I upgraded the BiS lists.
This is just, what RAWR gave me, using version 2.3.8.
Neither Hit nor Expertise Capped. One could gem Expertise/Hit gem [Accurate Ametrine] in the yellow slots to reach expertise cap at least.

You'll end up with higher DPS in rawr with a few more changes. Mongoose edges out berserking, precision to gloves outweighs assault or agility, rawr incorrectly has the rep ring at a 10% proc chance so the second ring should be the arp one. For gemming, the glintings should be accurates and with the ring swap, you should be able to use 2-4 hit gems and still stay at 1380+ arp. I'll have to check when I get home and see what I have saved.

Your one aggro building cooldown in this situation is Berserk, which you definitely want to save for when you're in cat form. If you meant that you should taunt the boss, in order that the other tank taunt back immediately, that could work.

However, I have to say that the costs far outweigh the benefits. For one, your healers will freak out when they see you take a hit, and may not even be ready to get you the kind of healing you're going to need. Healers have enough shenanigans to deal with already, without unnecessary tank rotations in the mix.

Two, there's no guarantee that you'll survive, even with admirable healing on you. You don't have as much dodge as a bear tank, you certainly don't have as much HP, and you lack the Protector of the Pack talent that gives you a flat damage reduction.

Three, if you're getting aggro for as much as a second, there's a chance that things can go horribly, horribly wrong. Boss attacks that normally never target the tank can now hit your main tank. If you're in melee DPS position, you're exposing the whole raid to cleaves and cone attacks. You may get a stack of a debuff you definitely should not have.

If you're consistently getting aggro, try working with your raid instead of devising an unprecedented strategy (cool as it initially sounds). Have your hunters Misdirect more often. Have your rogues give Tricks of the Trade to the tank instead of swapping it with each other. Ask for Vigilance, or Hand of Salvation. Consider holding off on Berserk a few seconds longer.

Sorry, if this mention is too trolly. We should wait for Arthas loot before making some BiS gear conclusions. We can expect high ilvl weapon drops. Currently, there are useless craps, like noArP/noHit distand land. The only weapons with hit/arp are 10man weak drops, or str mace. One week later and you could your hit rings, or Ikfirus, throw into container - even then you cant know atm, which tier pieces you should buy.

Actually, yes you can. Nearly anything Arthas could drop we can work around without swapping gear (unless you are downgrading bracers). In pre-Arthas BiS gear, we need to gem in order to reach ArP/hit/expertise caps. Nothing that Arthas drops is likely to change that: unless he drops a 50+ expertise weapon, nothing needs re-working except our gemming/enchanting strategy.

What are you assuming Arthas "could" drop I guess is the question to ask now.

For example, it seems common consensus that 4t10+gloves offpiece is the way to go. If Arthas drops a headpiece of Feral Uberness, this is likely to change to 4T10+Arhtas head. This was the Question originally asked in Temelin's last scentence.

You're not juggling a cascading set of gear, though, because we're gemming to get to hit caps. You are at most changing (X+1) pieces of gear, where X is the number of useful items off Arthas, unless there are 2+ hit rating items or a 50+ expertise item. Everything else is changing gems.

Now, you're right if you say that it won't matter because we'll know the Arthas gear before we can get any 277 items. But that's not exactly what's being argued.

I didn't want use Berserk, simple start generate threat in bear when you have >109% threat. And as cooldowan i mean SI, FR and Barkskin. It will help with your lower survivability when you have aggro form boss. With 4T10 it will be more easier because enrage will help you over aggro and survive this move

You should inform healers before you switch to bear what you gonna do, same for tanks.

You are right. Not on every fight is possible or easy to do. Best place where you can try it is Saurfang(when hi is low on rage) and Lady (catching debuffs will simplify this fight a bit).

Yes, you can manage top 5 priorities (T10, ArP, Crit, Hit, Exp) just with gems and switch weapons, because when you equip yourself into ilvl 277, you ll be overloaded with all needed ratings and with couple of empty sockets. I thought, that weapon with ArP/hit or both will save several gems. Then we will not have to wear Ikfirus chest. When you are wearing this chest, you ll have to wear T10 legs and in proper ilvl, you ll be 80pts over expertise rating. Well, you can drop 2/2 precision talents, but if you are not a mangle bot, those free points are useless. If you are not wearing Ikfirus now, you cant manage top priorities with some haste/crit crap in your hands. Those 80 exp you can convert into 80 STR or 80 haste in some more efficient gear set.

does rawr really have Mongoose better than zerk?
zerk still better right?

Yes, the 2% haste from mongoose helps it edge out Berserk in BiS due to it being a percentage and not rating. The difference in dps between the 2 is negligible, though, as it is easily lost in the RNG of combat.

The gloves slot is a much better x+4t10 piece than Ikfirus is for dpsing since you'll way overcap on expertise. The 277 legs are only 26 rating short of the expertise cap alone, so a precise cardinal ruby or expertise to bracers plus an accurate ametrine is all you need to get close to the cap.

Thats not an option, there is no comparable dps talent that could be taken instead of primal precision.

I'm getting very low up time on Mongoose (both while tanking and while dpsing). I havent done precise testing but I am getting 10%-12% uptime of Mongoose in sample of 4-5 different nights.
You better test which one is better for yourself cause the proc rates were tweaked lately.

I thought mongoose lost to berserker very high levels of gear because you can cap crit and not AP -- is crit cap fully taken into account on the estimations that make mongoose equal?

