Bear tanking, MoP beta changes so far.

[Tielyn]

Heya folks.

I managed to land myself an OP monk healer, so we ran the starter dungeon over and over again, and by the third time around, I think I've managed to solidify the changes as they stand of 4/7.

Natural caveat, stuff will likely change. YMMV. Not claiming to be an expert bear tank, just happened to get a beta key and I haven't seen another thread for bears in here yet.

Currently MIA:
- Pulverize.
- Demoralizing Roar. (There's a Disorienting Roar, but it doesn't say whether it does the same thing.)
- Challenging Roar. No more AoE taunt.
- Natural Reaction.
- Either the tooltip is broken, or Agi no longer grants as much Dodge as it used to. I'm short 6% dodge in caster (20%, down from 26%), and 10% more from feral talents (Feral Swiftness no longer grants it and Natural Reaction is gone). So I'm 17% more likely to get hit now. :P Armor now absorbs 3% more damage, though.

Namechange, same effect:
- Feral Charge Bear/Cat --> Wild Charge. Now does extra stuff for caster/boomkin.
- Bash --> Mighty Bash. 50 second cooldown. You still have Skull Bash as a main talent, plus glyphed FF silences for 3 seconds.

Same name, different mechanic:
- Lacerate. Currently no longer feeds Pulverize, but instead grants 12% possibility of Mangle proc per stack. Stacks up to 3. -3- second cooldown, so no more spamming it every GCD, but also does way more damage than in live.
- Mangle. Currently no longer costs Rage,and in fact generates 5 rage. Hidden 6 second cooldown not on the tooltip, which claims 'Instant'.
- Savage Defense. Now is an on-use. 1.5 second cooldown. Lasts 6 seconds, but can be refreshed past 6. Requires 60 (55) Rage to activate. Absorbs flat 40% damage.
- Frenzied Regeneration. No longer increases health - that was split out into Might of Ursoc. Still sucks down Rage like crazy to heal you. Glyphed, increases healing received by 40%, but costs 60 rage up front. Also, 1.5 second cooldown.
- Faerie Fire. Now applies 3-sunder like armor debuff. Glyphed silences for 3 seconds.
- Mastery now only adds armor, not to Savage Defense.

Brand new toys:
- Bear Hug. Stuns and does DoT damage, but freezes you in place. I thought it was just Bash with a different name, but probably good in combo with Mighty Bash in PvP.
- Ursol's Vortex. Interesting, but I can't figure out why I might want it yet (it's in the place of taking Bash), other than to maybe gather up trash packs. It's a targeted area, can't be moved once cast, and annoyingly blocks visibility.
- Might of Ursoc: Or, 'what we did with the health buff part of Frenzied Regen.' The 4T13 bonus uses this part. 3 minute cooldown. Glyphed increases this to more, but increases the cooldown to 5 minutes.
- Mass Entanglement: Because it was too cool to only let Fandral Staghelm have. Affects up to 5 adjacent enemies, pops you out into caster form. Might be good for an initial pull where you have DPS that won't touch the other rooted mobs..
- Renewal (Talented): Restores 30% of your health. 2 minute cooldown.

----------------
Early thoughts and observations before the real druid experts here take me apart:

* New initial pull routine seems to be Barkskin, FF, Lacerate and Mangle alternated until you can get Savage Defense lit up. You can almost get 100% uptime on it, but not always.
* If you pop Frenzied Regen or mash Maul a few times, your Savage Defense is going to drop off and be unusable for a bit, since it takes a bit to get back up to 55 Rage. And Frenzied Regen unglyphed will suck your rage dry for the duration, so that's 6 seconds + building Rage from 0 time after it wears off where you're not under the influence of SD. Whenever I goofed up and went rage starved, I fell back on Barkskin/SI to not stress the healer too much.
* You have one given self heal (Might of Ursoc) and one talent self-heal (Renewal), which are on medium and long cooldown timers.
* If currently MT, mostly stay away from Maul unless you've got ~100 rage, since keeping up SD is critical.
* I should probably take Incarnation instead of Force of Nature, but I've always wanted to charge into a fight with killer trees. :} Incarnation reduces all melee damage ability and Growl cooldowns to 1.5 seconds, pretty much like Inner Rage does for Warriors.
* I may have to consider using a Stam/Spell resist meta gem. No more Perseverance talent means that spell effects hit harder, and there are a lot of spell effects. Thick Hide supposedly reduces spell damage taken by 25% though.

