I think the big problem for Druid MTing now is how strong all of our specs are. In TBC, most druids that raided were resto or bear. Moonkin wasn't super viable and cat dps was low. Now, all four specs are equally good, and with dual specs, you give up too much to have a bear MT. I started off bear in LK, but my dual spec is resto(for pvp) so if i wasn't MT, i could shift to heal on bosses that needed it, or could go cat form and do great dps. My guild has since asked me to go Moonkin for the buffs, because tanks are finally very popular and guilds give up too much other "good stuff" if they use a bear for tanking purposes.

I fully agree that the Druid class has multiple specs worth playing, and this definitely is a factor in how many play Bear tanks. I myself would love to play Feral Tank, Feral DPS, Resto PvE, and Resto PvP (as well as some Boomkin PvE) but there are simply not enough specs for this; I have a Feral Tank/DPS spec and a Resto PvE/PvP spec, meaning I can't play any of these at their highest level. One of the reasons I got into Druid tanking, besides the fact that Druid is my only tanking class, is that in previous patches I had massive armor and health that allowed me to feel in some way comparable to the high-end Warriors in 213 and 226 gear, while I could only get 200 gear due to computer limitations. I liked the feel of being a high-health, high armor tank, and after nerfs the Druid is closer to the health and armor levels of the other tanking classes; it's lost some of its uniqueness in that aspect.

And there is little else to distinguish it from a Warrior (comparing these 2 as they are both Rage users) - Bear tanking is much more simple; here is your single melee cooldown threat skill, here is your single ranged cooldown threat skill, here is your single AoE threat skill, here is your single rage dump (which makes up a huge part of your threat in any case), and your single mitigation debuff, whereas Warriors have several of each of these, as well as reactive skills. Bears simply feel much less polished and more simple than not only other tank classes but the spec right next to it, Feral DPS. Undoubtedly Feral Tanks at some point are forced to do a little offtanking and spend some time as a kitty - Feral DPS not is not only much more complicated than Feral Tanking, but it also places Druids on top of the DPS meters, which is something entirely new to the class (and the class, as a shapeshifting hybrid, likely draws people who frequently want to try out new, different playstyles). Essentially the Feral tank is much more boring to play than other specs and classes, including the nearby Feral DPS role. This coupled with the fact that Druids make amazing offtanks rather than main tanks because of their design (seamless switching from tank to DPS even in a single fight and amazing utility through Innervate and Rebirth) makes playing a Bear main tank a very unattractive option.

A common theme seems to be that "all our specs are too good, so just being an MT is not getting the maximum out of my class", is that correct?

If so, what would you do to solve this? Would you like to see the other specs brought down (ugh) or that Bear should get some new toys? Keep in mind that in terms of tanking equivalency they really cannot buff Bears that much more anymore so if you want to suggest something in that direction, it should be some fun ability that doesn't skew EH/avoidance numbers. You know, such as Warbringer and interrupts for Warriors.

One of the common themes in the WotLK beta threads on this forum was concern that bear really hadn't gotten any new toys. Survival Instincts is a (albeit slightly stronger) version of a tool warriors have had for ages, and warriors got a better version of Frenzied Regen in exchange. I've been playing beside the same Warrior tank since Vanilla, and once I started tanking in TBC, where fights required multiple tanks and/or OTs, it was very interesting to compare our relative merits. I enjoy tanking a lot, but the more I play my paladin and warrior alts, the more constrained I feel on my Druid. Sure I have slightly more armor, sure I can hit 75k health for 30 sec, but there's no challenge to it beyond that presented to any tank. This is something that's compounded by the lack of gearing choices. On my paladin or warrior, changing a ring means I may have to regem, or swap another piece to keep the balance of defense, armor and avoidance just right, on the Druid it basically comes down to "Do I gain stamina or agility?". That's not fun or interesting. I think they missed a huge opportunity to remedy this with Savage Defense. While it has some token dependence on dps stats, it's not enough to make us care about them or to make our gear choices meaningful beyond the ilevel.

