The Write Up!
Main Spec: Brewmaster.
Main Gear: Staff of the One True Bramble King. TBC Gem Gear.
Gems: Combination of Steady Talasite (4 armor, 6 stam), and Deadly Pyrestone (+2Agi/+2Crit).
Enchants: Naga Hide, with without this run most likely is not/would not be possible. All other enchants are standard fare.
Off-set Gear/Trinkets: As usual, I recommend building a nice collection of off-set gear. I primarily used Ghost Iron Dragonling and Coin of Luck for my sets, although I also used Pit Fighter and Swift Hand of Justice for some fights.
Stat Priority: Agility, Stamina, Critical, Haste, Armor.
Stat Weights: Armor is 4.2:1 (at the level of armor I maintained, remember it slides around as you increase it at lvl 20 for some reason), Critical is 4:1, Haste is 3.7:1, Versatility is 4.5:1 and 9:1 respectively (damage bonus vs damage reduction), Mastery is 2.55:1, Dodge is 4.4:1, Parry is 4.4:1, Stagger is 2:1 (from Agility).
Armor Threshold: I recommend shooting for an absolute minimum of 20-25% damage mitigation from armor. It's hard to get it higher without giving up too much damage and Stagger.
Avoidance: I ended up with about 18% not trying to stack any other avoidance. If you can get it and have room I suggest putting in dodge/parry, or even better straight Avoidance if you can find some wiggle room in your gear. Avoidance itself trades at 3:2 for lvl 20, which is amazing.
Stamina Threshold: I recommend at least 3,000 hp. I ran anywhere from 2300-3250 during my run depending on the situations.
Agility/Stagger Threshold: I recommend at least 150-160. This will put your stagger to around 33-34% base, and 66-68% during shuffle.
Haste Threshold: Push your haste up high enough to get Spinning Crane Kick and Vivify down to 1.3 seconds or better. This will make your life a lot easier, with faster heals and dps. On top of that you don't want to be energy starved, so the haste will help a lot here. I recommend at least enough to get a minimum of 11 Energy Per Second recovered.
Mastery? Mastery is good and you should grab it wherever you can, however I found it drops off in usefulness once you push it too high as it starts to eat up your other side stats which help you kill things faster than just stacking Mastery itself does. It also doesn't help dealing with casters genarally, so becomes more of a wasted stat there. It scales very well though, so you can hit a nice threshold quite easily. It shines the most when dealing with a lot of physical damage dealers.
Versatility? A great stat to start with, and easy to get as I always say. The trades for it in terms of bang for buck aren't that great compared to other stats however, and the other stats like Critical and Haste are much easier to stack up and come by overall. As I stated many times in my other runs, you can get a nice chunk of this right away though very easily, and I recommend using it as a startup for your build until you build enough gear up to get away from it.
Setting up stats for the monk was very interesting since it's an atypical tank class compared to other tanks in the game. As expected you do not gain a large amount of physical mitigation from traditional stacking with the class, but it obviously helps. Critical is always my go to recommendation for doing any PVE material where your class can benefit from healing if you do these attempts. It's so easy to stack a good rating, and you really want this for your monk. Haste is equally as important and stacks up better than critical ratio wise, but I still recommend critical first, to at least 33%. You can push this higher and it will only help if you get the gear for it.
Talent: Eye of the Tiger is a great talent to utilize, but I found myself using Chi Burst once I got to the last 1/2 to 2/3 of my run. The reason for it is it benefits from Haste and does AOE damage, which I wanted more of, and needed more of to be successful in this run.
Professions: Engineering was the main prof used exclusively for belt bombs and cobalt frag bombs. Spinal Healing Injector is nice, but wasn't needed, the belt bomb was mandatory for some boss fights and many trash packs.
Consumables: I went with the +5 Mastery food as my main food. Dense Weightstone for +3 weapon damage. I used +5 Armor elixirs (1% mitigation) as well, and simple Elixirs of Agility. You can use better than these of course! I also used Drums of Haste on several key fights, which is not surprising. As usual Dense Weightstone was very important. I used Wildvine Potion or Iron Horde Potion, but only a handful of times.
Quality of Life: I used mount shoes (20% speed boost when mounted), Goblin Glider, and Water Walking Potions. +2 Mastery and +10% movement on boots. Having access to Roll (2 charges) is very nice, and helps in moving around and with greater mobility in dungeon fights.
DPS and Damage Set: For my damage set I stacked up Deadly Pyrestons and Critical/Haste for my secondary stats. One of the issues I faced with this class was the dps was always just under where I wanted it for most fights. I ended up pulling an average of 180-200dps on most packs (bursts were much higher sometimes or huge packs of course) of mobs, but my average single target damage was a paltry 130ish or so (and oftentimes less). Occasionally I could muster a lot more (150-180), but it depends on how much damage was being dealt to me. I didn't have the same wiggle room to resist damage the way I wanted to, and therefore would lose dmg b/c of needing to heal a lot. Dps on the hardest fights was always poor due to needing to heal so much.
