In this article, we present you the viable talent and glyph choices for your Brewmaster Monk (WoW MoP 5.3). We detail what each of the talents and glyphs do and in which situations they should be taken.

The other articles of our Brewmaster Monk guide can be accessed from the table of contents on the right.

This guide has been reviewed and approved by Sunnier, who maintains the most respected Brewmaster Monk resource site: Sunnier's Art of War.

1. Talent Choices↑top

• Performance-enhancing
• Survival
• Crowd Control
• Movement
• Utility
• Situational

There is no longer such a thing as a default build. Most of the talents are now viable. They can easily be changed, thanks to Dust of Disappearance (and Tomes of the Clear Mind from level 86 to 90). You will frequently find yourself changing talents and glyphs between encounters, in order to adapt your play style to different mechanics. Therefore, it is important to understand what each of your talents does and how they affect your play style.

2. Tier 1 Talents↑top

Tier 1 talents offer you a choice between 3 ways of improving your mobility.

• Celerity passively increases the number of charges of Roll and Chi Torpedo by 1, and reduces their recharge time by 5 seconds.
• Tiger's Lust removes all immobilising and movement-impairing effects from the target, and grants 70% increased movement speed for 6 seconds. It has a 30-second cooldown. It is targeted, so it can be cast on yourself or on another ally.
• Momentum passively causes each Roll and Chi Torpedo to increase your movement speed by 25% for 10 seconds, stacking up 2 times.

The choice of talent here depends greatly on how you wish to move during the encounter.

• If you are looking for a controlled burst of movement speed, or possibly to escape movement impairing effects, then Tiger's Lust is best. Do note that this spell can be cast on allies, providing you with added utility.
• If you believe you will make frequent use of Roll or Chi Torpedo, and you wish to make their usage more comfortable, then you will probably prefer Celerity.
• If you believe you will make frequent use of Roll or Chi Torpedo, and you wish to benefit from increased movement speed each time you do so, then Momentum is for you.

Overall, the preferred choice in most situations will be Tiger's Lust.

3. Tier 2 Talents↑top

Tier 2 talents offer you a choice between 3 hybrid, DPS-healing abilities.

• Chi Wave is essentially a chain-heal that bounces to the 7 nearest targets. The bounces target friends and allies alternatively. Each target that the wave bounces to is healed or damaged, depending on their alignment. The healing portion of Chi Wave is a smart heal, in the sense that it prefers healing low health players. It has a 15-second cooldown, and it is free of cost.
• Zen Sphere summons a sphere above the head of a friendly target (yourself included), which lasts for 16 seconds. Every 2 seconds, the sphere heals the target, and deals damage to the nearest enemy within 10 yards. It has a 10-second cooldown, and it is free of cost. You can have a maximum of two spheres at one time. Finally, the Zen Sphere will detonate, causing it to deal a moderate amount of damage and healing to all targets within 10 yards, whenever its target drops below 35% health, or after its duration runs out.
• Chi Burst is a targeted spell that deals damage or healing to its target (depending on whether it is hostile or friendly), as well as damage and healing to all targets in its path towards the main target (again, depending on their alignment). The spell has a 30-second cooldown, a very short cast time, and it is free of cost.

Your choice of talent depends on the type of healing that you need.

Chi Wave is suited for healing targets that are somewhat spread out.

Chi Burst is a good choice for when the raid is stacked up, providing a nice amount of healing. Outside of these situations, however, it is hard to use efficiently.

Zen Sphere is a more controlled, single target heal. The sphere detonation is a useful AoE heal in case many players are stacked, especially when players often dip below 35% health (so that the detonation occurs automatically).

4. Tier 3 Talents↑top

Tier 3 talents offer you 3 choices that enhance your resource generation.

• Power Strikes passively causes Jab, Crackling Jade Lightning,and Soothing Mist to generate 1 additional Chi. The effect has a 20-second internal cooldown. If you are at maximum Chi when this effect procs, a Chi sphere will spawn next to you. A Chi sphere grants you 1 Chi each time you walk through/over it, consuming the sphere in the process.
• Ascension increases your maximum Chi by 1 (from 4 to 5), your maximum mana by 15%, and your energy regeneration rate by 15%.
• Chi Brew instantly restores all of your Chi. It has a 1.5-minute cooldown.

