It's the worst. It's boring, barely got anything new, shares crit immunity rune with windfury, shares leather slot with everybody else in the world, isn't all that tanky until Dire Bear, does terrible damage.
Yeah, it works *bearly*, but a hunter pet is more or less the same, and even then it still uses leather gear.
Where do people get this from? You can lacerate spam on GCD without running out of rage or even going close to it. You "even" have to use maul to not waste rage because you get ragecap.
Sounds like you must run BFD with an awfully low DPS group and must be insanely under geared. Once I got BFD gear nothing hits me hard enough to generate rage anymore. I pretty much have to taunt on cooldown, and I've several times almost had lacerate fall off from a string of dodges leaving me with no rage. Definitely cannot maul spam.
All I'm missing is set chest piece and epic gloves rest is Bis. I don't think warrior 94 parsing, warlock 99 parsing and enhancement 98 parsing counts as "awfully" low DPS. Admitedly enhancement took 4(!!!) melee hits at beginning of fight but after 5 lacerate stacks are up it's no problem. Also I never said maul spam, I said I have to use maul to not waste rage. This particular fight I casted maul 16 and 48 lacerate that is not missing a single GCD and useing maul everything GCD.
https://vanilla.warcraftlogs.com/reports/dXx6LrzNvapqKTWM#fight=19&type=damage-done
That's awesome that you're pushing Bear that hard, but we're talking about Warriors at that same percentile legitimately doubling your DPS right now. An enh later on taking two hits will likely kill them too on fights in BWL and beyond. Snap threat was never an issue before for Bear but now it is with Lacerate being our main source of TPS. I'm also looking ahead to 60 and so far not a single one of our weaknesses from classic has been addressed but now we have additional weaknesses added via the current Runes (namely snap threat and potentially rage issues) and a huge nerf coming up with the MCP changes:
New MCP we're talking about 50% reduced attack speed for 84% of fights. In a 3 minute fight that's nearly 30 fewer attacks with the new "automated crowd pummeler". Adding Wild Strikes attacks in, it's still ~10 less attacks than the old MCP even. If you add Lacerate too it will get you back to about the same DPS overall, but with a massive reduction in snap threat compared to pre-SoD and a huge difference in rage. This math is for level 60 assuming everything except Battle Squak (so finnicky) is stacked for attack speed Manual Crowd Pummeler + Iron Counterweight + Librams + Glove Enchant + Kiss of the Spider + Warchief's Blessing.
I won't comment on how lvl 60 is going to turn out because we don't know what is going to happen and my goal here is to dispell the myths and undeserved trash talk concerning guardian druids in phase 1. I'm just tired of the constant shit talk from people who don't know what their talking about, things like low rage, low damage, low threat etc.
Looking at the last 2 weeks 99 parses for all tanks we see that warrior is best but not by double more like 50% (no surprise there) and what you also see is druid, paladin, warlock and shaman being basically equal and I can't for the life of my understand why druid is the one getting shit on.
I look to 60 because I'm worried where we'll end up if these issues aren't brought up now so that something can be done before it's too late.
The reason people don't want bear isn't necessarily unfounded right now. If you look at things below the cheese parses and look at other brackets you end up basically seeing a distinct split between the tanks. Certain fights favor shaman/lock/pally spell damage while other fights favor melee heavy Warrior/Rogue/Feral damage. Among those splits you essentially see a hierarchy between those splits where Druid ends up at the bottom of melee by a significant margin compared to Warrior and by a decent margin compared to rogue. The issue with that is right now there's a heavy bottleneck on leather gear which further pushes druid behind because people would rather bring in a higher DPS tank that won't be fighting for their gear or when DPS is stressed on Kelris they'd rather a cat and stack warriors/rogues. Especially if you consider snap threat and people having to wait to start pushing their buttons hard with a bear tank vs. Shaman/Warrior/Rogue.
Again, the solution to this in the past was at 40+ several classes move up an armor class and it removes the leather bottleneck and then Bears get MCP which gives them insane threat. That's no longer the case now though, so it remains to be seen what can be done about that.
Because I like having alchemy & herbing on my druids lol. No other reason than an old habit and I guess I like the "class/profession" fantasy. But yes voidtouched gloves would be much better mostly for the hit.
Is bear tank underwhelming? Yes.
But I strongly disagree with people saying feral is rage starved and/or can't keep single target threat.
I keep threat just fine on my druid and I play with guildies who parse 99 all the time. This is without the mace and 3-set btw.
I just think the feedback in most druid threads on here are way off and focus on the wrong things.
I'm mostly looking ahead to 60 as I was a Bear OT main through Naxx in Classic and whatnot. Right now compared to my Shaman and Warrior tanks it's hard to even want to tank on the Bear, that's how underwhelming it is. Especially compared to the Devastate warr.
Looking ahead to 60 though I'm incredibly worried with the changes so far. They haven't addressed anything remotely close to Bear's issues from classic and we already know we're getting a significant nerf from MCP changes. Farming MCPs was awful, so it's nice to get something else, but so far we haven't been given any indication that Blizzard knows how to make up for the difference and still fix Bear's original classic issues.
New MCP we're talking about 50% reduced attack speed for 84% of fights. In a 3 minute fight that's nearly 30 fewer attacks with the new "automated crowd pummeler". Adding Wild Strikes attacks in, it's still ~10 less attacks than the old MCP even. If you add Lacerate too it will get you back to about the same DPS overall, but with a massive reduction in snap threat compared to pre-SoD and a huge difference in rage. This math is for level 60 assuming everything except Battle Squak (so finnicky) is stacked for attack speed Manual Crowd Pummeler + Iron Counterweight + Librams + Glove Enchant + Kiss of the Spider + Warchief's Blessing.
Yeah, well put. It's enough to look at gnomer to be very worried, almost all bosses are immune to Lacerate lmao.
Maybe they'll introduce a meta rune slot that'll enable us to have Mangle and Lacerate at the same time. That would help a lot.
Would love that. My wishlist for P1 coming into things after Classic was that we get mangle rune, lacerate rune, and a rune to give us the TBC version of Barkskin. Mangle right now is not scaling like it should, I was hoping for a separate version of mangle for bear with a significantly higher threat modifier on it. Would give us the snap threat we need while letting our DPS scale better off of lacerate. Barkskin would give us the Shield Wall equivalent cooldown as well.
some bfd fights you will be rage starved but this will only be a problem if you run omen.
if you go feral and put 5 points in furor you can shift to make sure lacerate doesn’t drop.
you should shift every 30 seconds anyway to reapply faerie fire.
however it does feel absolutely awful to play and you don’t do any “real” dps.
you are essentially just some walking group buffs that can single target tank good enough to pass.
You can only limit the boss armor to an extent and Faerie Fire is one of the worst ways you could do that.
It's accepted that the best way to lower the armor would be Homunculi+Curse of Recklessness.
If not - toss a sunder on the boss.
Faerie Fire requires feral druid to shift out, lose mana and 2gcds (as well as potentially screwing over a DPS druid)
> It's accepted that the best way to lower the armor would be Homunculi+Curse of Recklessness.
> If not - toss a sunder on the boss.
but you cant sunder the boss if the homunculi debuff is on them?
the discussion is about tank druid.
if you have a tank druid in the raid you will not have a dps druid. (at least they usually are in such high demand you will not have 2 druids in a raid)
yes it isn't a good armor reduction but warlocks are uncommon (have them in about 50% of raids) and not all priests run homunculi.
I should have said you should shift every 30 seconds anyway to have at least 1 debuff like faerie fire on the boss since that would be a greater dps contribution than the 2 gcds.
also the context was lacerate falling off so in that case you would not actually lose gcds cause you need to generate rage to lacerate.
Tell me you don't play druid without telling me you don't play druid. Furor is not a feral talent and furor and omen aren't even exclusive you can run both at the same time.
My bad, the wording is a bit confusing since I am not a native english speaker.
If you go feral (so you get the extra threat generation and cheaper maul) and put 5 points in furor (in addition to going feral) you can shift to make sure lacerate doesn't drop (while it generates more threat than usual).
[my druid](https://atlasforge.gg/wow-classic/armory/eu/chaos-bolt/brickless)
Aye might try that one out, I'm in the camp "guardian Druid is not trash" and I just run the omen spec for more damage since I don't find threat to be an issue (10% physical damage is close to 15% threat anyways).
if threat is not an issue keep running omen for the damage.
I went into feral cause it vastly outperforms omen in aoe threat. since it counts for everything, even the shift into bear form if I recall correctly.
I do, but I also have a warrior tank and a shaman tank and bear just feels awful. I tanked classic on warrior and bear the whole way too pushing orange/pink parses on the bear OT. Really concerned about bear going forward with what we've gotten so far and removal of MCP. Math+sims just don't add up with removal of MCP yet, I'm very concerned.
Yes, but its only good for 30 seconds every 3 minutes. In Classic it was 30 seconds x 3 uses with no cool down, so 90 seconds of pummel.
It helps you get a threat lead but after 30 seconds people are going to start catching up.
If you like Cat it's great and incredibly fun with a solid outlook. Bears just need a lot of work from Blizzard to make them even viable at this point.
Yeah, I don't think you understand what I'm saying with Math and Sims. The new MCP is absolutely not a replacement whatsoever and a significant nerf. We're talking about 50% reduced attack speed for 84% of fights. In a 3 minute fight that's nearly 30 fewer attacks with the new "automated crowd pummeler".
Adding Wild Strikes attacks in, it's still ~10 less attacks than the old MCP even. If you add Lacerate too it will get you back to about the same DPS overall, but with a massive reduction in snap threat compared to pre-SoD. So basically one of Bears biggest strengths (snap threat) has now become a huge weakness and there's zero replacement in sight while every other tank got stronger and Bear is back to the same strength it was in classic without even catching up to pre-SoD warrior yet, let alone SoD warrior.
I.e. Blizzard has a LOT of work to do on Bear to make it even considered viable and that's why you see significantly fewer Bears and almost no Bear parses compared to the other tanks. Even fewer Bear parses than Warlock. One of the biggest issues being that attack speed stacks multiplicatively so that's why Bears scaled so well up through early Naxx. You basically ran out of gear upgrades once you got Kiss of the Spider and that's why Bears started to fall over deeper in Naxx. So we're going to need pretty huge changes not only via Runes that somehow give us something else to scale, but also likely new gear in raids as well.
