I was running herioic Slave Pens last night and doing such a poor job of holding aggro that one of the other members decided to give me helpful advice. I would have blown it off, except he cited a pretty good source.

I checked around here and found two relevent threads. One is the threat generation thread. The other is the lacerate threat measurement thread.

From those, it seems that the appropriate priority on threat generation would be mangle>lacerate>maul on bleedable targets while you should use mangle>maul>lacerate on bleed immunes.

Is that accurate?

I try to avoid using Maul unless I'm
a) desperate to get aggro
b) above 40-50ish rage

Even on bleed-immune mobs, I go for Lacerate if Mangle is down. Also spamming FF every time it's up. Up-front Lacerate is still 400+ threat, isn't it?

Personally I never use swipe on a single targets as I figure that the threat per rage generated by lacerate is superior. Swipe is ~200 damage for 15 rage and even with the bear form modifier it feels like a waste of rage. I prefer to mangle + maul for snap aggro at the start, then spam lacerate, maul on every swing and mangle whenever the CD is up. Spamming FF doesn't seem worthwhile to me either unless I'm rage starved as it wastes a GCD which I could use for a lacerate.

The DoT from lacerate actually has a threat reducing multiplier associated with it now, if I understand correct, point being: don't worry about the stack. If you need threat, its the second best use of your rage for threat, behind mangle, even on bleed immune mobs. Maul is for when you have rage to spare.

Until Swipe passes due to AP scaling that is.

I always favor Swipe over lacerate since I tend to run with High AP, and in general the extra 75 DPS Swipe provides is more important than the extra 10 TPS I'd get from lacerate

Doesn't it take around 2300 AP for that to happen?

If you are sporting Idol of Brutality, it's about 1900 AP. A high crit rate is in favor of Swipe of course.

Additionally, Swipe can't be fully blocked, while Lacerate gets blocked quite often.

The Lacerate DoT is not worthless, just not so significant anymore - in many cases it's better to swipe spam and just renew your lacerate stack every 9-12s.

Do consider your dps in the equation as well for 5-mans. Although I'm a little shocked to hear you are having threat issues (I tend to relax with a druid tank and honestly, I push our MT warrior pretty hard in heroics) the delta in dps is not trivial.

Your results will vary of course but if you are losing contact on single or double pulls I'd have to wonder if your dps has some bad habits. I'm doing pretty well for gear and I can still open full burn on most pulls with out resident bear tank. It's possible he's a savant but damn do I doubt it! (Hi Tytal, much <3 )

I try to maul every attack, and alternate between mangle and lacerate between mauls. I seldom have problems with dpsers stealing aggro, but when I'm tanking 2 mobs in a heroic, usually the healer gets healing aggro from the 2nd guy after 8-10 seconds, and if the dps isn't careful, they catch up to me in aggro on the main target, which is bad for them since my growl is now on cooldown. Am I unreasonable to ask them to wait 3 seconds? How do you deal with this? Lately I've been pulling the off target with starfire, moonfire, bearform, faerie fire, 1 maul on main target, then a demoralizing roar. You would think that 1 lacerate every 6 seconds on the 2nd target would be sufficient, but it isn't always.

Using my dodge trinket at the beginning of the fight has seemed to help with the healer aggro, but lowers my initial threat per second by a fair amount too.

I working by the principle that it's my job to stay above healers in threat, and it's the dps job to stay below me in threat.

That said generating as much threat as possible on the dps target is a plus, but keeping the healers safe have to be the top priority.

I suggest only tanking one defender. While they are immune to CC, they are very kiteable.

Edit: Defender ofc, champions are cc-able.