Cat being viable, complex and interesting, both in the gearing and execution, is likely to continue the trend of bears passing off their MT duties to other classes. A lot of people enjoyed tanking as a Bear because of some perceived challenge. The more that's diluted and the more it's readily available in an adjacent and familiar role, the less desire people are going to have to continue tanking. Even compared to Moonkin or Resto, Bear feels lackluster and low dimensional.

The only way i could see making it viable for more bears to MT would be to give LotP a unique buff that no one else could bring that was only active in bear form. Something like 5% melee crit to raid if in cat form, and 5% armor(or 5% less damage, etc) for the raid while in bear form. Then you would actually have to give something up if the druid shifts from bear, but that is unlikely do to the "bring the player, not the class" thing.

The main way they could fix this is by giving bears something that makes them want to be there as a bear. Warriors efficiently sunder the mob (compared to expose), paladins bring stacking bosanc + another pally buff. DKs bring all sorts of buffs depending.

Bears bring roar (which is usually handled by warriors), a slow (which all tanks have), and LotP (which can be brought as cat). They can't practically innervate or battle res reliably on all fights. Their global buff is no weaker or stronger than anyone else's. That's it. There's nothing a bear tank brings more easily or better than other tanks.

Having a bear bring some kind of sunder wouldn't be too bad. It's boring, but not too bad. Some way to apply insect swarm type ability wouldn't be bad either.

One of the least given ones is Judgment of Wisdom/light. That may be a decent way to go, but it's still covered by another tank. Blood frenzy/blood poisoning is another one with very niche abilities (arms warrior and only one kind of rogue that's not really in favor) - that's a good one. In any case, something along those lines would probably be best.

The final way is to make the buffs bears give more important. Faerie Fire is minor, lasts forever, and can be done by anyone. Mangle is less useful than trauma (in the sense that it's not always up like Trauma is) and only a couple of classes really care if it's up. Making it so that faerie fire from bears was better would be good. Making mangle from bears have a bigger boost to bleeds or more likely, making more classes care about bleeds would go a ways.

I also think that with DKs being nerfed, you'll see more bears because they'll be fairly strong. But it may not matter for a while given the gating mechanics in 3.2, and there simply aren't that many ferals out there anyway.

I think this definitely contributes to the lack of feral tanks. There weren't many feral-minded druids during TBC because cat was not viable in T6/Sunwell and guilds could only carry so many bears. Resto druids are as good (in both pve and pvp) now as they've ever been so there's no big movement for them to switch to tanks, and the moonkin population from TBC was low for the same reasons as feral. With the new-found viability of boomkins and cats, the already small bear population probably shrank even more. When you also consider that, even though bears have been very good tanks all throughout WotLK so far, DKs have been even better and easier to reroll to, there just weren't a whole lot of guilds just desperate for a bear tank and thus little incentive to reroll one.

Another issue that's more related to quality of life is that bears are pretty bland. Although Blizzard's efforts to give us more button to push (through Survival Instincts and Barkskin in forms), tanking as a bear is still pretty boring. Note that I've never tried tanking with any other class so I don't have a good idea of how they feel, but playing a bear isn't very involved. This was actually even more true in TBC, but we did have a big draw when it came to gearing up. The huge values for HP and armor were really fun, even if we needed them just to compete with other tanks. Even though we're as viable as ever as tanks, there's just a fun factor that's lost when you realize that your armor is lower now than it was 10 levels ago.

Fixing it is a tricky issue. As you've pointed out they can't really buff bears, we're already probably too powerful in 3.2. Tanking niches have been mostly removed by design, so giving us back out massive armor and HP pools is pretty much out of the question. Perhaps making our threat rotation more interesting would be the answer, or at least part of it.

Truncated versions are at the start and end of the post.

