# Ethmer's Bear (tank) necessities: - **Vigilant Roar** keep on cooldown on whatever the main target is (follow TA!); this is not only your one single target taunt but also lets you build up reflection threat on anything hitting you, and gives you a big incoming healing boost - keep **Guarded Attack** on cooldown (5s) for at least the first 20s of the fight, since you want that Guarded buff stacked to 5 ASAP to keep your defense up. Once it's at max tier, you can let it be off cooldown for 5-7 seconds before hitting it again, and still maintain your full buff. 5% may not seem like a lot, but since your mitigation should already be around 67%, what that additional 5% really means is that you're taking 15% less damage than before - **Thorned Armour** has a relatively short CD and is not really your main Oh Shoot skill so don't be afraid to hit it as soon as things start looking remotely serious, or right at the start of a tough fight to get you through the building up of Guarded - as long as your wrath is not at or near 100, keep **Hearten/Composure**, **Ferocious Roar**, **Nature's Wrath**, **Counter** (in that order) on cooldown; you have to spam wrath generation so you can spam Recuperate which is how you keep morale up - btw in case it's not clear, you should never leave bear form (if you do on accident like I do all the time no biggie just hit Biting Edge--your one worthwhile man form-only skill--while you're waiting for bear form to come back off cooldown) - **Thrash** goes between every other skill; besides the essential wrath generation, keeping up a high rate of attacks along with the viper cloak essence adds a good layer of self-healing - unless it's a one target fight, also spam **Claw Swipe** to hold AoE aggro; this may not be enough in the face of competent champ/warden/minstrel fellows, so keep an eye on things and hit **Menacing Maul** when needed, or even preemptively if your defenses are looking good. - cause that's the thing with Maul: great for getting aggro, but puts a gap in the maintenance of your defenses and debuffs, so be mindful of its timing; after hitting a cooldown it's good, or at least once you're sitting on five stacks of Guarded and/or have a fresh Hearten/Composure + Recuperate up - If you need to re/establish aggro on a dispersed group, **Thunderous Roar** has a 10m range and no target limit. And if you trait Lumber from the red line, you can get some extra CC if you hit **Rush** before to add a knockdown -- though note that since the force taunt from the Roar is short and is going to be about done once they're getting up again, you might need to supplement this with some smacks on various targets. Speaking of which -- - Because you don't have quite as many aggro options as, say, a guardian, don't be afraid to just switch targets and smack them to get them on you; if there's any question as to getting back to important targets for a fight, be sure to tooltip (press H) them before if possible - after keeping aggro and staying alive, your next priority is to maintain debuffs: - **Bee Swarm** comes first, since it also DoTs to help you hold aggro. Unless you need to save it for interrupts, shortcut the very slow bees animation by double-tapping **Vicious Claws**--one tap interrupts animation of the previous skill, second tap interupts itself, and then go immediately to thrash, or whatever - then **Armour Crush**, your strongest debuff - then **Trample** (you should be slotting the tracery for crit debuff on it) - then **Claw Swipe**, for the small outgoing damage debuff on its target(s) ## Not-rotations These aren't rotations, because you shouldn't be rotating through a preset order but rather monitoring a) whether you have threat under control, b) where your morale is, c) where your wrath is, d) what's off cooldown, and reacting accordingly. But here's some maybe-optimal starting patterns for generic simple single target and AoE situations, assuming starting with full wrath: ST start 1. Vigilant Roar (don't worry about Thrash because your wrath is 100 still) 2. Bee Swarm + Vicious Claws (double tap) + Thrash 3. Guarded Attack + Thrash 4. Armour Crush + Thrash 5. Trample + Thrash 6. Claw Swipe + Thrash (if didn't Claw Swipe before) 7. Guarded Attack + Thrash AoE start 1. Vigilant Roar 2. Claw Swipe + Thrash 3. Guarded Attack + Thrash 4. Bee Swarm + Vicious Claws (double tap) + Thrash 5. Claw Swipe + Thrash 6. Armour Crush + Thrash 7. Guarded Attack + Thrash 8. Trample + Thrash 9. Claw Swipe + Thrash After that you have to start making a couple choice before your next vigilant roar, you might want to get going on Hearten/Composure + Recuperate, or hit something harder to get more aggro (can definitely mix in Nature's Vengeance or even Grisly Cry for this, just be careful with fear effects), or get Counter up for the evade bonus and extra wrath generation down the line...