what happened to bears?

[sparks]

used to see a lot of them. Now I never see one tanking even 5 man heroics.
I asked a few resto and kitty druids and all of them say that its just too hard to eq for it any more.

Well I am resto/kitty and I would love to change to bear for tanking. Is it impossible to tank, too hard to hold agro
what is it with bear tanks ?

[Deleted]

Bears are perfectly viable tanks, just like warriors, paladins and death knights are.

[Deleted]

tbh, im im resto/feral, played resto untill the emblem of shizzlequest patch, and now gearing feral up. Point is, in my opinion, that it takes some time untill you have some good aggro, instead of pala's which have it in 2 sec.

Wasnt specced on the swipe +30% dmg tho, might wanna see improvement.

EDIT:
On single target tho, if you once have the aggro i most likely don't loose it *me happy*

[sparks]

you could be right, paly and dk get instant threat.
Bear starts with 0 and have to work at getting going when a pally or a dk hit a button and good to go.
All tank eq now seems to be made around plate, maybe that is why they said to hard to gear.
Maybe its the lack of good idols I don't know for sure. Its sad but with buzzard what can you say.

[Gigikent]

you could be right, paly and dk get instant threat.
Bear starts with 0 and have to work at getting going when a pally or a dk hit a button and good to go.
All tank eq now seems to be made around plate, maybe that is why they said to hard to gear.
Maybe its the lack of good idols I don't know for sure. Its sad but with buzzard what can you say.

I'm sorry but you are totally clueless and as such maybe you shouldn't start expressing this kind of conclusions.

1. About threat: all tanks start with 0, nobody starts with X amount. Oh, X class might get it faster than druids yea that is true but it is a very small diffrence, and a very well geared druid that knows wtf he is doing will be on par with any other tank in regards to threat. Also teach your hunters and rogues to help you, every class needs a bit of head start anyway.

2. A paladin does not hit 1 button and is ready to go. No tanking class can do that and even though you are being a bit sarcastic there, you are implying that they have it easier. That is simply not true. If anything we have it a lot easier than other tanking classes. Macro maul to every attack and you might say in therory you could faceroll your keyboard and get threat. The fact that you must actually move and position yourself very well etc means you can't actually faceroll.

3. Tanking equipment is not at all made only for plate. The leather itemization is pretty decent even in ToC/ToGC. While we can't really use the entire set for tanking as it is pretty kek, so do the other tanking classes. If you take a close look at Tier10 you will see the exact opposite: all 4 tanking classes now have very attractive 4pc bonuses, so if they stay like that and the stats are also designed well then you will see all 4 classes going for Tier10. The off-pieces (belt, wrist, boots etc) can be found in a lot of places for bears as well. Plenty of stuff to choose from. Not to mention the vast array of weapons we have available now.

So in conclusion: bear tanking is great, in ToGC I am the MT and having a lot of fun with it atm.

[Heywes]

Bear tanking is fine. Make sure you are gemmed and enchanted correctly and have some gear for heroics and go for it. If you want to try it, go for it, bear tanking is alot of fun

[shadet]

I'm boomkin main spec and tank offspec. I raid boomkin and I tank when i'm not raiding. I've tanked all content apart from TotGC. Bears have no problems holding threat!

[aquifer]

used to see a lot of them. Now I never see one tanking even 5 man heroics.
I asked a few resto and kitty druids and all of them say that its just too hard to eq for it any more.

Well I am resto/kitty and I would love to change to bear for tanking. Is it impossible to tank, too hard to hold agro
what is it with bear tanks ?

I do tribute to (mad)skill(10 man) runs with a bear druid MT and his main set is dps(meaning his tank set is his offset xD). there are no issues what so ever with druids atm.

[Deleted]

I have had no problem gearing up my druid, and i didn't even raid that much most of the items are from badges and lucky drops in the occasional pugs. Now that i'm raiding again i always have a tanking spot, while we have all 4 classes available.

About threat i don't have problems to get my TPS up real fast, in 2 gcd's you can start with a FF, queue maul and hit mangle. This will give you a big threat boost and after you can then start to apply lacerates and continue normal rotation. TPS during boss fights 7-8k with the occasional burst to 9-9.5 i don't see the problem. :P

[PopCorn]

Simple - they`r cats now. Back in TBC ferals were forced to tank, because cats were completely useless. Now if you ask one to tank all you hear is "NO I R DPS".

[metalbeerandwomen]

i sense an incoming bear druid spree. i think for a while there will be a lot of them, get on bear speccing fast, guilds will love you for it

[Deleted]

Do you want the truth?

You do not see bears (atleast night elf ones) tanking anymore because of...

The new model for bears, it is really pretty bad (from the druid player pov), what you have now is the arse of the bear, in your face, nothing else, they modeled it pretty badly so that the arse is tilted up (like they do while mating), so really all you see is where the arsehole would be.

Pretty bad design, and why i spend my time as cat :P

[Krothar]

My guilds Main Tank is a bear and he (And us) have always done fine.

I'm going to assume its more down to knowing your class and how you need to get aggro than "X Class is better than us."

[Deleted]

what happened to bears?

Funny you should ask...
[img width=400]http://www.headhuntertaxidermy.com/sell_bear/sell_bear2.JPG[/img]

In all seriousness though, our guild still asks them to tank and enough players still are Feral bears...

[Helansin]

i bear tanked BC raiding (like someone said dpsing was a pain as nobody viewed you as a dps - just a deluded cat (to which i could outdps most anyway but hey!)

I stopped tanking though because it got boring (for me atleast) i didnt like the changes they gave us..

