Last night I decided to respec/gem and give tanking a try with the new patch. Instead of going through my rotation or running 5 mans to figure it out, I grabbed the bear by the balls (omg pun. puuuuuuun) and delved into an icc25 pug as main tank. After finishing up figuring out how to properly hold a bit of aoe, it went very smoothly.

According to my recount I took around 15% less damage than the other tanks overall (trash excluded), with all of my reforging being taking from hit/haste and putting it into mastery. With the vengeance stacks and crit from pulverize along with mastery (excluding raid buffs) I typically have around 5k attack power. So I’ve nearly always got a 3kish shield up on me, around 4-4.5k shield in raids.

Anyway, yeah bear tanks are even better now. Kids that are crying about swipe shouldn’t be tanking anyway, go play a rogue or a mage and enjoy your 3 buttons.

From the bear thread at http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=27188059389&sid=1

Q: They broke my 4T10, WHAT THE HELL?
A: No, no they didn’t. It is still 12% damage reduction. All it is is a failed tooltip update, which with blizzard, is nothing new.

If you don’t believe me, here’s a simple test: Get someone to punch you from behind. Make sure they d not have any weapon equipped, any trinkets equipped, or the AV rep ring equipped. Take note of the damage being taken. Hit enrage. Take note of the damage being taken. Take the non-enraged damage and subtract 12% from it. It should match, within 1 or 2 damage, the damage being taken with Enrage up.

So it appears we’re fine enraging until the level cap goes up and we replace our 4 piece T10.

@styopa

Due to talents, bears cannot be critted, so the Barkskin glyph should be irrelevant to us. Likely it’s for the non-bears.

@BBB

Thanks for the guide! Could you please add it to the “sticky” bear post list.

would be awsome if you wrote something up about glyphs, personaly im not sure if glyph of frenzied regen is going to end up being good or bad. either way, i look forward to reading some more of your articles.

I am ready/excited for Cata, it will take more skill (like it used to be!), more CC and single target tanking (which we are now setup for.) I think the hardest learning curve will be for DPS who are used to being able to nuke whatever they want, whenever they want and never use CC or watch their aggro.

I’m trying to decide on a build for pre-Cata raiding and I don’t know whether to put any points in KOTJ or Primal Madness, given that I’m a little underwhelmed with pulverise at the moment and an 8-second-longer window for 3-10% crit seems like a very heavy point cost.

I can’t seem to find any info on what has happened with tier bonuses (or theorycrafting on pulverise or on bears in general for that matter, it’s all complex cat math) so any help would be appreciated.

Enrage is a 10% PHYSICAL damage increase.

Love,
Sangi

I am really disheartened at the releasing the talent tree and talents before Cata. As current fights require alot of AE tanking.

As of level 80, we have 3 AE abilities. Swipe, Demo Roar, Challenging Roar (And maul if you glyph is, but 30 rage cost is INSANE). Challenging Roar has a 3 minute cooldown (2:30 glyphed), so that is out as a threat generation/Tauning talent. Swipe has a 6 second cooldown and large rage cost. Demo Roar is not meant for theat generation… So that leaves us with 2 abilties, one one a 6 second cooldown… there is no way we can match AE threat for current content. Are we supposed to tab target and Growl?

I understand that Cata is getting away from AE tanking, but what happens in the 2 months before Cata drops?