The problem with Mongoose is that at later levels of gear the high crit rate becomes detrimental, especially compared to berserk. The flip side of that is that once you get 4pT10, crit rate becomes much more valuable again.

They're very close to each other, in any event, and a lot of it will come down to personal preference and your ability to optimize your rotation at proc times.

Last night i had a chance to test Tiny Abomination in a Jar for a very limited time. I did some training dummy test with my rotation for like 5 minutes that i forgot to screenshot. After that we did Blood Princes, thats a pretty bad fight for this type of testing, but this is more than nothing. I hope these screenies can be somewhat useful. (you can check the fight also on worldoflogs if my guildie uploaded)

1
2
3

I'd just like to point out the 3% damage buff can come from arcane mage's Arcane Empowerment as well.

Generally speaking I'm not in favour of trying to - or telling people to - time Berserk with trinket procs. The priority list is complicated enough as is, and dynamic fights put the opportunity cost of missing a Berserk fairly high, e.g. if you waited too long to pop Berserk and ended up just getting half or none of it due to having to move out of melee, or Rebirth/Innervate, or your raid wipes at 1% with the Berserk cooldown at 10 seconds.

However, the extraordinarily long internal cooldown on DBW means they had to make the proc extraordinarily powerful and long - plus the incidental fact that the proc is impossible to NOT notice - makes it tempting to try to occasionally (but not always, or even as a general rule) synchronize with a 3-min On-Use cooldown like Berserk. Assuming one is going to even begin to dig into this, the question becomes:

How long should I wait to pop a ready Berserk if I can reasonably assume that DBW (possibly plus another trinket) will be coming off ICD fairly soon - and at what point is the risk of losing a Berserk at the tail end of a fight too great to mess with this? Since I'm unable to mess with Rawr at the moment I'd like to just propose the following theoretical framework and either be told that this is too difficult and pointless or worth exploring by the community:

DBW proc + successful Berserk synchronization total damage increase over non-Berserked same time-interval damage = X

"Normal" Berserk total damage increase over non-Berserked same time-interval damage = Y

If [(Estimated risk of losing Y late in fight) * Y] > X then you should not attempt synchronization.

Bad news:

• dynamic fight mechanics play havoc with this
• my best estimate for the difference between X and Y are about 1000-2000dps for a 2T10-ish geared feral. I'd love to know if this is completely out of the ballpark wrong as it was arrived at by about 30min of experimenting using Team Robot WoW Simulator

Good news:

• InternalCooldowns - Addons - Curse is extraordinarily easy to use, just install, drag the interesting proc item onto an action bar and see the cooldown using something like Cooldowns - Addons - Curse Proculas is another more complicated/powerful option.

What I'm getting at is that no matter your thoughts about my methodology/theory above, there are certain simple situations where it's a no-brainer to hold off Berserk for a tiny little bit:
if you know there is next to no chance of losing a normal Berserk (due to the fight being over soon)
OR
if you know the internal cooldown on DBW - and even another trinket/enchant/on-use tinker like Mjolnir's - will be up very soon (say - ten seconds?)
AND
stable melee situation for the next (waittime + 15 seconds)

Even in a no-brainer situation, the question remains how much of a dps increase this is. The longer ICD, the longer proc duration and therefore more powerful proc impact of DBW should point to this being a non-trivial question.

I tried synchronising the last Berserk of the fight with DBW proc in simcraft and the results (6 dps increase) were too disappointing to bother. But maybe I overlooked something?

SimulationCraft - for fur and feather wearers

I don't see that SimulationCraft would be a conclusive way to analyze the outcomes of this issue as the answer is essentially a factor of fight length + RNG + fight mechanics which all affect each other in very unpredictable ways. Kudos for trying, though.

What would be very useful is putting a number on X and Y, which should be accomplishable via Rawr/SimulationCraft. I'm also not certain that I have the definition of X correct - i.e. whether it should be the total damage increase or just total damage. Or something else.

Otoh, given an average 25p-geared feral currently in ICC25 has an extraordinate amount of crit - you may safely depend on DBW proccing in the first 1-3 seconds of melee engagement. Which means the ICD will be up again at 1:46-1:48 and again at 3:33-3:36, unless there was significant time away from melee in the crucial ICD-off period at ~1:46. Which is enough to hint at a possible ruleset to determine if the 1st and 3rd DBW proc couldn't be reliably Berserk'd on various fights. I'm guessing most would just say it's an impossible-to-quantify player skill issue not worth worrying about except on the fly.

I'm one to think it's plenty quantifiable-- if you'll get the same number of berserks by giving it a ~3:40 cooldown as a 3 minute cooldown, then sync them. Note that this will happen a fair amount on fights. I'd be shocked if you can prove that N+1 berserks is worth less than N berserks synced with a DBW proc. And unless it's a roughly 7 minute fight, you never have to worry about the "will this keep me from berserking one more time" conundrum.

coldbear, I think you don't quite understand what I did. I simulated a 300 second fight 2 times with 1000 iterations each. 300 seconds means no matter what you do you will get a maximum of 2 Berserks in. In one profile I'd always have the 2nd berserk used as soon as I had enough energy. In the other profile then 2nd Berserk would only be used when deathbringer's will buff was up. I don't see a general problem with this kind of testing. What confuses me is that it doesnt seem to significatnly increase the dps over the course of the whole fight and thus I'm wondering if this is even worth bothering unless you are terribly bored with the encounter. Part of the reason is probably, that the speed buff is worthless for berserking. But this still seems fishy to me, although I'm not sure what kind of dps increase we should expect.