Anyone Else give up on their Druid? - Tanking

[invader]

fekk no ive just forcefully retired my mage cos i is shit bored n fed up of being a clothy (which was made my main the last year or so cos we got like 50 resto/balance droods ere pff) to spend as much time on bear and kitty as possible at long last and i is lovin it bryn ;p.. FERAL FOREVER !!

[royobote]

Don't pretend you do it for the class mechanics.

You do it to be a god damned bear.

[Findme]

I'm tanking, but i don't enjoy it any more, and i've already canceled my sub. The imbalance between tanks with shield and tanks without shields is horrible.
Druids are ok for single target tanking for example a raidboss, but if there are any sort of adds or trash bears are the worst tanks. I don't like that position where i'm only good in one role and can't do anything else as effective as the shield tanks. Since i've a paladin tank i can compare the incoming damage, and i must admit the paladin is much better, cooldowns and abilities for all situations. In comparison my bear has no raid utility, no tools, no tanking niche :/

Look at the tank class representation (Source: raidbots.com):
Warrior 36.13%
Paladin 34.13%
DK 15.11%
Druid 14.62%


You can see a huge gap between shield tanks and non shield tanks. With every patch we are going to be band aided instead of developing a savage defense mechanic which works.

[Taunar]

Quit your sobbing. Recently switched from warrior to bare durid, and it was the best decision I've made in this game. I hear people complain about AoE tanking? Quite frankly, I can't see their predicament. Sure, we DO take more damage due to the way savage defense works, in comparison to a regular shield, but we can still accomplish the same things Kiting adds on maloriak as a druid? PIECE OF CAKE! And Nefarian adds can be kited by anyone tbh.

Another benefit of being a druid is the insane DPS you have, compared to other tanks. Yes, we are the official high DPS tanks, and for encounters where the enrage timer is a concern, druids are most likely going to be your favorite. In raids I usually push between 13-17k, purely singletarget.. That is probably the main reason I enjoy druid so much, it certainly makes tanking a lot more fun when you can actually put out some considerable damage aswell as being an excellent meatshield.

And of course, the best part of being a bear tank is the ability to relentlessly teabag your dead companions after you kill a boss.

"Bare durids is 4 funs when u can charje & stun & haf sum armors lol." - Alamo.

[tyggyr]

Strange time to give up on your bear. I could almost see it in 4.0 until 4.1 because of many issues (primarily in 5-mans; raiding bears apparently didn't have these issues - aoe threat or damage taken), but since 4.1 the bear is overpowered in every way. It's not faceroll easy, but it's certainly not hard to tank with now in any situation, and the bear not only does more damage than any other tank - single target and AoE - but takes the least damage at the same time (both single target and AoE).

So, I'll bite - why did you give up now?

---------- Post added 2011-05-31 at 01:19 AM ----------

instead of developing a savage defense mechanic which works.

Savage defense works very well now, but I can see a time when it won't work as well because either

• Our dodge goes way up, so we don't get much vengeance, so our attack power is low..... so when we get an SD bubble it'll be small, and when we're finally hit it's for a whopper
• We avoid dodge, and just take a lot of hits to keep vengeance up.... and our overall damage taken will be pretty high

For the time being, SD is balanced pretty well - though from what I can tell a bear takes less damage in both AoE and single-target situations than the plate tanks (They probably won't get away without doing something to SD by 4.3 because of the dodge/vengeance issues.)

If you're seeing something else, most likely you're geared wrong, gemmed wrong, reforged wrong, and enchanted wrong, besides just playing wrong.

[Castnicke]

I love my druid, and while it did get harder to tank in Cataclysm (compared to Wotlk at least) I still don't find tanking very hard. With vengeance in its current state, threat is only an issue early on in the fight. Later on, you might as well be doing nothing and you'll still keep aggro.

Vengeance definitely needs to be changed. I remember them saying they wanted tanks to stay on top of threat throughout the whole fight.. with vengeance that is definitely not the case. Once you hit vengeance cap, the threat you do is several times higher than anyone else is able to put out. If anything, threat was more of a problem in Wotlk than what it is now.

