Brewmaster Monk Raid Guide

Welcome to the Brewmaster Monk raid guide for the World of Warcraft patch 11.1.5! This guide covers everything you need to know to understand your character! Are you starting out and leveling up from 70? Check out the leveling guide!

Brewmaster MonkRaid

Single-Target

Strong

AoE

Strong

Utility

Average

Survivability

Excellent

Mobility

Excellent

• Master of Harmony and ‍Shado-Pan are both very competitive with each other when it comes to damage output.
• Master of Harmony influences your gameplay with Endless Draught and Mantra of Purity, while Shado-Pan is almost fully passive.
• We recommend you to play Shado-Pan as it does slightly more Single Target damage than Master of Harmony and it is fully passive too which makes it easier to play.

Tier Set

• 2-Set: Each time you take damage you have a chance to activiate Luck of the Draw! causing you to cast Fortifying Brew for 6.0 sec. Your damage done is increased by 15% for 8 sec after Luck of the Draw! activates.
• 4-Set: When you gain Luck of the Draw!, your next 2 casts of Blackout Kick deal 150% increased damage and incur a 2.0 sec reduced cooldown.

Opener

• We want to gain a good amount of Shuffle through Keg Smash and Blackout Kick while also getting our debuffs rolling. This results in a long opener weaving in a lot of different spells.

Priority List

Make sure to keep this list in mind, unless some bosses or scenarios require you to hold some abilities listed here

1. Cast Blackout Kick on cooldown.
   • If talented into Blackout Combo consume it with Tiger Palm directly after.
2. Cast Keg Smash on cooldown especially if Flow of Battle (4-Set) is active.
3. Cast Breath of Fire on cooldown.
4. Cast Weapons of Order on cooldown.
5. Cast Rising Sun Kick on cooldown.
6. Cast Exploding Keg.
7. Cast Tiger Palm.
8. If talented, cast Chi Burst.
9. If talented, cast Rushing Jade Wind.
10. Use Touch of Death whenever possible towards the end of the fight.

Defensive Cooldowns

• Celestial Brew
  • Provides big on-use absorb. This is your main defensive ability against tank hits.
  • Purified Chi increases the absorb amount by up to 200%.
  • Gains cooldown reduction from Keg Smash and Tiger Palm.
  • Now has 2 charges with Master of Harmony's talent Endless Draught.
• Diffuse Magic
  • Your best tool against big magical hits. It offers a 60% magical damage reduction for 6 seconds.
  • This also self-dispels and, in certain cases, reflects the spell back to the caster.
• Dampen Harm
  • Amazing tool for big hits and dots.
  • Offers a 20% to 50% damage reduction based on the hits taken, that's why it's quite strong against a big hit and weaker on multiple smaller hits.
• Fortifying Brew
  • Crazy long cooldown of 6 minutes that gets reduced by Keg Smash and Tiger Palm.
  • Gives 20% max health and 20% damage reduction, which makes it your most well-rounded defensive.
  • Used mainly against big hits and early on so the cooldown reduction can start working on getting it back.
• Invoke Niuzao, the Black Ox
  • Used when your Stagger is particularly high since it suffers 40% of your Stagger damage instead of you.
• Zen Meditation
  • With a 60% damage reduction, this is your best tool against 1-time big hits.
  • The downside is that you can't move or use any ability without canceling the spell.
  • Mainly used to soak a mechanic or tank a big dot while you are not getting actively hit.

Offensive Cooldowns

• Weapons of Order
  • 10% increased Mastery and Keg Smash inflicts 8% increased damage taken for 10 seconds, stacking up to 4 times on the targets hit.
• Exploding Keg
  • Causes melee attacks of targets hit to 100% miss you for 3 seconds.
  • Throw a keg that amplifies all your damage with bonus fire damage. Pair with Spinning Crane Kick on AoE.
• Touch of Death
  • Clears up to 200% Stagger when casted. Touch of Death is very good to cast on cooldown for both damage and defensive value.

Stagger

Brewmaster Monks rely on their Stagger mechanic to passively reduce the damage they take which is an essential part of their damage mitigation.

Stagger Phases

Your Stagger is split up into 3 different phases.

• Light Stagger
  • Total Staggered damage amount is equal to 1-29% of your maximum health.
• Moderate Stagger
  • Total Staggered damage amount is equal to 30-59% of your maximum health.
• Heavy Stagger
  • Total Staggered damage amount is equal to 60% or more of your maximum health.

Using Purifying Brew cleanses 50% of the staggered damage thus reducing your Stagger phase and serving as your main mitigation ability. Purifying Brew is best used right after receiving a lot of damage to cut the Stagger damage in half.

Managing Celestial Brew & Purifying Brew

Juggling Celestial Brew & Purifying Brew is your main task and gameplay when it comes to your survivability on Brewmaster Monk.