Here, you are faced with a rather difficult choice in deciding which the best talent is for your survivability.

Ascension, in addition to the energy (and therefore Chi) that it provides, has the advantage of allowing you to pool slightly more Chi. This is beneficial because you can thus save up Chi in preparation for taking a lot of damage.

Power Strikes is ideally suited for fights where you have regular downtime on targets. This is because its internal cooldown continues to tick even while you are not attacking anyone, so you will get the Chi proc as soon as you are back on the target.

Finally, the burst of Chi that you gain from Chi Brew may be useful in some situations, if you need to use a lot of Chi in a short amount of time in order to survive. We find Chi Brew, however, to be the least desirable choice.

5. Tier 4 Talents↑top

Tier 4 talents offer you a choice between 3 crowd-control abilities.

• Ring of Peace is an ability that can be cast on a friendly player. It creates a ring with an 8-yard radius around the player, lasting 8 seconds. Enemy players cannot perform auto-attacks while inside the ring (so, enemy NPCs are unaffected), and all players and NPCs are disarmed while inside the ring. Enemies that cast spells while inside the ring are silenced for 3 seconds. This ability has a 45-second cooldown.
• Charging Ox Wave summons an ox that stuns all enemies located in a 30-yard path in front of you for 3 seconds. It has a 30-second cooldown.
• Leg Sweep stuns all enemies within a 5-yard radius of you for 5 seconds. It has a 45-second cooldown.

These talents have no meaningful impact on your gameplay and will not affect your performance. Therefore, you can choose them based on your own preference or the crowd-control requirements of the encounter.

To help you decide, we can mention that Charging Ox Wave is good when you need a ranged stun, and especially when you need to pick up newly-spawned adds with regularity. Leg Sweep offers good damage reduction if you are able to stun adds that are attacking you with it, but note that it has a lower range and longer cooldown than Charging Ox Wave.

6. Tier 5 Talents↑top

Tier 5 talents offer you a choice between 3 survival abilities.

• Healing Elixirs heals you for 15% of your maximum health each time you drink from a Brew or Tea. The effect has an 18-second internal cooldown.
• Dampen Harm causes the next 3 attacks against you (within 45 seconds), which deal 20% or more of your maximum health in damage, to have their damage reduced by 50%. It has a 1.5-minute cooldown.
• Diffuse Magic removes all magical debuffs from you. Additionally, for 6 seconds, it reduces all magic damage taken by 90%, and reflects all spells back to the caster.

The choice of talent in this case is based very strongly on the type of damage you are receiving in the fight.

• Diffuse Magic can help greatly mitigate magic damage against you, as well as clear harmful debuffs from yourself. Its low duration means that it is useful against spikes of magic damage, but not against sustained magic damage.
• Dampen Harm works against both magic and physical attacks, despite the ambiguous wording of the tooltip. It will prove most beneficial to reduce the damage dealt by powerful boss melee attacks. Note, however, that unless the boss hits particularly hard or you are doing progression content, its melee attacks are unlikely to trigger the effect of Dampen Harm.
• Healing Elixirs requires no management, and it will provide you with a nice amount of overall healing by the end of the fight. That said, this healing may often come at times when you do not really need it that much.

7. Tier 6 Talents↑top

Tier 6 talents offer you a choice between 3 multiple target abilities.

• Rushing Jade Wind summons a tornado that travels for 30 yards in front of you, dealing Nature damage to all enemies in its path, and increasing the damage they take from your Spinning Crane Kick by 30% for 8 seconds. Additionally, it grants you the Shuffle effect each time you cast it (increasing your parry chance and Stagger amount by 20% for 6 seconds). The ability has a 30-second cooldown, and it costs 2 Chi.
• Invoke Xuen, the White Tiger summons a tiger that will attack your target at the time of casting the spell, and 3 other nearby enemies. It also taunts your primary target. The tiger persists for 45 seconds, or until it is killed. It has a 3-minute cooldown.
• Chi Torpedo is an improvement over Roll, which it replaces. It causes you to roll a short distance in front of you, dealing damage to all enemies, and healing all allies in your path.

