4.0.1 Tanking First Impressions

So patch 4.0.1 went live yesterday and I took some time to play around on my druid and run some heroics so I am going to share my observations with you. Keep in mind that I haven’t done any raiding yet so I don’t have any real idea of how much damage I am taking relative to before but today I should be raiding so I will do a second post to follow up.

First just a little about my character so you know the perspective I have. I have just over a 6k GS. Unbuffed I have about 40% crit chance and 50% dodge with about 5000 attack power. As of yesterday I am hit capped and am about 2.2% off of the expertise hard cap (parry cap).

Rotation:

Fiddling around on the target dummy I had enough rage to do a full rotation so this is pretty accurate. The rotation has moved more towards a priority like the cat system.

You want to try and keep lacerate up (even one stack) so that you can benefit from berserk procs for more mangles. You want to mangle as soon as it comes off CD. You want to use pulverize on a 3 stack of lacerate to maintain the buff but get up lacerate up very soon after so that you can still get the berserk proc. Pulverize is not worth hitting just because. Try and maul when you proc OOC. Use FF when you are low on rage (which should not be very often) and maul when you are high on rage. Hitting maul at the wrong time now actually sucks. Lacerate is now your main filler ability however swipe is a little better so use it if you remember. And one note about lacerate is that the bleed sucks, most of the threat is front end loaded and the bleed is just there to proc berserk. Not looking good for the current manifestation of the T11 set bonuses but that will probably change.

I am noticing that my threat seems to have increased in live.

AoE tanking really sucks right now because they put the CD on swipe w/o giving us thrash and the threat that is on swipe is reported to be half of the threat of live on the beta. I have a feeling that we might see the swipe threat stay the same until cata when we will be able to get thrash to supplement our aoe threat. That being said however, if you just warm up that tab button and throw out 3 lacerates/mangles on your targets in between each swipe it is not that bad, just remember to spread them around. You may choose to let the other tank do the plague wing trash but we are doing fine.

Gear:

Stam is more important that armor now whereas there used to be a decent trade-off before. In T10 before you had a lot of arm pen which was rather weak as a stat. Now that arm pen is haste which is also weak as a stat. I have been reading some ideas on what to reforge that haste into and it seems like a lot of people are saying crit or mastery are the good choices. I think a little different though. Right now my dodge and the SD bubble are quite high with my dodge being much higher in ICC due to the dodge reduction being removed.

I think that if you are going to be reforging haste you should try and get to the hit cap and then start getting expertise. These two stats are going to give you a lot more rage than crit and are going to cause a lot more threat to keep up with the dps that have recently received a dps buff that is reported to be as large as 30% more in some cases. If I am wrong however I will eat my words and rereforge my haste to be mastery.

That is really all I have to say for now and I will update this as I experiment more and do a little bit of raiding and see what my threat and damage taken are like. My assessment so far...we are in a good spot.