A lot of what I have to say has already been elaborated upon but since you're calling out opinions I'm crawling out of the woodwork anyway. I tanked in TBC. I saw every fight in the game and tanked every fight in Sunwell, including Kil'jaeden (my sole glory from WoW). I loved tanking in TBC, and I am less interested in tanking now. Put simply:

Ugly model
Spoiled in TBC
Stupid hitbox
Boring rotation
Cat is a billion times more fun




Explication: The model being ugly is an obvious thing. This isn't such a big deal when the alternative is looking at something ugly (say the fr gear I wore every time I tanked adds on Illidan). I'll skip to the next point, which is a little more personal, but the bear hitbox is retarded. There are some videos of pre-2.1 where a tauren could attack a mob with his melee weapon and then shapeshift into cat or bear and be unable to hit it, and this is something that still bugs me. Mobs seem very happy getting behind me, and no matter how long I tank I still encounter mobs that aggravate me like that. Not having a normal appearance (bipedal and humanoid) adds an element of frustration that, while not unique to bears, is unique among the tanking classes.

Now I'm going to get to the big meat of the answer. In TBC druids were very spoiled. They were so good in Black Temple gear that the developers dropped Sunwell Radiance on our ass because it was the only way to hurt druids in a way that might somehow hurt the other tanks less. We had the highest single-target TPS, insane HP, and dodge that was absolutely ludicrous - probably above 70% in bis gear when all was said and done. Cat was a joke, but hey, 1500 dps when you're done tanking is better than 500 dps when you're done tanking. The deal was you got to tank extremely competently and dps adequately, and you knew that your dps was sub-par but you had the joy of running with a spec (I ran 1/46/14) that left you completely capable of tanking, dpsing and then jumping into a bg with a fully optimal pvp spec. You didn't have to worry about gemming wrong because you stacked hp to 25k or whatever in TBC and then ran agility everywhere. This also left you with an optimal dps setup, since the best stat for everything was agility. This versatility combined with a great toolbox meant you were potent as a tank, competent as a dps and CRAZY (imo) in pvp. Druids could do ANYTHING.

Cut to WotLK and now the best druid gear is Polar gemmed for stam, and when you hit Ulduar you're still gemming for nothing but stam. So you get these great leather pieces that will make cat form great fun, and then you gem them with stamina because Hodir or Algalon or whatever fotm-hard mode boss hits for a fucking billion and dodge might as well not exist for magical attacks. Bear form has improved from 3.0 onwards, taking nerfs only where needed (and I'm sure any non-bear tank would agree that at least some changes were needed). With Savage Defense, Berserk, SI and Barkskin in bear the conditions of tanking have actually improved from TBC, at least as far as interactivity. More tools, more fun stuff. But anyone who remembers TBC knows what it was like to actually play a hybrid and be able to do all that cool stuff without having to dedicate a different spec to pvp than you do to kitty, and a different spec to bear than you do to either of those. And beyond that, anyone who levels a new druid will spend no time in bear form because cat form is better for killing things and more fun to play in, arguably.

So we have cat form, which is very fun and challenging and engaging to play, and then all that work you put into getting those nice purples that will make cat form fun gets dampened by the fact that you can't dps as a bear spec, and simply by being a good tank you are reducing your capacity to have fun in your own time with the more entertaining cat form.. Oh, and cat form is ridiculously fun now and every set bonus is better for cat than it is for bear.

If my thoughts seem all over the place I apologize, but it's difficult to put what is essentially an emotional choice into words. Bears get a relatively boring rotation and playstyle with no great thought put into gemming or gearing, and cats are tremendously fun by comparison with lots of optimization and as much if not more theorycraft as bears. The way Blizzard tuned our class prevents us from doing both at once, so the choice the person makes is going to be the choice that is in their own interests, and probably the choice that is more fun.



TL;DR Blizzard forced us to choose between an improved, desirable cat form and a less desirable bear form (nerfed by necessity) after 3.0. This choice is still present for any new druid, and I believe it is the explanation for any perceived gap in bears vs. cat.

EDIT: I think a solution would be to allow for more shared area between cat and bear form so that bears don't feel as though there's a tremendous gap between them and a workable cat form. I don't think there's any way to do that without allowing for a bear to gem and spec in a way that is optimal for both bear and cat form. The reason this is suboptimal is because it is a retrograde movement - 3.0 forced us to choose, 3.2 removes the choice.