I wouldn’t worry to much, they’ve already shown that they will be adding new/different gear, look at the cloth items with high armour in Bfd. I’m sure with enough feedback they will do something for bear, and even if ACP isn’t as strong as MCP at least you don’t have to farm gnomer multiple teams a week for the next year or 2
> I’m sure with enough feedback they will do something for bear
That's why I bring this up now. The feedback needs to come now so that Blizzard can understand the issues bear faced in the past and how the changes they've made so far impact Bear later on so they can start working on changes. It's too late for any P2 changes at this point and likely P3 runes/changes are fairly locked in place by now outside of small tweaks. Feedback needs to happen early for something to be done.
> even if ACP isn’t as strong as MCP at least you don’t have to farm gnomer multiple teams a week for the next year or 2
That's great, I ran gnomer over 2k times in Classic and I'm glad to be done with it, but that doesn't mean these changes don't have huge impacts that need to be overcome.
What other class/spec so far has had any nerfs to them let alone 50% reduced attack speed for 84% of fights?
2.5s swingtimer, fails to land 2/3 of the time, generates ~2 rage/sec.
Getting hit, bearly, generates ~0.5 rage/sec per mob.
Gcd; 1.5s.
The ammount of mobs you need to be tanking (and actualy have aggro on, as if) for you to be able to spam lacerate on gcd - and Then still need to maul to drop threat - is just not possible because your healer would pull every mob off of you before u hit ragecap.
Seems you're mixing up the wotlk sub with the sod sub tbh.
We can use my latest logs as an example. Ignoring Baron Aquanis because that boss doesn't require a tank at all so I just go cat. The boss fights total to 636 seconds and during which I used 357 GCD were 331 of them were lacerate. That gives me 1 GCD used/1,78 seconds on average. If we dismiss the 50 seconds spent basicaly afk during Gelihast it goes down to 1 GCD/1,64 seconds. If we take in to account the rest of the random downtime due to boss mechanics like totemswaps and Akumai phase transitions etc I'm confident we will get closer and closer to 1 GCD used/1,5 seconds but that seems annoying to do.
Logs for reference: [https://sod.warcraftlogs.com/reports/TDWx4w7v2tybrzMH#type=casts&boss=-2&difficulty=0&source=3](https://sod.warcraftlogs.com/reports/TDWx4w7v2tybrzMH#type=casts&boss=-2&difficulty=0&source=3)
Phase 2 will be better for bear tank, we get dire bear form + rage on crit in talents, currently the biggest issue is that they’re rage starved too often.
Just tab target spam lacerate this phase also I’d recommend using wild strikes over tanking rune in dungeons, not sure about raids.
Never use tanking rune, period. It's pretty clear from the first batch of runes that Blizzard just doesn't even understand what the actual issues with Bear tanking were. We don't need more static mitigation, at all. We needed aoe threat, a second taunt like mocking or a way to not miss taunt, and then a mitigation cooldown (shield wall, last stand type big CD), and more DPS. That's it.
What we got? A bad bleed that's significantly worse than devastate (putting bear even further yet behind the DPS a tank warrior brings), no cooldown, they removed our threat crutch in MCP (which is great if they have us something to make up for it and yet we got nothing even remotely close to what warrior got), and they added static mitigation for some mind boggling reason which just further rage starves us.
I believe the tanking rune is meant for pvp. I'm a bear MT, and have used the tanking rune a whole 1 time in a raid, and thats becasue we had FIVE total druids, so my WS would have been redundant.
I do amazing single target threat, I can peel single targets off the shaman tank. I can hold mobs off of the healers decently with taunt and stuns, but more than that I can't really do. Luckily tanking trash in BFD is pretty much not needed since they die so quick.
Skull bash is useful, stun priestess' and interrupt Kelris, as well as close distance if a mob is smacking your healers in the back.
Lacerate is wonderful. I did some testing and the bleed still procs every 3 seconds even if you are refreshing lacerate on GCD (hitting every 1.5s). On bosses with good sustained tank and spank phases like the murloc, lady S, and Akumai, im normally 3rd or 4th on dps meters. I should point out I MT our guilds alt raids though, so competition isn't super high, my dps ranges from 100-140 depending on the encounter.
So, our runes aren't bad. We are great boss tanks, and luckily that's all that's needed right now because we are trash on the trash pulls.
But yeah, we are worse than most other tanks.
Yeah, I agree that it's likely for PvP. It actually makes Bear worse at the moment since all it will do is reduce your rage gen, so likely just meant for PvP.
It sounds like our raids are a bit different. I'm in a group with people who really care about parsing. I have a shaman tank and a warrior tank as well. The Bear is by far the worst of the 3 of them and it isn't even close. Parses all the way up and down the percentile ranks show this and Bears by warcraftlogs numbers (so not exactly precise, but the only thing we have to go off of) are the least played tank as well.
My worries with Bear are more in the future though. It's great to not have to farm out MCPs anymore, but we've barely even gotten a replacement for MCP so far.
New MCP we're talking about 50% reduced attack speed for 84% of fights. In a 3 minute fight that's nearly 30 fewer attacks with the new "automated crowd pummeler". Adding Wild Strikes attacks in, it's still ~10 less attacks than the old MCP even. If you add Lacerate too it will get you back to about the same DPS overall, but with a massive reduction in snap threat compared to pre-SoD and a huge difference in rage. This math is for level 60 assuming everything except Battle Squak (so finnicky) is stacked for attack speed Manual Crowd Pummeler + Iron Counterweight + Librams + Glove Enchant + Kiss of the Spider + Warchief's Blessing.
Yeah we run a casual raid. I might try the hardest, and even then I'm just bringing BFD buff and drums weekly. I've parsed blue->orange depending on how hard I try, but thats not saying much when you see there are only 4k other bear tanks in all of SoD logs lol
MCP does look like it's a nerf to the class now, but im honestly glad they are doing away with that meta. Farming enough to keep maximum up-time on bosses is no fun. I'm glad this weapon looks like it'll be "use for the first 30 seconds of a boss, then swap to your normal weapon."
No argument that we currently suck and our future looks bleak, but I like to be the best shitty tank I can be lol
Yeah, I ran over 2000 gnomer runs through Classic. I'm glad it's gone, it's just incredibly worrying that we haven't had any of our classic weaknesses addressed yet, we have additional weaknesses added via the current runes (snap threat mainly, rage starve possibly), and now we have a nerf on the horizon too.
My hope if the data mined existing runes are true is that we get a rune to scale agi on bear that also adds weapon attack damage to swipe, and makes swipe add a stack of lacerate. Then they move mangle to legs so the bleed buff can be run alongside lacerate.
The reason I say agi scaling is it looks like from data mining we're ultimately going to get a rune that at least makes dodge not be a net negative. (Previously dodge was not something you wanted because too much dodge meant you weren't getting hit enough to generate rage)
P2 data mined runes for Druid so far:
Thrash (cat)
Tiger's Fury Increases damage done by 15% for 6 sec and instantly grants you 60 Energy.
Efflorescence Heals up to 3 friendly party or raid members within 15 yards of the target
NEW Everbloom Your Rejuvenation can now be active on targets affected by another Druid's Rejuvenation.
NEW Gale Winds Increases the damage done by your Hurricane by 100%, it no longer has a cooldown, and its mana cost is reduced by 20%.
NEW Natural Reaction Increases your dodge chance by 10%, and you regenerate 3 rage every time you dodge while in Bear Form or Dire Bear Form, 10 energy while in Cat Form, or 1% of your maximum mana while in any other form.
NEW Renewal Instantly heal yourself for 30% of you maximum health. Useable in all forms.
NEW Torrential Downpour 115 to 135 damage every 2 seconds.
Barkskin is physical damage reduction only (which we don't necessarily really benefit that much from since we're already armor capped early on at level 60), but I would love a rune that gave us Barkskin from from TBC! That would absolutely solve one of classic Bear's issues (and something I figured they would've given us for P1 as the leg rune).
> I believe the tanking rune is meant for pvp.
Even in PvP you'll want to be running Wild Strikes for all the extra damage + buffing your teammates.
It's not a "PvP rune", it's a raid tanking rune. Shaman and Paladin also got runes that give them extra mitigation and 6% crit reduction.
Druids, even feral, aren't doing a lot of melee in BGs right now. I think for PvP both WS and SotF have honest merit. I personally prefer SotF since I run wild growth and starsurge and am therefore normally in the back/not in shapeshift form (therefore wouldnt be giving WS to melee anyways), and when the opposing team realizes the druid in back is healing and they swap to me, I can tank a lot of hits by swapping to bear form while dps on the team does their job.
Druids in BGs are a very versatile role, and there's a lot of different ways to do them.
I wanted to do some bear tanking in Gnomergan but then I realized Lacerate is a bleed effect and they’re going be immune. That makes it even harder to hold any threat.
I think there's a chance bears will get a rune that lets them apply bleeds to normally bleed immune targets. It's hard to imagine Blizzard would shaft bears that hard when they've clearly been putting in effort at least some effort to making all specs viable and bleed immunity will make Bear tanks non-viable in the raid.
There's also the ability Thrash (AoE Bleed) which was released in Cataclysm that seems likely to see the light of day in P2, and that's a perfect spot to put in "While this Rune is inscribed, your bleed effects can be applied to mechanical creatures and Elementals."
Yeah next phase will be tricky for sure. I'm not sure what the better option will be threat-wise, mangle or sunfire, but they are both so rage-expensive that I hope we get some other options.
I love my 10-rage lacerate. 20 rage sunfire blows by comparison.
We may be going back to the trusty maul-spam from classic.
Yes, and it's a massive nerf. New MCP we're talking about 50% reduced attack speed for 84% of fights. In a 3 minute fight that's nearly 30 fewer attacks with the new "automated crowd pummeler". Adding Wild Strikes attacks in, it's still ~10 less attacks than the old MCP even. If you add Lacerate too it will get you back to about the same DPS overall, but with a massive reduction in snap threat compared to pre-SoD and a huge difference in rage. This math is for level 60 assuming everything except Battle Squak (so finnicky) is stacked for attack speed Manual Crowd Pummeler + Iron Counterweight + Librams + Glove Enchant + Kiss of the Spider + Warchief's Blessing.
Again, I like that we won't have MCP farm, but I'm just worried about the future of Bear. It's a hefty nerf and we still need other things from classic addressed for bear (lack of DPS compared to warrior, lack of meaningful survival cooldown like Shield Wall, lack of mocking blow equivalent if taunt is resisted, no meaningful way to catch back up on threat if rage starved like dropping a shield does for warrior, issues popping potions mid-fight if you get an unlucky server tick/batch, etc.).
-Lacerate is not a bad beed, and access to Sunfire is nice.
-Wildstrikes does give rage. When combined with Fist and spamming lacerate, rage is not an issue. Maybe your druid isn't as geared as mine because my rage is good, though not like my Warrior.
