Weak TPS

[Nagrarok]

Since I began tanking on my Druid, I've noticed I've had problems with Threat. Not so much in early stages, but as I progressed a bit in gear and started to raid, albeit casually, I have noticed people climbing up on Omen all the time. Tending to think, "I'm a tank, it is not my job to babysit DPS. If they want to pull, they can be ready to tank it," but I don't think that should be the way.

I tend to float anywhere from 4k to 6k TPS in heroics and raids, depending on available buffs in the group. When Berserk is active, I can get up to around 7k-8k. With MDs or ToT, I am well off, but getting a DPS to be responsible about that kind of stuff is a bit of a hassle, haha. I'm quite a bit below Expertise cap, at least the Parry cap.

While tanking with/against other classes, I see that Paladins/DKs can reach 8k+ without the need for CDs. Is it the nature of the class to be highly gear dependent for Threat? Or do I just suck? Or is their class a bit more forgiving?

Rotation/Priority is: FFF when off of CD, Mangle when off of CD, Lacerate to 3, Mangle, Lacerate to 5, Maul on (almost) every white swing (rage permitting). AoE isn't generally an issue, just Swipe + Maul with tab to each to spread IW.

Armory Link: http://www.wowarmory.com/character-s...dgar&cn=Sichae

I don't actively raid (on a schedule or much of current content), so if the solution is to not just worry about it, then that can be it. But, as opportunities may arise in the future due to change in work shift, it may become an issue at that junction. Any suggestions would be nice.

[Lyren]

Your spec isn't showing up, but you can use Mangle instead of Growl glyph and spec imp mangle.

Also, I hope you're using swipe after lacerate's at 5, and only refreshing duration.

If you don't have WF/icy talons, you will lose a decent amount of TPS, much more than any of the other tanks.

[Health]

Hi there. As a new frost-dualwield-DK tank, I can't answer your questing.

But I ám wondering what addons you guys use to monitor your threat. I love Omen for my hunter and my priest, but i'd like something more 'tanky'. Would be great if Recount could show a tab for TPS.

[Sunshine]

Your gear and spec look fine. Beyond that, improving your gear and maybe getting a few more agi/stam gems would be my only suggestion (once you have "enough" health, the extra agi for crit will be very helpful). Your expertise rating is fine, although more doesn't hurt for threat. Weapon especially is something you should look to upgrade ASAP; the feral ap increase going from one ilvl to another is huge for bear threat.

That priority list sounds right also -- are you substituting swipe over lacerate when it's got plenty of time left and everything else is on cooldown?

But I ám wondering what addons you guys use to monitor your threat. I love Omen for my hunter and my priest, but i'd like something more 'tanky'. Would be great if Recount could show a tab for TPS.

This is one reason I've started using Skada -- it has a built in threat meter and can automatically switch to that in combat then back to whatever you were watching beforehand when you leave combat.

[Nagrarok]

Hmm... I had never heard of subbing in Swipe while at 5 stack of Lacerate. I always kinda viewed it as an AoE ability only. Thought the "produces a high amount of threat" would cover the damage difference between Lacerate and Swipe, but I can see the merit in only refreshing near the end of the duration, which should be something I will begin to track when I log in next.

Options for Weapons are a bit limited, due to raiding situation. Can't afford a Battered Hilt (10k to 15k on server) and I've yet to see one drop on any of my toons since the item has been introduced. Other option would be the Ony25 Polearm, which no one seems to run anymore. I dislike that a decent Polearm/Staff isn't available in ICC until at least past the Spire, which I've yet to see a PuG get past Saurfang (due to coordination efforts needed).

Thanks.

[Sunshine]

The idea behind swipe instead of lacerate is just that the pure damage of swipe multiplied by the standard bear threat modifier is higher than even the "improved" threat of lacerate. It's kind of counter-intuitive, and it can be a better idea to stick with lacerate in certain situations (e.g., Saurfang, where you don't want to accidentally grab blood beasts), but in general it's a good idea.

As far as weapon, you might be able to find a toc25 and grab the Lupine Longstaff / Twin's Pact. Other than that, yeah, I guess you've got to get into ICC.

[Dargoth]

Your threat sounds a little low for your gear. It might be that you need to convert more of your white swings to mauls. Consider just macroing it to all your other abilities for easymode. Otherwise a bit more expertise will help your single target threat, at the moment you are at bare minimum for a tank and are over hitcap. At the moment your highest TPS stat is expertise followed by ArP. Hit is roughly equal to expertise if you drop back below the hitcap.

