Thanks to the new Enrages changes, I'm not having so bad threat issues with the initial pull. Also it's a good idea to use macro for casting Maul right after Lacerate, Swipe and Mangle.

#showtooltip
/cast Lacerate()
/cast !Maul

Really did wonders for my threat, I guess I had the bad habit to not spam Maul enough.

It seems like Mongoose should be replaced with a better or newer enchant by now but all talk still points to Mongoose. Yes, it's great for avoidance and what-not, but perhaps Blood Draining is worth a second glance. I know that pretty much all other tanks (non-druids and non-DKs) go for Blood Draining. Has anyone shed any light on this topic? Perhaps if already at 40-50% dodge, it may be worth switching to.

I just find Blood Draining procs too infrequently so that you either are constantly letting off tiny heals on bosses that matter, or constantly sat at 5 on bosses that don't. Add in the fact mongoose also gives a decent threat increase as well as avoidance and has a huge uptime, its a no-brainer for me.

i know raw power that [Idol of the Corruptor] is better than [Idol of Mutilation], but on my last General Vezax kill, the Corruptor buff was only up 75% of the time (i currently don't have iMangle in my tank build).

Is anyone running [Idol of Mutilation] for tanking yet and can tell me what the uptime is like on it? It should have a higher uptime, but i don't know if it will be enough to make it better than [Idol of the Corruptor]

Got [Idol of Mutilation] the other nite.
Duration will NOT be refreshed but immediately once EVASION buff wears off, the next Lacerate or swipe can put the buff back up ( supposedly 70%~ ish proc chance ).

I´m going to get it tonight after raid,
Savantus, are you saying that [Idol of Mutilation] do not have a internal CD?
It can be always proc after the buff wears off?

Since this is the tanking thread I thought I would pose the question to you all. I was once a tank, about a couple months ago. I tanked Naxx10/25 OS 10/25, EoE10/25 and VoA 10/25. I joined an ulduar raiding guild a month back and went strict feral dps. Two nights ago, my old guild asked if I could tank H:ToC (5 man) and I did. I was still feral kitty spec and I was getting crushing blows by mobs the same level as me... It didn't make sense.

I went and respecced, reglyphed and tanked again. It was easier, but still I was getting crushing blows and critically hit. I have all the tanking talents and they are where they belong. I'm just completely baffled by this, I never was crushed or crit... Has something major changed with Tanking bears?

If not, give us our health pool back, crit/crush is not great when you have the same health pool as a warrior/dk/pally

The Lightwielders have an Unbalancing Strike, same as Thorim, but you only lose 100 defense instead of 200. Still enough to take a crushing.

Since a druid tank will have about 420 defense on average, the UbStrike would give you 320 defense. Since the weapon skill of the lightwielders is 355 or 360, this means you have 10% chance to get crushed.

Source: WotLK Crushing Blows - TankSpot

Edit: I learned something about the mechanics of fights in H.ToC >.<
Apologies for a mistaken post.

Hi!

I'd like to ask you for that, could you clear some mistakes for me about the agility/dodge for me, cause i cant understand it.
I have the [Darkmoon Card: Greatness] trinket and if it procs than the dodge of [Heart of Iron]is going to decrease. It will give lesser avoidance, but sometimes it will give a bit more it depends on the order of the proc. I cant understand it.

Foremerly I used [Darkmoon Card: Greatness] and [Heart of Iron] and in the blue sockets i used big (JC) stam, in the red sockets i used full agi gems. Now i got [The Black Heart] and i put it aside [Heart of Iron] and I fully gemmed to agility.

Could you clear that which choice is the better for me?

My stats with the old trinkets: (self buff)

hp: 37526
dodge: 56.11
armor: 29198

My stats with the new trinkets: (self buff)

hp: 36757
dodge: 52.87
armor: 36060

So another stupid question from a frustrated noob bear.

Is it just me or is there a blatant lack of good well suited bear gear going around now days?

I"ve been farming Ulduar 10 for the last 2 months, still having issues getting Yog down, and sadly, no real bear upgrades It seems everything I have atm is from either Naxx 10 or 25. So I've spent more than a couple nights trying to track down good sources of gear, seems they all lead back to either furious gear, or 25 man content in ulduar. Most groups are pretty tight with who they'll get tanking, 25 guys, 3 tanks, it's not easy getting a spot. It seems almost everything in leather now is geared to kitty/rogue, even the teir stuff is shared stats, somewhat balanced instead of one or the other.

Am I missing something here? or am I forced to go kitty and try and beg my way into a large 25 man group, or just continue trying to get a high enough arena rating to buy the furious stuff? Still looking for a good source for tank specific Bis gear etc.

Thanks, Blakhoof


Stam self buffed, 37k
dodge 39%
Armor 30k

So i find my self changing from cat dps to feral tanking, so you could say im noobish at it. I was told, regarding being a feral tank that i need to have a much higher number for expertise (like 35-42) for tank hardmodes in ulduar25 in order to keep high threat with all the mass dps going, so is this true? I have never had an issue in the past (which was pre ulduar) with keeping threat on bosses. I thought i might bring it up to yall first, and see your thoughts on this subject, ty.

At what point does it become better to stack lacerates on 2 or 3 targets rather than using swipe?

For initial damage, swipe doesn't need to build up stacks, so it gives great threat right away. But if there were 2 or 3 targets, and I rotated a lacerate on each target, and got all 2 or 3 targets up to 5 stacks, that'd be MUCH more threat than just swiping them. The problem is that getting just 2 targets up to 5 stacks each takes a long time. Getting 3 would take even longer, and anything hitting soft enough to have a few of them on a tank will usually die by the time you get enough stacks up, and anything living long enough to allow you to get 5 stacks up on it for a while will hit too hard for one tank to take it all.

