How to fix Druid Swipe Tanking?

[elapadrinar]

melee gcd is 1.5 seconds and unaffected by haste unlike spell gcd. there are plenty of post and threads on this site alone that can show you this just look at post about haste and how it sucks that no matter how fast you can get your melee swings all the skills that are on gcd are still stuck at 1.5 seconds. also look at mangle, its base cd is 6 seconds 4x global cool down, meaning that you could do 3 skills after its cool down before it would be back up. the tallent droped it by 0.5 per point for 3 points 1 gcd so you could do 2 skills before it was back up.

http://elitistjerks.com/f47/t15393-global_cooldown/
The answer is on the 3rd line of the article.

The reason melee GCD is unaffected by haste is because the minimum GCD anyone can have, including haste stacking casters is 1.0 seconds.
And haste does not suck. It is just as good as hit and scales better then hit. And since maul isnt on the GCD, assuming unlimited rage (ie. boss fight), you can maul more often which is significant.

[Odrok]

If it is fine, then please explain how to keep aggro on the Bronzebeard event in Heroic Halls of Stone. Post a video if you can. I would really like to see how you were able to swipe your way to victory here. It is easy on the first 6 pulls, but once the Golems start coming everything goes batshit crazy. If your DPS is going to do their job effectively and down them quickly, then you are going to lose agggro. I sincerely would like to know how to do this. Maybe I was in a bad group, but we wiped about 7 times in a row before finally inching in a victory + the achievement. I saw a paladin tank do it on youtube and made it look rather effortless. We wiped on our run again but the event had timed out on our last second alive.

[Bradski]

You should be happy that tanking actually is a "challenge" for you, as for deathknights, it's as easy as dropping one aoe, take a chillpill and wait for the mobs to die, i'm actually dissapointed that blizzard have made tanking so easy nowadays .

[Sulika]

Maybe learn to mark targets?

[Phreeze]

There's nothing to fix. You can hotkey maul and swipe to each key on your keyboard and faceroll your way to victory. If that's not easy enough for you do yourself and your group a favor and don't tank.

agree

just swipe 2-3 times, then mangle+lacerate the targets....only noobs are spamming swipe

[Odrok]

Maybe learn to mark targets?

How do you mark targets that are stacked right on top of one another until they get to you. Swipe isn't sufficient. the second you can target one the aoe have pulled it off of you and the stack of casting ones that came in a second behind the melee ones arespreading out to your DPS. We have growl which is on a CD that seems like eternity when you have to gather 4 mobs that just spread out. There is no time to mark them. I don't believe you are familiar with the fight if you actually suggest this. If you can then great for you, but it is a little more complicated than you make it out to be.

[vonholck]

You should be happy that tanking actually is a "challenge" for you, as for deathknights, it's as easy as dropping one aoe, take a chillpill and wait for the mobs to die, i'm actually dissapointed that blizzard have made tanking so easy nowadays .

This!

Challenging fights for a tank is extremelly rare these days, atleast for the other tanking classes (i play a warrior and have cleared all content). I really hope blizzard will make everything ALOT harder once ulduar hits.

[elapadrinar]

How do you mark targets that are stacked right on top of one another until they get to you. Swipe isn't sufficient. the second you can target one the aoe have pulled it off of you and the stack of casting ones that came in a second behind the melee ones arespreading out to your DPS. We have growl which is on a CD that seems like eternity when you have to gather 4 mobs that just spread out. There is no time to mark them. I don't believe you are familiar with the fight if you actually suggest this. If you can then great for you, but it is a little more complicated than you make it out to be.

swipe/demo roar when they are all togethor
charge/bash the casters to silence them so they will come to you...a talented bash is your friend
tell your dps to hold off for half a second so u can get aggro

[Odrok]

Thanks Elap. That is what I did, and we did emerge victorious if not a shit-ton shaken. I was trying my best and pulling out all of our stops to maintain aggro. But that is my point. Where we have definite limits, the other classes seem to have none. I do appreciate a challenge, but when your guildies are jumping down your throat, it doesn't seem like the challenge is anything I would conisider myself being thankful for. It was a bit much for me. Gauntlets are where I see trouble. No other instance offers much of a challenge at all, but where I barely make it to the optional boss on CoTS, the same setup with a Paladin had 9 minutes to spare. Makes me think that our AOE isn't "fine".

[elapadrinar]

what was your group setup...if there was a hunter or rogue, you shoulda been getting MDd. your dps shoulda been silencing/interupting casters so they would come to you insteading of getting initial aggro on everything making it harder for you to pick up. if they bitch at you again, you might tell them to use more then the 2-3 dps buttons they have on their bar :P

[khanthal]

hmm, ok. i dunno what kind of low dps you have been running with, but with full naxx 10 gear and 1-2 pieces from 25-man i cannot just spam swipe. if i do that any dps that i run with that got aoe will take aggro away from me. i gotta keep tabbing around and putting lacerate and occasional mauling on the other targets.