[Fojos]

Your threat sounds a little low for your gear. It might be that you need to convert more of your white swings to mauls. Consider just macroing it to all your other abilities for easymode.

Just... no. If you do that and you don't have enough rage for a few seconds (You know, those dodge streaks), you'll try to do maul when it's not possible, which means you're losing out on maul and white damage. Just place maul on a button that's easy to spam.

[mtotho]

Here is the rotation i use on 2 targets or less (IE the boss).

/castsequence reset=combat Mangle (Bear)(Rank 5), Lacerate(Rank 3), Swipe (Bear)(Rank 8), Swipe (Bear)(Rank 8), Faerie Fire (Feral)
/cast Maul

I dont use Imp mangle. Mangle comes off cd just as i reach it in the rotation. The rotation is based around FF and Mangle (neither of them are off cd for more then half a second throughout the duration of the fight).

Ive never had any problems with this rotation. I often find myself slowing down because Id be pulling threat from an off tank (Torovan, precious, fights where 2 tanks stand in front of the boss).

Depending on the situation, you may want to get up to 5 stacks of lacerate first. Other than that, swipe's damage is more threat than Lacerates front end damage.

Just... no. If you do that and you don't have enough rage for a few seconds (You know, those dodge streaks), you'll try to do maul when it's not possible, which means you're losing out on maul and white damage. Just place maul on a button that's easy to spam.

Rage is never an issue for me, ever.. except maybe, maybe on some, and i mean some heroic 5 man dungeon bosses, and all my macros have /cast maul built in (meaning im using maul every time its possible).


Spec and Gear in armory link

[Sunshine]

Here is the rotation i use on 2 targets or less (IE the boss).

/castsequence reset=combat Mangle (Bear)(Rank 5), Lacerate(Rank 3), Swipe (Bear)(Rank 8), Swipe (Bear)(Rank 8), Faerie Fire (Feral)
/cast Maul

That's too many abilities in between mangles -- with a 6 sec cd mangle (e.g., no imp mangle), you have time for 3 abilities in between mangles to use the full number. With a 4.5 sec cd mangle (imp mangle), you have time for only 2. It may look like it's just coming off cooldown, but that's because it's coming off the GCD.

Beyond that, you're refreshing lacerate earlier than you have to using this macro.

[Ormula]

Just... no. If you do that and you don't have enough rage for a few seconds (You know, those dodge streaks), you'll try to do maul when it's not possible, which means you're losing out on maul and white damage. Just place maul on a button that's easy to spam.

Against raid bosses, you aren't going to be going OOR. It's a good idea to bind all of your abilities to Maul, it will increase your TPS about 2000.

[Epoch]

Hmm... I had never heard of subbing in Swipe while at 5 stack of Lacerate. I always kinda viewed it as an AoE ability only. Thought the "produces a high amount of threat" would cover the damage difference between Lacerate and Swipe, but I can see the merit in only refreshing near the end of the duration, which should be something I will begin to track when I log in next.

Options for Weapons are a bit limited, due to raiding situation. Can't afford a Battered Hilt (10k to 15k on server) and I've yet to see one drop on any of my toons since the item has been introduced. Other option would be the Ony25 Polearm, which no one seems to run anymore. I dislike that a decent Polearm/Staff isn't available in ICC until at least past the Spire, which I've yet to see a PuG get past Saurfang (due to coordination efforts needed).

Thanks.

Swap out Glyph of Growling for Mangle glyph, spec into imp mangle. If you have a warrior in the raid or another feral, get them to put up their versions if Infected wounds then throw those 3 points into imp mangle. Your weapon is fine for the moment.

Swap out a few of the 30 and 24 stamina gems for agi / stamina. In your current progression you do not need to stack stamina gems to be a viable tank. Do you have a http://www.wowhead.com/item=44253 If so put it in place of one of your stamina trinkets, the agi on dmc: greatness as well as the proc will help in tps. If your worried about stamina swap your frenzied regen glyph for http://www.wowhead.com/item=46372

[olgreg3bear]

I do not tank at all, but in my weekly 10m icc group, we have a bear tank that is rockin nothin below 264 ilvl pieces except his polearm (hersir's greatspear) and he has been playing for a while and really knows his stuff as a bear tank.

