Nothing like a bit of digging into the details (aka Impromptu Research Projects, We Luvs Em!) to fill in the downtime on Patch Day.

Today we’re taking a closer look at Recognition’s Challenging Roar ability and the related glyph. Not much to this one, but there’s an important difference between this roar and your other aggro-management abilities.

This Feral Druid (Bear) ability is picked up at level 28, but sadly it isn’t as useful as it sounds. In fact it’s deceptively not-useful, something I didn’t figure out until I started doing the threat calculations to tweak my rotations.

You’d assume it was a taunt from the description:

Forces all nearby enemies within 10 yards to focus attacks on you for 6 sec.

But all it does is force them to focus on you, it doesn’t change the threat tables at all. Which means even though they are looking at you, their hearts are back with your squishy teammates.

As soon as those six seconds are up, Pattern is back to getting NOM’d on.

Plus with a three minute cooldown timer and the chance that it can be resisted, it’s something to use when it’s up, but otherwise ignore. True, it can be a lifesaver if you need to redirect things in a hurry, but better to use it and plan for it not to be there then to save it and have it fail when you need it.

So when you’re starting down two to three mobs or things have started taking a NOM for the worse… at a 15 rage cost, it’s worth the loss of the global cooldown even if it doesn’t work.

Glyph of Challenging Roar

This is a Minor Glyph (which you can also pick up at level 28) and reduces the cooldown of Challenging Roar by 30 sec. Which means you can use it once every 2.5 minutes instead of every three.

Not really much to write home about but it does seem to end up in every bear tanking guide out there. I’m guessing it’s because the rest of the Minor Glyphs are mostly useless, so you’ve got some wiggle room…