Brewmaster Monk Gearing Guide

The War Within Brewmaster Monk Season 2 Tier Set:

In season 2, Brewmasters tier set revolves around your rotational ability blackout kick, as well as providing one of our best defensives, Fortifying Brew. All forms of damage have the ability to proc our tier set, and when it procs it does alter your general rotation slightly, similarly to season 1, with a focus on Blackout Kick now.

• (2) Set Bonus: Each time you take damage you have a chance to active “Luck of the Draw!” causing you to cast Fortifying Brew for 6 seconds. Your damage done is increased by 15% for 8 seconds after “Luck of the Draw!” activates.
• (4) Set Bonus: When you gain “Luck of the Draw!”, your next 2 casts of Blackout Kick deal 150% increased damage and incur a 2 second reduced cooldown.

This tier set highly incentivizes us to talent into Blackout Combo. More Blackout kicks mean more empowered abilities, providing more offensive and defensive benefits.

In practice you won’t ever really play around the damage increase as it’s almost impossible to ensure it lines up with your cooldowns, however defensively it allows you to delay cooldowns briefly that you otherwise would have had to use.

You should still prioritise the gear you use by running a sim for your character, but the lists below will give you a good idea of what items are considered good for Brewmaster Monk, and help you target the right content for each piece of loot.

• Overall
• Raiding
• Mythic+

S - Tier

Grim Codex - This is easily our best raw damage trinket available right now, although a lot of its strength relies on the fact that the damage isn’t being reduced for us as tanks like most other dps trinkets. It’s likely unintended and will be fixed, but right now it’s a very good pick up.

Chromebustible Bomb Suit - Easily the best defensive trinket of the season. A short cooldown on use for a large amount of damage reduction and a large absorb shield. It also has a decent damage effect once the absorb is destroyed.

Tome of Light’s Devotion - By far the best purely offensive trinket for single target damage. You shift between 2 stances, one offensive and one defensive. You can force a state change with the on use, and it lines up perfectly to allow you to stay in the offensive state permanently.

Ringing Ritual Mud - The best purely defensive trinket from Mythic+. A 2 minute on use with a massive absorb shield that gets cooldown reduction when you take damage.

A - Tier

Eye of Kezan - A stacking main stat trinket. This amount caps at 20 stacks, decaying upon leaving combat. It has a minor damage and healing effect but that’s not where the strength of this trinket lies. The longer you’re in combat the larger the benefit of this trinket.

Geargrinder’s Spare Keys - A simple Damage effect that splits between all enemies hit. The damage is increased with target count, however it deals split damage to all enemies. It’s a very powerful on-demand damage trinket right now.

Zee’s Thug Hotline - You summon a goon squad to attack your target. A fun trinket that is performing fairly well currently.

Improvised Seaforium Pacemaker - One of the best offensive Mythic+ trinkets you can get. Provides a large amount of crit every 60 seconds that you can extend when dealing critical strikes.

Junkmaestro’s Mega Magnet - Another on-demand damage effect with a twist. You build stacks, then on a 20 second cooldown can spend them to deal damage. It’s a solid option but out-classed by other trinkets in this tier and above.

B - Tier

Sigil of Algari Concordance - An interesting trinket that summons an earthen ally to aid you. He deals pretty decent single target damage.

Cinderbrew Stein - This is one of the best support trinkets of the season. It provides you and an ally with absorb shields and main stat randomly, which is forced when you drop below 50% health.

Signet of the Priory - A 2 minute on use trinket that provides a large amount of secondary stats. Paired with Weapons or Order it’s pretty good but there are better options.

House of Cards - A large Mastery on use trinket on a short cooldown. Decent offensive value and very strong defensively value versus dodgeable targets.

Azerokk’s Resonating Heart - A random chance to gain main stat for 15 seconds.

Vexie’s Pit Whistle - An interesting trinket. You coat enemies in oil to provide you additional threat, and then it has a damage effect that’s split. Unlikely to be very useful but it’s not awful.

Scrapfield 9001 - A decent defensive trinket. When you fall below 60% hp it reduces your damage by 50% until a certain amount of damage is taken. The numbers on this are fairly low so it’s not overly useful. It also provides haste which we don’t like.

Conductor’s Wax Whistle - An underwhelming damage effect trinket from delves. Not only will you not be able to get this at any meaningful item level but it’s also numerically underwhelming.

Remnant of Darkness - A random agility increase that ramps. Once it’s at full power you deal dot damage to nearby enemies.

K.U.-J.O.’s Flame Vents - A decent damage effect trinket that deals split damage to enemies. When used against mechanical enemies they take additional fire damage.

C- Tier

Reverb Radio - A stacking haste amp. If we liked haste it would be very good, however haste is our worst stat so it doesn’t provide much value.

Mister Lock-N-Stalk - A simple damage effect trinket that doesn’t deal much damage.

Ravenous Honey Buzzer - A mediocre damage effect that deals split damage.

Charged Stormrook Plume - A short cooldown damage effect trinket with underwhelming numbers.

Modular Platinum Plating - A very bad defensive trinket. Provides a small amount of Armor.