How did Monk stack up compared to Warlock, Paladin, Shaman, Druid, and Death Knight?
Ah the moment of truth. I am going to talk about the pros first. Monk benefits from good, reliable healing which is great. It's Stagger ability is an interesting mechanic ever since it was first introduced, and allows you to play a "lighter" armor class and still be able to handle the incoming damage by spreading it out over time, enabling you (or others in groups) to heal you comfortably. The mobility offered by roll is excellent, and although it only has a few moves to use, they are all highly effective. The class also has a 1minute CD stun at this level, and an interrupt on a 15 second CD. The class has good control elements in this way. The cream of the crop is Touch of Death, enabling you to kill a problem mob right away, and finish bosses that much faster. This is especially important b/c it basically reduces a bosses health by X% depending on your own HP, and gives you a good reason to build at least a fair amount of health up. The class is able to pull at range with Jade Lightning, and Taunt as well. Talents are good, and all of them deal damage as Guardian, and all of them heal you. I feel Eye of the Tiger and Chi Burst are the best for a PVE run.
This being said I feel this class is actually the weakest of all classes I've attempted thus far. Monk at this level lacks some of the abilities it needs in order to be standardly viable for high end pve soloing at lvl 20. The class honestly shouldn't be able to complete the run in my personal opinion/experience without using some potent twink tricks. This is bad because anything potent is always in danger of being on the chopping block, especially when you least expect it. If this is true than how did I pull the run off?
Staff of the One True Bramble King and Naga Hide.
Satff of the One True Bramble King - As is common knowledge amongst the community, this staff still exists and is highly sought after, especially by those who were unfortunate enough to miss the window for ilvl 49 Legion Weapon Relic abuse. If you are planning this run, or a run with any class that can use it, make sure you farm it while you still can and enjoy it before it gets nerfed. I did the run on my druid without it, and had a fair time of it. I can tell you without batting an eye that had I had the setup on my druid I would have thought that run to be a lot easier than it really was, however I wanted to do the run without it to see if I was correct in deducing druid had what it took to do the class without any special farming or "tricks". This being said I can offer you an objective view of how good this actually is when it's used vs when it's not. I am not going to elaborate on the staff anymore than this, it basically has +40% stats of anything ilvl 34 or less, so we'll leave it at that.
Naga Hide - To my knowledge not much testing was done on this enchant for some reason. I'm not really sure why, but I assume it's b/c most twinks are more pvp oriented and therefore not interested in tanking style enchants. I, however enjoy tanking, so this was right up my alley of things to investigate haha
. This enchant is ridiculously good,
too good in fact. At level 20 it procs very very frequently and absorbs 333 damage on my monk, and gives +10 agility. This is not a 1ppm or 2ppm scenario. Here is the data from my run in Ragefire Chasm (the last instance I cleared to complete this run).
Lava Guard Gordoth
Name Count Healing Done/Damage Absorbed
- Expel Harm 8 3240
- Naga Hide 53 17,649
- Vivify 20 4498
- Chi Burst 4 1607
Ragefire Chasm Overall
Name Count Healing Done/Damage Absorbed
- Expel Harm 43 17.078
- Naga Hide 596 198,468
- Vivify 20 9037
- Chi Burst 21 5670
My fight with Lavaguard Gordoth took approximately 2 minutes and 13 seconds.
Naga Hide procced that much.
Final Thoughts
Monk is a favorite class of mine, and I was very excited to do this run. I enjoy the playstyle and the unorthodoxness of the class as far as tank classes go. I teach martial arts irl, so this class has a special place in my heart. I am deeply saddened that although the run was doable, it was only doable by abusing broken item/enchant combinations. While this is part of twinking, there is a limit to top end gear/play vs exploit/abuse style play, and I am not a fan of the latter.
The class is the lowest tier I've tried, and
I rate it's performance tier as D, even lower than DK on my list.
I doubt this class can do some of the harder instances later without major issue, all of which have proved to be easily doable on my lock and paladin without any issues. If you really want to try this class, by all means go for it, just be sure to farm your staff and enchant, and make sure you grab every consumable you can. Despite being a good AOE class, this class failed to pass some AOE challenges like Flamelord w/o using Frag Grenade and Cobalt Grenade(he killed me 14 times, much more than any other boss. The next highest count was 3) in addition to it's own AOE abilities.
I feel this class has a window, since we are all expecting Staff and Grandfathered legion weapons to be nerfed at some point, so if you want to do this, be sure to do it soon.
What's next?
I am now working on the Classic Solo Dungeonmaster Guide. The guide is going to feature preparation for a run, my thoughts on class tiers, and some bugs and other features I've discovered that will help everyone earn that nifty achievement for their toons! It won't be fancy, but it will be informative, as is my style
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God bless, Good luck, and Happy Gaming folks!
