Rage Dumping?

Fellow Tanks,
First let me thank you for all the great info…
The info on the site has been invaluable (I dare say “Priceless”). I have seen one term that I am still a bit unsure of; “rage dumping”.
Is that because you loose aggro gain since you are not generating any rage? Why is it important to “dump” it?
Anyway…I try to completely immerse myself in what I like and I hope to be the best dam Tank I can be. With your knowledge and great write ups…I believe I am on the right path. I look forward to your future posts!

we use the term rage dump as a means to say:

we have too much rage, use a skill that will waste rage but in a good way
our solution: Heroic strike

if your rage bar is full... it is wasted. all that nice rage should be going into either getting you threat, doing damage, and/or saving your ass :)

spamming heroic strike etc. when you've got oodles of rage is a nice way of keeping that bar from being full. it has the advantage of doing some threat and some damage at the same time.

-- gyre --

Thanks fellas/fellettes...
just wanted to make sure i wasnt missing something.
BTW, got my warrior to 34 now...Since i obviously dont have the talents of 70 (devastate...), i assume i go with the old; sunder, sunder...

Good rule of thumb:

When you have over 40 rage, queue Heroic Strike on your next attack.

The reason it's called a "Rage dump" is because of the global cooldown. When tanking, sometimes we cant use our rage fast enough spaming abilities every 1.5seconds. Heroic strike gets around this.

It's extra damage, and extra threat. Imp. Heroic strike is great for threat, and a little extra damage when grinding.

Be careful not to use Heroic Strike too often. Plenty of tanks get stuck in a cycle where they Queue up heroic strike too often and this results in not being able to use your Global Cooldowns effectively.

When you reach 70 you'll want to keep Shield Slam and devastate on cooldown, in between you'll be applying whatever debuffs and extra threat generating abilities as necessary. Finally, once you are using every global cooldown to its maximum effect, you'll notice sometimes you have excess rage and if you don't use some, your bar will fill to 100 rage and you won't generate any more. To keep your bar from filling to 100% as much as possible, we use heroic strike as an effective means to never lose any rage due to being hit or hitting a target when our rage bar is already full.

~meia

Heroic Strike substitutes your next white attack with a yellow attack that adds damage and threat.

The reason why it's the #1 choice as a rage dump is exactly because of the extra threat that's been generated from the extra damage and threat (as indicated on the tooltip). The key word in the previous paragraph is "substitute", meaning you will not gain Rage and you will expend rage for the extra threat instead.

Heroic strike, in addition to that extra threat, will not glance. This also seeks to improve your threat situation!