I will say this much though, the feeling with me has never been that bears are too weak. It does suck to have everything unique about you nerfed or adjusted so that you're more in line with other tanks, but bears are potent enough. I don't know if I'd buy any arguments against that. The trouble, at least in comparing tanks with other tanks, is that now we're just like everyone else, and our one unique fun factor (shapeshifting into a cat) is mutually exclusive with actually tanking. <bitter gripe>Vacc does make a point. I guess our cooldowns aren't as good, there is that making us unique.</bitter gripe>

Flavors of tanking wouldn't be bad as long as they weren't exclusive - I.E. you find that you can't do Hodir hard one week because you don't have a druid tank. That's a pain in the ass to balance though, so it's unlikely to happen, and I'm not sure there's room in the druid talent tree or even in the base abilities for a bear entertainment button.

Yer that is another thing I forgot, Cat being the most complex, fun and rewarding DPS class is a massive counterpoint to Bear being the simplest tank class.

Here's a great summary point: I think a big problem with bear form is that the fun ability that doesn't skew EH/avoidance is actually cat form.

My basic feel for this is that we might be trying to engineer a solution in the wrong area. Blizzard has worked since 3.1 to homogenize and homogenize, and all it does is focus on cooldowns to the degree that they are all that matters in tanking since everything else is stressed to equality. This is a problem in healing too, and I think the solution is to find a more elegant way of making tanking matter.

The problems stated in this thread stem greatly from homogenization and the forced dilemma of cat/bear that occurred from 3.0 onwards, and the reason for homogenization was to keep tanks equal. This (homogenization) was a HUGE druid nerf, but only because druids were that far ahead of everyone else. Towards the early end of WotLK there was a blue post about tanking flavor something to the effect of "maybe a bear stacks a lot of health and just eats hits, and that could be a tanking flavor". The reason this doesn't work is because bear scaling started invalidating some hard modes that otherwise required cooldowns, see Sarth+3D. While not wishing to direct too much attention away from how broken bear tank scaling is, since that's part of the problem (it's balanced by nerfing us in other ways which leads to things like this thread) I'd like to point out that a lot of the changes that bears feel are negative stem from a poor tanking model. This is talked about on healer and tank forums. The best solution, assuming we don't want another TBC scenario where bears are OP in endgame raids but entry-level content demands a warrior, is to make tanking actually matter somehow in a way that doesn't just force you to bring a bunch of Holy Priests* for GS because the tank doesn't have enough cooldowns by himself/herself.

*On a side note, if you can find a raiding Holy Priest who doesn't have Glyph of GS, let me know. It's on my scavenger hunt list, right after "A snowshovel made in Hell."

EDIT: Forgive the tautology, I did want to drive the point home though.

I think a major part of the problem is, like someone said earlier, that you don't need as many tanks for Wrath content as you do other roles.

For example, I played with a particular guild through TBC as a hunter. When it came time to level to 80, I chose to make a bear. Unfortunately, the guild already had a prot Warrior RL, prot Paladin assistant, and a bear that'd been around forever but wasn't entirely reliable. None of these guys had any intention of giving up their raid spots, so I was forced into cat (which I was not geared for and bad at) or benched. When it came time to find a new guild, none worth mentioning needed tanks, but a lot needed ranged DPS, so I went Moonkin and they were more than happy to regear me for that role. Several guilds later (bad luck with disbands/real life), I'm still a space chicken and happy with it.

Point is: most "good" guilds have been around a while. Most of these have established tanks, because tanking is fun and these good tanks like their jobs. Most of these tanks are not bears, because bears weren't seen as viable in early TBC content as the other options. This, of course, probably doesn't apply to the truly hardcore guilds, where everything is min-maxed and will switch out players to reach maximum potential. I would say that the vast majority of guilds that exist would be considered casual, however, where the player behind the character makes much more of a difference than the class.

Honestly, it's not something that can be solved except by making bears so relatively OP that casual guilds are willing to go to the effort of shifting to using them (pun not intended). We have a old bear main that gets dusted off when we're desperate for a 10-man tank, but that's about it.

The two solutions I could see;

1. Homogenize gear between the four specs somehow. With two being casters and two being physical, I don't see how this could happen.

