta, dk mastery, druid mastery have abysmal values compared to any pure avoidance stat. The faster the attack speed (so on spine, ridiculously fast since the bloods are all attacking) the smoother the RNG and thus the better avoidance is. In theory tanks have wanted to have "enough sta" to live through the big burst, then stack mitigation on most fights, but what amount "enough" was has varied dramatically between fights.

Mackeyser · 08/10/12, 4:08 PM

Lairpie, you are correct, of course. My point was that most tanks not in top guilds generally don't build multiple sets of gear. They may have a few swap pieces, but there's a delineation between those who'll have multiple tanking specs and/or multiple tanking sets to optimize their performance for individual fights.

Mione's theorycrafting and other information may highlight in more clear relief (and I say may because it's Beta and things still change on a daily basis) is that Monks may require at the very least dual tanking gear sets for competent play based on fight mechanics and other variables. The numbers were to the point that Mione called Monks "too good" on the big hitter type fight stacking mastery.

And yet, for general tanking (edit: for Monks), mastery is still a poor stat, hence the concern about multiple tank sets.

Question: will a balanced approach to mastery after hit/exp capping allow normal mode tanks to progress without need for multiple gear sets or will the power of Stagger be so powerful that on Sha of Fear type fights be such that even on normal, tanks should expect to have a Regular set and a Stagger set?

Once I get to heroics, I'm sure I'll have a Regular set and a Stagger set unless the numbers change that affect the values significantly for Mastery or our Stagger mechanic. That said, based on all available information, I just don't know how our normal mode gearing should look at this time.

superworm · 08/11/12, 11:16 AM

Originally Posted by Mackeyser

Lairpie, you are correct, of course. My point was that most tanks not in top guilds generally don't build multiple sets of gear. They may have a few swap pieces, but there's a delineation between those who'll have multiple tanking specs and/or multiple tanking sets to optimize their performance for individual fights.

Mione's theorycrafting and other information may highlight in more clear relief (and I say may because it's Beta and things still change on a daily basis) is that Monks may require at the very least dual tanking gear sets for competent play based on fight mechanics and other variables. The numbers were to the point that Mione called Monks "too good" on the big hitter type fight stacking mastery.

And yet, for general tanking (edit: for Monks), mastery is still a poor stat, hence the concern about multiple tank sets.

Question: will a balanced approach to mastery after hit/exp capping allow normal mode tanks to progress without need for multiple gear sets or will the power of Stagger be so powerful that on Sha of Fear type fights be such that even on normal, tanks should expect to have a Regular set and a Stagger set?

Once I get to heroics, I'm sure I'll have a Regular set and a Stagger set unless the numbers change that affect the values significantly for Mastery or our Stagger mechanic. That said, based on all available information, I just don't know how our normal mode gearing should look at this time.

I read that Sha of Fear analysis spreadsheet. However, my impression is different from you. Basically I don't see why monk mastery will be considered too good here compared with other class. If we take the worst scenario as the standard, then paladin is the best tank here: they have the highest the mitigation which does not depend on mastery, which means that they can pretty much stack stamina to pass the dread thrash check. Monks, even when stacking mastery, still lacks behind paladins in the worst scenario.
In the average scenario, which means avoidance is considered, monks are doing the best, simply because the high avoidance provided by BoK and Elusive Brew. In this case basically you get better results stacking avoidance instead of mastery.

So basically I don't get your point. If you think monks are overpowered in this fight, which means you're considering the average scenario, then the numer here really suggests stacking avoidance instead of mastery; if you are considering the worst scenario, then paladins are the best, though it's true in this case monks had better stack mastery.

Disargeria · 08/11/12, 11:59 AM

I brought up the potential power of Elusive Brew charges being consumed to avoid specific attacks, and I guess they agreed it would be a bit powerful because EB will now have a 9 second cooldown.

Beta Class Balance Analysis - Forums - World of Warcraft

That makes it harder to do frequently, but we can still use it like that. Last I checked we were only gaining charges every 8-10 seconds on average anyway!

Mackeyser · 08/12/12, 4:53 PM

I don't think Monks are overpowered for any fights. I relayed that Mione called them, "too good".

My question was whether the stat disparity for Monks based on fight mechanics was such that for Thrash/Massive Damage fights it would be incumbent to acquire two gear sets, one a regular avoidance set, another a Stagger set.

Moreover, will that disparity be substantial enough that even normal mode Brewmasters find it efficacious to pursue multiple gear sets in order to progress or will that disparity only be a heroic mode phenomenon?

I honestly don't know and as we saw with the EB CD change that just went in, they aren't done tuning Brewmasters.

Edit: I found an addon called Brewmaster Tao that tracks Stagger amount which I've found extremely helpful and can be moved around like a timer bar. I've found it helpful in testing.