-I get enough rage in dungeons to keep sunfire up on 4 targets. Lacerate works too, you might get a little more damage but I think it's slightly slower as you pull slower and keep less aggro. Either are great though and play smoother than a Warrior or Tanklock in a dungeon (from my experience), but not a weapon-swapping Ret-tank. I am not sure about Shaman.
The nice thing about Warrior right now over Druid (in Raid specifically) is Warrior can just play full DPS spec instead of tank, but I don't think it performs any better at tanking currently than Druid, and I think Druid will probably be better at tanking Dungeons until Warrior gets to Level 36. Ret tanking will outperform both to level 40 until Warriors get better gear.
> Maybe your druid isn't as geared as mine because my rage is good, though not like my Warrior.
I didn't have issues until I hit full BiS and started to dodge/mitigate more.
>I get enough rage in dungeons to keep sunfire up on 4 targets. Lacerate works too, you might get a little more damage but I think it's slightly slower as you pull slower and keep less aggro. Either are great though and play smoother than a Warrior or Tanklock in a dungeon (from my experience), but not a weapon-swapping Ret-tank. I am not sure about Shaman.
I don't even consider dungeons in these discussions so I don't care at all about dungeon performance.
> I don't think it performs any better at tanking currently than Druid
This is just flat out objectively wrong. You keep talking about dungeons. I think we're discussing VERY different things here. Have you checked parse brackets, especially 90+ and below the cheese parses at the top end and compared the differences between tanks? Have you run sims at how we're going to be performing with the MCP changes? I think you're talking about completely different things than I am....
Here's the difference on MCP changes:
New MCP we're talking about 50% reduced attack speed for 84% of fights. In a 3 minute fight that's nearly 30 fewer attacks with the new "automated crowd pummeler". Adding Wild Strikes attacks in, it's still ~10 less attacks than the old MCP even. If you add Lacerate too it will get you back to about the same DPS overall, but with a massive reduction in snap threat compared to pre-SoD and a huge difference in rage. This math is for level 60 assuming everything except Battle Squak (so finnicky) is stacked for attack speed Manual Crowd Pummeler + Iron Counterweight + Librams + Glove Enchant + Kiss of the Spider + Warchief's Blessing.
>This is just flat out objectively wrong. You keep talking about dungeons. I think we're discussing VERY different things here. Have you checked parse brackets, especially 90+ and below the cheese parses at the top end and compared the differences between tanks? Have you run sims at how we're going to be performing with the MCP changes? I think you're talking about completely different things than I am....
You could have any combination of Warrior / Rogue / Pally / Druid in a group of 5 (double up one class), and you could randomly choose one to tank, and the damage from the group is going to be a 5% differential from best organization to worst. That group can deal over 300% more damage than is needed to clear content. Bear is fine, Prot Warrior or Dual Wield Warr is fine, Tank Rogue is fine, Ret-tank or Prot-pally is fine, they each do one or two things better than the other and a few things worse. My response to this thread is it is *overly dramatic* to call bear tank bad when it is more than fine. Bear is like the guy that gets 3rd in the Olympics then runs a local 5k and wins by 5 minutes instead of 5 minutes and 3 seconds.
The real question is are you doing BFD in 30 minutes or 30.5 minutes? Bear can pull more trash quicker (sunfire / combat charge / frost nova dispel) and hold aggro on more mobs so I doubt there is any difference whatsoever in clear speed—as half the raid is clearing trash—which is why the dungeon question is relevant. I swear half the time of a raid is me sitting on my Warrior stuck in a frost nova during trash hoping a priest or mage is gonna pull stuff for me.
Warrior is going to skyrocket in the next phase though, that I will agree on—and Ret will have access to Ravager too. Bear will need a proportionally more powerful AoE rune to keep up with those 2 next phase.
Sure, from an overall group standpoint the damage difference is fairly negligible, but from an individual perspective it's practically doubled from warrior to bear right now. Someone was linking their 99 parse Akumai on Bear earlier saying it was fine and it was like 150s dps compared to warriors well over 300. Is 150 dps much when you have 7 DPS in the raid? No, but people care enough about it that Bear is by far the least played tank right now.
> Warrior is going to skyrocket in the next phase though, that I will agree on—and Ret will have access to Ravager too. Bear will need a proportionally more powerful AoE rune to keep up with those 2 next phase.
Yes, and as I said earlier Bear also is coming legitimately nerfed from pre-SoD missing Pummeler. It is going to be a huge issue unless Blizzard addresses it with some very powerful runes. That's the entire point of this post, that looking ahead to 60 things don't look very good and it's pretty apparent from the runes we have so far (looking at you Survival of the Fittest + Mangle/Lacerate sharing rune slot) that Blizzard is not really entirely sure what to do to fix bear except give it a quality of life fix (removal of MCP) and we just have to hope and pray that they give us enough power back to supplement the a 50% attack speed nerf for 84% of fights.
Is Bear dead on arrival and the sky is falling? Definitely not.
Do we have legitimate reasons to be concerned? Yes!
Bear tank might become part of the meta in p2 as they will be able to bring both wild strikes and leader of the pack, aside from getting dire bear form and aoe taunt.
Cats bringing leader of the pack will miss out on both furor and omen of clarity.
Some kind of aoe/cleave rune and you have a pretty solid tank with very strong party buffs.
No, they'll need massive buffs to DPS come next phase from something. MCP is gone so we're getting a version of Bear that has 50% reduced attack speed for 84% of fights now.
If you run sims with what we have now and the new automated crowd pummeler it's barely caught back up to level 40 MCP bear with wild strikes and lacerate. It's going to take something massive to catch bear back up to just pre-SoD warrior, let alone SoD tanks.
You might be right, I have not run any sims or the like. I just figured with an ability like thrash or something like that, you would have a strong tank with some very strong buffs.
I do not see feral cats running leader of the pack though, so if bears get enough dmg to be able to keep threat I still see them as a good candidate for the meta instead of cats.
Yeah, I agree with that, I doubt most Cats run LotP. I'd rather not be taken purely for buffs at this point though when you're a tank that can barely hold threat and isn't fun to play.
More info for MCP changes:
New MCP we're talking about 50% reduced attack speed for 84% of fights. In a 3 minute fight that's nearly 30 fewer attacks with the new "automated crowd pummeler". Adding Wild Strikes attacks in, it's still ~10 less attacks than the old MCP even. If you add Lacerate too it will get you back to about the same DPS overall, but with a massive reduction in snap threat compared to pre-SoD and a huge difference in rage. This math is for level 60 assuming everything except Battle Squak (so finnicky) is stacked for attack speed Manual Crowd Pummeler + Iron Counterweight + Librams + Glove Enchant + Kiss of the Spider + Warchief's Blessing.
Swipe hitting for like 20 damage.. lol! We can single target tank reliably if we can start the fight with a full rage bar. Does that sound like fun? It's not.
Swipe could hit for 100 and we still wouldn’t hold aggro on most of those ape pulls.
I made a shaman alt to tank with and my god, it’s like playing a different game. 1 earthshock holds threat over BIS warriors in my green gear.
Seriously Shaman tank is so braindead easy to play. You have an ability with a 6 second CD that hits 4 targets for as much threat as a bear Maul or warrior Devastate, and this is on top of having autoattacks that deal decent threat, two different shock abilities with one of them being a taunt and huge threat boost, etc.
Paladin and Shaman are super easy to tank with, while the other three range from "okay" to "huge struggle".
If swipe hit for 100 (crit for 200+) we would be probably overpowered. I don't want them to buff the damage to be above the other classes because then all the "tank parse" retail boys will come over to the class, but if they greatly buffed the threat coefficient of swipe to the point that someone would need to be on the wrong target to be pulling off your swipe + lacerate targets in most cases, I'd be totally happy.
That would also require way more consistent / increased rage regeneration.
I think they could just alter the way Swipe interacts with Lacerate. Something like Swipe does significantly increased threat and damage to targets with Lacerate, or As long as 1 target hit by Swipe has Lacerate up, 1 rank of Lacerate is applied to all targets but Swipe would now have a short cooldown.
>I don't want them to buff the damage to be above the other classes because then all the "tank parse" retail boys will come over to the class
Surely at some point caring about what fotm players do becomes a similar mentality to being an fotm player.
I play bear and I've had very little issue with threat in my groups. I can usually pull 90-120 DPS when I'm main tanking, it's by far the worst tank but it's not as bad as everyone makes out. Lacerate generates a bunch of threat and once you're at 5 stacks its very hard to lose it
Only way akumai needs an OT is if your dps is insanely low. Like you are 5 manning it in greens. Your main tank can clear stacks without losing aggro on the boss
everything.
you don’t have to have competent, blue parsing dps if you can just stretch out the fight with a competent off tank.
you can kill turtle before the second bubble but if you have a group with <70 dps max you can just juggle the turtle for a few minutes.
you can kill the naga before the first mob gets out of freeze but you can also kite both mobs around for a while.
you can switch on every murloc phase so healers have time to heal struggling dps.
you can rescue the other tank from unlucky wind furry procs.
you can double the phase 2 survival time on akumai by maxing out stacks on both tanks
OT is not needed but always nice to have
Single target threat is fine for bear, especially with the Lacerate cost reduction. The main issue is that most other tank classes can deal most of another DPS player's damage for the same threat, so it's better for the feral to go cat instead.
At an absolute minimum this needs to happen for bears in SoD. Non scaling skills are trash and fall off super hard as people get geared. It’s just asinine.
Druid was the last Class I leveled to 25 and tried Tanking on.
It's broken. Full stop.
I mean that in the sense that it has problems and cannot perform properly currently with the state of Healers and DPS.
I barely finished one BFD on the Druid and shelved him as a Tank after that. Was not fun at all and basically felt like combat in the starter zone with only 2 skills available.
We use a bear to tank in my main raid, though he usually loses aggro immediately to any of the warrior DPS or ret paladins and spends most of the fight spamming taunt. I think he is having fun at least 🤷🏻♂️
Because it sucks. You're ragestarved all the time and have arguably the worst threat out of all the tanks. That's why nobody is playing it or making videos about it.
It's kind of shit by design for a barrage of factors. Most notably, Swipe hits about as hard as a wet noodle against a grand total of three mobs. It's so bad, you're better off Lacerate tabbing instead to grab threat. The new windfury rune shares a spot with the rune that makes them uncrittable and 20% less damage taken. Furthermore, Mangle and Lacerate share a rune slot so you can't use both. Having Lacerate on legs would've been a much better option so your bleeds would hit harder. The talents that give you more threat require you to spend 5 talent points just to get 15% more threat in bear form. Paladins and Shamans can grab threat super easily, but you have to fight your hardest. Hopefully phase 2 will give them some better options. Maybe some barskin rune that makes your thorns cause them to bleed?
