When tanking a dungeon, how do you know if you have an adequate amount of ironfur stacks rolling, so you can then use your rage for something else like Maul?
You never use Maul and always spend on Ironfur.
You should have near 100% uptime with Galactic Guardian + Ursolâs Fury legendary + Mangle on CD.
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So in other words, you can never have enough?
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higher uptime is usually better than higher stacks but yes.
Maul is nearly never worth pressing, except in very niche situations (tank swaps where you still have rage left over and no incoming damage mostly).
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Stack Iron Fur until your fingers hurts.
Healers will thank you.
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i seen players that NEVER! stack iron fur then super mad why they dying so fast.
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Maul is worthless.
Basically what others have said here. You can ditch maul from your bars. Itâs practically useless.
- it uses rage which means you lose stacks of ironfur
- itâs on the GCD so you donât want to use it when you can use thrash, mangle, and GG moonfire (or swipe for AoE.)
- it does abysmal damage for the cost.
The only time you would ever think of using it is when you are on a single target fight where you arenât actively tanking nor going to tank in the next 10 seconds, have full rage and have GG moonfire, mangle and thrash on cooldown. Itâs just so rare that you effectively lose nothing by ditching it.
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I donât even have Maul on my bars anymore, itâs that useless. Even when questing out in the world, because I donât want to build any kind of bad habits for when Iâm doing tougher content, I leave it completely out of the rotation. Even when I did use it, it never contributed enough damage to warrant using it. Iâd rather pull 3-5 extra mobs and use Ironfur, itâs a much better damage-survivability ratio.
To get more specific on the initial question:
- I usually have 1 stack of Ironfur up nearly all of the time through general play
- Where adding stacks is important comes from knowing fights and knowing when bigger hits are going to be incoming (could be something huge from a boss or youâre juggling a LOT of adds)
- Once I know when the big hits are incoming, thatâs when I find jumping up to 2-3 stacks of Ironfur can make a huge survivability difference
- Thus the idea is fill the rage bar, use enough to keep 1 stack of Ironfur going consistently, and be prepared to spend enough rage to jump to 1-2 additional stacks (if more is needed thatâs when you hit CDs like Guardian of Ursoc, etc.)
Maybe others know of a more efficient process, but this has been working really well for me thus far.
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Maul is used only when you know you are not going to be getting hit with a great deal of physical damage so only in niche situations, such as the last boss in DOS killing his shades for some more dps, tank switching in raid etc. but if you took it off your bars it probably wont affect you much at all.
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The shades in DOS donât need to be tanked you should be shifting to boomkin and convoking.
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If the mob is about to die in group content then you can press Maul; otherwise Ironfur. If you are soloing as a bear then Maul all you want.
Just take maul off your bar, only time I might use is when I am off tanking
I try to always have an IF rolling. if I get above 80 rage and one is rolling, Iâll pop another one so I have room for rage from Mangle, Thrash, or GG MF.
I do keep Maul up on my toolbars though. There are casting mobs where IF is a useless use of rage, so might as well do some DPS. But even then I still end up hitting IF more from habit and hope that itâll do something.
As others have said, remove maul.
The trick to guardian is smoothing your damage intake by having as many ironfurs up as possible, but not sacrificing duration. E.g no point having 5 up if that means youâll leave yourself with 1 stack a bit later. Better to try and smooth it out and keep 3 up.
As you get better, youâll start doing things like deliberately filling any gaps with frenzied regens and pooling rage when you know you donât need stacks right now, but will soon.
Guardian is known for being weak on the pull, if we didnât pool rage properly from the previous one. This is often when you want to use defensives, to limit how much you get smashed until youâve got ironfurs up.
The main thing to remember with bear is how they scale into pull size. More mobs = more thrash on multiple mobs, generating more rage. Which means more ironfurs. If we pull big enough, we can sit at like 8 ironfurs with pretty much infinite rage and be ridiculously tanky.
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This exactly.
Sometimes Iâll pop wall or bark just to smooth over until I get thrash rolling.
A lot of the time you should have incarn up for big pulls as well. Same thing though, pop a defensive and get rage rolling with incarn and just go to town on IF.
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I went the lazy route that just macro it into thrash so its always stacked as much as I can, I never tank higher than 15s really so it works very well and always get told Iâm super easy to keep alive.
Hardly ever have less than 2 stacks and never have less than 1 even right on pull you can shift into bear> charge> trash> and iron fur is up. Though outside of berserk and convoke I almost never have more than 2 stacks. And Iâve never not had rage for a frenzy regeneration, not that I need it often.
Itâs the reason I love the NoW legendary. Completely fixes 2 of Guardians biggest problems which is weakness on the pull, and being smashed by magic damage.
30% DR, and an ironfur and frenzied regen at the start and finish of our bark, which we can use at least once per pull, is simply amazing. Basically triples how many frenzied regens we can usually use on a pull (3 instead of 1 if the pull lasts 30 seconds).
UFR won out, but I maintain that NoW makes us a lot more tanky in more situations. It provides no damage though, so UFR won. Unfortunately that doesnât do much to make the (arguably) most boring tank spec any more engaging, but NoW certainly does!
Iâm just hoping that once we can use two leggoâs, itâs UFR and NoW instead of the other thrash one. Thatâll just be lame AF, but iâm not holding high hopes. Everyone will follow the meta where tanks focus on as much dps as possible, even when itâs irrelevant in their +10 or +15 keys 
and if they focused on surviveability theyâd wipe less.
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I have both ufr and now. I thought ufr was fantasticâŚuntil I got now. There is no comparison. Now is the best, hands down. I think luffa would be a nice compliment to the dual leggos, because although I donât die, it takes way to long to kill things.
Besides, more damage means more threat.
Yup, NoW is just an insane tanking legendary.
The only âproblemâ with it is weâre already the tankiest tank, and UFR buffs our damage so everyone plays that.
I love NoW though, and will continue to use it. Legitimately donât need a healer with it. Makes us into a blood DK but with bears defensives, lol.