4.0.1 Tanking Second Impressions

So I raided last night and as promised I am going to share my experience with that.

First off, in my last post I said that I reforged to mass hit and expertise for this patch and I am maintaining that that is the way to go right now because...

Threat and Damage:

My threat in the raid was really high yesterday. I was previously always in a threat race with our destro lock during some fights but yesterday on marrowgar he was at about 50% of my threat. My damage also seems to have increased, I was hitting mangle for like 13k at some points and with the berserk procs I was hitting it quite often. The Berserk mechanic seems very strong right now for aoe and single target. I was finding that I always had enough rage to use my abilities but I may have to put my rage bar in the middle of my screen since it actually matters right now for knowing whether to use maul or FF.

As proof of the increased threat: the instance bugged out last night and the whole raid had to jump off of the boat before saurfang and die so that we could get out of combat so I took off my weapon and jumped off to save some money. Fast-forward to me standing in front of rotface’s room after killing heroic saurfang and the festergut achievement thinking to myself “that’s weird my weapon isn’t displayed in caster form.” So yes I did tank those two fights without a weapon on and did not even notice until 2 bosses later when I thought that my character looked funny.

Abilities:

Maul damage seems rather low but I am still trying to use it on OOC procs since it is instant, does not trigger the global and has such a high rage cost. I think that the net gain is higher using OOC for maul because if you can have maul on CD and still be using it often while having loads of rage it seems like that can only be a dps increase. Like I said before however do not use maul at the wrong time because it is actually possible to run out of rage but the consequences are not as bad for that happening as I think they may become when we level up and start losing our high crit chance and get big reductions in the potency of our stats

Mangle hits like a truck now. If you can use it you should be because the damage and threat is just so high. That’s all I really have to say about mangle right now. It is your top priority so use it every time.

Lacerate is pretty much all front loaded now for threat and is going to be your filler ability just like at the start of wrath. Its threat seems pretty good now and it actually seems to function as a sort of secondary resource for bears. You can consume it to gain a crit buff or let it stand and generate mangles for you. I am beginning to see lacerate as a buff instead of rebuff since the bleed damage is so low but having it has such good return.

Pulverize was an ability that I was not sure as to how it would function but I think with its low damage it is a mock savage roar. Pulverize puts up the crib buff so you want to always lacerate at 3 stacks to get 9% instead of 3% or 6% but you want to always follow it up with a lacerate. I’m thinking that lacerate is better to use after a pulverize than a mangle since lacerate will take a couple seconds to tick and by then you will have been able to use a mangle and will be closer to the next berserk proc w/o missing the first one but we shall see.

Swipe is decent right now. Its threat is actually really high so you should be able to hold threat pretty well in aoe packs if you don’t only rely on it. Its threat is actually higher than lacerate right and having just been told that swipe is still going to be better than lacerate after the buff you should get used to using it in your single target rotation.

Faerie Fire is not the same way as it was before, where you wanted to use it every time it came off CD. Right now it is good as an armour debuff, a ranged pull and as a filler ability to use when you accidently hit maul out of instinct at low rage.

Both our CD’s I have yet to use because healing and survivability is so good right now.

Talents:

I’m only going to go over the ones that have really impressed me thus far in this patch.

Feral Aggression: so I got into a discussion with kalon over at wowthinktank and now it is time to put my tail between my legs because I love this talent especially with the glyph to increase the range.

Stampede: I have not even noticed the effect of this talent so what does that say? But at the moment there isn’t really much else to take.

Brutal Impact: I haven’t noticed the talent too much but I sure have noticed the 10 second interrupt that I have now.

Endless Carnage: Keeping up the pulverize buff for longer is something that I have noticed will be rather handy if pulverize does not get a big dmg increase.

Berserk: Who cares about the actual ability (I have always thought it to be completely underwhelming) but the proc from lacerate ticks is frigging amazing. I love this change.

Ratings:

Agility is really good right now as it has always been but it may be even better now.

Stam does the same thing as before.

All of our secondary stats seem to be about the same in value as they were before.

I didn’t really check out armour at all.

I have no idea about mastery but Kalon over on wowthinktank.blogspot.com is saying that it is quite good so I may reforge some of my haste into mastery instead of expertise just to see but I’m not sure if I want to do that yet.

Glyphs:

Prime: Mangle, Berserk, Lacerate

Major: Frenzied Regeneration, *I took Faerie Fire but it is not optimal*, (your pick)

Minor: imo go unburdened rebirth, dash, challenging roar

So that’s all I got for now but if I find that my opinion changes on anything or that i learn something new that makes a difference for me i will do another post. Good luck in 4.0.1 but be positive for right now cause we are looking good so far.