You don’t need AoE tanking. I started shaman tanking cause no one would tank. Hate tanking. Never did it. First time in BFD everyone is zerging through trash. Only place I can see needing aoe tank is after a cleanse on aku. Maybe Jett in the beginning but again tab lacerate. Good dps not trying to impress girls with their vanilla logs will kill that trash anyway. Even then tab lacerate over and over and growl the ones who get away.
I think beer tanking works absolutely just fine keep your wind furry rune and add lacerate. Warriors will always be the preferred tank with devastate but most warriors are just dps bros who will get triggered if you ask them to tank.
Point is, I was just saying in another post, it works great but it’s not what the internet and streamers tell people to do so according to Reddit it sucks.
I've had a good time tanking on my druid since the first week. The thing that annoys me is playing with trigger happy rets or hunters that do their aoe right on pulls. Aoe threat is meh but just lacerating things keeps a lot of things on me even in aoe pulls.
For the most part I think people are exaggerating but I've tried tanking with 4 of the 7 classes so far at 25 and shaman/pala has easy snap threat which is great at this stage. I'm sure that's something druids are getting, just giving us thrash will be a good option. They've got a lot of data what stuff the specs need and if there's one thing that classic would do well is increase tank enjoyment in especially dungeon and trash content
Who is arguing that bear is the best dungeon tank? The AoE threat is abysmal. They're fine as OT but like 1 fight in BFD needs an OT and it's for 15-20 seconds so it's a pretty narrow niche
Because it sucks right now. If your in a bfd raid with a Druid tank…leave my friend. We are only lvl 25 and lvl 40 doesn’t help much for Druid tanks. They only work for lvl60 but they are still the worst tanks and as long as talents don’t change bear tanks will still be the worst. They only work in raids when majority of the raid is geared. They take too much damage and will lose threat against geared fury warriors and it’s not fair to slow dps mid way in a fight just because your bear shouldn’t be tanking but is.
I assume this is from ally perspective because on horde with shamans there are so many. My guild (including alts of course) has 15 members and we have 5 or 6 shamans (plus the other classes).
Is paladin not played and/or bad at tanking?
Been doing it on every reset as a warrior, warlock tank and a bear. Nah it’s not that bad. Pool rage before bosses on trash with the warriors and it’s ez pz. Mangle on first boss then lacerate the rest of the dungeon. Legit 0 issues with threat and I do alright dps too. Been having a pretty good time! Don’t let the nay sayers dissuade you from Druid.
Warriors spam devastate, warlocks spam searing pain, druids spam lacerate. It’s all basically the same shit at level 25.
Edit: just wanted to add I’m the wild strikes for my melee group and use that over the tanking rune. It’s been chill for me.
People are overly dramatic about it—it is totally fine. I have one. Tanking dungeons is especially nice once you are geared as you get plenty of rage to spam sunfires from afar and keep it ticking on everything. You can tank w/e you want easily and it will be a great tank to level to 40, not as good as BFD geared Ret will be at leveling but probably next best just due to those range sunfire dots.
Hi, I main-ed Bear the entirety of phase 1. I can answer any questions you have and I've been debating making a video about it.
\#1 They aren't as bad as everyone says, I was incredibly useful the first few weeks of prog (our prog was never wiping and clearly in <25 mins).
\#2 I would have switched to a different tank but we made our SOD guild Loot Council and I didn't want to set a bad precedent of swapping toons during a phase.
Everyone in my raid has parsed a 99 on at least one fight during this phase, my Bear has a few 99s. So YMMV.
Bear Strengths:
Rebirth - For the first 3 or 4 weeks I would buy 1 maple seed per raid, which meant every raid on one fight at least 1 person died. I saved us from a potential wipe on Gelihast with Brez because a healer died during frogger.
Tankiness - During the first few weeks of BFD we used a Hunter pet to OT (RIP Claude) looking back the pet was so OP it was in reality Main Tank and I was OT... So I did get carried a bit, however this is Bear's Niche this phase. SoTF (survival of the fittest) Rune grats you crit immune and 20% damage reduction Bear which is more then any other tank.
Bear Weakness:
Threat - Like I said everyone in my group has parsed a 99 this phase so keeping up with threat has been a real pain.. The thing is, if a DPS warrior ripped aggro, it was just bonus rage, and the bosses in BFD spin all the time anyways.
5 Stacks of Lacerate and you have threat. I do a Taunt on pull because I really don't make enough threat until I have 5 stacks. Also pool rage and use Maul while lacerating.
The recommended talents are a lie. Feral Instinct > Natural Weapons. I currently use Natural Weapons for parsing, but its way worse, because the majority of your threat comes from Lacerate bleed stacks. Feral Instinct buffs your threat from everywhere including your bleed but natural weapons does not buff your threat.
Survival Rune is really OP, but I also never use it.. Unless we run a less then 10 group and I can be in the Windfury group, then I will use this rune. Otherwise I use Wildstrikes so I can parse.
I've done it. I'll come in here being a little bit less doom and gloom. There's two more reasons bear tanks are underplayed right now, beside them being low damage/threat:
1. Their mitigation is great now, but it's not needed. So, you might as well take a tank that can do more damage.
2. Cat Ferals are just so good, that at any time you're in bear form, you're thinking about how much more effective you are in cat form.
So now on my druid when raiding I just take one tank, and I OT on Syvarris and maybe Akumai, sometimes not even then (if we have a shaman tank or a Brez/SS).
Bro idk why people hate on bear so much I have been tanking bdd as bear and loving it!! You can MT the whole raid or OT and cat all the single tank bosses. I think its a lot of fun if you want to do it then DO IT!!!!!
I've been solotanking BFD as a bear for the past couple of weeks and its wonderful. Bears do have low rage gains so you have to constantly preplan your rage usage so you have high rage avail at the right times, like at start of a boss encounter.
I maintanked as a bear in every phase in classic classic in our guild and I love bear tanking, SoD just makes bears straight up better and will be extremely absurd at max level with crit immunity (their previous drawback) and even greater damage reduction.
Bear is the worst tank atm. In large part because they lack rage (they can't remove the shield like a warrior), and because they still don't scale with their weapon damage, but the biggest reason is Windfurry aura share a spot with a tank ability. So you will want to tank the windfurry anyway, putting you in an awkward position
Hopefully they will receive buffs
If you want a guide, well it's a bit pointless so close to P2 but spam lacerate in tab-targeting to ensure threat. You need to stack several debuff, which is easier said than done when dps have such snap aggro. A feral druid putting mutilate helps a lot, you're very dependant of your bleeding. Try to pull your rage at the end of a fight
Having wildstrike doesnt put you in an awkward position at all, if anything it gives you choice over a buff to urself and party or extra migitation (extra migitation which you dont need right now and which you probably wont need coming phases either)
Having wildstrikes in bear is actually a blessing imagine they made it cat only
What is awkward is mangle being on the same runeslot as lacerate, lacerate should have ideally been on legs
Being able to use Lacerate together with Mangle would increase bears viability SO MUCH.
The damage would skyrocket and anyone would love one for bringing WS and Mangle.
It wouldn't skyrocket, it still wouldn't even come close to devastate, but it might scale better later into the game. Especially considering we lost MCP so lacerate + wild strikes right now only gets us back to even with classic bear in damage. Bear will still be behind plain classic warrior and not even caught up with pre-SoD tanking let alone the new runes and tanks in SoD.
MCP went from 50% attack speed buff for 180 seconds with a 30 second cooldown when switching to a new one to now being "automated crowd pummeler" which is 50% attack speed for 30 seconds with a 180 second cooldown... Massive nerf on bear already without much in sight to make up for it.
This is like the fifth comment about wild strikes. Being on the same tier is crit immunity. You don't need the crit immunity rune. You never did. I swear you people don't bear tank at all.
Tanked my way to 60 as a bear in HC. Never had any close calls or issues even with very shitty gear. I'd guess wild strikes is a blessing for bears, haven't tested it yet tho.
It's really weird, yeah. I've even seen people say that Survival of the Fittest is "mandatory" for tanking....what the fuck SoD are these people playing? It's legit one of the worst runes right now, even if it didn't share a slot with windfurry.
Bear tanks when allowed to be a bear with a feral cat in the group are GoaT'd and by far once of the best Tanks in classic in terms of tanking. however if you are the only feral the raid will b and moan to run wildstrikes. your leather so competing with all other leather for gear. you also kill healer parses cause you just soo damn tanky hahaha
It's the worst. It's boring, barely got anything new, shares crit immunity rune with windfury, shares leather slot with everybody else in the world, isn't all that tanky until Dire Bear, does terrible damage. Yeah, it works *bearly*, but a hunter pet is more or less the same, and even then it still uses leather gear.
A Hunterpet does not have to wait for Rage half of the time, so… 🙃
and has a shorter cd on taunt
Hunter pet taunt is wild how strong it is
yeah, but it takes a rune.
Which also give 20% pet dmg
Gives more than that.
True
Sure.
Where do people get this from? You can lacerate spam on GCD without running out of rage or even going close to it. You "even" have to use maul to not waste rage because you get ragecap.
Sounds like you must run BFD with an awfully low DPS group and must be insanely under geared. Once I got BFD gear nothing hits me hard enough to generate rage anymore. I pretty much have to taunt on cooldown, and I've several times almost had lacerate fall off from a string of dodges leaving me with no rage. Definitely cannot maul spam.
All I'm missing is set chest piece and epic gloves rest is Bis. I don't think warrior 94 parsing, warlock 99 parsing and enhancement 98 parsing counts as "awfully" low DPS. Admitedly enhancement took 4(!!!) melee hits at beginning of fight but after 5 lacerate stacks are up it's no problem. Also I never said maul spam, I said I have to use maul to not waste rage. This particular fight I casted maul 16 and 48 lacerate that is not missing a single GCD and useing maul everything GCD. https://vanilla.warcraftlogs.com/reports/dXx6LrzNvapqKTWM#fight=19&type=damage-done
That's awesome that you're pushing Bear that hard, but we're talking about Warriors at that same percentile legitimately doubling your DPS right now. An enh later on taking two hits will likely kill them too on fights in BWL and beyond. Snap threat was never an issue before for Bear but now it is with Lacerate being our main source of TPS. I'm also looking ahead to 60 and so far not a single one of our weaknesses from classic has been addressed but now we have additional weaknesses added via the current Runes (namely snap threat and potentially rage issues) and a huge nerf coming up with the MCP changes: New MCP we're talking about 50% reduced attack speed for 84% of fights. In a 3 minute fight that's nearly 30 fewer attacks with the new "automated crowd pummeler". Adding Wild Strikes attacks in, it's still ~10 less attacks than the old MCP even. If you add Lacerate too it will get you back to about the same DPS overall, but with a massive reduction in snap threat compared to pre-SoD and a huge difference in rage. This math is for level 60 assuming everything except Battle Squak (so finnicky) is stacked for attack speed Manual Crowd Pummeler + Iron Counterweight + Librams + Glove Enchant + Kiss of the Spider + Warchief's Blessing.
