Brewmaster Monk Frequently Asked Questions — The War Within (11.2)

This is a question that, unfortunately, does not have an easy answer. The short version is that, in general, if you are new to playing a Brewmaster Monk, you should definitely focus more on being defensive while you are learning everything you can do. The first and foremost job of a tank player is to stay alive!

As you become more comfortable and learn what you are capable of, it may be useful to focus on dealing more damage to kill things faster. If something dies faster, then it will not be alive as long to try to kill you! The hard part is figuring out what defensive benefits you can afford to give up as you pursue higher DPS. Ultimately, this answer will change depending on the group you are playing with and even your healer.

It is also heavily recommended to play defensively when beginning to progress on a boss in organized raiding. If you ever die due to not being sturdy enough, then every other member of your raid just lost a chance to learn more about the encounter. As you and your raid get more confident, you can begin to switch to dealing more damage if you like. Otherwise, the impact of your own damage contribution before you are nearing the end of a fight's progression is minimal.

Some choices you can make when deciding to provide more damage as a Brewmaster Monk, starting with the smallest defensive losses are:

1. Optimize your stat priority for more damage. This includes gems, enchants, and consumables.
2. Adjust your talent build for more damage by opting into some additional offensive choices over defensive ones.
3. Use one or more DPS trinkets instead of tank-oriented trinkets. This is often the single largest DPS gain you can achieve while also being the easiest to switch between defense and offense.

While it would be simultaneously nice and awful if there was only one correct answer to this question, the truth is that the Shado-Pan and Master of Harmony Hero Talents each come with unique strengths and weaknesses.

Shado-Pan's talents operate entirely in the background, with their Flurry Strikes occurring as you perform the regular Brewmaster rotation. In addition, they feature many buffs to your core damage skills of Keg Smash and Tiger Palm, pushing your damage to new heights. However, this tree's defensive powers are largely reliant on consistently dodging attacks to trigger Predictive Training and casting Vivify with Vivacious Vivification procs to improve Protect and Serve.

Master of Harmony talents, on the other hand, remain largely passive as well but do require you to regularly cast Celestial Brew to trigger Aspect of Harmony. In addition to this slightly larger amount of control, its tree also features improvements to your Purifying Brew while also granting a second charge of Celestial Brew. This combines to make the Master of Harmony certainly feel more impactful, and it is arguably a better learning experience when playing defensively.

Ultimately, any piece of major content can be completed with either set of Brewmaster's Hero Talents. The two remain close enough in damage for both to be viable, though Shado-Pan tends to see a slight edge in larger AoE. Defensively, the greater feeling of control over your survival as a Master of Harmony may make its talents especially appealing for progression environments. However, you should be willing to experiment with both and see which of the two you favor, being ready to switch as new opportunities present themselves.

As a Brewmaster, you have a large amount of customization in your defensive power, and this is especially true in the choice talents of Celestial Brew and Celestial Infusion. While both of them provide a similar benefit of an on-demand absorb shield with the exact same cooldown, these two talents go about it in different ways.

What this means is that you are choosing between a shield that absorbs all damage ( Celestial Brew) over one that absorbs only some damage ( Celestial Infusion). However, Celestial Infusion's duration is double that of Celestial Brew, meaning that you have up to 16 seconds of mitigation present rather than only 8. Although both abilities have the same total amount of damage that can be absorbed, Celestial Infusion's partial reduction results in a smoother experience to heal overall. Rather than reaching full health with an absorb present to eat additional damage and waste any healing floating around, you instead get to benefit from further healing by not getting back to your maximum health despite still mitigating damage.

Due to this general tanking and healing philosophy, Celestial Infusion should end up as your default choice in the vast majority of available content. There are, however, some exceptions where Celestial Brew can prove more useful. If, for example, you need to be at full health with the absorb to survive a massive burst of damage, then Celestial Brew better serves that purpose. Likewise, if there is an ability that punishes you for your health being reduced, then it would make more sense to absorb it all. Whenever you encounter these types of mechanics, consider switching from Celestial Infusion.

Niuzao's Resolve is another talent that allows you to further customize how you mitigate and heal the damage you receive as a Brewmaster. It fills a similar goal of smoothing things out by converting the healing from Gift of the Ox or Spirit of the Ox into a HoT effect. Not only does this result in a steady stream of healing based on your damage received, but the HoT itself will automatically increase in strength by up to 80% depending on your current health whenever it heals.

What this ends up meaning for tanking as a Brewmaster is that you are encouraged to not consume your healing spheres with Expel Harm while you have Niuzao's Resolve talented. Rather, you should instead allow them to naturally expire or reach the spawning cap of 5 spheres at once. After this point, any further spawns will be automatically consumed to give a continuous source of healing. If you instead consume them all at once with Expel Harm— such as if you need an emergency burst of healing—then you are setting yourself up to be deprived of that steady healing until the cap of 5 spheres has been reached again.

Technically, this guideline for healing with Expel Harm is true whether or not you have chosen this talent. However, the instant-healing nature of your healing spheres without Niuzao's Resolve can help make up for this deficit by at least topping your health off in those similar emergencies when they pop up. However, these emergencies are rarely bad enough to need that kind of intervention from you outside of the toughest content, such as Mythic raiding or higher keystone levels in Mythic+. In there, you should likely consider avoiding Niuzao's Resolve, but otherwise think of it as a default choice and play accordingly.