Currently Embellishments are fairly under-tuned and don’t provide a ton of value, although the following are the most notable for Brewmaster in my opinion:

Darkmoon Sigil: Ascension - This is a random secondary stat proc that stacks.

Adrenal Surge Clasp - This is a kiss-curse type effect under the Nerubian Embellishments. It provides you with main stat at the cost of Mastery.

Writhing Armor Banding - This embellishment is put onto a random leather armor piece and buffs your Adrenal Surge Clasp or other Nerubian Embellishments. It’s useless on its own, but when paired together is good.

Elemental Focusing Lens - Your spells and abilities have a chance to deal bonus magic damage, this is a simple proc of extra damage and it adds up to a decent amount, particularly single target.

Puzzling Cartel Chips and Corruption

In the most recent patch we’ve been re-introduced to both Puzzling Cartel Chips and Corruption!

Puzzling Cartel Chips

Puzzling Cartel Chips are a limited catch-up currency that let you buy any trinket, weapon or rare item from Liberation of Undermine and the current Mythic+ season. They come with two notable restrictions, one of which is only being able to obtain 3 of them in total, and the other being an item level cap unless you’ve done the respective content on its highest difficulty.

The priority in which you’ll decide what you want will change based on what content you’ve completed, but trinket item level, similarly to jewellery, doesn’t tend to matter as much as other slots so don’t feel dis-heartened if you can’t buy the maximum item level piece you want.

Cartel Chip Priority:

1. Tome of Light’s Devotion - this is the best single target damage trinket for tanks right now. As it comes from Mythic+, getting this on Mythic track will prove quite challenging, so that makes this the perfect choice to skip the great vault frustration!
2. Improvised Seaforium Pacemaker - this is your best offensive trinket when multiple targets are involved. It’s still solid on single target, and provides us with decent defensive value too, solidifying it as your best offensive option if your main content is Mythic+.
3. Giga Bank-Breaker - This weapon is your best-in-slot choice for the season. It’s not super far ahead of other 2 handed weapons of the same item level, or the dual wield alternative, but it’s definitely something to pick up if you lack a Mythic track weapon.
4. Capo’s Molten Knuckles - This weapon is quite strong, helping our dual wielding be comparable to the 2h strength right now. It’s going to be your go-to pick if you already have a high item level 1h to pair with it and don’t have access to a high item level 2h.
5. Ringing Ritual Mud - This is our best defensive trinket of the season and pairs very nicely with Brewmaster. If you’re doing more challenging content, I’d 100% recommend picking this trinket up.
6. The Jastor Diamond - The stats on this ring are not ideal. Regardless, the stat effect makes it still worthwhile, and with it being extremely sought after and rare, it could be worth a pick-up if you have spare chips to play with.
7. Eye of Kezan - This trinket relies on extended encounters to see its value, making it ideal for progression raiding, but quite poor in the current season at this point. If you don’t care for raids then this trinket is definitely a no go.

The rule of thumb for how you want to spend your Puzzling Cartel Chips as Brewmaster comes down to whether or not you have a Mythic-track weapon. If you don’t have one, despite doing the content level required to unlock it with these chips (which would be odd at this point), then you’ll want to pick one up.

Outside of weapons, your choices mostly come down to trinket decisions. I’d almost always target Mythic+ trinkets before raid options as the ability to obtain them on Myth-track is significantly lower. Then it’s just a matter of your content preference. If the content you’re doing isn’t challenging you won’t need a defensive trinket such as Ringing Ritual Mud, or if you’re primarily focused on Mythic+ over raid then the Improvised Seaforium Pacemaker is very ideal. One thing to note as well, is defensive trinkets typically don’t gain much value at higher item levels compared to offensive, so if you have Ringing Ritual Mud on hero-track, then I wouldn’t bother buying a Mythic version unless you have extra chips at hand.

If you are satisfied with both your weapons and trinkets, then the only other option to grab is The Jastor Diamond. It’s not your best in slot, but it’s a very powerful ring nonetheless.

Corruption

Corruption effects have returned in the most recent season of The War Within! We’re being provided with a new helmet enchant that contains corruption effects. This is a system returning from BFA, which provides us with powerful augments.

As with anything, your choice is going to come down to whether or not you’re prioritising offensive or defence. Due to current tuning our options are fairly limited right now, being this:

Offensive - Greater Rune of Echoing Void

Defensive - Greater Rune of the Void Ritual

Until you get your hands on the strong versions of these corruptions, you’ll have access to the ‘lesser’ versions of each.

You can obtain these enchants after a brief questline requiring currency that you loot from the end of Horrific Visions.

Cyrce’s Circlet

The power of this ring currently means we will be using it throughout the new season, at least until you get bis mythic rings. It’s far too powerful and versatile of a ring, with the only downside being a loss of secondary stats. It’s definitely worth grabbing if you haven’t, and using throughout the new patch unless it gets nerfed.

Best Gems for Brewmaster in raid:

• Thunderlord’s Crackling Citrine
• Fathomdweller’s Runed Citrine
• Windsinger’s Runed Citrine

Best Gems for Brewmaster in Mythic+:

• Stormbringer’s Runed Citrine
• Fathomdweller’s Runed Citrine
• Windsinger’s Runed Citrine