Patch 4.2 for Bloody Tanks

Patch 4.2 will be upon us soon (MMO champion pegs it at June 28th and Boubouille is usually on the mark), so let me summarize what will be in it for Bloody Tanks.

General
There's a new daily quest hub in Hyjal called the Molten Front which, after many hours and weeks of doing dailies, will provide three vendors with some nice tanking gear. The vendors can be unlocked using 125 Marks of the World Tree. I'll leave it to other sites to give you the full lowdown on how to unlock these.

Dalek Bloombeard

• Ricket's Gun Show, Parry/Mastery bracers
• Masterwork Elementium Deathblade, two-handed sword with Mastery/Haste that can be crafted by Blacksmiths. (So you need to buddy up with a Blacksmith for one of these. Unless you are a Blacksmith, you don't need to unlock this yourself)

Ayla Shadowstorm

• Moonwell Phial, a trinket with Stamina and an on-use Dodge

Varlan Highbough

• Nemesis Shell Band, a ring with Dodge/Expertise
• Lylagar Horn Ring, a ring with Parry/Mastery
• Relic of Tortolla, a Relic with Parry and Expertise

As you can see there's some nice iLevel 365 items to be had for us Bloody Tanks. Though I wonder about some of the itemization (I'm looking at you Relic of Tortolla. In patch 4.2, Relic of Khaz'goroth will be available for Justice Points, and provide more value with its Mastery)

Classes: General

Many crowd control abilities no longer cause creatures to attack players when they are cast. The creature will not attack the player when the crowd control wears off, and nearby creatures will not become hostile to the player either. However, if a visible player gets too close to the target creature, the creature will remember and attack the player when the crowd control effect wears off. The intent is to make it easier for dungeon groups to manage crowd control assignments and pulling packs of hostile NPCs. The abilities affected by this change are: Hibernate, Entangling Roots, Wyvern Sting (will still cause hostility when it begins to deal damage), Freezing Trap, Polymorph, Repentance, Shackle Undead, Blind, Hex, Bind Elemental, Banish, Seduction.

This change is great for those PUGs where you can't count on the DPS to know which end of their weapon they should aim towards the mobs. Mage sheeps before the Hunter's trap has armed? Mark hex, and Shaman goes into action before other marks are assigned? No aggro, no problem. So CC can set up their stuff, and when all is said and done, we are free to pull the group. Hardcore players are complaining about the game dumbing down, but unfortunately these scenarios are all too common in LFD.

Death knights, paladins, and warriors no longer receive any bonus to their chance to Dodge from Agility. Their base chance to dodge is now a fixed 5%.
Death knights, Paladins, and Warriors now receive 27% of their Strength bonuses as Parry rating, up from 25%. This conversion still only applies to Strength above and beyond their base Strength.

I've discussed this before, with patch 4.2 Agility will become completely useless for us. (And vice versa, Strength will become next to useless for Druids, giving only 1 AP instead of 2 AP like Agility)

Dungeons & Raids

A host of dungeon information is now built into the user interface via the all-new Dungeon Journal. This feature can be accessed via a new button in the Navigation tray from anywhere in the world. Boss background story, encounter details, abilities, and loot can be viewed with the Dungeon Journal for all bosses which have been integrated into the new system (this includes bosses for all Cataclysm dungeons and raids). Additional dungeons are planned to be incorporated in future updates.

This will help out with naming abilities for bosses when you want people to move or interrupt. And it's an easy Atlas Loot replacement for boss loot.

Zul'Gurub
All cauldron buffs are now usable while mounted.
High Priestess Kilnara's death now turns off the flaming tiki mask gauntlet.
High Priest Venoxis's death now removes the poison from the plants at the start of the dungeon.

These are some nice quality of life improvements for ZG. Nothing game breaking or nerfing; just making it easier to get back in after a wipe.

Items

If a player wins a Need roll under the Need Before Greed system on a Bind on Equip item, the item will become Soulbound to that player. The item will remain unbound if won via a Greed roll.

This'll be great for those ninjas that roll Need on a BoE, only to auction it off later for a tidy profit.


As you can see, there are no specific class changes for Bloody Tanks, which may be just as well, because as it stands, we're doing pretty good and any change would just as likely be a nerf.