Among the many choices present in the Brewmaster talent tree, Rushing Jade Wind and Special Delivery is both one of the first and also one of the most difficult. This is because the two talents remain competitive with one another across many different target counts and types of content. With that being said, both options have their pros and cons.

Rushing Jade Wind is a useful option for providing a continuous amount of damage to all enemies around you, thus helping out with managing threat. It also is an ability on a low cooldown that has no Energy cost to press, making it very helpful as an additional "filler" so you do not end up spending too much Energy on Tiger Palm or Spinning Crane Kick while waiting for the cooldown of Keg Smash. However, because there are a lot of other abilities that have no cost and also have a low cooldown, you may have a hard time maintaining the ability's effect and miss out on damage.

Special Delivery, on the other hand, is a passive talent that activates any time you use one of your many "Brew" abilities (such as Purifying Brew). This means that it is frequently dealing damage while also applying a hefty 50% snare and not dealing reduced damage against multiple targets. However, as this ability has a 3-second delay between activating and dealing damage, it can miss enemies or even accidentally hit a target that had been kept in crowd control, causing potentially costly mistakes.

Overall, choose the talent out of these two that you have an easier time playing around. If you are especially concerned with maximizing damage, Special Delivery will be better at all target counts, provided you are actively making use of your Brew abilities to trigger it. However, the ultimate gap between these two talents is only a small percentage of your overall damage.

The choice between Charred Passions and Dragonfire Brew continues the trend of having proper decisions to make in nearly every choice node present within your talent trees as a Brewmaster Monk. However, like with Rushing Jade Wind and Special Delivery, there are certain times when one will generally be better than the other.

Charred Passions again acts as the option that makes a larger impact on your rotation as a Brewmaster by encouraging you to make more use of Spinning Crane Kick and Blackout Kick. In addition, due to our general talent recommendation of Sal'salabim's Strength, its effect will always be active due to the low cooldown of Keg Smash, resulting in always being able to cast another Breath of Fire before the Charred Passions buff expires. However, this does result in further emphasizing the need to hit Blackout Kick on cooldown and still needing to use Tiger Palm in at least single-target.

Dragonfire Brew, meanwhile, acts as the "passive" option between the two, minimally impacting the rotation beyond potentially encouraging you to use Breath of Fire when beginning a pull (assuming you are using the generally-recommended Sal'salabim's Strength talent) rather than Keg Smash. The unique strength of this talent, likewise, comes from its damage not being reduced until hitting 20 targets or more. This makes the talent very powerful in larger AoE while remaining competitive in specifically single-target scenarios.

Overall, choose the talent out of these two that you have an easier time playing around. If you are especially concerned with maximizing damage, Charred Passions will be better with appropriate play while Dragonfire Brew will prove stronger otherwise.

Press the Advantage and Weapons of Order are each some of your strongest talents in the entire class and spec trees, though they offer their power in very different ways. The short answer here will be to default to using Weapons of Order, though the use-case for either talent is further detailed below.

Press the Advantage acts as the "passive" choice in this talent pair, completely removing your ability to use Tiger Palm in exchange for dealing bonus auto attack damage and even triggering additional casts of Keg Smash or Rising Sun Kick. These extra casts also then get to benefit from talents that otherwise would have interacted with Tiger Palm or Weapons of Order, such as Counterstrike, Face Palm, Blackout Combo, and even Chi Surge or Call to Arms! In doing so, it is possible to receive up to 9 seconds of cooldown reduction to your Brew abilities at a time or to deal large amounts of damage to a target with Rising Sun Kick. However, this does mean the rotation will feel slower and have more gaps where there is nothing for you to press, and you will also have to carefully monitor when an extra cast is going to occur so you trigger it on the ability you intend.

Weapons of Order, by comparison, is a more active ability that, surprisingly, does not really alter your actual gameplay. Instead, its benefits truly shine on enemies that survive long enough to reach four stacks of its debuff and suffer 32% increased damage from all of your abilities. It also provides an additional 9% Mastery while active, which is essentially a 9% extra dodge chance on demand. Indeed, it is often the easier talent to play around once you have become comfortable with the basic rotation of a Brewmaster Monk.

Overall, Press the Advantage acts more as a talent for beginner Brewmaster Monks. None of its effects are truly "bad", but there is enough of a performance gap between it and Weapons of Order do not recommend it unless you are still learning. So long as you have either of these talents, however, you are taking a step in the right direction!

This question is a bit complicated and is more thoroughly looked into on the Gearing section of this guide. However, in general, if both of the dual-wield weapons and the two-handed weapon are of the same item level, or if you are using the Press the Advantage talent, then a two-handed weapon will generally be better for you. Otherwise, choose the approach that provides more total secondary stats on the items you are selecting from. Remember to always have the weapon with higher Weapon DPS in your main hand!

Simming yourself is the best way to determine whether changing gear, enchants, trinkets, and anything else would be an upgrade to your DPS. Simulating defense upgrades is another matter entirely. Due to the variety of boss mechanics and situations out there, you cannot reliably simulate tanking and should be wary of anything claiming to do so.

We have a guide on how to sim yourself in Raidbots produced by Azortharion.

A great place to get Brewmaster info beyond the scope of this guide is the Monk Discord, Peak of Serenity. Players in the Brewmaster sections are friendly, and many knowledgeable Brewmasters monitor and participate, author included. Please make sure to read the introduction if visiting to better understand how to use the resources offered there.

You can also use the Monk section of our own forums to help get your burning questions answered.