We believe that the best choice is either Rushing Jade Wind or Invoke Xuen, the White Tiger.

Rushing Jade Wind replaces Blackout Kick once every 30 seconds, and allows you keep up the Shuffle effect. It is excellent for AoE DPS, and it also allows you to pick up newly spawned adds from range.

Invoke Xuen, the White Tiger is an excellent DPS cooldown. Also, its long, 3-minute cooldown somewhat simplifies your rotation (as opposed to casting Rushing Jade Wind, which must be used much more often).

Chi Torpedo provides a hybrid role of DPS and healing. It is only useful when you can roll around and when your raid is stacked up enough that the healing from Chi Torpedo is very efficient. In reality, this talent is highly situational.

8. Major Glyphs↑top

There are several Major Glyphs that are interesting for Brewmaster Monks.

• Glyph of Fortifying Brew increases the damage reduction of Fortifying Brew (a major survival cooldown) by 5% (to 25%), but reduces the health increase by 10% (to 10%). We believe that, as Fortifying Brew is best used preemptively, this glyph will often be useful.
• Glyph of Stoneskin reduces all damage taken from bleed effects while Fortifying Brew is active. The usefulness of this glyph depends on the existence of bleeds (or lack thereof) in the encounter.
• Glyph of Guard increases the amount of damage absorbed by Guard by 10%, but causes it to only absorb magic damage. This glyph is useful in fights that have a lot of magic damage, but it is even more useful in fights without any magic damage. This is because, Guard absorbing only magic damage, any physical damage you take will not consume the absorb effect, allowing you to retain Guard for its entire 30-second duration. This is beneficial because a side-effect of Guard is that it increases all self-healing on you by 30% while active. Note, however, that since Brewmaster self-healing is not very potent, this effect is not that important.
• Glyph of Leer of the Ox grants you the Leer of the Ox ability, which grants your Black Ox Statue a single target taunt. However, this taunt does not generally work on raid bosses.
• Glyph of Touch of Death removes the Chi cost of Touch of Death, but increases its cooldown by 2 minutes. Since using Touch of Death against a raid boss will be extremely difficult (you must cast the ability when the boss' health is between roughly 500,000 and 0), removing the Chi cost will make using it exactly when you want to somewhat easier.

9. Minor Glyphs↑top

Glyph of Spirit Roll and Glyph of Water Roll allow you to use Roll and Chi Torpedo while dead, and while traveling over water respectively. They have no raid applicability, but they can prove to be very convenient.

All other Minor Glyphs have only cosmetic purposes, or are otherwise not useful during raid combat.

10. Changelog↑top

• 20 May 2013: Patch 5.3 update: nothing to change.
• 12 Apr. 2013: Several important updates.
  • The Tier 2 talent section now correctly reflects the fact that these talents are very useful for Brewmaster Monks.
  • Reworded and improved the Tier 3, 5, and 6 talent sections to better reflect the usefulness of these talents.
  • Added a mention that Glyph of Guard is not quite as good as it sounds. Also added a mention that the taunt from Glyph of Leer of the Ox does not work on raid bosses.
• 11 Mar. 2013: Patch 5.2 update.
  • Updated explanations for all Tier 2 talents to include the addition of cooldowns, and the removal of Chi costs. Also further updated the explanation of Zen Sphere to account for the fact that now two spheres can be active at once.
  • Removed explanation for Deadly Reach, following its removal from the game.
  • Added explanation for Ring of Peace, a new talent introduced in Patch 5.2.
  • Updated Healing Elixirs explanation to mention that the healing provided is 15%, up from 10%.
  • Added mention that Invoke Xuen, the White Tiger fixates on the target of the Monk at the time of casting it.