Hope this helps get the ball rolling...
-Tielyn

[Fakemessiah]

Nice little write up, I have been on my monk tank and warrior and have yet to step foot on my bear

I am loving the overall tanking changes. Sounds like they added a few more things to make bear less 3 button mash :P
It's nice that they kept a damage cd and healing cd for when you have to use something else besides SD. Can't wait to try it out.

Now the big thing is gemming. On live servers I was full agility gems for LOL 50% dodge, then went pure stam for LOL almost 80k absorbs. but with what i just read in blue posts...they are going to have a lot more crit and haste on druid gear...sooooo...what does that mean, with talent changes and everything...

Either stack:
agil for dodge and more self healing due to crits.
Stam for more self healing from CDs
mastery for more armor
or do the normal mix n match like plate tanks

I have a feeling they want tank gemming to be normalized all around with these changes tho. I know on the monk I have swapped my gems out at least 20 times to get the right feel. It seems they want mastery in yellow, stam mastery in blue, and agil stam in red...i wonder if they will be same for bears.

only time will tell. All i know is I tried all the stackings, then did the mix and by far the mix is more potent. I really need to play with my bear this week and see how the gemming should go.

[Fakemessiah]

also...stick with the treants
running in with killer tanking trees just seems awesome lol
It says the trees change abilities based on spec...I wonder how guardian spec will fare with these trees.
would be awesome to have them aoe attack or attack seperate tgts and all threat gained by trees is transferred to bear upon death. Or have them do a MD kind of ability right to you.

[Suicideking666]

Demo Roar is now a part of Thrash: thrash all near by enemies, dealing immediate physical damage and periodic bleed damage, and also causes the Weakened Blows effect. Damage varies by shapeshift form. Weakened Blows: demoralizes the target, reducing their physical damage by 10% for 30 sec.

All the other tanks have this same effect baked into an ability, but have the original removed I.E. demo shout

[Wooji]

As of beta build (15589) Savage Defense currently has 3 charges (like Monk roll) and the charges have a 9 sec recharge time making it impossible to keep it up 100% even if you have endless rage. SD currently gives 40¤ dodge for 6 sec at a cost of 55 rage, using it before the buff has fallen of increases the lenght of the buff by 6 sec. I don't have any of the other tank classes in beta at the moment so i don't know if the same system has been implemented for other similar abilitys.

[Tielyn]

Heh. That's a huge change from 'absorbs 40% extra damage'- playing with it a little bit on a target dummy this morning gives it the behavior of being able to chain the charges together, allowing for about 18 seconds of uninterrupted 63% dodge for me, as long as I can time the charge just right, the first charge comes off of cooldown before the third is up, leading to me sitting at '1' charges continuously.

Thanks for the heads up on that and the Thrash bit. Unfortunately, macros were broken this morning so two-thirds of my bar isn't working, or I'd play with it for a little while live and report back.

Fun times...
-Tielyn

[Tielyn]

Current tooltip is now showing 14% dodge for me no matter what form I'm in, down from the 26% I had in the beginning of the month and down a total of 22% from live (since I have Wrath of the Unchaining, and Kiril's, that goes up in combat). I get that I'm supposed to use Savage Defense since it gives +40% dodge and they removed the 1.5 second cooldown (like that's much different from the 1 second GCD), but you're going to have to get pummeled a few times before you build up the 55 Rage you need to activate it in the first place. Enrage doesn't cut it to get you to 55 before you charge in, so healers'd better get ready for The Amazing Spiky Bear Health Game again. Just fiddling with the target dummy, auto attacks and whatever Mangle procs I could get left the Savage Defense button unlit for long enough for the buff to fall off.

Once you get a full bar of rage, however, you should be fine, as long as you stay away from Maul mashing -- (I love the new junior edition tooltip: "Use when you have more rage when you can spend.") Nuh uh. You'll want to be keeping Savage Defense up if you have that much rage sitting around unless you're maxed. And woe be to the bear tank that spamcasts when they're on the OT sequence waiting to taunt back from the other tank.

I don't mind having to relearn my class rotation -- I do mind that my survival factor currently relies on me getting hit enough just at the right rate to maintain a healthy amount of rage, but not enough to eat the floor, while doing everything else we normally do on boss fights including hitting things enough to maintain threat.

