Ok, so.. Rend? I must be a noob.

[Glomgore]

Like many warriors, past level 40 we took rend off of our bars, once we decided to be tanks.

Now, 2 questions.

One, when was rend usable in def stance?
Two, if it's always been, then can I borrow a gun please?

Final question, worth a GCD? Thinking about swapping 2 points outta imp h strike and into imp rend. Combine this with Damage shield and Deep woulds, I'm thinking spreading some rend around during AOE tanking might help my overall AoE threat.

I seriously feel very stupid for asking this, but apparently this is one of those things I missed, and was very confused about when seeing rend being talked about on tanking threads.

[Galushi]

Afaik, it's always been usable in defensive stance. The problem always was the hoooorible damage it did pre 3.0. Now that its been buffed, and does extra damage if its applied while the mob is over 75%, it's not terrible. One thing, similar to deepwounds, is that the bleed damage is somewhat reliant on weapon speed. In other words, the slower the weapon the better.

With a slow tanking weapon ( not many of these, tho Broken Promise is good for this) Rend does pretty significant damage for its global cooldown. With 2/2 Imp rend and possibly the glyph if you want to spare it, a single rend application can do easily over 3k damage, even with a fast weapon. The problem really comes down to the fact that it cannot proc Sword and Board.

For myself, i only use rend if shield slam is a gcd away from being usable (IE: its up in 1.5 seconds and a sword and board proc off devastate wouldnt make that shield slam come any sooner), and everything else is on cooldown except devastate. Basically concussion blow, shockwave, revenge all do higher average threat i think.

Rend isnt easily discounted as it used to be, but id try it out a bit for yourself maybe with some WWS or Recount parsing and find out if its total dmg (5 ticks or glyphed 7 ticks) makes it worthwhile enough to use over other abilities.

[Durandro]

I only use Rend after I charge. After that it's Devastate, Shield Slam, Revenge, Thunderclap, repeat.

But it's far from useless. Just doesn't fit well into my rotation, bar right at the start (since it's very cheap on rage).

[Glomgore]

Thanks for the replys. I'm gonna give it a shot, I really don't need the damage or threat on single target, I think the rage might be better spent elsewhere. But for AoE packs it's another 'passive' threat generator, like deepwounds and damage shield are. I'll play with it.

I still feel like a moron.

[Kalken]

I'd say don't worry about it if you dont have a Bleed Raid Debuffer in the set up (feral druids, arms warriors). With broken promise and Improved Rend my rend ticks for 700 or so which is more damage than a devastate so keeping it up wont hurt.