My Thoughts on the 4.0 Tanking Warrior

Patch 4.0 has been out for a week now, and that has given me sufficient time to basically re-learn how to play my character.  Below are some of my thoughts.  For your amusement, the header of each section is a song title.  

Ready to Start
The first most noticeable difference, aside from the sweeping changes to the talent trees, is the fact that rage is now quite different.  I would go sofar as to say that right now, pulling mobs is much more difficult than it was before, due only to the fact that the amount of rage we can generate before pulling a pack of mobs has been severely nerfed.  Bloodrage is gone and replaced by our shouts, but the added 10 rage over a few seconds feature is gone.  So right there, we've got 10 less rage to work with than we had before, and we're not even getting hit by a mob yet.  Also, Bloodrage placed us in combat, which means the rage didn't decay as quickly as it does using the weaker Shout version of it.  The combination of these two things means that unless I'm charging into the pack of mobs, I'm SEVERELY struggling to get the pull started correctly.  I've been thinking about whether or not I think this is something that needs to be adjusted by Blizzard, and I've come to the conclusion that I think it does.

Somebody Like You
One thing that sort of annoyed me about the sweeping changes is how the four tanking classes are now even more similar than they were before.  It's unfortunate, as I feel I've lost just a little bit of what made me unique.  It makes me nostalgic for the times when warriors where the Horde's only tanks.  On the positive side, this means that it's going to be even more difficult for anyone to justify any tanking class as being superior to another.  In my opinion, there simply isn't a superior choice, even before these changes.  Now it's even more apparent that they are all balanced quite nicely.  Sure, you may have a situation here or there where one might have a slight advantage over the other.  But it's not going to be a major advantage and it's not going to happen often.  That's a good thing.

Bleed It Out
While the single target tanking rotation has stayed basically the same, the AoE tanking rotation has completely changed.  To me, this rotation felt clunky as all hell to me at first.  But now that I've worked with it for a while and practiced it, I actually believe it is much better than it was before.  Basically, it goes like this:  Charge in, Rend your target, Thunderclap to spread the Rend, Shockwave now that it's damage is increased by Thunderclap, Cleave, and Thunderclap again.  From this point, you can fill in the waits on cooldowns with single-target attacks.  With this rotation, I'm actually finding that I can hold mostly everything without tab targetting through the mobs to give each one of them attention with single target attacks.  Obviously, if someone is nuking the fuck out of a mob that I'm not targeting, yes, they're going to pull it.  Duh.  But if they are AoEing the pack, usually they will not pull.  That is an improvement from before.  I realize that we're not going to be AoEing everything down in Cataclysm, but this makes me feel better about the whole thing.  Because, what I'm sure we will be doing in Cataclysm, when we're not CCing, is focusing on one target and letting incidental AoE hit the other mobs.  This makes me confident that I will be able to hold onto these mobs through something like that without having to switch off of the main target (and risk losing it because of the DPS focus nuking it down).  And I'd like to say that Thunderclap spreading Rend is my current favorite thing ever.

The Anthem
Shield Block again costing rage sucks.  There, I said it.  All it means is that I'm going to not use it as often as I should, because I need the rage for other things.  It's back to TBC when the button was left unpressed most of the time.  Making a tank decide between taking less damage and having more rage in which to cause threat IS NOT FUN AND INTERESTING.  It's annoying.  Stop it.  There will never be a situation in the game...EVER...where I would ask myself, "Hm, would I like to take less damage here, or would I like to generate more threat?"  Because you know what?  The answer is always both!  And if I really do want to take less damage...I'm going to use Shield Wall!  Amazing, ain't it?  Yeah.  Stop making Shield Block useless.

Overall, my general opinion of things is that while tanking feels a little bit different now, it's still pretty much the same.  Which is good, since I wouldn't be happy if everything I enjoy about it was just gone.  Instead, they've kept the foundation of tanking there and just changed a few things so that it's not completely the same 'ol stuff.  That's probably the best route they could have taken with it.