If it -is- real, however, (14+40) == 54% dodge isn't that far off from what I have on live (roughly 43-45% with raid buffs and everything running), and pure dodge tanks probably have that on live -- only now we have to work for it instead of having it passively 'on' all the time. It reminds me of back in the SSC days where you had to butt tank (aka turn around and let the mobs hit you sans dodge) in order to get enough rage at times, or actually sit down so you got crit once (whereupon the game would make you automatically stand up).

(TL-DR: 36% base bear dodge on live is now 14% in beta. Prepare to micro-manage Savage Defense or be squishier than you ever remember being.)

-Tielyn

[Katarn]

It's real. All the Dodge from talents is gone, and the coeffs from Agility and Dodge Rating have been nerfed drastically.

[Tielyn]

Got some decent tanking in this weekend with a level 87 shammy healer backing me up.

TL-DR: The new Savage Defense mechanic plays some serious havoc with my rotation, to the point that taking Maul off my bar completely might be a good plan.

The good:
- Thrash and Swipe no longer cost rage. Furthermore, keeping Thrash up gives you 12% to proc a free Mangle, and it's a bleed. Still on 3 second cooldowns (despite not having a tooltip saying as much) but at least your AOE threat mechanic is still around to give you carpal tunnel syndrome.
- The redesign of Frenzied Regeneration now gives you all of the healing up front for 60 Rage and is based on your AP, rather than your max health. This means you have a choice of either healing yourself for about 35K or putting your dodge at +40%, because you can't do both. It's kinda like a Pally Word of Glory, only you don't get to pick between extra damage on the boss/heal self, but rather heal self/don't get hit. In other words, if your healer is having trouble, that's a handy maybe-emergency-button to have without burning one of your big cooldowns, and brings your instant heals up to 3 (talented):

• Renewal (Talented) -- heals 30% health, 2 minute cooldown.
• Might of Ursoc (Guardian) -- 30% max health pool, plus heal to 30% base health if below 30%, 3 minute cooldown. (aka 'half of the Frenzied Regen ability in live'). (The T13 bonus gets only the Might of Ursoc part, which is a severe nerf to its current awesomeness. I've used it to save the raid a few times.)
• Frenzied Regen - Now an AP based heal (great if you're the tank, kinda lame if not) -- 1.5 second cooldown. Glyphed does its 'increases healing that can be done to you by a chunk, but no longer heals you' stunt.

The meh:
- Lacerate also gives you 12% per stack to proc a free Mangle, stacks to 3 like always, but it falls off way too quick for my liking, and there's no way to cash it (Pulverize is still gone) so it feels weird seeing it up there. It's not like Sunder where you can stack it to three and forget it for awhile, because by the time I get done collecting adds up in the Jade Temple instance, I have to put it back up again.
- Mangle is your main rage generator when you're not getting hit. Despite having up to 48% proc capability from Lacerate + Thrash, I didn't see it proccing a whole lot, and right now it generates 5 Rage per hit (7 if talented), so in order to get to your next Savage Defense, you need at most 11 Mangle procs -- remember though that Savage Defense falls off in 6 seconds, though, so even though I was trying really hard, it's nigh impossible to keep it going consistently -- but it may be that I was hitting Maul and inadvertently burning my Rage.
- Even from a standing start, Enrage, wait for it to build up, then go in, there's a noticeable point of 'mobs hitting you at nearly no dodge' before you get your first SD available. Fortunately Thrash/Swipe/Mangle/Lacerate doesn't cost any rage (currently, anyway), so you can go in and establish threat reasonably well, but you'd better love your healers, because especially on bosses, your health dips alarmingly at points.

Threat: Despite going in with two of our biggest aggro fiends, I didn't have any problem holding threat or peeling back off of them if they picked up a stray mob (I lost Growl off my button bar at one point due to a broken macro and didn't notice I wasn't taunting). Once I got a better handle on the SD/FR choice, I got a lot easier to heal as well. Most of the time, anyway.

Also:
Skull Bash is on a 15 second cooldown, and you can't talent it down to 10. However, you can glyph for Faerie Fire to also silence, putting that on a 15 second cooldown -- except that takes up one of your Major Glyphs. That might make Nefarian hard to do with its 12 second cooldown on Nova... since 2x15 < 3x10, unless Bear Hug works on them too, but that's a minute cooldown...

Will keep folks posted.
-Tielyn

[Ericastar]

I was thinking to reroll to bear on this expansion but though i enjoy it very much and looks interesting in MoP, im not so thrilled to have a tank as my main! but overall i love bears!

