Tanks and Bubbles

It's about time that I Like Bubbles actually spent some more time on bubbles.

Once upon a time, tanks fussed about bubbles. Wrath has changed much, however, leaving a few of us in confusion. When is it okay to bubble the tank?

Paladins have a couple of bubbles. The only one we're really going to worry about here, though, is Sacred Shield.
You don't want to BoP...er...HoP?...the tank. In fact, you might want to move that button somewhere out of the way. What, me speaking from experience? Nooooooo.... *shifty eyes*

For disc priests, you have PW:S and your divine aegis proc. You can't control the latter, however, so never mind that.

When you bubble is pretty depending on what you're bubbling, so let's go down the list of tanking classes.

Warrior: Warriors are going to be your problem children. Don't bubble them before a pull. Don't bubble them if they're over geared for the instance and thus ending up rage starved. Otherwise, once in a fight I wait until I see they've got about half a rage bar before tossing one up. In a raid, keeping one up as much as possible on a boss is a good idea. This applies to both SS and PW:S.

Druids: Druids generate rage very differently than warriors. You can be a bit more liberal with the bubbles here, though I still wouldn't use one pre-pull. They generate rage from crits, and even in an instance they vastly out level (the 80 bear I had taking us through Slave Pens, for example), they don't seem to have issues with rage generation.

Death Knights: For the love of all that is holy, bubble them as much as possible. Runic power is generated solely by their attacks and they are currently plagued with some mitigation problems, so go wild. This is the one class where I bubble pre-pull every chance I get.

Paladins: Mana starvation in a tankadin seems to have gone the way of the OP warlock. With the way Sanctuary works now, bubbling seems to have a negligible effect. They start with the blue rage bar at full, so to speak, so you can get away with pre-bubbling.


Don't forget the elusive disc priest tank. They seem to appear along side unhappy frost DKs, usually after giggling and casting holy fire on an add...