Most guides out there describe how you should play to minimize your damage taken in reality they should say the average damage taken. The problem with that is most tank deaths today is because spike damage not because of your average damage taken throughout a fight. Just ask your healers what scares them the most, the spikes you take or the constant damage.
What makes it hard to write a guide about minimizing spike damage taken is that it obviously is depending on the encounter and what tactic that is used for that encounter. Combine that with the fact that it is easy to compare the average damage taken between two tanks but harder to compare the spike damage taken and the result is that a lot of tanks play to minimize average damage taken instead of what is actually killing them.
Avoidence with Elusive brew
As a brewmaster you got two spells in you arsenal that are good example of how you can either minimize average damage taken or spike damage taken. Elusive brew at max stack is 15 seconds of 30%(35 with 2 set bonus) extra dodge and Guard is a 30 sec cooldown that absorbs damage for around 500k damage depending on vengeance. The easy way to use these two spells is of course to make sure Elusive brew is used as soon as it reach max stack and that guard is used on cd and the end result is that you minimize your average damage. As I described earlier, the only way to explain how to decrease the spike damage taken is through specific encounters and examples, therefore I will give you some examples (I will assume you know the fights on heroic).
Healing done by personal guard and the raid guard.
The fourth boss in Heart of Fear(heroic) Wind Lord Mel’jarek I always solo tank this for my guild and for us we found two dangerous situation. One is the “Rain of Blades”, often our two healers can cope with keep me up but when both packs of adds are up it does get hairy, therefore I always save my guard for that ability and as a result I don’t use it on cooldown. The other dangerous situation is when the second pack of adds respawns, therefore I always make sure I got a full stack of elusive brew for that moment even though it means I sit on a full stack for ~10 secs and waste some procs but since the damage before the second packs spawns is of no concern for my healers this is a good trade off.
The first boss in Heart of Fear(heroic), one of the dangerous times for us was when the boss flies over to the second platform at that point me and a healer move over there. While we are there we will eat a force and verve and while it is casting we will have to do the dance. So we got a lot of damage going on while my healer are force to run, however since the damage on the first platform is incredibly low with three healers I always make sure to come to the second platform with a full stack of elusive brew and guard off cooldown. This way I can pop these two in combination with my biggest damage reduction to reduce the damage I take. Doing it this way I have never died at that part(unless my healer ran into a orb and died before the others got there ^^)
To sum it all up, it all comes down to experience on an encounter and being able to identify what situations and ability’s that may possess a danger for you as a tank and then make sure you have you small and big cooldowns ready for those situation to prevent them from turning into a disaster.
Next post: How to evaluate your performance with World of Logs (for real this time! 🙂 )
tankraiding 
I die a little inside every time someone tells me they use Guard on cooldown. The worst was someone arguing that since Guard is never wasted (with no regard for the heals being wasted because of an unnecessary Guard), it’s most effective if you use it every 30 seconds. I have a really hard time convincing people how important smoothing is and how effective Guard and Elusive Brew are for that because it’s hard to quantify how well a tank reduces burst. It definitely helps that more and more tanks are arguing for smoothing over total damage reduction, though!
Yeah, more tanks should try to play a healer alt or talk to their healers and I am pretty sure they would understand the value of minimizing thr spike damage.
I was wondering if you ever considered changing the structure of your website?
Its very well written; I love what youve got to say. But maybe you could a little more in the way of content so
people could connect with it better. Youve got an awful lot
of text for only having one or 2 images. Maybe you could space it out better?
Hi sorry for the late response Sue but your post got stuck in the spam filter ^^
Thanks for the feedback, I totaly agree with you and plan do redo the earlier post i made with that in mind. As you can see(I hope) it is better in the later post I made.