[Tielyn]

Update: Confirmed what I found on the Warrior MoP thread:

You no longer get rage from being hit or dodging attacks. Zero. I sat in Tol Barad with those spider mobs chewing on me, throwing spells on me, dotting me up, rage bar at zero. For as long as I've been tanking, I've been used to needing rage to attack, and the best way to get rage was to get things to attack you.

Only by attacking stuff (and autoattacks) will you get rage, plus your usual Enrage for things. Fortunately, since most of your attacks no longer -cost- rage, the new mechanic for tanking is 'use your rage to manage your defensive abilities (Frenzied Regen and Savage Defense).'

Unfortunately, building up to that 60 rage is going to be a problem. GCDs are the limiting factor - you have to be able to string together enough rage via attacks that generate rage to have those defensive abilities available to you, so I am definitely reiterating: 'take Maul off your bar or at least put it out of the way'. You don't need it for threat, using it makes you a hella lot more vulnerable to being squished if it drops you below 60 rage, and unless you're the tank waiting to taunt and have a full rage bar, you're a tank, you don't need to pad the DPS meters, your job is to stay upright. I got a lot more practice playing with defensive ability management when my healer kept dying on the last boss of Jade Temple because he kept running away from me instead of stacking....

Your effective tanking goal, therefore, (still imho, based on current practice) is to keep your Thrash and Lacerate bleeds running at all times (12%x4=48% proc of a free Mangle), and hit Mangle whenever it's up, and just use your rage for the SD|FR hit whenever you look like you need one. If you have the 60 rage, hit Savage Defense if you're up above 60% health (your healer will love you for it, because your dodge will be 40% more instead of sub-20%, or Frenzied Regen if you're below half health. If you have a full rage bar, you can actually do both after a couple more Mangle hits.

You're trading getting hit less for helping your healer out - at full Vengance, mine is currently healing me for 91K on a crit, 53K normal, which is nothing to sneeze at. It kinda feels more like a Paladin WoG heal now, in a lot of ways, only you use red mana.

-Tielyn

PS. Ericastar; Try the beta bear. It's a free 85 with free gear.

[Tielyn]

Urgh.

In the words of Sean Connery:
"Our situation has not improved."

The latest patch brings a 'buff' to Savage Defense -- it went from +40 dodge to +45 dodge -- but the nerf bat got wielded again on Dodge scaling. I'm down to 12.65% from 14% and change, so we're slightly at a plus, supposedly, but.... when your very survival pretty much requires you to have a perfect rotation to keep your rage up, or you're sitting at 'Hit Me Really Hard and Often' percentage.

Also, the Mastery scaling got nerfed slightly - I'm down to 9% armor buff from 10%. Total armor absorb is 65.65% right now. Compared to the premade pally I copied over, at 55.74% armor absorb... that's pretty much our mastery in action. And it's actually -lower- than the 66.94% armor absorb I have on live.

Yes, Thick Hide gives us 25% magic resist passive, but that's not gonna make up for the fact that we're going to get hit a lot. More so than a paladin with combined dodge and parry of 24% -- and they have block on top of it. Passive block, mind you. But a whole lot more passive mitigation than we have.

Also new data: you're going to need to get your hit and expertise capped again. Without it, you're not getting any rage (see again: getting hit does nothing for you). -Every- hit counts now -- I put on my caster gear and whacked on a target dummy. It took 32 seconds to get enough rage (tested a handful of times running with a stopwatch) for one Savage Defense with 0 hit and 0 expertise, as any attack that misses, gets parried, or dodged does not generate any rage at all. You'll also need to keep decent crit, because without it your Primal Fury won't proc as much -- and each crit is worth 15 rage.

Also, Fury Swipes appears to be gone, taking 8.5% of my damage with it. :|

I've done some pally tanking in the meantime. (I was that upset.) Comparing the two side by side, bear tanking is all about using your buttons to stay alive. Pally tanking is more about keeping threat on things... while building up combo points. It's going to be really hard to raid lead while maintaining a rotation that's the only thing keeping me in Dodge while doing other stuff...

-Tielyn

[Tielyn]

Good news.

Dodge got buffed on bears. I'm back up to 17% dodge -- without Savage Defense getting nerfed in the process. When my Wrath of Unchaining and Kiril are both up and running, that makes it up to 19% dodge + 45% more for a total of 64% dodge when Savage Defense is up. Sadly, it's still dodge. So keep that Maul off your bar, folks.

