Real world tanking isnt a rotation. Latency, rage problems, and a million other things will throw a lovingly crafted, theoretically optimal ability rotation into a tailspin in mere seconds. Fortunately, the pecking order of what to do is fairly clear, and will become second nature with some practice.

The GCD, your swing timer (heroic strikes), and shield block are all entirely separate. Try not to think about planning abilities with them all in some set order... it as doing three things at once.

The GCD is king. Instant abilities are you bread and butter. Shield slam and revenge are the top two, and when they are on cooldown, your most rage efficient threat comes from devastate and/or sunder. If you dont have enough rage to keep mashing away on the instants, don't heroic strike or shield block. If rage is a concern, then heroic strike is too inefficient, and shield block isnt necessary... if you were getting hit hard enough to warrant shield block, you would have more rage. Youll also need to mix in debuffs, taunting, etc on the global cooldown... for something like thunderclap, replace a sunder or devastate. For a taunt, well, you pretty much gatta do it when you gotta do it

If you are trying to maintain #2 aggro without incoming damage, try to save your bottom 17 rage for shield slam. Only pop a sunder or devastate when slam is on cooldown AND you have more than 29 rage. Delaying a sunder or devastate a bit wont hurt your threat generation as much as missing a shield slam cooldown will.

If you are fighting anything that can hit you fairly hard, and you need shield block, pop it whenever its up. Again, dont think of it as how many abilities you can squeeze between refreshing shield block... just pop it when its up. Theorycrafting can probably reason out holding out for that last second between the cooldown and the buff expiration, if it doesnt get consumed on charges... but thats 1 second, minus latency, and minus reaction time. Go ahead and pop it.

Finally, get the heroic strikes rolling if you still have leftover rage. When talking about rage-rich situtations, every swing means EVERY SWING. A absolutely perfect tank would do 0 white damage to vaelstraz. Again, dont think of heroic strike timing as having anything to do with your GCD abilities. When rage is up, activate it.



BTW... if you are trying to come up with a rotation to throw into a /castsequence, I have one recommendation: dont. A big part of being a good tank is making the quick, correct decisions on what abilities to use; and begin a great tank means getting that to be second nature so that you can keep it up while moving, breaking fears, charging around, managing multiple mobs, and doing whatever else an encounter requires. A macro cant make the good decisions for you.

If you dont feel you want to put the effort into tanking without a goofy macro, I respectfully suggest that perhaps tanking isnt for you, and you may enjoy a different role or class more.

Aye, I hope I wasn't too accusatory... I've been subjected to a glut of "wutz the best 1-button tanking macro lulz" recently, and just the thought of it makes my skin crawl.

I can't imagine having my revenges always try to queue up a heroic strike though... my preference is to keep my most rage efficient abilities as far from my most inefficient abilities as possible. I can imagine a lot of scenarios where I have 14 rage and want to use revenge, but wouldn't want that HS in there. But then again, I haven't tried it, so I wont knock it. My practice runs more along the lines of mashing the crap out of the HS button when I am high rage, and pecking shield block and GCD abilities when they come up. More control, but also a much higher toll on fingers, keyboard, and sanity.

As for improved heroic strike, the total rage cost of a heroic strike is the rage spent plus the rage you would have gained from a white hit. Just pulling some sample numbers out of my bum, a 180 white hit with a 1.6s weapon grants 5.2 rage, so a heroic strike costs 17.2 without imp hs, 14.2 with; so you can kind of sell it as a ~17% efficiency improvement, as compared to the 25% improvement that going from 12 to 9 appears to be. The harder you hit, the lower that 17%ish number goes (but it doesnt go down that fast).

Considering that you are usually only using heroic strike in rage rich situations, improved heroic strike is an efficiency buff that only takes effect when efficiency isn't important. Its not a bad talent, especially if you are throwing two points in to grab anger management (which I like better than most people, and miss dearly); but I'd give some real consideration to what other talents you could grab for those points.


Btw... if anyone is looking at my spec in armory, that point in iron will was a misclick. I'm taking up hydross duty this weekend and will be speccing to get imp defensive stance, so I just decided to save myself the 50g and leave it in until then.