However, we have a pala tank that usually can't make it so we end up having to pug one. Yesterday we pugged a DK tank, and the guy didn't have anything Higher than what you could scrounge up in Random Heroics. Our usual tank kept stating in the vent that he couldn't keep up with the DK on TPS on several fights. Kept on saying something about how they recently buffed frost fever (idk i dun pay much attention to dk's)

Anyone else experiencing similar situations?

[Lyren]

Don't know why people care so much about tank vs tank discussion. If DPS is comparable, and all tanks have sufficient snap/sustained tps to keep over dps, then what does it matter if a DK does 5k tps more? It's even worse than comparing overhealing HPS.

And yes, DKs are capable of putting out insane TPS via icy touch, but they sacrifice ~1k dps to do so. Is unnecessary threat really worth ~1k dps?

[littlepiggy]

Against raid bosses, you aren't going to be going OOR. It's a good idea to bind all of your abilities to Maul, it will increase your TPS about 2000.

you could always, you know, have a good reaction time and then you don't need macro's and even if you don't i highly doubt you would get that much extra tps or everyone would suggest this, rather than just the lazy

Swap out Glyph of Growling for Mangle glyph, spec into imp mangle. If you have a warrior in the raid or another feral, get them to put up their versions if Infected wounds then throw those 3 points into imp mangle. Your weapon is fine for the moment.

Do Not ever suggest to someone to not have infected wounds, especially someone looking for help with tanking. another tank isn't going to be holding your hand on every boss fight, so you'd be taking 20% extra damage on bosses. Half the bosses in ICC have an OT on different adds then the MT and the other half have both tanks on the boss (i'm even giving you lootship as it's a joke, so technically its 7/5 in favor of infected wounds)

[Ormula]

you could always, you know, have a good reaction time and then you don't need macro's and even if you don't i highly doubt you would get that much extra tps or everyone would suggest this, rather than just the lazy

So instead of having one button do two things, you'd rather click two buttons every GCD? There's a difference between being lazy and being smart.

[Cheezee]

Don't know why people care so much about tank vs tank discussion. If DPS is comparable, and all tanks have sufficient snap/sustained tps to keep over dps, then what does it matter if a DK does 5k tps more? It's even worse than comparing overhealing HPS.

And yes, DKs are capable of putting out insane TPS via icy touch, but they sacrifice ~1k dps to do so. Is unnecessary threat really worth ~1k dps?

The problem comes when said DK keeps spamming IT on tank swap fights and immediately gets agro again. I know when I play my DK alt I usually have to completely stop attacking now or I will easily pull off any tank not as geared.

[k3nn]

Even if the lacerate hit itself did more threat than a swipe, it'd still be less threat since spamming it would make you lose so many dot ticks (which do much better damage/threat than hits).

Imagine a M/FF/L/L rotation. Lacerate is going to tick at about 1s into each cycle before it gets refreshed twice. So you're getting maul, ff, 2 lac hits and 1 lac tick.

In a 6-second cycle of a M/FF/L/S rotation your lacerate comes up every 6 seconds. Whether you refresh before or after the final tick depends on latency and how long you're willing to delay your cycle; I'll go rule-of-thumb and say you refresh after the last tick half the time. So you average at maul/ff/lac hit/1.5 lac tick/swipe.

In M/FF/L/S/M/FF/S/S lacerate is up every 12 seconds. Again using the half-the-time refresh rule, you end up with 2maul/2ff/1lac hit/3.5 lac tick/3 swipe per 12 seconds, so an average of maul/ff/0.5 lac hit/1.75 lac tick/1.5 swipe per cycle.

So the difference between cycles:
M/FF/L/L: 1.5 lac hit
M/FF/L/S: .5 lac hit, .5 lac tick, swipe
M/FF/L/S/M/FF/S/S: .75 lac tick, 1.5 swipe

The last rotation is clearly the best.

NB Not considering imp mangle, I'm not interested in gimmick builds.

[Fojos]

Against raid bosses, you aren't going to be going OOR. It's a good idea to bind all of your abilities to Maul, it will increase your TPS about 2000.

It will only make a difference to your TPS if you've got "fat" fingers. I'm often out of rage for a few seconds against bosses, because of dodge streaks.

[Dargoth]

It will only make a difference to your TPS if you've got "fat" fingers. I'm often out of rage for a few seconds against bosses, because of dodge streaks.

So tell me, how many of your white swings slip through in terms of a percentage of mauls?