In other news, Frenzied Regeneration has been tweaked such that it no longer requires 60 Rage to use, but rather consumes up to 60 Rage and heals you some percentage of your AP in health. If you have more than 60 rage, it eats all 60, but if you have 5, 9, or 59.999 rage, it still goes off, just for less healing. That's a bit of an improvement -- it gives you a fairly functional Heal Self button to work with on a 1.5 second cooldown to go with your other Heal Self buttons.

-T.

[Tielyn]

Minor update; no news is no good news, but no bad news either.

I've been doing side by side comparisons on the same mobs and dungeons with my 87 druid versus 87 pally, and the last batch of updates does fit the bill of 'you need to actively manage your Rage-based defensives' like Blizz wants. Talented to where Mangle gives me 7 Rage per hit keeps me with enough Rage by going through my normal rotation to have a reasonably small gap in defensiveness, and having 60% dodge now and again is pretty nice. Frenzied regen crits for 97K heals, which got me through a boss fight after the healer died at one point. I'm finding that my health is, as to be expected, pretty spiky, so I'll wind up hitting FR if the healer is falling behind (which happened fairly often on boss fights), and Savage Defense otherwise.

On the other paw; threat is definitely not much of an issue. I'm showing at 600+% threat over anyone around me, whereas my paladin runs around 174% threat of the next highest DPS, and Mangles which hit for 65K melt things waaaay faster than the pally's 15-23K hits. You really do want to rethink your rotation around Thrash/Lacerate, because Mangle is your big damage sink whenever it procs. If you have a full rage bar, you'll still want to avoid Maul unless you have 0 stacks of Savage Defense available -and- a full health bar. It may seem like you're wasting rage, but having both defensive abilities available to you in a row is really nice to have. Maul only seems to hit for 23K or so, so it's definitely not worth getting hammered by the boss while you build back up.

One note that is unconfirmed: since Thrash is placed on every mob you hit, I'm not sure that the 12% chance to proc Mangle is additive (5 mobs w/ thrash = 12%x5=60%? Or still just 12% ) since I don't have a way to keep a combat log just yet. If that's true, though, it makes us more like Wrath paladins in the sense of 'Yessss... pull more...' sense where you build rage faster via more free Mangle procs at the cost of more incoming damage taken per second when your SD stacks are at 0. I noticed I had a very hard time keeping SD up on a single target (boss) fight, versus trash tanking, where I was down to 0 fairly easily, but that might have been a statistical aberration.

When MoP goes live, I strongly suggest running the quests as a viable alternative to dungeon grinding. The XP is better per hour in the dungeon, but the item rewards from questing are guaranteed, and you'll be fighting every monk and rogue for the blue item drops which are only slightly better than the green quest items you get -- even if you're fighting everyone else who will be mad-questing when the new expansion drops. Also, the 87 dungeons have a minimum ilevel requirement that you can't easily get from running dungeons alone - I had the chest and boots on my druid and the weapon and bracers on my paladin, but it wasn't until I ran some of the 87 quests that I filled out enough gear to tip the balance.

Also, I never seem to need Might of Ursoc. Yes, it raises my max health by 30%, floor 30% health, but I get more bang for my buck out of Frenzied Regen. (Now if they'd kept the 4PT13 bonus to do Might of Ursoc + FR like it is in live.... that would be stupidly overpowered tank heals on the raid. ) Ah well. I can dream.

-T.

[Leucifer]

The sad thing about this..... it really sounds like if you're running dungeons while leveling, pretty much all the tank classes will just be 'non-functional'. this was one of the complaints I had with Cata, that you really didn't get a lot of the essential tank abilities until 74+.

Sure, for everyone at end-game, it'll work just fine. For anyone starting from scratch (warning to all monks), you might really have a gimpy tank until max level.

[Fetzie]

The sad thing about this..... it really sounds like if you're running dungeons while leveling, pretty much all the tank classes will just be 'non-functional'. this was one of the complaints I had with Cata, that you really didn't get a lot of the essential tank abilities until 74+.

Sure, for everyone at end-game, it'll work just fine. For anyone starting from scratch (warning to all monks), you might really have a gimpy tank until max level.

