A Week Later...

So it has been about a week since the patch dropped and I feel like I want to make a short post about some things that really hit me after a few more raids.

First off, 4.0.1 is making getting your drakes a lot easier now so if you are working on it you should have good time to get it if you are remotely close. The extra damage from everyone as well as most people being more interested in getting to know their class seems (to me at least) to be making people more eager to do stuff.

I know that healing is higher than it was pre-4.0.1 but it seems like healers are having to get used to things a little more than they are used to so give them a little bit more leeway.

My damage is through the roof. Since the patch i have been doing so much more damage that it is not even funny. Vengeance does not make much difference in a heroic but when the boss is wailing on you in a raid you do a lot more damage than you would otherwise. While not a boss, the blood wing trash was giving me enough Vengeance to hit for about 14k with swipe. I also did about 8.5k dps on one of our heroic blood princes attempts while tanking Valanaar and Taldaram (and was highest on damage) but was only at about 6.5k on the attempt where we killed them.

Some people are talking about how they seem to be doing less relative threat than before and I am sticking with my previous assessment that reforging for Hit and Expertise. Right now your survivability should be at least the same but probably better than before so why change that. As it stands most wipes in our raids are not from tank deaths but from incorrect placements of things, positioning, or just general mess ups by the raid. And at the same time healer throughput is definitely higher than it was before so you shouldn't be having any trouble staying alive. The way I see it was that pre-patch the biggest issue we were having was holding threat off of dps that were scaling way faster than us and after gemming hit and expertise I no longer have to worry about my threat. Granted I probably could turn some of that expertise into mastery to give me some larger SD bubbles but at this time I don't really see the need. This could very well change in Cata when we start leveling but for now I think that this is the way to go. Obviously however if you are finding yourself dying while tanking go for more survivability, but remember that hitting the boss almost every time will give you more SD uptime. One las thing on this is that by no means should you be leaving all that haste on your gear, if you have haste on your gear reforge it into something because right now in T10 you have way too much haste that isn't doing a whole lot.

I find, and this is totally personal, that the bear "rotation" is a lot more fun than it used to be. I think that right now it is in a very good place as far as difficulty. It is not too hard that you lose track of what you are doing, but it is hard enough that you have room to improve. I still need to find a addon that will stick my rage bar somewhere that I like it so that I better know when to maul to bleed off my rage but that will come when everything is updated and I have to get used to using demo roar again so I don't keep forgetting.

If you haven't been able to tell, I definitely think that we are in a good place and I hope that that keeps up into Cata, because even though I will never stop playing my druid, I like how bear tanking is right now.