Standard Information
Builds
That one point in Stampede can be thrown anywhere.
You have some choices for major glyphs, but that's all there is for bear form prime glyphs. Rebirth is nice as you'll still occasionally be throwing out battle rezzes. Best for them to be 100% health.
Gear
Agility is your highest priority, followed by Stamina and Dodge. Don't take strength-oriented tanking jewelry just because it has dodge, though. Avoid strength gear like the plague.
Haste is a wasted stat, as are hit and expertise to an extent. You should try to get gear without those stats, but if your highest ilvl piece in that slot has one of them, reforge it to dodge.
Since you gear so heavily for agility, you will sometimes find that you are a little short on stamina in certain fights. Swapping out trinkets is a great way to quickly compensate for this from fight to fight.
Reforging
Generally you will reforge something to dodge. Your first targets for reforge are haste, hit, and expertise, followed by crit.
Gems
- Red Slots - full agility
- Yellow Slots - dodge/agility
- Blue Slots - stam/agility
- Meta - Austere Shadowspirit (81 stam/2% armor) - requires 2 yellow
Enchants
- Head: Earthen Ring (90stam/35dod)
- Shoulder: 50agi/25mast
- Back: 22agi
- Chest: 75stam
- Wrist: 50agi
- Hands: 65mast
- Legs: 145stam/55agi
- Feet: 35agi
- Weap: 130agi
Instructions
The standard ability priority is:
- Keep Demo Roar up
- Mangle on cooldown
- Thrash
- Faerie Fire
- Keep up the Pulverize buff
- Keep up a 3 stack of Lacerate
- Spend excess rage on Maul
TellMeWhen is a good mod for tracking those debuffs, but requires some configuration.
Tips & Tricks
- Maul is not on the global cooldown, so you can press it at the same time as another ability and both will go off at the same time.
- Demoralizing Roar is incredibly valuable for your survival. Keep it going. I use an addon called TellMeWhen to show me when another class has an equivalent debuff applied.
- Don't expose your backside. When a mob swings at you from behind, you lose your ability to dodge. This will greatly impact your survival. Try to strafe around a mob if you need to move quickly, and keep adjusting position when mobs get behind you. If you must run through a boss, use your mouse to spin 180 right as you pass his center.
- Be pro-active with your cooldowns. Cooldowns aren't just a backup ability for when your health drops to 20%. Just heard over vent that a healer is out of mana, stunned, teleported, or otherwise incapacitated? Pop one.
- Taunt doesn't cause any threat.
Taunt gives you exactly as much threat as the person who currently has aggro, and then gives you aggro. If you taunt at the very beginning of a pull, all you have done is wasted your time (which is precious in the first few moments of a pull).
- There's a threat buffer before aggro is pulled.
When do you lose aggro on a mob? It's NOT when someone gets more threat than you. There is actually a buffer area where they can have more threat but you retain aggro. At range, your party members will need 30% more threat than you in order to pull (10% if they're standing in melee range). The buffer doesn't help much at the beginning of a fight but it does as time goes on. Also, it is important to keep mobs out of melee range of your casters.
- Charge in combat
You can feral charge during combat, so remember to use it. Great for returning to bosses that knock back, or picking up stray trash mobs.