I know bruisers are kinda at the bottom of the tank food chain, I have my reasons for rolling one Still - I was in a late teens WC group the other night with a SK. The SK was tanking, pulling half the room & seeming to hold agro very well. I inspected him, thinking they might have some awesome gear, but they were half naked. Then, they had to leave, so I step up to tank & we fill their spot with another dps. I'm FULL geared with mostly crafted stuff I've made myself. Yet holding agro was a challenge with just single mob pulls. I'm firing off my taunts every chance I get. Which are adept or better. Do SK's get some super agro spell or buff or something? Am I doing something wrong? Or is this part of the 'fun' of being a bruiser
The only reason to play brawlers is simply because you like the aesthetic, there is no other reason. SK is the premier group content tank. No issues on aggo, plenty of AEs that even if you get adds it's not a big concern. SK's are just easy mode, where brawlers (monk and bruiser) are quite the opposite. I hate it, it sucks, but it is how the game was designed. There are some niche uses for the brawlers but overall they just don't have much purpose. I wish they actually were a better DPS tank, but they're not, especially when you're in AE content with your 1 (2 for bruisers later on) AE vs SK's handful. And, with all that whining, well, I still go with monk as my tank . In the end you can get the job done, you just have to work a bit harder and be more careful, and hope your group is willing to work with you instead of against you. EDIT: Forgot to put some more productive comments in. Communication is key, SK's and really every other type of tank can get away with a lot more and people will be ready to just do their normal thing, which just may not work with a brawler tank. Positioning your group is more important because late aggro is the biggest issue with brawlers IMO. Saving your AE if you think you will get a late set of adds may be required, but maybe you can avoid that issue by pulling to a different spot. You might need to ask the DPS to hold off a few seconds and let you have some aggro ramp up time. Shamans work very well with brawlers but ward aggro is a huge issue, if they're pulling aggro right off the bat have them stop pre-warding if you need to. You're going to have to deal with issues that the other tanks won't have to, and people won't be used to it, so communicate and learn to deal with it, it's not going away.
I have no big aggro issue on bruiser (lvl 50) when it comes to tanking heroic. But yeah u need to be more carefull. U cannot pull a whole room. And while leveling, u play with lots of people with app spells, so if u upgrade yours, u can keep up with hate with dps. Yesterday i did nek 2 ... and lots of adds, and the lack of blue positionals (miss wild beating) and dps going crazy made me work more. Plus the mobs mana drain u !! Hurray But i agree, we cannot compete with sk. They get grave sacrement, which is positionnal and ticks cray amount of hate. Bruisers have st and encounter taunt and manhandle. Which is a small hate proc. It helps but when tanking never does as much hate as our taunts anyway. I guess brawlers were designed as heroic tanks/dps. But even when dps goes, sk are far better suited. We’d need a boost to our abilities. But as tanking goes, i wish u luck to steal mobs from a sk. We did a raid. I had to offtank the adds, i never could get aggro on any of them . But i love brawlers and will keep playing bruiser, just want a bit more damage then if i can’t have better tanking abilities
