Feral Tanks, Tell Me I'm Not the Only One...

[Rixxe]

Sounds odd to me.

I've been doing a couple of heroics as a healer and have had two bears tanking for me . I absolutely loved them. They took way less damage than any other tank I've had with about the same amount of cc. Did not check their gear though, so no idea what they were using. I just know that I would do anything to keep a bear if I could.

I'm a bear tank too atm, and i have to say having done a heroic as a DPS the other day with a warrior tank, who had about 10k more HP than myself when i tank. He died constantly, didnt hold threat that well, and generally seemed like he was about to die every pull.
People are stupid if they think Bears shouldnt be using agility stuff, i dps and tank in the same gear, doesn't make a blind bit of differences in heroics at the moment.
Using CD's are what make a Bear tank decent.

Overall, tanks are in the same position. Seen some paladin tanks just almost WOTLK style a heroic, and some not.... depends on the player.

[Deleted]

No, they don't.

Erm, yeah they do, dodge/hit/exp gear is still very useful for a feral tank, and they generally use stam, dodge and even armor trinkets.

[Fatowlkinidiot]

Bears still generally use tank trinkets/rings/necks.

No they don't. Agi DPS Rings/Necklaces etc. give virtually the same survivability and a great deal more threat.

[Exsoul]

I'm Druid tank and I'm around 160k hp with some buffs. I don't take too much dmg (said by healers) as other tanks but when something gets out of control I see my life going down too fast.

I usually do random hcs with guildmates and we are paly holy, shadow priest, druid tank (me), Warlock demon and DK frost or another priests. Sometimes we don't have the needed CC so when this happen it's time to use all my CDs (I glyphed for frenzy gen so the heal heals me up to a 30% more) and we can do.

I must say the heal is pretty good and he doesn't need to rest too much in an heroic as others healers random I partied with.

Btw I have a cloack with stam/str with dodge + expertise and a ring with str/stam with dodge. Although I just stack stam over agi I found most items with agi grants me the same or more dodge than a item with str/stam/dodge so yes, we (atm) don't need those specific tank items, we can go with agi/stam since they grant the same amount of stamina and more armor and dodge thanks to the agility. We'll see with raid loot how this evolves.

To the OP. Don't take seriously those players who think this is wotlk. I found someones that replied that they can't top my life with even a great heal (the slow one). That's weird man, I have 160k ~ wtf they'r talking about.

If you wish you can check my druid: Exsoul from Sanguino (EU)

TL;DR: Most of the healers think this is WOTLK and they can heal just with one button so if they don't it's our fault. To this people I say: think in open the box, open your mind and enjoy your class.

[antiviolenc3]

I'm Druid tank and I'm around 160k hp with some buffs. I don't take too much dmg (said by healers) as other tanks but when something gets out of control I see my life going down too fast.

I usually do random hcs with guildmates and we are paly holy, shadow priest, druid tank (me), Warlock demon and DK frost or another priests. Sometimes we don't have the needed CC so when this happen it's time to use all my CDs (I glyphed for frenzy gen so the heal heals me up to a 30% more) and we can do.

I must say the heal is pretty good and he doesn't need to rest too much in an heroic as others healers random I partied with.

To the OP. Don't take seriously those players who think this is wotlk. I found someones that replied that they can't top my life with even a great heal! (the slow one). That's weird man, I have 160k ~ wtf they'r talking about.

Hi, could you link me your armory?
Right now I'm about 130k buffed with MotW and I too have a pally healer that's always with me and he sometimes complains that I'm really hard to heal because my health drops too quickly lol.
You could PM me if you wish to thanks!

[Cortano]

we can go with agi/stam since they grant the same amount of stamina and more armor and dodge thanks to the agility

Agility doesn't grant armor in cataclysm

Agility grants 72% dodge and 55% crit
An item with 100 agility is the same as 100 strength, 72 dodge, 55 crit rating

At the current low levels of crit, it is pretty close to mastery rating for defensive purposes.

You need a MUCH higher level strength item to equal the value of an agility item.

[Exsoul]

Hi, could you link me your armory?

Currently there is a maintenance, I edited the post with the name and server coz I can't post links yet ;( (exsoul from Sanguino EU)

try this: eu [dot] battle [dot] net / wow / en / character / sanguino / exsoul / advanced

Agility doesn't grant armor in cataclysm
Agility grants 72% dodge and 55% crit
An item with 100 agility is the same as 100 strength, 72 dodge, 55 crit rating

Then this makes things better.
I really don't look at my armor (I think the last time I checked it was a 37k ~, not sure now)

I must say one more thing, the alchemy's trinket is one of the best items I've found right now.

