Brewmaster Monk Frequently Asked Questions — The War Within (11.0.5)

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. Switch up your Hero Talents. If you are playing as a Master of Harmony, you will gain a noteworthy amount of damage by switching to the Shado-Pan talents for only a small loss in overall defense.
4. 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 Vivacious Vivification 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 noteworthy edge in skilled hands. 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.

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!

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 (particularly 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 always-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.

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 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.