Anyone have any Guardian tips and tricks?

[gerhard2202]

I want to know if there's any fun or unique tactics you guys use while guardian tanking to improve your performance. On a fight by fight basis, I've noticed the following things:

Stone Guard: Thanks to Vengeance, Thrash, Swipe, Maul (if you have it so it cleaves) and Berserk, you can pull a significant amount of DPS on this fight.

Gara'jal: Savage Defense helps a ton with mitigating Voodoo Dolls raid damage. Additionally, if your raid uses Bloodlust / Heroism on the pull, you should have the other tank initiate combat and equip an intellect weapon until it's your turn to tank. That way, you can use Heart of the Wild to pull about 60k initial DPS. Just don't forget to switch back to an agility weapon when Heart of the Wild is over.

Spirit Kings: Thanks to Savage Defense, you can dodge a majority of Qiang's massive cleaves, so when the Flanking Orders come about, make sure you have Savage Defense up, just in case your raid fails to move as a group. Additionally, Subetai's fast attack speed can be easily countered by Savage Defense.

Will of the Emperor: Theoretically, you can accomplish 100% effective uptime on Savage Defense by letting it recharge during devastating combos. This is sort of a double-whammy, because you get to build rage during the combos without having to spend it on FR or SD.

[Sarella]

Garaj'al: Spellpower weapon, Int pot and go to town spamming wrath. The int on the weapon and from the pot will add spell crit, which agi equivalents would not. Also the spellpower from the weapon adds to the damage. When you end HotW you want to have a weapon swap macro that will equip your bear staff while turning you into a bear (equipping a weapon in combat and shapeshifting both trigger the gcd, but if you order the weapon first both will trigger at the same time. Alternatively, equip the staff and in the midst of the gcd hit GROWL which will shift you into a bear automatically (since the boss is a fixate it wont matter you have "aggro")

Elegon, remember FR gets buffed 50% and is often more efficient than using SD. When the adds come out, hit THRASH while on the boss to spread it to 3 adds. Do not leave the platform, just use the excess rage to self heal, so the vengeance builds up to grant more deeps.

Spirit Kings: When Maddening Shout comes out, target the most annoying raid member with Nature's Swiftness up and hit CYCLONE. Then enjoy them CC'ed for 9 seconds while you laugh. Failing this, hit thrash if they are melee to give them a 10% damage reduction for 30 seconds. As for useful tips, during the Shadow guy you want to move away from the boss slightly and, if shield of darkness is up (heroic) you can use your interrupt safely with enough time to cancel auto attack before it blows up the raid. You can also typhoon the shadow adds helping the kiter.

Finally, remember you can shapeshift out of the stoning effect on Emperor trash, or stampeding roar to cleanse the entire raid of all stacks.

[Drilnos]

Elegon: Using Symbiosis on a paladin, hunter or mage is extremely helpful for controlling the spark adds. The second power draw phase is the best time to use HotW.

Imperial Vizier Zor'lok: I like to glyph Stampeding Roar, and there is no better time to use it than when the raid has to run to a new platform through the pheromones.