[Deleted]

I'm not sure since i didnt check about tank at all for cata but still, even i with full kitty gear manage to tank vortex pinnacle with a decent healer...

and taking allotta dmg with ~itemlevel 333 gear is nothing special, our guilds main tank has full 346 and i think 1 raid item and takes decent damage in heroics.
Just blame the heal :P

[antiviolenc3]

Currently there is a maintenance, I edited the post with the name and server coz I can't post links yet ;( (exsoul from Sanguino EU)

try this: eu [dot] battle [dot] net / wow / en / character / sanguino / exsoul / advanced



Then this makes things better.
I really don't look at my armor (I think the last time I checked it was a 37k ~, not sure now)

I must say one more thing, the alchemy's trinket is one of the best items I've found right now.

Haha. Thanks for the link.
Greatly appreciated

[Deleted]

Take a rogue gear. Reforge every haste / crit / mastery / whaterver is pretty useless since threat is almost a non-issue (except hit) to Dodge.

Gem for dodge and stam.

That's it, you have a tank gear. Let haters hate. As long as this game stands, the world (of Warcraft) will need tanks more than morons.

[Revnent]

Dude your good. It was definately a dumb healer. Bear tanks can go either way. Dps tank or tank tank. Dps gear is fine. Only thing i would suggest is maybe replace one of your trinkets with a trinket that has stam. But really u should be fine to tank in what u have. Myself i stack more stam but again personal play style.

[Paskgotsheal]

Take a rogue gear. Reforge every haste / crit / mastery / whaterver is pretty useless since threat is almost a non-issue (except hit) to Dodge.

Gem for dodge and stam.

That's it, you have a tank gear. Let haters hate. As long as this game stands, the world (of Warcraft) will need tanks more than morons.

Why would you gem dodge/stam instead of agil/stam? Have we not already proven that agility is much more useful? If you're going pure avoidance I'd go dodge I guess, but the extra AP converts into more DPS AND higher SD shields (which are usually one of your top heals in raids believe it or not, I'm averaging over 1/2 million in SD absorbs per fight) and agilitys dodge % convert ratio is only a few points behind. Top it off with extra crit and I really don't see why you would use dodge gems over agility.

[Infort]

There are several posts about the current situation of Bears and tanking.
I think this would summarize things pretty well.

We have a problem with thick hide, it only gives us the 10% more armor contribution from cloth and leather items.
I was also critted, particulary in Deadmines heroic, haven't parsed through logs since that, cause as soon as I found out Thick Hide was bugged,
I put my tanking on hold. I've made alot of tickets and have had ticket-discussion with several GM's since last thursday due to this.

To quote the post that I made here, on the Bug Reporting forum, and also mentioned in the initial ticket:

Without Thick Hide in my spec i have 28326 armor, and with it I have 31159 with it. (Unbuffed)
Now the tooltip states 10% more from leather, and 33% more in bearform, so the math says 40506 - which is the amount I had previously.
It all happened after the first server restart, I got deadmines heroic as our random heroic before and after the restart.
But the second time, after the restart I was taking way more damage, and noticed that I got critted alot.
That's when I checked the armor, and I thought it was way off.

I tried relogging, nothing happend, teleported to moonglade, unlearned talents and put up the spec from the start, popped bear and the armor was fine.
Then I ported back into deadmines (the second run) and buffed, and popped bear, boom, armor was being a nobhead again.

Why should bears have 10k less armor then every other tank?
I thought they were generalizing tanks, to be "similar" in terms of hp, avoidance and armor.

[exochaft]

I'm Druid tank and I'm around 160k hp with some buffs. I don't take too much dmg (said by healers) as other tanks but when something gets out of control I see my life going down too fast.

This is actually true of any tank. If the situation gets out of control, any tank will start taking a lot of damage, but that's what cooldowns are for. I have zero problems blowing Frenzied Regen or SI on trash, because it will allow the healer to conserve more mana for faster clearing of instances or I'm being lazy and not CCing (but it's not too bad if you use CD's for it). I don't know if you've started raiding, but I've found myself literally going through all my survival CDs a lot more than any raid content in WotLK, which makes me happy to actually need to use them often.

Just keep in mind, the differences between tanks will allow one to perform better than another depending on the fight. While druids have the potential to absorb quite a bit of damage, the mitigation provided diminished when you increase the number of targets you actively tank at once. There are some instances where you can't hit your target (such as the Omnitron Defense System when they toss of their shield for 10 seconds), so a shield-wearing tank would have the momentary advantage in terms of survivability. In heroics, if you plan on actively tanking multiple things at once, a warrior/paladin only needs to stand there and look pretty to block, while druid tanks need to actively hit the target to mitigate... but I will say I've started to consider Berserk a tanking survivability cooldown in heroics (and raids to some extent), because you blow Berserk and you get 32-36k AoE Mangle crits flying around, and you destroy your target(s) hopefully before you take too much damage.

