Looking back through Pandaria's Raids

Hello everyone! This post is going to be quiet a short and sweet one. With WoD looming over us now and just a few weeks away from re opening the Portal to Draenor, I thought it would be an appropriate time to look back on the changes of the Windwalker monk through each patch and my thoughts on each tier. After listening to the recent Monk Meditation episode and hearing their views on the life of the monk and its patch it had taken, I wanted to give my own view on this topic. So grab your finest brews folks, It's go time! 

Tier 14 (Heart of Fear - MoguShan Vaults - Terrace of Endless Springs)

So this is where our journey all began come the launch of MoP. For a first raiding tier I thought it was great. It was challenging and you can see Blizzard did a great job on creating new and interesting raid encounters. Sure it was tough but it added depth and it was for the most part very enjoyable. During this moment in time as well I was raiding with my close friends and fellow guild mates in Forced Intent. We had some fantastic players and I sure do miss those guys! They made raiding enjoyable. Also with monks being the new shiny, our single target dps was fantastic, but it just lacked that burst, but I knew from the get go, I wanted to play this class.  Each of the raids were unique and really did push the boat out in terms of mechanics, visuals and story telling. Bravo!

During this time we also had our first, yes first mastery, Combo breaker, a little meh, but we knew blizzard was not happy with our class design and wanted to give it another shot come next Tier.  

Tier 15 ( Throne of Thunder)

So it began, the return of the Thunder king and his noble companions. What a raid. This for me was the first raiding *feel* much like Ulduar was at the start. This place was incredible, it had every single type of enemy in one zone form dino's. trolls and even huge. The Encounters were fantastic and with our new shiny, Storm, Earth and Fire now on our bars, we could cleave for ever and a day. With this Tier also brought the monks most broken stage thanks to a new mastery called Bottled Fury and the RoRo trinket. Our mastery increased our damage during the TeB duration and once the trinket proced it will dump all your haste and crit in to your mastery which would of been your main stat back then. What this did was cause all of our abilities to do so much more damage, things like 7 mill crits were not uncommon from our rising sun kicks. 

During my time in ToT, I also raided as a Brewmaster tank for the servers top raiding guiled and managed to clear all of tot heroic excluding Ra den in two nights. Great effort but so scary! Dark animas heroic with Speed kill tactic was super hard work! 

Tier 16 (Siege of Ogrimmar)
So this is were our journey ends, through all the pain, hatred, sorry and anger we are finally here, with a huge war on the Orcs yard. The corrupted Garrosh pledged war or any one against him and wanted to re create his own visions of the horde. Here we had 4 wings and the introduction to Flex raids, The god send for all casual guilds! Anyway, we had a ton of unique bosses and its location was awesome. However I think this is my least enjoyable raiding Tier because of the longevity of this Patch it is still with us today as the top end game content for the past year or so.  BORING! 

The monk in general felt as solid as ever here. Tons of multi target fights and opportunities to cheese everything was incredible and still is. Monks are fast paced, our mastery, although not as fun as previous tiers was steady and reliable which ultimately left us in a great place during the end of this expansion.