Thanks to the wonder that is Patch 4.1, I can finally put Swipe (Bear) back into my rotation!

Alas Swipe (Cat) and all it’s yummy double-damage is still stuck up out of my reach for the moment. I’m tempted to slip back into my main just to do some overpowered kitteh AoE. (purr)

But back to the bears!

There’s nothing more frustrating that trying to to tab-tank when you’re playing two toons. Building and maintaining threat to keep the mobs off Pattern was much harder than anticipated, even with the help of the faux-AoE Challenging Roar.

Instant cast, 3 sec cooldown, 15 Rage, 8 yd range
Requires Bear Form (duh)

Swipe nearby enemies, inflicting a scaling damage. Damage increased by attack power.

Now I have a way to thwap all the bad guys upside the head every three seconds, thus distracting them from the yummy boomchicken snack food!

Obviously I didn’t have a chance to use this ability prior to the change, so the cooldown reduction from six seconds to three seconds is appreciated… but it won’t affect my learning curve much.

Right now the plan is to macro this into my Maul so that Swipe triggers if off cooldown and Maul triggers if not. Since Maul has a three second cooldown as well, there’s room for a third skill in that macro, but I’m not sure what to use.

[code]/cast Swipe
/cast Maul
/cast ???[/code]

Mangle has a six second cooldown, plus I don’t want to stack the bleeds so it might have to sit open until Lacerate shows up… (Thrash will end up sharing a macro with Mangle I think).

I’m also trying to macro Thorns in somewhere to help boost the ‘Bears R Tastie’ neon sign that Recognition wears. I’ve seen a lot of guides that suggest using thorns for low level bear tanks, although I’m not quite as low level as I used to be.

I’m still trying to find a good way to test out how much threat Pattern’s various spells use vs how much threat Recognition generates. Hopefully I’ll have something to post by this weekend.

So many new things to explore!