There are probably some situations in which you could find 2 or 3 mobs to tank at once that have high enough HP and low enough damage that you'd be tanking them for a while. The first that comes to mind is VoA with Emalon's adds - would rotating a lacerate on each of the adds be an effective method of tanking instead of spamming Maul & Swipe?

And I'd assume that keeping Mangle up would be wise given its bleed damage effect.

The only time that it's going to be worth it to stack multiple lacerates on targets over multiple swipes is if you care about massively long-term threat and your targets aren't going to die any time soon and you need high threat. So for example, it's very bad on VoA; you have plenty of time to get your own threat lead, things are going to die quickly, and you don't need the threat anyway.

To build a 5 stack of lacerates on 2 targets requires 10 GCDs. If you're always doing a mangle and FF when you can, that's going to be about 30 seconds into a fight. In order for that threat to catch up to simply doing 10 swipes, which is higher single target threat on both targets, you need the fight to last about 4 minutes for each mob. I know of no fights where this sort of behavior exists.

Now, one point to make here is that it can be valuable on two targets to keep a lacerate up so that your mauls get 20% more damage if you don't have the bleed debuff. But that's just putting one lacerate up per mob; it doesn't assume that you even care if it drops off or that you're refreshing the stack.

I haven't seen any comment here on the onyxia 2.0 loot.

Reclaimed Thunderstrike - Items - Sigrie looks like a good tanking weapon:

Reclaimed Thunderstrike

(232.7 damage per second)
+78 Agility
+157 Stamina

Equip: Increases your dodge rating by 62.
Equip: Increases attack power by 167.
Equip: Improves haste rating by 55.
Blasts up to 3 targets for 150 to 250 Nature damage. Each target after the first takes less damage.

May be a good balance between mitigation and threat?

I've recently switched to a bear tank spec, and I have a quick question about AoE threat. What is the generally accepted rotation/priorty list for a pull that has a main boss-like mob and multiple lesser mobs that will be ignored until the boss is down. In particular, the fight I'm thinking of is the first and second phase of The Black Knight in ToC. If I use an AoE rotation (spam swipe while tab-mauling), I lose agro to the DPS, as they are going all out on the boss. If I use the standard single target priorty list on the boss, I lose threat of the lesser mobs (Ghouls in the ToC example) to the healer. Should I simply tell the DPS to hold off a bit or AoE everything first? Or is this a rare enough situation that its not a concern? I should say that I rarely have a problem with AoE threat when the DPS is using AoEs as well.

I simply mangle/lacerate the knight, then maul swipe until everything's down, with an occasional onmouseover taunt on the single ghoul if necessary. Don't switch off the knight; as long as you're mauling him and as long as lacerate/mangle stay up early, you'll have such a huge threat lead it'll be fine.

Meh I'm also a little confused myself as to which pieces to use.

1) greatness vs essence of gossamer
2) my feral dps rings vs furious rings

I forgot to mention I don't tank much, but I will be tanking on 10m algalon this week, so if one piece is better specifically for algalon vs another piece it would be greatly appreciated

*oh, and how much hit is needed, assuming glyph of growl?

Considering the soft (6.5%) and hard (15%) expertise cap, and the importance of expertise as tanking stat, i have found some problems in equipping good level 226 gear items with reasonable expertise numbers. I read somewhere an average bear tank should step into raids with at least 38-42 expertise(including primal precision). So my question is if i really need to aim to at least 40 expertise or if you have found lesser values (above the 6.5% soft cap in order to reduce parry/haste mechanisms from bosses) work fine as well.

Expertise is a good stat, don't get me wrong, but there is no "minimum" you need to be a raid tank. Sure being parried has an affect on your threat, and even survival if the boss parry hastes, but that assumes that you can't survive 2 hits in a row in the first place. Most of the bosses in uld can't two shot you even if you do parry hasten them ( really only Thorim with quite a few stacks on him ) before your healers can get to you, and if they can't, well then you really have other issues.

Does this mean don't stack expertise? No that's not what I am trying to get at, but don't stack it at the loss of other arguably more important tanking stats.

The only 3 stats that consistently matter unless you're losing agro are sta, agi/dodge, and armor, and there's really only so much you can do to increase those 3. Beyond that you're pretty much forced to end up with a fair bit of hit, expertise, resilience, arpen, haste, or crit on your gear. Of those hit and expertise are far better for higher threat reliability, leaving the others all pretty useless. Of hit and expertise, they have an equal effect on your threat, assuming you're soft but not hard expertise capped, and not hit capped. Hit also helps taunt, expertise helps reduce parry haste in the few fights where that matters. The reason there's any focus at all on stats beyond sta, agi, and armor is mostly that they're all you can really control too much as the others are mostly just a factor of item level. If you're not losing agro, i'd put about 90% of your gear focus on sta/agi/armor and about 10% on hit and expertise.

Thank you for your answer, Sephon. Of course i know there is no a minimum of expertise. I would have liked to maintain this discussion on a "general profile" so that it could have been useful for more forum users, i will try to make an example related to the issues that brought me to write this post. At the moment i have 38 expertise. I have Valorous Dreamwalker Legguards - Item - World of Warcraft and i'm thinking if replacing this item with Leggings of Wavering Shadow - Item - World of Warcraft.