Bolded your problem. You maul every swing. EVERY SWING. Not occasionally. And you both tab and move to make sure it applies to more than just the same two every time.

It sounds like you didn't do much AE tanking before the 3.0 patch either when swipe was 3 target. With limited target threat abilities like swipe-then and maul-now you have to move around and cylce targets to make sure you arent just hitting the same ones all the time. Just tabbing alone isn't enough. You must both tab and shift around. Otherwise you will always hit the same target with one of the maul hits and that's not what you want; you want two new targets every time.

Also talented mangle is more effective than lacerating. You only lacerate when you can't mangle. And really I'd rather do another swipe than a lacerate. Also make sure to demo roar it's a decent initial threat.

You may have to tell your AE to hold for a sec if they literally all drop blizzards the second the pull gets near you. The easiest way to train them to do this is to mark one target before pull. They single target dps that one target (which you pull with FFF, maul, mangle, and then gets the initial swipe/demo and should be yours entirely through all their dps, if it breaks aggro don't chase it, growl it or bash it or just let it go...it'll die before they do). Once the marked one is dead they go hog wild with AE. By then you should have plenty of threat.

Lastly for the GCD argument: Everyone except rogues has a 1.5 sec GCD. Rogues have 1.0 sec. Haste effects your white swing timer, cast time for non-instants, and your GCD (though it can only bring GCD down to 1.0).

[elapadrinar]

Lastly for the GCD argument: Everyone except rogues has a 1.5 sec GCD. Rogues have 1.0 sec. Haste effects your white swing timer, cast time for non-instants, and your GCD (though it can only bring GCD down to 1.0).

rogues and cat druids

[Sarevokcz]

rogues and cat druids

rogues and cat druids and DKs with unholy presence. tho it doesnt matter that much anyway imho

[Sulika]

How do you mark targets that are stacked right on top of one another until they get to you. Swipe isn't sufficient. the second you can target one the aoe have pulled it off of you and the stack of casting ones that came in a second behind the melee ones arespreading out to your DPS. We have growl which is on a CD that seems like eternity when you have to gather 4 mobs that just spread out. There is no time to mark them. I don't believe you are familiar with the fight if you actually suggest this. If you can then great for you, but it is a little more complicated than you make it out to be.

I have the keys on my numpad bound to mark the targets when tanking.

1 - Skull
2 - X
3 - Cross
4 - Circle
5 - Triangle
6 - Diamond
7 - Square

No matter who pulls or how bad a pull goes all I ever have to do is quickly tab to the first target and press 1 to make sure it is marked with a skull. If you cannot do that then you certainly do need to learn to mark targets. Doing it through the in game UI in any sort of responsive manner is pretty much impossible after the pull, with a couple of key bindings and a little practice marking up two or three targets is really easy. It also makes runs go a lot smoother and faster when you are tanking which everyone appreciates. I can mark up the next pack while finishing off the last one or two from the previous pack or in the short time it takes to run between packs.

The simple fact that you are trying to say you can't do what many tanks do quite easily indicates that (in your case at least) it is just a simple l2p issue.

[Pisky]

Agreed... It was easy before the hotfix, even easier now. Asking for our AOE to compare to that of a Paladins, no thank you. I like not having a CD on swipe. If you need to spam swipe to keep threat, you need to check your gear.

Seriously? You want it even easier than pressing three buttons?

People like you two are the type of community and players who cause no progression to be made on issues, i don't know about anyone else on this forum but i can speak for myself on the issue. Firstly Swipe/maul queuing tabbing, works perfectly fine in heroics you two are completely right, in raids? LOL no sorry, don't care how good you are, paladins, DK's not only have an extremely easier time(Which they should), but it is nearly impossible for me to hold any aggro what so ever from then when it comes to AE, and don't say "LOL L2Tank" b/c i'll laugh right back because i know how to. We shouldn't be able to tank like Pally's and DK, but we should be able to compete threat wise, even warriors leave us in the dust as far as AE..that's just pathetic. I have suggested a very simple idea, and not this "Take Swipe off GCD" that's pretty stupid, or the no swipe target, that'd be OP. You just change the thorns glyph or add on to it, to have a passive debuff or buff of some kind on top of what it does now, because the threat it does now is absolutely dreadful, it wouldn't have to be any big threat buff by any stretch of the imagination but just a bit, so you pick up mobs they hit you couple of times and this buff or debuff gets us an early lead on threat so dps can jump in quick.

