A simple /stopcasting will de-toggle maul. That would still only work if your melee attacks aren't happening at the same time as your lacerate/mangle/swipe (since it would go off before you can de-toggle it). I'm also not sure if /stopcasting would mess with anything else. Still, if you're going to use 4 hotkeys anyway, why not simply get in the habit of queuing maul every time you have enough rage for it?

Noob question about maul... if maul is qued will other moves overwrite it? IE I hit maul... its waiting for next attack, then I hit mangle. Will maul still go off for the next white attack or does mangle overwrite it? Sorry for the question but I want to make sure I understand it before messing around with macro's and the like.

Specials attacks such as Mangle, Swipe, Lacerate and FFF are independent of white hits/normal melee, i.e. hitting a special attack doesn't effect your normal melee swing timer. Maul works by turning your next white hit into a special and when toggled on will be unaffected by the use of a subsequent special attack. All the above macros do is make sure every time you hit a special attack it also queues up maul for your next white hit.

These settings are fairly straightforward, but the threat setting seems ... fuzzy. Do most bears just leave it set to 10%, even if they're primarily an OT? The OT setting of 50% threat seems to pick too many "DPS" items to my mind, whereas a 25% custom value splits the difference.

I turn off the threat setting when I'm building my "maximum survival" set, but that isn't actually the set I usually wear when tanking. I've found that if I leave it disabled it all the time I end up with set recommendations that have no expertise and little hit, which in practice causes me a lot of problems. Adding a condition to the optimizer to make sure expertise and hit are above a certain value is an option, but for eyeballing things I think the threat information is helpful.

The 50% threat definitely seems too high to me. I can't think of a situation where I want that much extra threat at the cost of so much survivability.

An option for adjusting the value of threat stability (as opposed to sustained tps) would be really nice. I essentially never have issues with sustained threat but "oops maul missed, mangle got parried and I dodge 3 attacks so I'm out of rage, oops, the enhancement shaman is dead" definitely would be nice to avoid.

It seems like all of the druid tanks on my particular server go with blood draining for their tank weapon. From what I've read on these forums it seemed that people weren't altogther impressed by blood draining and frankly, I'm not either. I'm a fan of mongoose myself. Does anyone have some math or discussion in this subject that I can use to expand my mind?

My guild just downed Jaraxxus last night in 10 man reg so we're going to start working on Faction Champions tonight. I use a standard 55/16 tank spec and wondering what use I am for this fight? I read somewhere that I should try and chain stun a mob with pounce>maim>bear>bash>feral charge but that leaves me with a bunch of questions:

1) What do I do after that when everything is on CD and I can't re-stealth
2) Don't DRs mess with that and make it impossible/unreliable
3) Should change my 2nd spec to a 'pvp' spec for this fight, and if so what would that look like?

I don't pvp at all really, so I don't really know what I should be doing for this fight.

There shouldn't be any need for a respec. If your job in the fight is to tie something down do it however you can. Use roots (if your chosen target is melee, and don't forget nature's grasp) and cyclone. While in bear form, dont' be afraid to taunt your target as well. By mixing up methods you should be able to go a long way towards keeping something locked down. Also if it's an important target to keep locked down and busy (warrior for instance) and you are leaving him up for later in the kill order then I highly suggest mixing another CC or two in there to let your diminishing returns fade.

I lock down the paladin these days. I find it very helpful to have points spent on bash to give me another interrupt per minute and really fills in the only gap that would exist in my rotation otherwise, the longer duration also gives me time to go cat and get 5 cp for Maim as opposed to 3-4. Pouncing is generally impossible so I open with 3xcyclones (time your casts so the next one hits right after one ends), Feral Charge the next heal, Bash the next, Catform and maim the next, Feral Charge again, and Cyclones are off DR at this point. I really like Feral Charge for that reason, it's 15s cooldown makes an easy way to determine if something else is off DR (15s is the time it takes for something to reset DR).

This ends up being a lot of mana shifting so I wear my resto gear (I arena as resto) for both health and mana. When cycloning I throw out heals and decurse and when in bear I'll taunt any pets that are up. the only downside is when you get focused by 2 or more of the dangerous DPS (Rogue, DK, Ret Pally, Hunter, Warrior)

It's less, because our main threat move (Maul) has a fixed extra threat value(I remember ~420 extra threat), and this won't change with +damage modifiers (hysteria, KotJ and Master Shapeshifter).