FFF generates more threat than Swipe and it's free.

You'll find having FFF in your rotation generates significantly more threat than not. It's also easier on your rage pool, which is especially helpful on bosses that are not constantly hitting you.

Outside of the initial pull and stacking of Lacerate, my rotation looks like this..

Mangle, FFF, X, Swipe

If Lacerate is going to fall, X = Lacerate
If Demo roar is going to fall, X = Demo Roar
Else, X = Swipe

That actually was the first thing I was thinking about. Since T10 pretty much EVERY Rogue uses TotT on CD. And because of this a lot more of us have Tricks glyphed to 10 Seconds.

Because of the mechanics of Tricks of the Trade this is not simply a "Macro" Problem - Tank A has aggro, I trick him and now Tank B taunts. Tricks is still on Tank A and this can easily lead to Tank A regaining aggro.

My Advice would be: Announce a taunt early or tell your rogues to trick a DD who can handle the additional aggro after the pull.

Most fights are only aggro sensitive at the start. I would expect ToTs to be distributed to other DPSers as soon as the threat ceiling is high enough that a string of crits will not jump past the 110% mark. Our rogues typically ToT each other since they can use vanish for a threat dump if needed. This is especially true on tauntable bosses where each tank can save threat generating cooldowns for use when they are MTing. The threat ceilings on those fights should be well out of reach of the DPSers. Also, most tanks probably know to do something for a few seconds after having the mob taunted off to make sure their threat level drops below the new tank (Festergut is a great example of this - where the debuff increases tank dps - and a bear can pop into cat form to generate less TPS and more DPS).

Tanks should only be the continuing target of ToTs on fights where there is a mechanic that causes DPSers to generate more TPS than the tank (fights like Hodir and General Vezax are good examples) - and those are generally fights with either taunt immune bosses or no required tank switching. Continued lazy taunting on the tanks on a taunt fight will most often be a dps loss to the raid.

Ok, but its also more threat to reup lacerate after a tick or two rather than waiting to reup it before its about to fall.

Thats going to be awful for threat. All you need to do is ensure you use Mangle every time its up. With Imp Mangle this is going to follow the pattern of Mangle, ability, ability, (0.5 sec wait) Mangle etc... After Mangle you want to prioritise Feral Farie fire. The CD is 6 seconds so this will shift through your rotation and sometimes come off CD at the same time as Mangle, but its 2nd priority. After this your next abiility, you want to stack a 5 stack lacerate during the starting 4-5 rotations of the fight. After that Swipe is the priority except to refresh Mangle when its down to a few seconds.

So Mangle > FFF > Maintain Lacerate > Swipe.

According to Think Tank these are the damage and threat values for our skills.

Threat (mangle): 3406.9
Threat (swipe): 1578.763 (post 50% boost)
Threat (lacerate): 1162.154
Threat (maul): 5309.797
Threat(FF): 1933.057
Threat (Lacerate DOT): 844.21

Damage(mangle): 1644.7
Damage(Swipe):508.1
Damage(Lacerate): 91.08
Damage(Maul): 2139
Damage(lacerate DOT): 815.1

According to teeth and claws, the optimal threat rotation is as follows:

Maul everytime it's up is a good idea, but just to save my finger from spamming, I simply macro my lacerate, mangle, and swipe attacks to maul right after. My question is, what glyphs should be used since maul messes up the Saurfang fight? Are my choices limited to just switching to something arbitrary like Berserk and changing back or dpsing, or is there a different glyph we could just put in altogether?

Switch it out with Glyph of Growl since you want to make sure every taunt hits in that fight. I recommend carrying a stack of both the Growl and Maul glyphs, as each fight usually favors one or the other, but you rarely need both.

Today @ ICC-10 Lich-King I had a Taunt Resist in Phase #1 having more than 11% Hit. Wasn't Growl/Taunt changed to 8% somewhere around 3.0.x? Anyway, I will go for the Taunt Glyph as my third at any fight that requires secure taunts, even if I am obviously(?!) overcapped.

As far as I know, all regular taunts still use the spell hit cap (17%). Due to the different conversion factors for melee and spell hit, if you are at the melee hit cap and have the appropriate glyph, you should be at 17%.

One trick would be to set it up so that you don't swipe if you're holding down a modifier key. For ex. holding down shift to not mangle (a few secs before the adds spawn, until they're out of range)

Note: I haven't tested this macro, but that's the general idea

Litch: You should be looking for a new weapon more than anything. Gettin the extra feral AP going from a ilvl 200 to a 232(a prime target would be the polearm from HoR heroic, or anything from TOC10/25) will be huge for your swipe threat. Also, you've got 0 expertise from your gear, while having too much hit. Getting to at least the softcap of 26 expertise will be very significant as well.

Should I gem or enchant to meet that soft cap? Or just start looking for new gear altogether? In bear form tanking Ive got just under 42k health unbuffed and about 48k health with GotW, Fort, Kings, and Bloodpact. Im running ICC 10 first wing with my guild and ToC 10, tanking both as the off tank. I dread halls of reflection but Ill try to tough it out to get the polearm.