• Purifying Brew is your main tool to cleanse Stagger like described above.
  • Important to note: Purifying Brew is not on the global cooldown, so it can be pressed while using any other ability.
• Celestial Brew is your defensive tool that is empowered by cleansing your Stagger.

Here are some tips and tricks on what to keep in mind when using them:

• Purifying Brew has a few rules you want to keep in mind when juggling your charges:
  • Avoid having both charges ready, you are wasting both defensive value and cooldown reduction value from your abilities.
  • Use a charge when your Purified Chi is about to expire you don't want to lose your absorb increase on Celestial Brew
  • Make sure you always get full cooldown reduction on this from Keg Smash.
• General rule on when to use Purifying Brew the most efficient way:
  • After a big hit so you get the most Stagger value cleansed when it is new and at the highest point.
  • The other option is to almost fully cleanse yourself of any dangerous Stagger after big hits, this is achieved by getting a very big stagger and then using 2 charges back to back.
• Overall, if you follow a natural flow of gameplay, you should use it quite frequently just to avoid Heavy Stagger and not overcap charges.
• The biggest mistake you can make is to use all charges on cooldown and then end up with none when the Stagger becomes dangerous.
• Celestial Brew is more straightforward to use:
  • It's your most frequent active defensive and should be used on most mechanics whenever possible.
  • Try to not hold it for too long since you are wasting cooldown reduction, which results in more damage taken in the long run.
  • However, you have to hold it for dangerous tank mechanics in certain scenarios, so keep that in mind.

Shuffle

Brewmaster Monks need Stagger to live any mechanic and what enables it to a large extent is Shuffle.

• Shuffle is passively generated by pressing Keg Smash, Spinning Crane Kick and Blackout Kick.
• If you don't stop pressing buttons, Shuffle should never drop and you don't need to pay any attention to it. But there are some scenarios where the buff might run out:
  • When mechanics force you out of range and you are unable to reach the boss you might end up dropping it, resulting in a lot more damage taken so watch out for that!
  • Starting combat with Keg Smash and running in fast can result in death. Since Shuffle is triggered by the damage of Keg Smash and not the cast, if you are faster than the keg flying, you might get hit without Shuffle up and you die.

Blackout Combo

• Blackout Combo provides you with a variety of options to empower your spells after using Blackout Kick, which happens very often so taking this talent makes it quite difficult to play well.
• Blackout Combo has a number of buffs it can provide but only 2 of them are really worth using:
  • Tiger Palm, which gains 100% increased damage
  • Breath of Fire, which gains 50% increased damage and 5% additional damage reduction
• The hard part of using Blackout Combo is that you always want to pair it with Tiger Palm. This is very easy to mess up since any other ability consumes Blackout Combo.
• Using the buff on Keg Smash to gain extra 2 seconds of brew cooldown reduction is not the worst but not worth it most of the time.
• Using the buff on Purifying Brew is almost entirely worthless.
• In order to avoid wasting your Blackout Combo, you need to fill the time until your next Tiger Palm with abilities that deal good damage but don’t consume the Blackout Combo, such as Rising Sun Kick, Rushing Jade Wind, Spinning Crane Kick (watch your energy!), and Chi Burst.

Understanding Mechanics

Rotational min-maxing is just one aspect of mastering a specialization, but there are numerous other key mechanics that influence your performance. Use the following guides to improve them.

• Pandemic
• Spell Queue Window
• Stat Diminishing Returns

The following tips are applicable to Mythic Bosses and how to survive those the best. The recommended builds in this section are going to help you survive each encounter but are not giving you the most damage output.

← Scroll for more Bosses →

Understand your secondary stat priority and the tertiary stats needed for optimal performance during Raid boss fights as a Brewmaster Monk. For more detailed information, visit the Stats and Attributes guide.

All secondary stats are affected by diminishing returns. Click here to learn more!

Tertiary

• Avoidance - Great stat to reduce the damage intake of "Area of Effect" abilities.
• Leech - Provides additional healing through damage dealing.
• Speed - Niche tertiary that can be very useful and has been proven useful in the past. This makes managing certain mechanics a lot easier.

In general, Leech is really strong for tanks, especially in AoE scenarios it can be by far the best stat you can have.
Avoidance is great but most of the time tanks are not struggling to survive the typical Area of Effect abilities.

Trinkets

Below you can find active and passive alternatives to our recommended trinkets. Do note that the trinkets recommend above are for optimal damage, if you do not care about your damage and only want to survive I would recommend you to use Chromebustible Bomb Suit and Ringing Ritual Mud.

Active Trinket alternatives

• Ringing Ritual Mud
  • This trinkets cooldown is approximately 1 minute, it is a great alternative to Chromebustible Bomb Suit.
• House of Cards
  • Provides you with a massive mastery buff for 15 seconds which can be used in combination with Weapons of Order since it shares an almost similar cooldown.
• Tome of Light's Devotion
  • Passive trinket that has its biggest value offensively, make sure to always have the "The 50 Verses of Radiance" buff up.