2. Bring back TBC's bearcat where one spec is a tanking bear and a DPS cat, to cut down from 4 possible specs to 3. This would likely be terribly imbalanced unless they nerfed cat some since one spec is great dps and a great tank, but maybe with dual specs in anyways for all the other tanks they might not mind so much.

I have been complaining about this in vent for years, but have always assumed I had the problem because I sucked. (Even spent an hour trying to duplicate the positioning techniques in Tankspot's theory videos and eventually gave up before I broke my keyboard.) Huge source of frustration when it comes up.

I strongly question the validity of this statement, because of the same thing Cedrich said, and more. Being 1% better than DK/Warriors, and 1% behind paladins in overall damage taken (by Rawr BiS Gear) matters little when that's not considering the power of cooldowns or talents like Redoubt.

I sure as hell am not seeing us becoming "OP" in 3.2 with the parry buff and dodge nerf, and I expect the Doubling of Block Value to widen the gap between us and warrior/pally.

I'm also going to question your statement that there's abundant gear, by Rawr several items for every slot are "upgrades" but in general the majority give a Stam loss. The BiS set is pretty much 2k health and 6% dodge, and lost 1k armor. Our biggest gain, and strength over other tanks? Sustained Threat and DPS while tanking. As vaccine said, it's also rather annoying that because of DK's (and Blizzard's understandable desire to cut back on "oh great, another feral tanking staff") we're stuck with armor/str/defense/dodge accessories. The itemization issue really pisses me off because their stated excuse makes no sense with the large number of utterly horribly itemized items. No one wants [Shoulderpads of the Monolith], or any of a dozen (or more) other items in Ulduar, but they can't put in Agi>Sta>Str rings that at least one person would use, probably most melee would use actually, most other Str classes still use the Agi rings because they don't have excessive Stam like the Str rings, of the 7 physical dps classes, 4 prefer Str to AP every time.

The problem with bear tanking is that of the four roles that our class can make, bear is the most boring of all. I have literally fallen asleep while tanking Ignis several times. Bear form has very few buttons to press (which can be macro'ed to even reduce them more). There's nothing exciting to be looking forward on the rotation. Do you feel the same excitement when you get an OOC proc in bear as in cat? Not at all. And what about AoE tanking? That's even worse. I really miss the old days of using Hurricane to pull a pack of mobs.

Besides from the boring threat rotation, the other tanks have much more interesting abilities. Take for example the DK. You can use death grip to control a running mob, sacrifice your ghoul to heal yourself, use Death Strikes to heal yourself, use Death Coils to kill mobs that are running away, etc... What cool things can you do as a bear (without risking a wipe)?

Another thing that bothers me (although it's purely cosmetic) is that the animations for all of our abilities look outdated. There's the usual mangle "explosion effect", the Maul "standing in two feet move" and that's it (ohh I forgot the swipe "claws"...). Compare that to the animations of the DK. DnD, IT, Plague Strike, Death Grip, Pestilence... all those animations look cool.

What could make bear tanking more interesting?
1- Making the rotation interesting. What about having something cool to do with the OOC procs?
2- Making the AoE tanking less about pressing a single key repeatedly. Again DK's can DnD, use Pestilence and Blood Boil. That's way more interesting than swipe.
3- Improving the animations of the important abilities.
4- Making Savage Defense something to really care about and not just consider it as a side effect of the dps gear we're tanking on. Instead of being a block mechanic, why not change it to an armor increase? (Toned down so that it's not overpowered a obviously).

Hey there. I saw this topic and it interested me (it's not something you normally see much on EJ).

I play a druid and raid on a semi-casual basis (about once a week). I used to be cat/bear spec until a month or so ago, when I turned my offspec into tree form. Why?

Most of the reasons have been reflected above, but one thing I'd like to point out as well: trying to bid on gear that's part of your "off set" or "main set", and having people question you about your choices is an issue.