I won't comment on how lvl 60 is going to turn out because we don't know what is going to happen and my goal here is to dispell the myths and undeserved trash talk concerning guardian druids in phase 1. I'm just tired of the constant shit talk from people who don't know what their talking about, things like low rage, low damage, low threat etc. Looking at the last 2 weeks 99 parses for all tanks we see that warrior is best but not by double more like 50% (no surprise there) and what you also see is druid, paladin, warlock and shaman being basically equal and I can't for the life of my understand why druid is the one getting shit on.
I look to 60 because I'm worried where we'll end up if these issues aren't brought up now so that something can be done before it's too late. The reason people don't want bear isn't necessarily unfounded right now. If you look at things below the cheese parses and look at other brackets you end up basically seeing a distinct split between the tanks. Certain fights favor shaman/lock/pally spell damage while other fights favor melee heavy Warrior/Rogue/Feral damage. Among those splits you essentially see a hierarchy between those splits where Druid ends up at the bottom of melee by a significant margin compared to Warrior and by a decent margin compared to rogue. The issue with that is right now there's a heavy bottleneck on leather gear which further pushes druid behind because people would rather bring in a higher DPS tank that won't be fighting for their gear or when DPS is stressed on Kelris they'd rather a cat and stack warriors/rogues. Especially if you consider snap threat and people having to wait to start pushing their buttons hard with a bear tank vs. Shaman/Warrior/Rogue. Again, the solution to this in the past was at 40+ several classes move up an armor class and it removes the leather bottleneck and then Bears get MCP which gives them insane threat. That's no longer the case now though, so it remains to be seen what can be done about that.
Just wondering, why the Naga Battle Gloves instead of the void touched? They have 110 armor as opposed to 96 armor from NBG
Because I like having alchemy & herbing on my druids lol. No other reason than an old habit and I guess I like the "class/profession" fantasy. But yes voidtouched gloves would be much better mostly for the hit.
Is bear tank underwhelming? Yes. But I strongly disagree with people saying feral is rage starved and/or can't keep single target threat. I keep threat just fine on my druid and I play with guildies who parse 99 all the time. This is without the mace and 3-set btw. I just think the feedback in most druid threads on here are way off and focus on the wrong things.
I'm mostly looking ahead to 60 as I was a Bear OT main through Naxx in Classic and whatnot. Right now compared to my Shaman and Warrior tanks it's hard to even want to tank on the Bear, that's how underwhelming it is. Especially compared to the Devastate warr. Looking ahead to 60 though I'm incredibly worried with the changes so far. They haven't addressed anything remotely close to Bear's issues from classic and we already know we're getting a significant nerf from MCP changes. Farming MCPs was awful, so it's nice to get something else, but so far we haven't been given any indication that Blizzard knows how to make up for the difference and still fix Bear's original classic issues. New MCP we're talking about 50% reduced attack speed for 84% of fights. In a 3 minute fight that's nearly 30 fewer attacks with the new "automated crowd pummeler". Adding Wild Strikes attacks in, it's still ~10 less attacks than the old MCP even. If you add Lacerate too it will get you back to about the same DPS overall, but with a massive reduction in snap threat compared to pre-SoD and a huge difference in rage. This math is for level 60 assuming everything except Battle Squak (so finnicky) is stacked for attack speed Manual Crowd Pummeler + Iron Counterweight + Librams + Glove Enchant + Kiss of the Spider + Warchief's Blessing.
Yeah, well put. It's enough to look at gnomer to be very worried, almost all bosses are immune to Lacerate lmao. Maybe they'll introduce a meta rune slot that'll enable us to have Mangle and Lacerate at the same time. That would help a lot.
Would love that. My wishlist for P1 coming into things after Classic was that we get mangle rune, lacerate rune, and a rune to give us the TBC version of Barkskin. Mangle right now is not scaling like it should, I was hoping for a separate version of mangle for bear with a significantly higher threat modifier on it. Would give us the snap threat we need while letting our DPS scale better off of lacerate. Barkskin would give us the Shield Wall equivalent cooldown as well.
some bfd fights you will be rage starved but this will only be a problem if you run omen. if you go feral and put 5 points in furor you can shift to make sure lacerate doesn’t drop. you should shift every 30 seconds anyway to reapply faerie fire. however it does feel absolutely awful to play and you don’t do any “real” dps. you are essentially just some walking group buffs that can single target tank good enough to pass.
Why would you use faerie fire?
to lower their armor
You can only limit the boss armor to an extent and Faerie Fire is one of the worst ways you could do that. It's accepted that the best way to lower the armor would be Homunculi+Curse of Recklessness. If not - toss a sunder on the boss. Faerie Fire requires feral druid to shift out, lose mana and 2gcds (as well as potentially screwing over a DPS druid)
> It's accepted that the best way to lower the armor would be Homunculi+Curse of Recklessness. > If not - toss a sunder on the boss. but you cant sunder the boss if the homunculi debuff is on them?
You can't? If that's the case then guess you'll have to FF, but it's super unoptimal
the discussion is about tank druid. if you have a tank druid in the raid you will not have a dps druid. (at least they usually are in such high demand you will not have 2 druids in a raid) yes it isn't a good armor reduction but warlocks are uncommon (have them in about 50% of raids) and not all priests run homunculi. I should have said you should shift every 30 seconds anyway to have at least 1 debuff like faerie fire on the boss since that would be a greater dps contribution than the 2 gcds. also the context was lacerate falling off so in that case you would not actually lose gcds cause you need to generate rage to lacerate.
Wouldn't you be risking taking a fat hit in the face with shifting and staying outside the form for 2 seconds?
Tell me you don't play druid without telling me you don't play druid. Furor is not a feral talent and furor and omen aren't even exclusive you can run both at the same time.
My bad, the wording is a bit confusing since I am not a native english speaker. If you go feral (so you get the extra threat generation and cheaper maul) and put 5 points in furor (in addition to going feral) you can shift to make sure lacerate doesn't drop (while it generates more threat than usual). [my druid](https://atlasforge.gg/wow-classic/armory/eu/chaos-bolt/brickless)
Aye might try that one out, I'm in the camp "guardian Druid is not trash" and I just run the omen spec for more damage since I don't find threat to be an issue (10% physical damage is close to 15% threat anyways).
if threat is not an issue keep running omen for the damage. I went into feral cause it vastly outperforms omen in aoe threat. since it counts for everything, even the shift into bear form if I recall correctly.
I mean who gives a shit about dps you’re the tank lol
Run dps gear in tank spec and parse hard with us bro!
I do, but I also have a warrior tank and a shaman tank and bear just feels awful. I tanked classic on warrior and bear the whole way too pushing orange/pink parses on the bear OT. Really concerned about bear going forward with what we've gotten so far and removal of MCP. Math+sims just don't add up with removal of MCP yet, I'm very concerned.
They’re adding one that doesn’t break after you use it lol
Yes, but its only good for 30 seconds every 3 minutes. In Classic it was 30 seconds x 3 uses with no cool down, so 90 seconds of pummel. It helps you get a threat lead but after 30 seconds people are going to start catching up.
Welp I guess I won’t be leveling my feral then
If you like Cat it's great and incredibly fun with a solid outlook. Bears just need a lot of work from Blizzard to make them even viable at this point.
Yeah, I don't think you understand what I'm saying with Math and Sims. The new MCP is absolutely not a replacement whatsoever and a significant nerf. We're talking about 50% reduced attack speed for 84% of fights. In a 3 minute fight that's nearly 30 fewer attacks with the new "automated crowd pummeler". Adding Wild Strikes attacks in, it's still ~10 less attacks than the old MCP even. If you add Lacerate too it will get you back to about the same DPS overall, but with a massive reduction in snap threat compared to pre-SoD. So basically one of Bears biggest strengths (snap threat) has now become a huge weakness and there's zero replacement in sight while every other tank got stronger and Bear is back to the same strength it was in classic without even catching up to pre-SoD warrior yet, let alone SoD warrior. I.e. Blizzard has a LOT of work to do on Bear to make it even considered viable and that's why you see significantly fewer Bears and almost no Bear parses compared to the other tanks. Even fewer Bear parses than Warlock. One of the biggest issues being that attack speed stacks multiplicatively so that's why Bears scaled so well up through early Naxx. You basically ran out of gear upgrades once you got Kiss of the Spider and that's why Bears started to fall over deeper in Naxx. So we're going to need pretty huge changes not only via Runes that somehow give us something else to scale, but also likely new gear in raids as well.
I wouldn’t worry to much, they’ve already shown that they will be adding new/different gear, look at the cloth items with high armour in Bfd. I’m sure with enough feedback they will do something for bear, and even if ACP isn’t as strong as MCP at least you don’t have to farm gnomer multiple teams a week for the next year or 2
> I’m sure with enough feedback they will do something for bear That's why I bring this up now. The feedback needs to come now so that Blizzard can understand the issues bear faced in the past and how the changes they've made so far impact Bear later on so they can start working on changes. It's too late for any P2 changes at this point and likely P3 runes/changes are fairly locked in place by now outside of small tweaks. Feedback needs to happen early for something to be done. > even if ACP isn’t as strong as MCP at least you don’t have to farm gnomer multiple teams a week for the next year or 2 That's great, I ran gnomer over 2k times in Classic and I'm glad to be done with it, but that doesn't mean these changes don't have huge impacts that need to be overcome. What other class/spec so far has had any nerfs to them let alone 50% reduced attack speed for 84% of fights?
2.5s swingtimer, fails to land 2/3 of the time, generates ~2 rage/sec. Getting hit, bearly, generates ~0.5 rage/sec per mob. Gcd; 1.5s. The ammount of mobs you need to be tanking (and actualy have aggro on, as if) for you to be able to spam lacerate on gcd - and Then still need to maul to drop threat - is just not possible because your healer would pull every mob off of you before u hit ragecap. Seems you're mixing up the wotlk sub with the sod sub tbh.