I didn't have a Shield Wall cooldown from October till nearly December when I got to 85 when it was moved from Divine Protection to Guardian of Ancient Kings >.>

[Leucifer]

I didn't have a Shield Wall cooldown from October till nearly December when I got to 85 when it was moved from Divine Protection to Guardian of Ancient Kings >.>

Yeah, but Fetz, your pally still had a LOT of the basic functional rotation abilities. HoR, Capt. America Shield, Judgement, consecrate..... you had the majority of the tools you'd need to learn how to tank as a pally.

I can tell you though, from 1-70+.... you're missing a lot more than that, and well... like lack of HoR at one point really sucks. It's the primary AoE threat tool for a pally. Consecrate doesn't pull hard enough.

I'm just thinking of this from the perspective of "how do we bring the new players in?". It's just really a pain in the ass to have a guy/gal go racing to 85 (90), and then want to tank...... but haven't even started learning the basics because of how non-functional it is on the way up.

And again.... consider all the new little monks we'll be seeing. They WILL start at 1. Do you think Blizzard is going to have an intuitive learning curve for them?..... or will it be.... "OH! you're level 90 now!.... Here's a totally new rotation. Everything you did before is stupid because we held back a key end-game tank ability!".

[Tielyn]

Oh yes... I remember when Cata dropped and they dropped Swipe from on-GCD to '6 second cooldown' it was a pain in the fuzzy butt to hold threat on trash packs because Thrash was a level 81 talent and our only other AoE attack was Thorns ... I remember seeing low-level feral 'tanks' in Wailing Caverns running about and tanking in catform because Bear form and Cat form got swapped, too.

You know... I feel like being crazy and rolling a level 1 pally and druid on the beta and see how well they roll out, once I hit 90 with these... thanks for the idea!

My biggest concern is that the 'active tanking' is going to weed out a lot of the passable tanks, but also those who are too stubborn to learn the new rotation but don't want to give up their tanking shoes will burn out the healers. I told our heal lead about the new bits, and she's not happy to hear that she's going to have to do double time to keep the tanks up if they don't get with the program, and I'm debating -requiring- my main tanks to practice on the beta before the real thing hits so they know what they're in for early, rather than late.

-T.

[Tielyn]

Urgh.

Latest patch includes a 12% nerf to Mangle. Extremely noticeable while running the Jade Serpent Temple for the 12th time. Yeah, yeah, I know, we were due, but it's still hitting for less than I hit on Live for, and as our main (and really only) main engine attack, it kinda hurt.

Also, dodge got scaled back down again. I'm at a touch under 14% dodge, down from 17% -- might have something to do in that they did some sort of weird scaled gear nerf so that when you're in an instance gear shows two iLvl numbers -- like my 414 gloves showed 407 and my 397 gear showed as 382. Or something like that.

Single target tanking is accordingly affected, in that you will have a hard time generating rage at points in fights, where I was going 10-12 seconds from 0 to 60 rage sometimes and the healer was having issues accordingly. The good news is that FR still scales with vengance AP, so I was able to top myself off from half health with a FR, but at the cost of not having a SD available for even longer. I found that kinda adopting the paladin attitude (ShotR >> WoG) helped a bunch, but sometimes it was like bailing out a leaky boat because I'd be forced to use FR constantly when the healer was OOM.

Also, despite having 25% passive magic resist, the Sha of Doubt's AOE pulse kills me if the healer dies, no save, no recourse. Frenzied Regen can't keep up, though it keeps up just fine with the melee damage the boss puts out, because I only had to help the healer sometimes. And I can't dispel it off myself either. (I don't think, anyway.)

-T.

[Tengenstein]

How are you running temple of the jade serpent, hasn't it's been out of the LFG for a couple of weeks now? the lack of avoidance kinda makes up for the fact that bears will have more stam and armour( excluding the additional armour from mastery) than the other tank classes. The gear scaling in dungeons brings your ilvls up or down to be appropriate for the dungeons, generally 440 for level 90 dungeons, less for the lower level ones. If you want more rage you need to gear for it accordingly, and this means getting hit and expertise, preferably to the caps and with those caps bears should be able to get a fairly decent uptime on SD/FR, and yes you should be having to choose between both (though if your healers ooming something somewhere is really wrong.)

And no, in the appropriate gear you should not be able to kill bosses without a healer. That's a pretty ridiculous expectation to have. and no tanks aren't meant to be able to dispel it (though the healer should be). it kinda defeats the point of even bringing healers if the tank can sort out the debuffs and heal themselves through the damage.