Bear Tanking

I have looked at several websites (EJ, Think Tank) and I'm pretty sure I'm using the right rotation, but man, I am having a hell of a time holding threat off of this one particular warrior buddy of mine. I will just call him Bay. Is he well geared? Yes. Is he a good warrior? Yes. Does he wait for a count of like 10 before engaging? Yes. And he still catches up to me in threat. Damn it Bay, you are killing me! On Sindy, he even waits until after the first air phase to start dpsing, and he still ends up in second place but at least he doesn't catch me when he does this.

My current rotation is FFF, Mangle, Lacerate x 3, Pulverize, Lacerate x 3, Maul, Pulverize, Lacerate x3, Maul, Pulverize, repeat with Mangles thrown in as they proc. I only Maul if I have a lot of rage, and I spam lacerate a lot even when I have a stack of three if it is a single target and I don't need to refresh Pulverize yet and I don't really need Swipe. For AOE, I spend a lot of time tab targeting to put Lacerates up and using Swipe and Maul.

I also have quite a few agi/stam gems instead of just stam so that my threat would be higher and I am typically between 18000 and 30000 TPS so I know I'm doing okay but it is very frustrating.

I have to say that overall, bear tanking is in a good place. I have spoken to the healers in my guild and they much prefer to heal me than our warrior tanks. My dodge is up to 54% and my mastery is at 14% so I'm sitting pretty good there. I don't really take much damage to speak of at all.

I really do miss being able to spam swipe and hold tons of AOE threat, I always found that lots of fun. I find it interesting that Blizz has once again made it more difficult (i.e. thought provoking) to tank given that everyone is always short on tanks for Heroics. Not that I mind in the slightest, but I think the number of "bad tanks" is about to go up again since most classes have had their AOE threat reduced and we will be using CC again and it will take more effort on the tanks part to make sure everything goes well.

Keep it wild and furry!