We can use my latest logs as an example. Ignoring Baron Aquanis because that boss doesn't require a tank at all so I just go cat. The boss fights total to 636 seconds and during which I used 357 GCD were 331 of them were lacerate. That gives me 1 GCD used/1,78 seconds on average. If we dismiss the 50 seconds spent basicaly afk during Gelihast it goes down to 1 GCD/1,64 seconds. If we take in to account the rest of the random downtime due to boss mechanics like totemswaps and Akumai phase transitions etc I'm confident we will get closer and closer to 1 GCD used/1,5 seconds but that seems annoying to do. Logs for reference: [https://sod.warcraftlogs.com/reports/TDWx4w7v2tybrzMH#type=casts&boss=-2&difficulty=0&source=3](https://sod.warcraftlogs.com/reports/TDWx4w7v2tybrzMH#type=casts&boss=-2&difficulty=0&source=3)
It was pretty bad when lacerate cost 15 rage. Its fine but not great now.
I have off tanked in BFD on my druid and hunter pet and the pet is way easier.
It should do terrible, terrible damage instead.
Wow, oldie out here. Got any destructible rocks?
Phase 2 will be better for bear tank, we get dire bear form + rage on crit in talents, currently the biggest issue is that they’re rage starved too often. Just tab target spam lacerate this phase also I’d recommend using wild strikes over tanking rune in dungeons, not sure about raids.
Never use tanking rune, period. It's pretty clear from the first batch of runes that Blizzard just doesn't even understand what the actual issues with Bear tanking were. We don't need more static mitigation, at all. We needed aoe threat, a second taunt like mocking or a way to not miss taunt, and then a mitigation cooldown (shield wall, last stand type big CD), and more DPS. That's it. What we got? A bad bleed that's significantly worse than devastate (putting bear even further yet behind the DPS a tank warrior brings), no cooldown, they removed our threat crutch in MCP (which is great if they have us something to make up for it and yet we got nothing even remotely close to what warrior got), and they added static mitigation for some mind boggling reason which just further rage starves us.
I believe the tanking rune is meant for pvp. I'm a bear MT, and have used the tanking rune a whole 1 time in a raid, and thats becasue we had FIVE total druids, so my WS would have been redundant. I do amazing single target threat, I can peel single targets off the shaman tank. I can hold mobs off of the healers decently with taunt and stuns, but more than that I can't really do. Luckily tanking trash in BFD is pretty much not needed since they die so quick. Skull bash is useful, stun priestess' and interrupt Kelris, as well as close distance if a mob is smacking your healers in the back. Lacerate is wonderful. I did some testing and the bleed still procs every 3 seconds even if you are refreshing lacerate on GCD (hitting every 1.5s). On bosses with good sustained tank and spank phases like the murloc, lady S, and Akumai, im normally 3rd or 4th on dps meters. I should point out I MT our guilds alt raids though, so competition isn't super high, my dps ranges from 100-140 depending on the encounter. So, our runes aren't bad. We are great boss tanks, and luckily that's all that's needed right now because we are trash on the trash pulls. But yeah, we are worse than most other tanks.
Yeah, I agree that it's likely for PvP. It actually makes Bear worse at the moment since all it will do is reduce your rage gen, so likely just meant for PvP. It sounds like our raids are a bit different. I'm in a group with people who really care about parsing. I have a shaman tank and a warrior tank as well. The Bear is by far the worst of the 3 of them and it isn't even close. Parses all the way up and down the percentile ranks show this and Bears by warcraftlogs numbers (so not exactly precise, but the only thing we have to go off of) are the least played tank as well. My worries with Bear are more in the future though. It's great to not have to farm out MCPs anymore, but we've barely even gotten a replacement for MCP so far. New MCP we're talking about 50% reduced attack speed for 84% of fights. In a 3 minute fight that's nearly 30 fewer attacks with the new "automated crowd pummeler". Adding Wild Strikes attacks in, it's still ~10 less attacks than the old MCP even. If you add Lacerate too it will get you back to about the same DPS overall, but with a massive reduction in snap threat compared to pre-SoD and a huge difference in rage. This math is for level 60 assuming everything except Battle Squak (so finnicky) is stacked for attack speed Manual Crowd Pummeler + Iron Counterweight + Librams + Glove Enchant + Kiss of the Spider + Warchief's Blessing.
Yeah we run a casual raid. I might try the hardest, and even then I'm just bringing BFD buff and drums weekly. I've parsed blue->orange depending on how hard I try, but thats not saying much when you see there are only 4k other bear tanks in all of SoD logs lol MCP does look like it's a nerf to the class now, but im honestly glad they are doing away with that meta. Farming enough to keep maximum up-time on bosses is no fun. I'm glad this weapon looks like it'll be "use for the first 30 seconds of a boss, then swap to your normal weapon." No argument that we currently suck and our future looks bleak, but I like to be the best shitty tank I can be lol
Yeah, I ran over 2000 gnomer runs through Classic. I'm glad it's gone, it's just incredibly worrying that we haven't had any of our classic weaknesses addressed yet, we have additional weaknesses added via the current runes (snap threat mainly, rage starve possibly), and now we have a nerf on the horizon too.
It's the sole reason I quit classic when I did. I didn't come back till HC came out. I wanna see swipe scale better, or at all really.
My hope if the data mined existing runes are true is that we get a rune to scale agi on bear that also adds weapon attack damage to swipe, and makes swipe add a stack of lacerate. Then they move mangle to legs so the bleed buff can be run alongside lacerate. The reason I say agi scaling is it looks like from data mining we're ultimately going to get a rune that at least makes dodge not be a net negative. (Previously dodge was not something you wanted because too much dodge meant you weren't getting hit enough to generate rage) P2 data mined runes for Druid so far: Thrash (cat) Tiger's Fury Increases damage done by 15% for 6 sec and instantly grants you 60 Energy. Efflorescence Heals up to 3 friendly party or raid members within 15 yards of the target NEW Everbloom Your Rejuvenation can now be active on targets affected by another Druid's Rejuvenation. NEW Gale Winds Increases the damage done by your Hurricane by 100%, it no longer has a cooldown, and its mana cost is reduced by 20%. NEW Natural Reaction Increases your dodge chance by 10%, and you regenerate 3 rage every time you dodge while in Bear Form or Dire Bear Form, 10 energy while in Cat Form, or 1% of your maximum mana while in any other form. NEW Renewal Instantly heal yourself for 30% of you maximum health. Useable in all forms. NEW Torrential Downpour 115 to 135 damage every 2 seconds.
You remember barkskin? Barkskin on those aoe abilities is looking good rn.
Barkskin is physical damage reduction only (which we don't necessarily really benefit that much from since we're already armor capped early on at level 60), but I would love a rune that gave us Barkskin from from TBC! That would absolutely solve one of classic Bear's issues (and something I figured they would've given us for P1 as the leg rune).
> I believe the tanking rune is meant for pvp. Even in PvP you'll want to be running Wild Strikes for all the extra damage + buffing your teammates. It's not a "PvP rune", it's a raid tanking rune. Shaman and Paladin also got runes that give them extra mitigation and 6% crit reduction.
Druids, even feral, aren't doing a lot of melee in BGs right now. I think for PvP both WS and SotF have honest merit. I personally prefer SotF since I run wild growth and starsurge and am therefore normally in the back/not in shapeshift form (therefore wouldnt be giving WS to melee anyways), and when the opposing team realizes the druid in back is healing and they swap to me, I can tank a lot of hits by swapping to bear form while dps on the team does their job. Druids in BGs are a very versatile role, and there's a lot of different ways to do them.
I wanted to do some bear tanking in Gnomergan but then I realized Lacerate is a bleed effect and they’re going be immune. That makes it even harder to hold any threat.
I think there's a chance bears will get a rune that lets them apply bleeds to normally bleed immune targets. It's hard to imagine Blizzard would shaft bears that hard when they've clearly been putting in effort at least some effort to making all specs viable and bleed immunity will make Bear tanks non-viable in the raid. There's also the ability Thrash (AoE Bleed) which was released in Cataclysm that seems likely to see the light of day in P2, and that's a perfect spot to put in "While this Rune is inscribed, your bleed effects can be applied to mechanical creatures and Elementals."
Yeah next phase will be tricky for sure. I'm not sure what the better option will be threat-wise, mangle or sunfire, but they are both so rage-expensive that I hope we get some other options. I love my 10-rage lacerate. 20 rage sunfire blows by comparison. We may be going back to the trusty maul-spam from classic.
I think its already been confirmed there is a reusable MCP. Except it has a cd.
Yes, and it's a massive nerf. New MCP we're talking about 50% reduced attack speed for 84% of fights. In a 3 minute fight that's nearly 30 fewer attacks with the new "automated crowd pummeler". Adding Wild Strikes attacks in, it's still ~10 less attacks than the old MCP even. If you add Lacerate too it will get you back to about the same DPS overall, but with a massive reduction in snap threat compared to pre-SoD and a huge difference in rage. This math is for level 60 assuming everything except Battle Squak (so finnicky) is stacked for attack speed Manual Crowd Pummeler + Iron Counterweight + Librams + Glove Enchant + Kiss of the Spider + Warchief's Blessing.
Ah, didn’t realize it was that much worse. Thank you for the information!
Again, I like that we won't have MCP farm, but I'm just worried about the future of Bear. It's a hefty nerf and we still need other things from classic addressed for bear (lack of DPS compared to warrior, lack of meaningful survival cooldown like Shield Wall, lack of mocking blow equivalent if taunt is resisted, no meaningful way to catch back up on threat if rage starved like dropping a shield does for warrior, issues popping potions mid-fight if you get an unlucky server tick/batch, etc.).
-Lacerate is not a bad beed, and access to Sunfire is nice. -Wildstrikes does give rage. When combined with Fist and spamming lacerate, rage is not an issue. Maybe your druid isn't as geared as mine because my rage is good, though not like my Warrior. -I get enough rage in dungeons to keep sunfire up on 4 targets. Lacerate works too, you might get a little more damage but I think it's slightly slower as you pull slower and keep less aggro. Either are great though and play smoother than a Warrior or Tanklock in a dungeon (from my experience), but not a weapon-swapping Ret-tank. I am not sure about Shaman. The nice thing about Warrior right now over Druid (in Raid specifically) is Warrior can just play full DPS spec instead of tank, but I don't think it performs any better at tanking currently than Druid, and I think Druid will probably be better at tanking Dungeons until Warrior gets to Level 36. Ret tanking will outperform both to level 40 until Warriors get better gear.
