This guide is meant for new brawlers that might have trouble keeping growing fury or use punch-counter in their rotation. It assumes familiarity with the class and hopefully knowledge from the guides on Essential Mana (Advanced PvE Guide and Min-Max Guide). While those guides are informative, they only offer a tier or priority system assigned to each skill, leaving room for variety in Brawler playstyle, but often leading into rotations with downtime. After studying this guide, your goal should be to DPS and hold aggro more consistently and gain a better awareness of how to flow between different parts of the Brawler combo.
Gear in the console patch follows the older recommendations of running a mixed jewelry set and swapping out the necklace based on whether you’re with a priest or mystic. For priest, you’ll run 3 crit pieces with 2 power, mystic will have 3 power, 2 crit. Ideal earrings are 4% HP and 4 Endurance, rings are 4 Power with 4 Crit, roll 4 Power on both necks. For innerwear, Power and Crit are both viable, just balance the missing stat with your Vyrsks. When Circlets come out, you’ll generally want 8 crit factor unless your balance is off elsewhere. The crit to aim for is somewhere around +140-150 with Mystic and +180-190 with Priest.
Weapon rolls for Guile and Misery should match the picture below. Your clear times will be slower until you get into crafted gear and find others that can deal high damage, so running double CDR is recommended at first. With the Deathwrack Update, the bosses are more active and rolling double enrage damage shouldn’t hinder you at all. The chest topline is either jackhammer damage or RHK cdr, based on preference. RHK cdr will save you some glyph points and makes the rotation easier to learn.
Here are the rolls for your crafted VM 8 or 9 gear.
As far as glyphs go, there’s a shift towards stacking more power and taking the Triple Haymaker Crit Glyph. The idea is that the crit caps have increased and there’s more benefit in aiming for a lower overall crit rate, but hitting harder with Haymaker and focusing on getting perfect blocks with it. Nep’s recent min-max guide has a lot more info on how to balance Crit Factor vs Power.
This glyph page is what I’ve been using as my all-round set. It takes counterpunch cdr over the power glyph, since you’ll be using this skill often in your rotation to minimize gaps. Counter’s 50% damage buff takes some time to get in the habit of using, but is key to reaching your dps potential. If you take 15% RHK cdr on your chest topline, you can drop the Piledriver reset glyph and pick up the second Counterpunch glyph.
Base Rotation:
Video example (right click and loop)
This rotation is set up to revolve around the CDs of your highest priority skills, Haymaker and Ground Pounder. It also spaces them out around the CD of Roundhouse Kick to make it easy to get around a 60% buff uptime. There’s a small amount of downtime at the end of the loop if you don’t get the RHK reset, but we’ll explore the rotation and find ways to rearrange skills to reduce this downtime or eliminate it with Counterpunch.
As you improve, especially on fights with active bosses, you can move away from a set rotation and work on maximizing the number of Haymakers and Jackhammers you use, filling in the new gaps with manual Counters to try for the 50% damage buff proc.
The first loop (starting fight with GF):
Aggro Shout -> Infuriate ->
Second loop, repeats indefinitely (RHK reset):
Second loop (no RHK reset):
Counterpunch:
If you tried the above, you’ll find two areas that don’t flow together immediately and other places where you can’t use a high priority cancel. Counterpunch placement can fix this, but it’s less reliable on slower bosses. Where you use it should be based on preventing downtime later in the combo and knowing when to use it early based on boss behavior.
The ideal placement:
If you’re able to cancel out of it quickly, Counterpunch is the highest DPS skill next to Haymaker, so feel free to put it basically anywhere as long as you’re able to cancel it with RHK, Ground Pounder, or block right after.
A Closer Look:
As you may have noticed, this combo can be broken down into a few independent sections, each with a couple of considerations. Everything below will follow the second loop rotation.
The Start:
The start includes everything before the Ground Pounder and has a couple of possible variations. After Haymaker, if your Piledriver resets RHK, use it and follow the second loop (no RHK reset) path from there. This change allows RHK to be up after Jackhammer and you do RHK -> Pilediver -> Haymaker, which means that when you Flip Kick later, RHK is back up to cancel that skill quickly.
You’ll often find that Jackhammer and Piledriver are up at the same time after the Haymaker. The normal priority would be Jackhammer, but if you believe in your reset luck it’s worth going for. If you know Counterpunch will be up, follow the normal priority chain.
Leading Into Flip Kick:
This middle section is short, but contains one rule: don’t Piledriver after Haymaker. The cooldowns won’t line up correctly even with an RHK reset and you’ll be stuck on cd for a few seconds. The other thing is that Piledriver’s placement will vary. You might not have Jackhammer up after Ground Pounder if your attack speed is very high, so you can fill with Piledriver there. If you use Counterpunch, you can omit Piledriver completely.
(No flip kick)
The first option, skipping flip kick, is ideal. Only high priority skills are used, all of the CDs line up, and there’s no delay after Flip Kick.
The second is what you’ll see most often. It uses Piledriver to eliminate the delay after Flip Kick and pads out the time between Jackhammers to make sure it’s up.
The last option requires either an RHK reset in the starting section or no reset at the end of the preceding loop. If you don’t get a counterpunch opportunity, you’ll run into a short wait on the RHK after Flip Kick.
If you believe in your resets and know you’ll have Counterpunch available, there’s also this variation to get another buffed Jackhammer:
Finishing The Rotation:
Not much variation, this section hopes for a lucky RHK reset or having Counterpunch up, otherwise you’re left with a delay after the Jackhammer. There’s one added variation for an off-rotation Counterpunch that’s useful to know.
Wait~~
Haymaker Resets:
If you get a Haymaker reset in the start, it’s simple enough to spam it until it goes on CD, then choose a starting combo to lead into Ground Pounder. You’ll also sometimes see this option come up:
It’s only notable for getting the 15% rhk buff on both Piledriver and Ground Pounder. The usual Jackhammer/Ground Pounder lasts too long for the buff to fully encompass both skills.
If you get a reset after Ground Pounder and notice it quickly enough, it’s best to keep chaining Haymakers together. After the resets end, continue the combo as normal, since the filler moves after Haymaker are needed to reach its normal CD. You’ll take the Loop 2 no RHK reset to go into Ground Pounder afterward.
If you don’t notice immediately, using one of the chains below will skip Flip Kick and link into the next Ground Pounder. Which one you use depends on how you went into Ground Pounder. You’ll have to continue the unorthodox combo until the next Haymaker, which is off CD for about a second until RHK can be up. You can slot things back to normal faster with Counterpunch spacing, using it anywhere will put things back in order more or less.
As far as my play is concerned, I find this section to trip me up the most, since it requires some strange loops unless I do the double Haymaker immediately.
Perfect Counter:
I haven’t mentioned this at all, since it can be placed pretty much anywhere and fills in gaps you may run into. Keep in mind the sentiment from Bernkastel’s guide: using Counter without a high priority cancel afterwards is a net DPS loss. With few multihit moves in the harder dungeons this patch, try to place it before RHK, Counterpunch, or Ground Pounder.