From not needing to think about gearing anymore (loosing req for defense - yes i enjoyed that challenge of gearing and making sure to stay at the cap)

the 360 swipe made it fairly stupid too (why the hell you would need it to swipe behind you as a tank is beyond me... if they are thier... your doing it wrong)

and the fact that we got no new skill for tanking ATALL... paladins/warriors all got thier fancy new end tier skills (DK are new but have great end tier tanking talents for tanking) the only thing druid got was berserk.. which lets face it, is a much more focused dps talent than a tanking one, its situational at best for tanking... i would have loved a bear like talent built into berserk like -

Berserk -

Reduces energy cost of Cat abilities by 50% for 15 sec (what is now...)

And for bear -

The druid smashes the ground with both paws in a berserk manner shattering the ground and dealing x% physical dmg and dazing all targets in range of the effect - 25sec cooldown..

NOTE - Please dont confuse the no new ability with "but you got IW" im talking about a new button to push in the rotation... not a passive debuff

[Leafre]

i sense an incoming bear druid spree. i think for a while there will be a lot of them, get on bear speccing fast, guilds will love you for it

There are two types of bear tanks on our realm. Numbers of good bear tanks are decrasing as the content goes further. You can only see the "regular" bear tanks running around in Dalaran. They are usually well geared, enchanted and gemmed correctly, the whole server knows them (us :P). Maximum of 10 players.

The othe type of druids are probably rerollers, or newcomers. They are still in Polar set or in PvP gear, stacked with stamina, with 0 hit and expertise rating, running with 1.8k FAP weapons. They are worse then Spongebob.

[NoAbloIngles]

Bear tank are getting used for Heroic modes 60-62k Raid buffed, but almost every druid are resto/cat.

[Trifande]

Also keep in mind the constant shift b/w rerolls. Your specific example here was that you did not find so many bears tanking 5mans. I'm going to take a leap of faith and say you're mostly referring to PuG situations.

Most PuG tanks are either alts, fresh 80s and very rarely, main tanks from smaller guilds. Big and/or highly successful small guild tanks usually have a pretty hardcore list of friends (aka parasites ) that they would rather run 5mans with. Therefore you won't see any representation from these in your PuGs. From the first list you have to realize that after a certain point of time a lot of players gather a substantial 'friends' list that they then pug with further reducing the amount of PuG tanks. Secondly, once players have all/most of the gear they can 'easily' get on an alt or PuG runs then tend to go do something else than rerun those PuGs. Given the speed at which a dedicated and informed player can gear up a char you won't see a highly active tank for longer than 3 weeks PuGing (considering about 4days min per week of playing with pugs). This means that that you have a rough estimate of 3 week turnover for every tank.

Now consider the fact that bear tanks are a small fraction of available tanks (Warr >> DKs/Palas >> Bears) due to historical reasons, you can see why you may see a shortage on tanks and more specifically bears. To make matters 'worse' druids have 3 other viable specs that are all equally fun in their own right, thereby further reducing the population of bears (as druids how so much more to choose from).

Ah back to work now :S

[Havitech]

you could be right, paly and dk get instant threat.
Bear starts with 0 and have to work at getting going when a pally or a dk hit a button and good to go.
All tank eq now seems to be made around plate, maybe that is why they said to hard to gear.
Maybe its the lack of good idols I don't know for sure. Its sad but with buzzard what can you say.

Sorry, but you couldn't be more wrong; we can instantly grab and maintain threat just as well as any other tank. The gear we wear keeps our stats more or less on par with all the other tanks. In fact, it's much easier for us to gear up because we become uncrittable through talents - hence, no need to worry about managing the defense cap.

I don't know if there really is a bear shortage, but anecdotal evidence seems to suggest that's the case. The 2nd top raiding guild on my server has been looking for one for a while, and within my own guild (we float around server rank #4-6) I'm the only druid who seems to have any interest in tanking. Even people with tank alts are either warriors, paladins, or death knights. Maybe since they removed our huge dodge and armor numbers that made up OP in many boss fights, people are going back to plate classes because it "feels right."

[Razya]

i bear tanked BC raiding (like someone said dpsing was a pain as nobody viewed you as a dps - just a deluded cat (to which i could outdps most anyway but hey!)

I stopped tanking though because it got boring (for me atleast) i didnt like the changes they gave us..

From not needing to think about gearing anymore (loosing req for defense - yes i enjoyed that challenge of gearing and making sure to stay at the cap)

the 360 swipe made it fairly stupid too (why the hell you would need it to swipe behind you as a tank is beyond me... if they are thier... your doing it wrong)

and the fact that we got no new skill for tanking ATALL... paladins/warriors all got thier fancy new end tier skills (DK are new but have great end tier tanking talents for tanking) the only thing druid got was berserk.. which lets face it, is a much more focused dps talent than a tanking one, its situational at best for tanking... i would have loved a bear like talent built into berserk like -

Berserk -

Reduces energy cost of Cat abilities by 50% for 15 sec (what is now...)

And for bear -

The druid smashes the ground with both paws in a berserk manner shattering the ground and dealing x% physical dmg and dazing all targets in range of the effect - 25sec cooldown..

NOTE - Please dont confuse the no new ability with "but you got IW" im talking about a new button to push in the rotation... not a passive debuff

This guy summed up the entire reason I stopped tanking and gone full time kitten. That and the fact I really HATE how nelf bear asses look... as that's all I'll ever see. Also not to mention kitten dps has become fun. Until recently, we had 4 active tanks (myself included) but I was by far the best dpser of the tanks, which also only made it logical that I reroll kitten. Now they don't even want me to consider tanking cause my dps is too vital >.<