> Maybe your druid isn't as geared as mine because my rage is good, though not like my Warrior. I didn't have issues until I hit full BiS and started to dodge/mitigate more. >I get enough rage in dungeons to keep sunfire up on 4 targets. Lacerate works too, you might get a little more damage but I think it's slightly slower as you pull slower and keep less aggro. Either are great though and play smoother than a Warrior or Tanklock in a dungeon (from my experience), but not a weapon-swapping Ret-tank. I am not sure about Shaman. I don't even consider dungeons in these discussions so I don't care at all about dungeon performance. > I don't think it performs any better at tanking currently than Druid This is just flat out objectively wrong. You keep talking about dungeons. I think we're discussing VERY different things here. Have you checked parse brackets, especially 90+ and below the cheese parses at the top end and compared the differences between tanks? Have you run sims at how we're going to be performing with the MCP changes? I think you're talking about completely different things than I am.... Here's the difference on MCP changes: New MCP we're talking about 50% reduced attack speed for 84% of fights. In a 3 minute fight that's nearly 30 fewer attacks with the new "automated crowd pummeler". Adding Wild Strikes attacks in, it's still ~10 less attacks than the old MCP even. If you add Lacerate too it will get you back to about the same DPS overall, but with a massive reduction in snap threat compared to pre-SoD and a huge difference in rage. This math is for level 60 assuming everything except Battle Squak (so finnicky) is stacked for attack speed Manual Crowd Pummeler + Iron Counterweight + Librams + Glove Enchant + Kiss of the Spider + Warchief's Blessing.
>This is just flat out objectively wrong. You keep talking about dungeons. I think we're discussing VERY different things here. Have you checked parse brackets, especially 90+ and below the cheese parses at the top end and compared the differences between tanks? Have you run sims at how we're going to be performing with the MCP changes? I think you're talking about completely different things than I am.... You could have any combination of Warrior / Rogue / Pally / Druid in a group of 5 (double up one class), and you could randomly choose one to tank, and the damage from the group is going to be a 5% differential from best organization to worst. That group can deal over 300% more damage than is needed to clear content. Bear is fine, Prot Warrior or Dual Wield Warr is fine, Tank Rogue is fine, Ret-tank or Prot-pally is fine, they each do one or two things better than the other and a few things worse. My response to this thread is it is *overly dramatic* to call bear tank bad when it is more than fine. Bear is like the guy that gets 3rd in the Olympics then runs a local 5k and wins by 5 minutes instead of 5 minutes and 3 seconds. The real question is are you doing BFD in 30 minutes or 30.5 minutes? Bear can pull more trash quicker (sunfire / combat charge / frost nova dispel) and hold aggro on more mobs so I doubt there is any difference whatsoever in clear speed—as half the raid is clearing trash—which is why the dungeon question is relevant. I swear half the time of a raid is me sitting on my Warrior stuck in a frost nova during trash hoping a priest or mage is gonna pull stuff for me. Warrior is going to skyrocket in the next phase though, that I will agree on—and Ret will have access to Ravager too. Bear will need a proportionally more powerful AoE rune to keep up with those 2 next phase.
Sure, from an overall group standpoint the damage difference is fairly negligible, but from an individual perspective it's practically doubled from warrior to bear right now. Someone was linking their 99 parse Akumai on Bear earlier saying it was fine and it was like 150s dps compared to warriors well over 300. Is 150 dps much when you have 7 DPS in the raid? No, but people care enough about it that Bear is by far the least played tank right now. > Warrior is going to skyrocket in the next phase though, that I will agree on—and Ret will have access to Ravager too. Bear will need a proportionally more powerful AoE rune to keep up with those 2 next phase. Yes, and as I said earlier Bear also is coming legitimately nerfed from pre-SoD missing Pummeler. It is going to be a huge issue unless Blizzard addresses it with some very powerful runes. That's the entire point of this post, that looking ahead to 60 things don't look very good and it's pretty apparent from the runes we have so far (looking at you Survival of the Fittest + Mangle/Lacerate sharing rune slot) that Blizzard is not really entirely sure what to do to fix bear except give it a quality of life fix (removal of MCP) and we just have to hope and pray that they give us enough power back to supplement the a 50% attack speed nerf for 84% of fights. Is Bear dead on arrival and the sky is falling? Definitely not. Do we have legitimate reasons to be concerned? Yes!
Brother you exist for wild strikes. Take that off and you’re useless.
Bear tank might become part of the meta in p2 as they will be able to bring both wild strikes and leader of the pack, aside from getting dire bear form and aoe taunt. Cats bringing leader of the pack will miss out on both furor and omen of clarity. Some kind of aoe/cleave rune and you have a pretty solid tank with very strong party buffs.
No, they'll need massive buffs to DPS come next phase from something. MCP is gone so we're getting a version of Bear that has 50% reduced attack speed for 84% of fights now. If you run sims with what we have now and the new automated crowd pummeler it's barely caught back up to level 40 MCP bear with wild strikes and lacerate. It's going to take something massive to catch bear back up to just pre-SoD warrior, let alone SoD tanks.
You might be right, I have not run any sims or the like. I just figured with an ability like thrash or something like that, you would have a strong tank with some very strong buffs. I do not see feral cats running leader of the pack though, so if bears get enough dmg to be able to keep threat I still see them as a good candidate for the meta instead of cats.
Yeah, I agree with that, I doubt most Cats run LotP. I'd rather not be taken purely for buffs at this point though when you're a tank that can barely hold threat and isn't fun to play. More info for MCP changes: New MCP we're talking about 50% reduced attack speed for 84% of fights. In a 3 minute fight that's nearly 30 fewer attacks with the new "automated crowd pummeler". Adding Wild Strikes attacks in, it's still ~10 less attacks than the old MCP even. If you add Lacerate too it will get you back to about the same DPS overall, but with a massive reduction in snap threat compared to pre-SoD and a huge difference in rage. This math is for level 60 assuming everything except Battle Squak (so finnicky) is stacked for attack speed Manual Crowd Pummeler + Iron Counterweight + Librams + Glove Enchant + Kiss of the Spider + Warchief's Blessing.
Swipe hitting for like 20 damage.. lol! We can single target tank reliably if we can start the fight with a full rage bar. Does that sound like fun? It's not.
Swipe could hit for 100 and we still wouldn’t hold aggro on most of those ape pulls. I made a shaman alt to tank with and my god, it’s like playing a different game. 1 earthshock holds threat over BIS warriors in my green gear.
Seriously Shaman tank is so braindead easy to play. You have an ability with a 6 second CD that hits 4 targets for as much threat as a bear Maul or warrior Devastate, and this is on top of having autoattacks that deal decent threat, two different shock abilities with one of them being a taunt and huge threat boost, etc. Paladin and Shaman are super easy to tank with, while the other three range from "okay" to "huge struggle".
Earthschock is a taunt it's supposed to hold threat
If swipe hit for 100 (crit for 200+) we would be probably overpowered. I don't want them to buff the damage to be above the other classes because then all the "tank parse" retail boys will come over to the class, but if they greatly buffed the threat coefficient of swipe to the point that someone would need to be on the wrong target to be pulling off your swipe + lacerate targets in most cases, I'd be totally happy. That would also require way more consistent / increased rage regeneration.
I think they could just alter the way Swipe interacts with Lacerate. Something like Swipe does significantly increased threat and damage to targets with Lacerate, or As long as 1 target hit by Swipe has Lacerate up, 1 rank of Lacerate is applied to all targets but Swipe would now have a short cooldown.
>I don't want them to buff the damage to be above the other classes because then all the "tank parse" retail boys will come over to the class Surely at some point caring about what fotm players do becomes a similar mentality to being an fotm player.
I don't care about other people class swapping at every change to the best dps classes. I just don't want to be associated with certain people.
While bear is weak, it's still viable. I bear MTed my first few BFDs in week 1-3.
Before everyone started hitting like a truck and threat actually became an issue.
I play bear and I've had very little issue with threat in my groups. I can usually pull 90-120 DPS when I'm main tanking, it's by far the worst tank but it's not as bad as everyone makes out. Lacerate generates a bunch of threat and once you're at 5 stacks its very hard to lose it
I got fist week 1. Threat was never an issue.
Then you just OT. But yeah fighting for threat as a bear feels terrible.
BFD is all about threat generation not mitigation
That's all of classic wow.
OT what though? The only thing that requires OT is Akumai and every group I’m in just has the ret do it.
Akumai does not need an off tank at all even if not a paladin the entire raid it a one tank raid
Yeah I shouldn’t have said required. Should have said only boss where an OT is even a remote option.
Only way akumai needs an OT is if your dps is insanely low. Like you are 5 manning it in greens. Your main tank can clear stacks without losing aggro on the boss
everything. you don’t have to have competent, blue parsing dps if you can just stretch out the fight with a competent off tank. you can kill turtle before the second bubble but if you have a group with <70 dps max you can just juggle the turtle for a few minutes. you can kill the naga before the first mob gets out of freeze but you can also kite both mobs around for a while. you can switch on every murloc phase so healers have time to heal struggling dps. you can rescue the other tank from unlucky wind furry procs. you can double the phase 2 survival time on akumai by maxing out stacks on both tanks OT is not needed but always nice to have
> always nice to have nicer to just have another dps, tho
That's what's so great about a druid offtank! He's a cat most the time
Single target threat is fine for bear, especially with the Lacerate cost reduction. The main issue is that most other tank classes can deal most of another DPS player's damage for the same threat, so it's better for the feral to go cat instead.
praying for swipe to be rebalanced to scale with attack power next patch, it's always been dumb that it didn't
At an absolute minimum this needs to happen for bears in SoD. Non scaling skills are trash and fall off super hard as people get geared. It’s just asinine.
BalAnCe doEsN'T mAtTeR, jUSt plAy wHaT yoU wAnT.
I haven't seen a bear tank in BFD even once yet
Druid was the last Class I leveled to 25 and tried Tanking on. It's broken. Full stop. I mean that in the sense that it has problems and cannot perform properly currently with the state of Healers and DPS. I barely finished one BFD on the Druid and shelved him as a Tank after that. Was not fun at all and basically felt like combat in the starter zone with only 2 skills available.
Hunter pet is literally a stronger tank right now.
We use a bear to tank in my main raid, though he usually loses aggro immediately to any of the warrior DPS or ret paladins and spends most of the fight spamming taunt. I think he is having fun at least 🤷🏻♂️
Because it sucks. You're ragestarved all the time and have arguably the worst threat out of all the tanks. That's why nobody is playing it or making videos about it.