Due to the nature of the gear, what we need to do is stack up on often similar gear pieces, but enchant them differently. I bid on leather DPS legs for my "main spec" (cat). Later on, the same legs drop again and I have to somehow convince my raid leader that I'm going to bid on those same legs again, for my offspec (no no, don't deduct full DKP, it's an *offset*). For a while I really mismanaged my DKP because I bid on everything as main spec even if it was tank gear because I misunderstood "feral" as being both DPS/Tank.

it also sucks to have to look at every tanking trinket/neck/ring/back to see if in fact you can use the stats on it. In fact, it sucks that there's really only three good feral tanking stats. Other people get to gear for "block" and get more damage, or balance dodge/parry. Bears? Stamina, agility, dodge rating, maybe some strength... *yawn*

But for me, the main thing is that there's simply not enough abilities to use. You do four things as a bear in the normal rotation: you mangle, you lacerate, and you maul. You can also swipe. The rotation is dumb - you mangle when CD's up, you lacerate when the DOT's about to run out, you Maul pretty much... all the time. What do you do in the meantime? Swipe spam. Oh, and sometimes we get to charge stuff for fun too. That used to be really cool until Warriors also got a charge.

So, as posters above me have pointed... gear issues and lack of complexity when playing the class make me want to do cat more than bear.

Allow me to extend my thoughts on why feral tanks are harder to come by. The meta game for WoW has never been more alive than it is today. Theorycrafting, napkin mathematics, armchair class design and the like have really broadened the resources available to any player to maximize their classes. In Vanilla the game consisted of like-minded people where a common desire to achieve a goal was more important than the skills required to achieve that goal.

In comes TBC, where guilds are cut down by nearly half and the raid encounters became far more complex. Player skill started to become paramount to like minded individuals. As TBC progressed the encounters became far more dynamic than anything we had seen before. Consider KT and Vashj, Kalecgos and M'uru to mostly anything in vanilla wow. The game began to severely shift from bringing the player to bringing the class to topple encounters.

Try as Blizzard might to defeat this problem it was just too commonplace to end. What has occurred (in my limited opinion) is that the nuances of each class are still more important that what the player of the class provides. Yes, a good player is always worth the raid slot, but a good player playing the best spec and class for the raid is always priority. Again, I hate to complain about not having the abilities of other classes, but as a druid I really felt the pain when we attempted Vezax hardmode and I knew I simply wasn't the right tank for the job. It felt odd to call for the cooldowns I did on Mimiron P1 when other tanks could do it themselves. Tanking 3d Sarth was my highlight, and that was only due to a massive imbalance in HP pools. And though it was an imbalance, it was something that I felt defined me as a tank.

The class is more capable in other areas, which is unfortunate given what I was and what I am now. The druid tank feels like it's stuck in the past and Blizzard hasn't really caught up to all the changes they made. The rotation is simple and boring, and we are no longer a niche tank for anything (as many posters above had said). We lack the cooldowns on our own bars to survive and the added pressure of timing raid cooldowns with some of the insanity of the current raiding scene just isn't worth the effort if another tank can pick up and do the same things through virtue of class skills and talents.

To sum it all up the druid design has become uninspired. I truly feel as though the druid philosophy is stuck in TBC and has become a matter of combating mistakes of the past that are no longer present and in turn has created a multitude of problems for the future.

I still love druids, though.

Not that it should influence anyone, but one of the small things that i find disturbing about bear tanking is that:
A bear's threat is generated, in no small part, by maul. It is one of our most powerful abilities, and will eat up 95-100% of our auto attacks when tanking and rage permits. Most bears report this damage being in the 60% range for them.

Back when i was a bear tank, i remember reading a post on the official blizzard tanking forums, posted by none else than GC, saying that they were not content with the fact that warriors were using heroic strike as much as they are (almost as much as a bear's maul, if not the same) and that in the future they would 'fix' this system, so that it would have to be an intelligent decision to use HS, and that you could easily rage starve yourself if you didn't do it right.

Why would this concern me? This is something that could really, really screw with bear threat, and i could foresee bear threat becoming substantially sub-par if we got the "back flack" of this change. As my old guild leader said, "if blizzard fixes a hunter talent, Tenebron will start evading tanks"

Do not miss my point here, i am not complaining, all i am saying is that if they want to make warriors, and possibly by extent bears, a more challenging class to play (by changing rage generation by white hits) and then forget to compensate for the threat lost, then bear tanks would be worthless until it was fixed, which could take some time.