Now, would I say that druids are at a disadvantage? Certainly not, I'm still taking less damage in the same roles as my warrior counterparts on average (except huge AoE packs, warriors win that), but that is not to diminish a warrior tank at all. Every tank is viable right now, skill and CD usage/management makes a bigger difference right now. If you feel the need, switch up tanking classes into positions where they perform well.

Alright, this is straying off from the quote a bit (though he did mention his/her HP), but this is more generalized towards the comments I'm seeing. Stamina really plays a much diminished role in raids right now. There is nothing that will one-shot you short of mechanics that will one-shot anyone (or intended to as a mechanic, aka you can't avoid it and stam-stacking wouldn't solve the issue). The reason why Vengeance scales with our HP isn't so we can stack stam for whatever reason, it's so our threat scales through content where gear has increasing values of stamina innately. Stacking stamina for the sake of Vengeance is a really poor idea, survivability is much, much more important. Mitigating or outright avoiding damage is your best bet right now, not increasing the size of your HP to levels that don't matter.

[Kagonos]

Why would you gem dodge/stam instead of agil/stam? Have we not already proven that agility is much more useful? If you're going pure avoidance I'd go dodge I guess, but the extra AP converts into more DPS AND higher SD shields (which are usually one of your top heals in raids believe it or not, I'm averaging over 1/2 million in SD absorbs per fight) and agilitys dodge % convert ratio is only a few points behind. Top it off with extra crit and I really don't see why you would use dodge gems over agility.

The reason to gem dodge/stam is to fulfill yellow gem sockets. This go around, socket bonuses seem to generally be worth it. Also, thank you tushn for pointing out the dodge>mastery. I made this adjustment, reforged all the way dodge. I don't know if it was what made the difference, but I'm definitely beginning to see that healers are NOT using their entire spellbook! Last night's heroic Throne went well, we wiped only on bad trash pulls (my own fault) and then we requeued and got Heroic HoO. On the first boss the pally healer goes, "Oh, I should probably have taken crusade, lemme go port out and respec." We ended up losing 2 of the DPS and it was really late, so we stopped with 3 bosses up, but all in all, it was not bad. I still don't think pure HP is going to be the way of things this go around, at least not yet. I don't think any of my issues up to this point will be different with more HP.

Anyways, good discussion, and hopefully a lot of good advice/knowledge for people reading this thread.

[Auroro]

I went to reg dungeon and two healer said "You are bad tank". When they are the one running out of mana each pull.

I was at 72k health for the dungeon, in humanoid form.

I am starting to think that I going have to do Guild run because these LFD PUG are starting to become worse.

[Kagonos]

I went to reg dungeon and two healer said "You are bad tank". When they are the one running out of mana each pull.

I was at 72k health for the dungeon, in humanoid form.

I am starting to think that I going have to do Guild run because these LFD PUG are starting to become worse.

At 84, there are several upgrades to your old t10... Almost any Cata blues you snag are better in every way than anything left over from WotLK. I don't know how you are as a tank, but @ 83 I was completely out of wrath gear... I looked at your character profile, and your dodge is abysmally low... you have only 14.73% and would gain only 10% in bear form for a total of 24.73%. In this case, you MAY be partially to blame, and I would really recommend grabbing a few quest blues like Clandestine Spaulders from regular Lost City of Tol'Vir questline. As I just learned after posting this thread, reforge to dodge...

[Auroro]

At 84, there are several upgrades to your old t10... Almost any Cata blues you snag are better in every way than anything left over from WotLK. I don't know how you are as a tank, but @ 83 I was completely out of wrath gear... I looked at your character profile, and your dodge is abysmally low... you have only 14.73% and would gain only 10% in bear form for a total of 24.73%. In this case, you MAY be partially to blame, and I would really recommend grabbing a few quest blues like Clandestine Spaulders from regular Lost City of Tol'Vir questline. As I just learned after posting this thread, reforge to dodge...

I am doing those quests. The dungeon stuff started to replace all my T10. I just think that the healers are still using their big heals like what happen in WOtLK.

[Kagonos]

I am doing those quests. The dungeon stuff started to replace all my T10. I just think that the healers are still using their big heals like what happen in WOtLK.

=) no question, the healers are experiencing a learning curve in this content as well... It seems to be much rougher on them than anyone else.

[Tharkkun]

=) no question, the healers are experiencing a learning curve in this content as well... It seems to be much rougher on them than anyone else.

It's a huge learning curve for everyone. Healers actually run out of mana on trash and bosses. DPS standing in fire mechanics are detrimental to the group now. If a healer has to heal the group and the tank more than necessary it's going to get ugly. Also with people jumping into heroics undergeared the overall DPS is lower causing healers to run out of mana when the Boss should be dead.

To the OP I didn't understand the new str/agi mechanics myself until Saturday of last week. The bear guide doesn't cover strength or specifically state "Strength is bad" now. It took reading many of the threads here to get a solid answer that agility as well as mastery is the way to go now.