Litch: apart from generally low level items which are certainly gimping your threat output (doubly so for the weapon slot, which would be by far the largest jump should you upgrade it), the set you're wearing on armory is extremely stamina oriented. While it certainly has its place on a hard hitting boss with rogues and hunters giving you bonus threat, in most other circumstances it's really overkill - at the expense of threat generation and avoidance. You may want to consider swapping (quite) a few DPS-oriented pieces in, every time your survival doesn't feel threatened.

I also ran into the AOE threat problem as well.


My solution, which has been working wonders, is the following.
This is assuming that you slave Maul in macros to Lacerate, Mangle, and Swipe as well as gylph Maul.

1) Select your target and hit Lacerate+Maul
2) Swipe+Maul twice in a row.
3) Cycle through steps 1 and 2 and drop in a Mangle+Maul if you want..

If you gylphed for Maul and have 3 or more enemies, hit Enrage and go through the cycle. This will ensure that Maul is hitting as many people as possible and generating a large threat lead.

Typically, DPS will pull off to you if they are not assisting off of you. In the realm of PUGs, this is quite common.
As stated before, getting the Expertise Cap and Hit cap will also work wonders for aggro generation, but the cycle above will help cement it.

Additionally to Argatha's proposal, in heavy AE situations I'm constantly tabbing (and Shift-Tabbing) through all enemies, watching Threatmeter to find targets where I am low on threat and/or dd's coming close, so I can get some more threat on those targets via Maul and maybe Mangle. If you identify 2 targets where you need more threat, check if there's a melee second on the aggro list and hit that mob first.

Due to the way our raid days work (we don't raid on Weds) and some attendance issues, we're starting our first serious LK attempts tonight after a couple of short tries at P1.

How do others at this stage feel about HP levels for tanking the LK? It's probably going to be my job and at present nothing has really required that I optimize in a particular direction, therefore I am using a mix of 30sta, 10agi/15sta and 20agi or 10agi/10hit gems (see my armory)

This leaves me around the 54-55k mark depending on trinkets and I'm thinking this isn't really going to cut it. Do you think it's worth me quickly going for 30sta gems across the board to make things easier for the healers?

So my roommate was showing me one of the higher end druids from the Dethecus server and I noticed that he had 155 hit rating and 40 expertise. My question is, if you can't be dodged or parried, is it OK to miss a few times, or should I focus on not missing with a chance to be parried? I'm currently sitting right below the soft cap for expertise(which I believe it's 25), and at 275 hit rating(looking to replace my pants and chest).

I think you will want to go full-on Stamina for this encounter. Our main LK tank is a DK, and there were plenty of times where his health pool was just a bit too low. LK can do some HUGE hits, so a very large HP pool (~65k or so) can be extremely helpful. If I were tanking this encounter I'd go all Stam

Hit and Expertise both work out to be pretty similar in tanking situations (I'm assuming you're talking tanking based on your armory); both stats are mainly there for threat generation, as the "parry-haste" mechanic that wrecked so much havoc in BC is largely missing from most WotLK bosses. I personally like to have a decent amount of hit so that my Growls don't miss as often (though when I simply can't afford to miss a taunt I use Glyph of Growl in place of Maul), but Expertise is just money for threat. A balance is nice, and there are no specific "soft/hard cap" numbers to really shoot for as a tank, but rather you get enough so that your threat is where you need it to be.

I've never been worried about being below hit cap for a long time. It depends on the fight really. Fights like Heroic: Deathwhisper you really don't want to be missing anything so I was drafting in some DPS gear to reach hit capped and some DPS trinkets to max threat. Most fights though you'll get the Tricks/MD's though so threat isn't much of an issue.

This is a fight you purely want to go for stam given the mechanics. When off tanking there is no incoming damage that is really a threat, with the exception of multiple shambling horrors enraging at the same time and hunters being slow on tranq (but that is what barkskin is for).

The main threat is Soul Reaper which hits for ~40K upfront, another ~40K in 5 seconds and gives the Lich King a brief +100% damage buff once it goes off. Once spirits are down you and the other tank should be swapping for this and using a cooldown if you are the one taking the increased Lich King damage. However even with Barkskin up I would take hits well over 30K and up to 40K, at which point you need a health pool that can take 2 of those with only some hots/earthshield/shield giving some cushion rather than hoping you avoid or a holy light and another heal hit you before the next swing.

I haven't seen this brought up yet, and Druids that I've asked on my server just think I'm an idiot for even suggesting it, but...

Is it feasible to tank with Cryptmaker? I was trying to figure out a way to stay at the hit cap without losing too much. The only suggestions so far on these forums have been to use necks/rings/cloaks with hit. I was trying to find a solution that would allow me to keep all the bonus armor on those pieces, and Cryptmaker seems to be it. In fact, this gives me the option of going with Armor Neck, Cloak, Ring + Ashen ring, or Armor Neck, Cloak, Ring, any other ring I choose + Hit food and one Vivid in place of a Tear.

Not to mention Cryptmaker has higher threat and higher EH, at the cost of only 2% Dodge. To me it seems like a much better solution for staying hit capped than losing ~1.5k armor.