My point here is that why would i want to play a class that could become obsolete for a decent amount of time?

This is a problem we all face, but it was a "death by a million cuts" case for me. Only recentley have i seen a resurgence in the interest of bear tanks, prior to this i saw as much interest in this issue by higher ups as in "How op rogues are because they can stun lock me at lvl 40" posts. In the post sited herein, and in other similar cases i saw little regard for my fury friend, and did not want to play a class that was left on the back shelve.

Obviously this problem is being corrected by posts exactly like this one, but i figured i'd put my two cents in as to why I (and a friend) had retired my bear.

I am the MT of my guild. I love my drood.

- Tanking is face roll easy. I hit a few buttons and barely have to think. Unless I'm kiting then I have rage issues.

- At the same time I have shit for cooldowns. So if CDs are involved I need outside help.

- Cat DPS is engaging, fun and a challenge. If my guild starts to understand how much DPS I could do they would try and convince me to DPS.

- I have looked the same when I tank since level 10. This is actually a big issue. New forms will be nice but then same issue just starts again on a new model. My gear looks cool now. No one ever sees it. This issue affects all droods.

- I would love for bear tanking to be a bit more interactive. OoC procs are ignored for rotation.

- Gear is lame. I wear DPS gear to tank... The difference for many slots is gems/chants. This is lame. It also contributes to bears being a nightmare to balance as we scale too well off too few stats. Also merges with the OT/DPS issue.

That being said; RAWR. I love my bear tank.

Playing my warrior since '05 and having startet my drood back in TBC playing as feral, I also see the main difference while tanking:
Warriors are more complex and fun to play. You have more tools to counter several situations (Scions are casting bolts? Hell yeah, eat my imp. Spellreflect. Fear in coming? Fear ma zerker rage! Casting mob off a trashpul refusing to come to me and casting instead? Catch my flying weapon of silence! and the list goes on..)

I enjoy playing and equipping my bear at the moment, since I parked him since TBC at level 70. It's nice to see him getting better by new gear, but tanking is like.. One mob? Three? Ten? Boss?
Nevermind, skill usage stays quite the same, except more clicking the more mobs are there. (at least while given one focus target for the few DPSers who do not got AE-nuts on three mobs)

I Excessively tanked heroics for a week now, also had the chance to tank adds on Sarth 25 and even Emalon on Vault25. Once an enemy is placed, I could start using an automated macro that does FF, Maul, Mangle, Lacerate. Boring, as said many times before.

This is far from satisfying, looking at what other classes can do. Bad warrior tank not priorizing skills correcty will certainly lose aggro. Bad DK not knowing what to do will also lose aggro. Paladin - I don't see many pals who tend to loose aggro, but they're the class I have least knowledge coming to their prot tree.
As a bear, you don't have an option to shine. You sit there, doing your four buttons, and you do well. Period.

You don't even hat to look to other classes - when playing as cat, you can play simple and suck (or like others say "do ok") or you can try to excel, keep everything up and fu*king rock the meters. This is what rewarding gameplay looks like. There's nothing like this playing the fur-tank.

I don't care about how my character looks, since as a tank I'm bothered more about what's going on in the whole encounter, not what colour my furry ass is. Also I don't care about that "oh look he's got that friggin great staff from encounter xy", I care about a "well done" after an encounter is done.

Itemization is an issue, as you see like no real bear equipment dropping from heroics. What does not matter, as you can get polar-stuff for HP and take away that leather stuff from rogues. But you cannot go like "hey, there drops this really well itemized pair of gloves, I am going to farm for them" as your main stats are basically on every part of melee-dps-leather gear and you might have to struggle with DPS who go like "there's no dodge rating on this, go f*ck yourself, I want this".

Reading over what I wrote I guess I did not say much new, but it should emphasize what was already said before.

Starting whit myself, Raid and Guild Leader in one person, playing the druid as feral since 2.0, before playing resto as a day 1 Druid when everything beside being resto was rare for druids in raids. I am tanking everything were high HP is helping. Things like Steelbreaker, Hodir and if no DK is available Vezax. So I jump in when the big HP pool helps or we lack a tank anyway. I DPS the rest of the time with Top5 DPS on nearly every fight.