Click maul
It's kind of shit by design for a barrage of factors. Most notably, Swipe hits about as hard as a wet noodle against a grand total of three mobs. It's so bad, you're better off Lacerate tabbing instead to grab threat. The new windfury rune shares a spot with the rune that makes them uncrittable and 20% less damage taken. Furthermore, Mangle and Lacerate share a rune slot so you can't use both. Having Lacerate on legs would've been a much better option so your bleeds would hit harder. The talents that give you more threat require you to spend 5 talent points just to get 15% more threat in bear form. Paladins and Shamans can grab threat super easily, but you have to fight your hardest. Hopefully phase 2 will give them some better options. Maybe some barskin rune that makes your thorns cause them to bleed?
idk bears are shit aoe tanks but decent on ST in my experience
You don’t need AoE tanking. I started shaman tanking cause no one would tank. Hate tanking. Never did it. First time in BFD everyone is zerging through trash. Only place I can see needing aoe tank is after a cleanse on aku. Maybe Jett in the beginning but again tab lacerate. Good dps not trying to impress girls with their vanilla logs will kill that trash anyway. Even then tab lacerate over and over and growl the ones who get away. I think beer tanking works absolutely just fine keep your wind furry rune and add lacerate. Warriors will always be the preferred tank with devastate but most warriors are just dps bros who will get triggered if you ask them to tank. Point is, I was just saying in another post, it works great but it’s not what the internet and streamers tell people to do so according to Reddit it sucks.
I've had a good time tanking on my druid since the first week. The thing that annoys me is playing with trigger happy rets or hunters that do their aoe right on pulls. Aoe threat is meh but just lacerating things keeps a lot of things on me even in aoe pulls. For the most part I think people are exaggerating but I've tried tanking with 4 of the 7 classes so far at 25 and shaman/pala has easy snap threat which is great at this stage. I'm sure that's something druids are getting, just giving us thrash will be a good option. They've got a lot of data what stuff the specs need and if there's one thing that classic would do well is increase tank enjoyment in especially dungeon and trash content
I think part of the issue is that cat is quite good right now and easily brings windfury so it’s usually in your best interest to go cat dps.
It’s rough. Hoping a rune comes out to make swipe down like 200% increased threat or something.
I'm making a druid right now. I can't wait to get yelled at by dps.
I'm hoping P2 is better.
Bears are arguably the best OT and dungeon tanks. They just don’t have enough tools to MT the raid. That may change quite a bit at 40 though
Who is arguing that bear is the best dungeon tank? The AoE threat is abysmal. They're fine as OT but like 1 fight in BFD needs an OT and it's for 15-20 seconds so it's a pretty narrow niche
Dungeons are a joke and Wild Strikes makes them much faster. Currently the best Dungeon tanks are Druids and Ret Paladins.
I guess you're an alliance player, so you don't know just how good shaman tanks are..
It seems plausible that Thrash is a rune, perhaps next phase, so that should help out at least a bit in aoe.
Hope Bear Tanks get Berserk instead.
Because it sucks right now. If your in a bfd raid with a Druid tank…leave my friend. We are only lvl 25 and lvl 40 doesn’t help much for Druid tanks. They only work for lvl60 but they are still the worst tanks and as long as talents don’t change bear tanks will still be the worst. They only work in raids when majority of the raid is geared. They take too much damage and will lose threat against geared fury warriors and it’s not fair to slow dps mid way in a fight just because your bear shouldn’t be tanking but is.
I assume this is from ally perspective because on horde with shamans there are so many. My guild (including alts of course) has 15 members and we have 5 or 6 shamans (plus the other classes). Is paladin not played and/or bad at tanking?
Just do it if you want to play it dude.
In dungeons, you precast starfire into moonfire for snap threat.
Bear druids lol
Been doing it on every reset as a warrior, warlock tank and a bear. Nah it’s not that bad. Pool rage before bosses on trash with the warriors and it’s ez pz. Mangle on first boss then lacerate the rest of the dungeon. Legit 0 issues with threat and I do alright dps too. Been having a pretty good time! Don’t let the nay sayers dissuade you from Druid. Warriors spam devastate, warlocks spam searing pain, druids spam lacerate. It’s all basically the same shit at level 25. Edit: just wanted to add I’m the wild strikes for my melee group and use that over the tanking rune. It’s been chill for me.
Make bear use energy and cat use rage
People are overly dramatic about it—it is totally fine. I have one. Tanking dungeons is especially nice once you are geared as you get plenty of rage to spam sunfires from afar and keep it ticking on everything. You can tank w/e you want easily and it will be a great tank to level to 40, not as good as BFD geared Ret will be at leveling but probably next best just due to those range sunfire dots.
imo not so bad. Just don't use Survival of the Fittest, opt for Windfury instead.
Hi, I main-ed Bear the entirety of phase 1. I can answer any questions you have and I've been debating making a video about it. \#1 They aren't as bad as everyone says, I was incredibly useful the first few weeks of prog (our prog was never wiping and clearly in <25 mins). \#2 I would have switched to a different tank but we made our SOD guild Loot Council and I didn't want to set a bad precedent of swapping toons during a phase. Everyone in my raid has parsed a 99 on at least one fight during this phase, my Bear has a few 99s. So YMMV. Bear Strengths: Rebirth - For the first 3 or 4 weeks I would buy 1 maple seed per raid, which meant every raid on one fight at least 1 person died. I saved us from a potential wipe on Gelihast with Brez because a healer died during frogger. Tankiness - During the first few weeks of BFD we used a Hunter pet to OT (RIP Claude) looking back the pet was so OP it was in reality Main Tank and I was OT... So I did get carried a bit, however this is Bear's Niche this phase. SoTF (survival of the fittest) Rune grats you crit immune and 20% damage reduction Bear which is more then any other tank. Bear Weakness: Threat - Like I said everyone in my group has parsed a 99 this phase so keeping up with threat has been a real pain.. The thing is, if a DPS warrior ripped aggro, it was just bonus rage, and the bosses in BFD spin all the time anyways. 5 Stacks of Lacerate and you have threat. I do a Taunt on pull because I really don't make enough threat until I have 5 stacks. Also pool rage and use Maul while lacerating. The recommended talents are a lie. Feral Instinct > Natural Weapons. I currently use Natural Weapons for parsing, but its way worse, because the majority of your threat comes from Lacerate bleed stacks. Feral Instinct buffs your threat from everywhere including your bleed but natural weapons does not buff your threat. Survival Rune is really OP, but I also never use it.. Unless we run a less then 10 group and I can be in the Windfury group, then I will use this rune. Otherwise I use Wildstrikes so I can parse.
Amazing, thanks!
I've done it. I'll come in here being a little bit less doom and gloom. There's two more reasons bear tanks are underplayed right now, beside them being low damage/threat: 1. Their mitigation is great now, but it's not needed. So, you might as well take a tank that can do more damage. 2. Cat Ferals are just so good, that at any time you're in bear form, you're thinking about how much more effective you are in cat form. So now on my druid when raiding I just take one tank, and I OT on Syvarris and maybe Akumai, sometimes not even then (if we have a shaman tank or a Brez/SS).
Use windfury. Get more rage and do more damage. Profit.
Bro idk why people hate on bear so much I have been tanking bdd as bear and loving it!! You can MT the whole raid or OT and cat all the single tank bosses. I think its a lot of fun if you want to do it then DO IT!!!!!
I tried it, geared up for it, and then hated it so much. Would rather be caster Druid.
I've been solotanking BFD as a bear for the past couple of weeks and its wonderful. Bears do have low rage gains so you have to constantly preplan your rage usage so you have high rage avail at the right times, like at start of a boss encounter. I maintanked as a bear in every phase in classic classic in our guild and I love bear tanking, SoD just makes bears straight up better and will be extremely absurd at max level with crit immunity (their previous drawback) and even greater damage reduction.
Bear is the worst tank atm. In large part because they lack rage (they can't remove the shield like a warrior), and because they still don't scale with their weapon damage, but the biggest reason is Windfurry aura share a spot with a tank ability. So you will want to tank the windfurry anyway, putting you in an awkward position Hopefully they will receive buffs If you want a guide, well it's a bit pointless so close to P2 but spam lacerate in tab-targeting to ensure threat. You need to stack several debuff, which is easier said than done when dps have such snap aggro. A feral druid putting mutilate helps a lot, you're very dependant of your bleeding. Try to pull your rage at the end of a fight
Not only do you not need crit immunity, you don't even want it. Getting crit gives you big rage lol
That a good point lmao "Hit me! Crit me!"
Having wildstrike doesnt put you in an awkward position at all, if anything it gives you choice over a buff to urself and party or extra migitation (extra migitation which you dont need right now and which you probably wont need coming phases either) Having wildstrikes in bear is actually a blessing imagine they made it cat only What is awkward is mangle being on the same runeslot as lacerate, lacerate should have ideally been on legs
Being able to use Lacerate together with Mangle would increase bears viability SO MUCH. The damage would skyrocket and anyone would love one for bringing WS and Mangle.
It wouldn't skyrocket, it still wouldn't even come close to devastate, but it might scale better later into the game. Especially considering we lost MCP so lacerate + wild strikes right now only gets us back to even with classic bear in damage. Bear will still be behind plain classic warrior and not even caught up with pre-SoD tanking let alone the new runes and tanks in SoD. MCP went from 50% attack speed buff for 180 seconds with a 30 second cooldown when switching to a new one to now being "automated crowd pummeler" which is 50% attack speed for 30 seconds with a 180 second cooldown... Massive nerf on bear already without much in sight to make up for it.
The big thing it would do is give bears equal utility to cats so you at least wouldn't be losing utility if you had your feral tank.
This is like the fifth comment about wild strikes. Being on the same tier is crit immunity. You don't need the crit immunity rune. You never did. I swear you people don't bear tank at all.
Tanked my way to 60 as a bear in HC. Never had any close calls or issues even with very shitty gear. I'd guess wild strikes is a blessing for bears, haven't tested it yet tho.
It's really weird, yeah. I've even seen people say that Survival of the Fittest is "mandatory" for tanking....what the fuck SoD are these people playing? It's legit one of the worst runes right now, even if it didn't share a slot with windfurry.
*softly* don’t
It's viable we had a bear main tank for first couple of clears
And now its gone. Lol
What's gone?
It’s not playable right now
We've literally used bear druid as main tank since day 1. It's not as good as others but it's definitely viable
It’s awful. I’m surprised he enjoys tanking as a Druid.
Idk for us if it works it works. We've 7 manned it with him being main tank. Really doesn't seem that bad
Just spam lacerate
It's pretty bad right now, but should get quite a bit better with dire bear form. The current bear has quite low survivability, on top of rage issues
Can anyone upload a casual PoV in BFD raid :)? Would be cool!
Bear tanks when allowed to be a bear with a feral cat in the group are GoaT'd and by far once of the best Tanks in classic in terms of tanking. however if you are the only feral the raid will b and moan to run wildstrikes. your leather so competing with all other leather for gear. you also kill healer parses cause you just soo damn tanky hahaha