Brewmaster Tao : Mists of Pandaria Beta : World of Warcraft AddOns

Venyasure · 08/12/12, 7:04 PM

Here is a new version of my Excel program :

http://www.filedropper.com/brewmastergear

(don't forget to enable the macros if your Excel disables them, it is important)

In this version :

- the new Vengeance system (with the recent 2% unmitigated thing) is implemented
- healing from Expel Harm is doubled, according to the last beta build
- dodge and parry are not missing (i really don't know how i forgot them in the last version)
- results are now displayed in decreasing order for more clarity
- new button : you now have the choice to not update the graph if you don't want to wait
- inclusion of the passive damage reduction from the Stance of the Ox and Weakened Blows in the total damage reduction value ; this value used to represent the damage reduction from stagger/avoidance/armour that was already diminished by the passive damage reduction. Now the value is a more genuine number taking into account every damage reduction. This addition has had no effect on stat priority (which is logical, but requires a few lines of explanation)
- the mastery bonus is now correct (i thought it was +5% mastery rating, but it's +3000 ; it used to be +5% right ?)
- 5% stats buff now fully included

As we could expect, Stamina does not provide damage reduction (by increasing healing) any more, since it gives no AP. This was the major change in this last version ; the rest hardly changed (Agi is slightly better than before since Expel Harm was buffed).

Screenshot :

If you don't have Excel 2010 :
http://www.filedropper.com/brewmastergearcopie3

superworm · 08/12/12, 8:02 PM

Originally Posted by Mackeyser

I don't think Monks are overpowered for any fights. I relayed that Mione called them, "too good".

My question was whether the stat disparity for Monks based on fight mechanics was such that for Thrash/Massive Damage fights it would be incumbent to acquire two gear sets, one a regular avoidance set, another a Stagger set.

Moreover, will that disparity be substantial enough that even normal mode Brewmasters find it efficacious to pursue multiple gear sets in order to progress or will that disparity only be a heroic mode phenomenon?

I honestly don't know and as we saw with the EB CD change that just went in, they aren't done tuning Brewmasters.

Edit: I found an addon called Brewmaster Tao that tracks Stagger amount which I've found extremely helpful and can be moved around like a timer bar. I've found it helpful in testing.

Brewmaster Tao : Mists of Pandaria Beta : World of Warcraft AddOns

Fair enough. My personal opinion is that there is no need to stack mastery, unless the devs tune it for a higher number later. Even in the Heroic Sha of Fear fight, simple mathematics will show that the chances that a brewmaster fail to avoid one attack in any dread thrash is very very low, to an extent that you may not experience that in your progression. And avoidance is still a much better DR once you stop dying from dread thrash, which you should as long as you avoid at least one of the dread thrash attacks with the base 50% stagger amount.
In fact I think Sha of Fear favors avoidance than mastery. That's because avoidance get better results the more you have it. Typically it has the diminishing return. However, skill usuage does not cause diminishing return, and Sha of Fear is kind of special as you can pop EB every dread thrash, effectively make it 100% uptime if only thrash/dread thrash is considered, while in a normal case the uptime should be much lower.

qwas · 08/13/12, 1:51 PM

Anyone thought about stacking shuffle on boss swaps (while currently not tanking)?
As far as i can see it can be beneficial to stance dance (to jab only in dps stance because of the 2 chi generation)

In my 30sec test with 2100 haste (no buffs) on 90 lvl training dummy from behind (hit/exp capped)
i can get to 37sec on shuffle

without stance dance i can get to 27sec on shuffle

in a 30sec tank swap scenario i can work on shuffle while not tanking and when i'm tanking i can use all chi on PB/Guard/Chi wave (and this bonus 7seconds convert into preemptive guard)

Maikro · 08/13/12, 3:09 PM

Originally Posted by qwas

Anyone thought about stacking shuffle on boss swaps (while currently not tanking)?
As far as i can see it can be beneficial to stance dance (to jab only in dps stance because of the 2 chi generation)

In my 30sec test with 2100 haste (no buffs) on 90 lvl training dummy from behind (hit/exp capped)
i can get to 37sec on shuffle

without stance dance i can get to 27sec on shuffle

in a 30sec tank swap scenario i can work on shuffle while not tanking and when i'm tanking i can use all chi on PB/Guard/Chi wave (and this bonus 7seconds convert into preemptive guard)

Er? I thought shuffle only stacked to 12 seconds.....

Disargeria · 08/13/12, 7:28 PM

It was changed recently. See this blue post:

Beta Class Balance Analysis - Forums - World of Warcraft

In the build after next, you’ll find that Shield Block, Savage Defense, Shuffle, and Shield of the Righteous will always add their duration to the existing buff if there is one, instead of just adding an imaginary tick. If you hit Blackout Kick with 7 seconds left on Shuffle, it’ll go up to 13 seconds remaining.

Maikro · 08/14/12, 9:07 AM

Wow, I thought it was still capping out at 12 seconds, it just wouldn't waste it if you refreshed at 7+ seconds remaining....that is pretty awesome now.

Is there any current limit to how high it can stack or just limited by Chi generation at this point? If that is the case, this change should significantly increase the values of haste.