[Brasko]

We shouldn't be able to tank like Pally's and DK, but we should be able to compete threat wise

wat?

[Furo]

To be honest, Swipe works as AoE tanking method. But still it is a quite poor thing. I wish we druids would get something different then just triggering one button until all mobs are dead.
Someone once mentioned including Thorns to tanking somehow (actually.. why the hell did Blizz even create that skill?) and so make it a really worthy skill. I know its not too bad for healers and Moonins in PvP, but thats it.
Why do I get the feeling that druid is one of the classes always getting the poorest-made skills?
Looking at cat Swipe, it wont be a nice skill either.. Maybe nice for dps, but not nice for the gameplay.

[Charo]

sigh, are people just really that bad? i'm not some elitist jerk, but come on, how are you having any trouble keeping aggro with swipe and maul? are you wearing blue of stamina gear or something? all of our tank gear can be someone else's dps gear, it's loaded with crit, agility, haste, expertise, sometimes hit, how are you not holding aggro? if a warrior can hold aggro with his thunderclap and damage shield ability, how can you not hold aggro with abilities that do twice the damage of thunderclap with the same threat modifier in bear form?

[neanoa]

sigh, are people just really that bad? i'm not some elitist jerk, but come on, how are you having any trouble keeping aggro with swipe and maul? are you wearing blue of stamina gear or something? all of our tank gear can be someone else's dps gear, it's loaded with crit, agility, haste, expertise, sometimes hit, how are you not holding aggro? if a warrior can hold aggro with his thunderclap and damage shield ability, how can you not hold aggro with abilities that do twice the damage of thunderclap with the same threat modifier in bear form?

1: Swipe is not 360° hit radius - if mobs wander a bit (which they have incredibly high tendacy to do ever since wotlk came out) there is a great chance you wont hit some.
2a: TC does more threat per hit, but has a short cooldown, swipe does not.
2b: If spamming swipe and tc only - then yes swipe will win. But while the warrior can hit TC and then continue to move cleave/devastate/s.slam while cooldown on TC resets. The druid has to use swipe on every global cooldown - meaning no room to use lacerate/mangle. Only tab-maul spam (while spamming swipe).
2c: Since you can't choose which second target glyphed maul hits - you can only hope different targets are being hit to a degree where you don't loose any of them.

Sadly the only solutions I see to reduce the swipe-spam needed is either boosting its threat (which they already did some), increase the degree of the cone it can hit or increase the dmg - maybe put a cd on it.

I do agree it's not so impossible to keep agro with as some say - but I do know that since the release of wotlk, at the end of raid-nights .. my fingers actually hurt from spamming buttons as much as i need to on trash. Sometimes I tend to go to mouseclicking on bosses to rest my fingers  :-\

[Charo]

1: Swipe is not 360° hit radius - if mobs wander a bit (which they have incredibly high tendacy to do ever since wotlk came out) there is a great chance you wont hit some.
2a: TC does more threat per hit, but has a short cooldown, swipe does not.
2b: If spamming swipe and tc only - then yes swipe will win. But while the warrior can hit TC and then continue to move cleave/devastate/s.slam while cooldown on TC resets. The druid has to use swipe on every global cooldown - meaning no room to use lacerate/mangle. Only tab-maul spam (while spamming swipe).
2c: Since you can't choose which second target glyphed maul hits - you can only hope different targets are being hit to a degree where you don't loose any of them.

Sadly the only solutions I see to reduce the swipe-spam needed is either boosting its threat (which they already did some), increase the degree of the cone it can hit or increase the dmg - maybe put a cd on it.

I do agree it's not so impossible to keep agro with as some say - but I do know that since the release of wotlk, at the end of raid-nights .. my fingers actually hurt from spamming buttons as much as i need to on trash. Sometimes I tend to go to mouseclicking on bosses to rest my fingers :-\

er, well the only time i had ever wish i had thunderclap over swipe was on gothik the harvester tanking, where the mobs on live side come out at full run speed and it's a little difficult picking up four mobs in four different directions, other than that, huh? you can back pedel two yards and have everything in swipe range, maul helps with aggro, but of course you're not going to hit -everything- on say those little shitter spider packs in Naxx, where there is more than 6 of them running around, but most packs are a couple of large mobs, five or six, if you can't tab maul six targets while swiping, you're just not that good.

swipe does twice the damage of thunderclap, crits more often, gives me 5 rage a crit when it does, and has no cooldown, it's better threat per second, never mentioned threat per rage, because rage is a non issue for bears. you can also use other abilities while spamming swipe, you know, that ONE OTHER ABILITY ON A COOLDOWN bears should be using on trash called mangle? what else is there to spam? lacerate? lol?

there is not a problem with druid tanking, there's a problem with people playing the druids.