I have seen people starting Druids in my guild and asked me how to lvl and specc while lvling. On my question what they want to do as lvl 80, most who want to stay feral said they want to Tank and DPS on occation. The easiest to get into Raids is still a druid tank since most equipment is easy to get from your friendly Leatherworker such as Polar gear for getting you a big HP bump.

Overall when I look around in Dalaran you see most of the druids with either Moonkin or Resto Equip. Feral population is low and if I see them than in Tank gear the amount of DPS geared Ferals is very low.

I myself must say that I still prefer a Druid Tank for the high hitters because you can get to enormous amounts of HP. Since DK Tanks are sometimes not available at least in our Raid, I do my bet on my Druid Tank gear to get in to progression fights. I don't go for Warrior or Pala Tanks for this kind of stuff.

Edith: On the other had I must say T8 Raids are not the source of tanking gear since most T7.5 items have more Stamina than T8.5. So no progress fro me except for Idol, Weapon and Ignis Trinket. I am awaiting T9 Raids to upgrade my Tanking gear.

Another long-term tank (tanked up to ZG and AQ20 in vanialla in a pretty casual guild, and then everything up to and including Kil Jaedan in TBC) gone DPS recently here. Not going to add anything which others haven't said, but as I see it the purpose of this thread is to get a consensus of opinion on the reason for the lack of bear tanks lately.

Why I personally stopped tanking and went dps:

- Itemisation. Yes, wearing DPS gear and having talents which buff us to tank levels does technically work, but it is somehow less satisfying than being properly itemised from the ground up like all the plate tanking classes are. And while I personally understand how to gear a bear using this approach, I strongly suspect that the 'vagueness' of our itemisation puts a lot of starter bear tanks off. A common question from new bears is 'where is the tank gear?'. A classic example of this is the Origin of Nightmares - there is no reasonably obtainable 'clear' upgrade for this as a tanking weapon, unless you can get hold of a staff which is clearly DPS itemised but of such high ilevel that it edges out the origin as a tank weapon. I can see why blizzard took this approach in terms of cleaning up the loot tables and making more drops useful for more classes, but in my opinion it does make gearing up my bear less enjoyable because there are fewer items I can fantasise over obtaining.

- Fun and variety. Bears have too few interesting cooldowns and abilities by comparison with DKs and warriors (pallies I find pretty dull too on this front).

- Cooldowns. Related to the above, many of the current fights especially in hardmode rely on surviving burst damage phases. Barkskin as really our only mitigation cooldown is pretty lame. Mostly bear tanking is about spamming a pretty simple rotation for threat, occasionally popping barkskin, and praying the healers can keep us up.

- Death Knights. This is not really so true at present, but for a while from WoTLK Death Knights were in every way superior to bears; almost the same armor, almost the same stamina, but VASTLY better cooldowns and avoidance and more fun to play. Recently DKs have taken armor, cooldown and avoidance nerfs and this argument is probably no longer so relevent, but at the time I 'rerolled' to DPS it was very much an issue - I simply couldn't justify tanking Ulduar progress fights when I knew for a fact that our deathknight tank could do the job better.

- Cat DPS is fun. Unlike bear tanking, the rotation is complex and interesting. The difference between a skilled and knowledgable feral DPS and a clueless one is possibly greater than for any
/ other class in the game. Our DPS potential is now very good, possibly even too high although I think the upcoming 2% nerf will put us in a good place a reasonable distance behind rogues overall but still very competetive.

For me it's not so much a full reroll as a change of focus. I have a cat main spec and a bear offspec, I roll on DPS gear as a main spec and that's what I spend my DKP on, while my bear gear is 'decommisioned' cat gear, eg the 10 man T8 which I replaced with 25 man T8. When our regular tanks are not around I step in and bear tank quite effectively.

I still love my druid (and I have 6 level 80s and 4 level 70s so I've been able to try the other classes) but if I had to tank full-time I think I would be too bored to continue playing due mainly to the first two point on my list.