Thi is my story will be a bit long so tldr versions are at the end!

I've played druid since vanilla and very early on in vanilla after I hit 60 I specced feral, this was 2-3 months pre 1.8 revamp and since then I never really looked back till Wrath. In Vanilla I went from being "lotp healer" to offtanking in 40 man raids by the time my guild was running around in AQ. I didn't offtank all the time as the mindset was still always "warrior MT". Nevertheless my guild saw my skills and saw I could be relied on to tank when it was needed and I was happy with that as I had equal rights on the gear.

When TBC hit we lost our gm as both mt and guild leader but in stepped another warrior we had. Him and I both shared tanking roles equally I became the bear MT and he was often offtanking some fights. We switched MT/OT roles around alot and I thoroughly enjoyed it. It was a sense of being needed because a fair few fights needed a non warrior tank (we had 2 warriors and a bear that could tank by this time). My first goal after hitting 70 was to gear up for tanking and after much expense and farming I had my tanking set and was crit immune and ready to go. I main tanked all throughout Kara, SSC, TK - Not KT obviously although I did want to try!. Hyjal I tanked the first 2-3 bosses before I left the guild to reroll horde.

As horde I actually levelled a prot paladin - yes levelled as prot - I had intended to go holy but since I was on a realm as a casual I chose to go tank instead and I loved it. So much stuff was missing for me compared to druid. I mean I could collect a block set, a boss tanking set, a higher stamina set, a pure avoidance set - yes a set to go solo Garr. Any chance I could get I would theorycraft the best possible stats for me to remain uncrushable and look for realisitc upgrades I could obtain. Once rolling the tankadin I found it extremely hard to consider going back to tanking as a bear again but my new cow druid became 70 and slowly geared it up and then a BT farming guild took me in and gave me tier so we could do sunwell. Never once in my time did I tank a 5 man heroic instance on my cow after I had been farming them on my tankadin, I found it too painful.

By this time wrath beta was out and I was able to get a key. I didn't even try feral out I just saw the changes to moonkin and specced it. I've remained a moonkin since then and I don't intend to switch back to tanking full time. I do have feral as my dual spec as I do like tanking from time to time in raids but that's as far as it goes for me. My main spec will always be balance now.

I do have a prot paladin at 80 now aswell and I'm still loving that. There's more variety in a sense compared to a bear. I have to put some thought process into how I want to gear effectively. With my bear I could have just facerolled it in dps gear - not that I have done that, I do have a tanking kit with a few defense items purely because of other avoidance stats on the items. With that said I'm probably opposite to most I'd rather tank a fight where I tank it all the way through on my druid, as I really do not enjoy cat dps. I can do the rotation fine I just find it boring.

TLDR version:
Imo we lost our uniqueness as bears when we were given crit immunity via talents. I enjoyed having to theorycraft the gear keeping hte best set you could while maintaining crit immunity.

The gear - we should have blatant bear items again and not have to look towards pvp for it. Not everyone enjoys arena. I never minded grinding heroics in TBC to get a certain drop, but as the poster before me said it, there's no bear items dropping anymore in heroics which is sad.

There's no real challenge for bears. My oh shit cooldown consists of barkskin and a dodge trinket. My double oh shit is SI and hoping the boss dies before I do.

I dont think that our survival cooldowns are that bad. We have barkskin, SI and glyphed FR (which can be stronger than SI, depending on situation). Thats 3 cooldowns, and you can combine these if needed (e.g. for Mimiron i use barkskin + SI for first plasma, barkskin + FR for 3rd). I think that bear cooldowns are better than warrior or paladin ones (or better said, more flexible).

It is true that barkskin is no match for shield wall, but SW is not mandatory for boss fights and i doubt it will ever be.

Bear is lacking fun, especially in AoE tanking, but it is effective. Before WotLK i was hoping they'd sort the AoE tanking problem for bears by letting us cast Hurricane in forms, and maybe some other spells as well and that could sort the boredom thing, but it didnt happen.

The versatility of the druid as a class is likely to blame for the lack of bears as of late. Appropriately geared a druid can tank, heal, melee dps or ranged caster dps as necessary. Back when druids were jack of all trades and master of bear and healer, it was a pretty clear decision for most people depending on whether they wanted to tank or heal. Now every one of the four possible raid roles can be done by a druid and raids are more than accepting of most.

What seals the choice is that the itemization for bear tanks is very weak, thus making the plate tanks stronger in the regard that they have the options to gear appropriately for different tanking requirements. Shoehorning a piece that is BiS for cat dps as a tank item through use of gems and enchants isn't optimal. It would be like throwing the defense stat out for plate wearers and expecting them to make use of plate dps gear to tank. With the other three druid specs there exists gear which is itemized extremely well and allows the specs to compete with and in some cases exceed the so called pure classes. A cat with either an arms warrior or a second cat designated as the mangle gimp is capable of competing for top dps slot assuming other requisite raid buffs are available. Moonkins finally have itemization that caters to them and are capable of pressuring the pure casters with equal levels of gear. Finally trees have always been niche healers with potent capabilities when well utilized and have always had the support of appropriate itemization.

This leads to the question of whether or not this is a significant problem. Are people fleeing the class or are they simply exploring a different option of play within the class? From the responses so far in this thread, it seems there is a bit of both. However, for the most part it seems that druids are trying the other roles and finding that they enjoy them just as much if not more than being a feral tank.

This is a horrible thread. It's just one long, stupid, whiny "I've been a druid..." post after another.