Passive Trinket alternatives

• Cinderbrew Stein
  • A passive trinket that provides primary stat for you and your raid members.
• Azerokk's Resonating Heart
  • Another passive trinket that gives you a big amount of main stat for 15 seconds.
• Improvised Seaforium Pacemaker
  • Passive trinket which gains a lot of value when played around correctly.

Embellishments

• 2x Elemental Focusing Lens
  • Deals a decent amount of damage in Single-Target.
  • The optimal slots to craft on are Wrists, Boots, Hands or Waist depending on your available gear.

or

• Adrenal Surge Clasp
  • Provides good passive Agility at the cost of some Mastery.
• Writhing Armor Banding
  • Empowering your Adrenal Surge Clasp.
  • On Wrists, Boots, Waist, Hands or Cloak depending on your available gear.

or

• Darkmoon Sigil: Symbiosis
  • Passive Versatility with almost 100% uptime, the damage taken is very minimal.
  • Has to be crafted on a weapon.
• Writhing Armor Banding
  • Empowering your Darkmoon Sigil: Symbiosis.
  • On Wrists, Boots, Waist, Hands or Cloak depending on your available gear.

or

• Binding of Binding
  • If both tanks & all healers wear this ring then it provides a greater raid DPS increase but it is a DPS loss for yourself.
• Either 1x Elemental Focusing Lens or Adrenal Surge Clasp or Darkmoon Sigil: Symbiosis on weapon.

Remaining Sparks

• Crafted items are 675 item level and regular items are 678 on max item level, therefore, it's a small loss to equip crafted items outside of your 2x Embellishments unless you don't have access to other high item level gear on that slot.

Simcraft

To find the best combination of gear available to you or identify the best possible upgrades, visit our Simcraft guide to learn how to utilize Simcraft easily and effectively.

• Phials
  • Flask of Tempered Versatility
• Food
  • Feast of the Divine Day
  • Feast of the Midnight Masquerade
• Combat Potion
  • Tempered Potion
  • Potion Bomb of Power -- group potion, this is a DPS loss for you.
• Health Potion
  • Algari Healing Potion
• Weapon Stones
  • Ironclaw Whetstone -- usable on Sword, Axe, Polearm.
  • Ironclaw Weightstone -- usable on Mace, Staff and Fist Weapon.
• Augment Rune
  • Crystallized Augment Rune
• Sockets
  • Deadly Sapphire
  • Culminating Blasphemite -- Unique, use one of each gem colour to enhance your Blasphemite.
    • Deadly Onyx
    • Versatile Ruby

Enchantments

For min-maxing a Brewmaster Monk in Raids, different racial traits can provide a tremendous benefit to your characters. If this is not your top goal, picking a race that fits your style works just as well.

• Stoneform -- Dwarf
  • Is very valuable because you can dispel yourself or remove dangerous bleed effects.
  • On top of that using Stoneform gives you 10% physical DR which can be used as a small extra 8 second personal when tanking.
  • Use-cases
    • Perforating Wound on Mug'zee, Heads of Security
• Arcane Torrent -- Blood Elf
  • Strong racial to dispel or purge enemies, the value is very limited but sometimes can come in handy.
• Rocket Jump -- Goblin
  • Do a small jump in the direction your character is facing.
  • While you're in the Rocket Jump animation you are placed on a global cooldown until your character lands.
• Spatial Rift -- Void Elf
  • Spawn a shadow traveling into your facing direction, and activate again to teleport to the rift.
  • Maximum range of 100 yards.

Recommendation

As a tank picking a racial for damage is most of the times such a small gain that it's not worth it. If you care about min-maxing your DPS go with the highest DPS racial.

That being said the recommended race for raid tanks is for sure Dwarf for the on-use physical damage reduction and the ability to self-dispel when needed. These features are insanely strong and should not be undervalued!

Discover recommended macros for Brewmaster Monk for Raids and watch a quick video guide on creating simple macros for your character.

Macro Import Guide Video

Taunt Macros

Taunt Macro --- This macro either casts Provoke at your target or your mouseover (very handy to pick up mobs)

#showtooltip Provoke
/cast [@mouseover,exists,harm][@target,exists,harm] Provoke

Boss 1 Taunt --- Casts Provoke on Boss1

/cast [@boss1] Provoke

Boss 2 Taunt --- Casts Provoke on Boss2

/cast [@boss2] Provoke

Mouseover Macros

Focus Macros

Utility Macros

Below, you see a screenshot of the author's User Interface for their Brewmaster Monk, outlining which addons are used and how they are utilized in Raids to make your life easier.

Addons

Weakauras

Patch 11.1

Patch 11.0.5

Patch 11.0.2

Patch 11.0.1

Q: Why do I just get one-shot?

Credits

Written By: Skövte

Reviewed By: Wolfdisco