[barkles]

when I pug call to arms heroics on my druid alt people always mention how they never see any druid tanks. I've tanked whole boss fights in heroics with no healer and kept myself alive. If I don't bring guildies then I am generally top dps/damage done. Berserk mangle spam on trash and peoples jaws drop and are like wtf how do you do 30k dps?!?!? I do 2-3x the damage of other tanks in raids, which is obviously helpful to getting the boss down....and since I'm a resto shaman main, I can appreciate the fight ending sooner lol. My bear is OP. I love it!! It is definitely quite different from wrath tanking...but I find it much more enjoyable now. I like that you actually have to know how to gear and how to play, or you're dead/hard to heal/a failure

One thing I find lacking is a way to pull/silence ranged mobs away from cc'd ones. My solution was to just learn which ones they were in every instance and have them cc'd...or bash silence them and run back out...but tanking heroics on my death knight is soooo nice...oh death grip how I love you

[Djuntas]

15k overall in yesterdays odd timed ZA again for a mate who come back to wow after breaks... Were fine now, could be better, but atleast our AOE and threat is better now, and the dmg.... )

Edit: Dont tank in raids trough, we got 2 tanks in guild who always seems to join. If they didnt Id haft to trough.

[Balbo]

Still love my bear. Although, i hate the first trash packs in vortex pinnacle, tanking them to gear girlfriends 3rd alt, never enough rage, makes me cry when people just AoE straight away and i never have enough threat for a thrash and swipe..

[Deleted]

I'm tanking, but i don't enjoy it any more, and i've already canceled my sub. The imbalance between tanks with shield and tanks without shields is horrible.
Druids are ok for single target tanking for example a raidboss, but if there are any sort of adds or trash bears are the worst tanks. I don't like that position where i'm only good in one role and can't do anything else as effective as the shield tanks. Since i've a paladin tank i can compare the incoming damage, and i must admit the paladin is much better, cooldowns and abilities for all situations. In comparison my bear has no raid utility, no tools, no tanking niche :/

Look at the tank class representation (Source: raidbots.com):
Warrior 36.13%
Paladin 34.13%
DK 15.11%
Druid 14.62%


You can see a huge gap between shield tanks and non shield tanks. With every patch we are going to be band aided instead of developing a savage defense mechanic which works.

This means sweet fuck all..... just because alot of people prefer to play a "shield tank" it means nothing about how balanced the class is. And as for aoe threat you are literally talking thru your backside as bears are by far the best aoe tanks right now. Single target i agree totally with you i never ever lose aggro

[Deleted]

I dropped tanking, I was just generally bored of it. Currently Feral DPS mainspec, with resto offspec.

Overall I liked my druid, was the best tank I had. Have all tanking classes at 85. The AoE threat wasn't exactly the best in Cata, got slightly better with the Swipe buff in 4.1, but it's still not brilliant.

[vaccine]

I enjoy it now they've fixed our AoE so we can actually hold stuff on us during boss encounters.

I still think we lack a lot of the utility talents that Warriors and other tanks enjoy. All our utility feels tied to caster form, letting Ferals cast stuff like BR and Innervate in forms would be a good change, even if its a longer CD.

[Barou]

I used to play Boomkin MS as I was always top 3 in dps for our 25 mans. Recently switched to Bear in the past month as it was my OS and have cleared through most raids completely. "Healing made easy" according to my healers. We have so much mitigation and a couple CD's to use whenever it's quite ridiculous lol. Go bear tanking!

And oh yeah, heroics are a joke - pull 3 pats at a time these days lolol.

[Speshuled]

I didn't give up on my druid, but my guild had an abundance of tanks and a lack of heals & melée dps so now she's resto/kitty until I'm needed to tank again. Ive enjoyed my bear since wrath but the diversity in what a Druid can do is what makes it so much fun to play one.

[Tareum]

Hm as a matter of fact I tanked all throughout TBC, when I first started.
WotLK I went cat and never looked back tbh.
Bear is still my 2nd spec as it comes as 2nd nature - wouldn't give it up for any reason.

In fact I rerolled another druid just for going moonkek i so love feral :>

ps. I admit I rolled a hordie one too just to see what's it's like fuglies side

---------- Post added 2011-05-31 at 10:36 PM ----------

Damn u ... U made me horny...
Now I gotta go kill stuff

Geronimo ... ooo !!

[cquirki]

Why dont people like playing their Druid tank!? I love looove it. The only thing that I don't like is no way to bring a caster to you when he's next to a ccd mob and you either ignor it, FCC, taunt, or go and get him and break the cc next to him bc maul macro FTW. Other than that said situation, I feel they are superior dps threat and survivabily than the other classes, unless ur bad?

[Findme]

Another benefit of being a druid is the insane DPS you have, compared to other tanks. Yes, we are the official high DPS tanks, and for encounters where the enrage timer is a concern, druids are most likely going to be your favorite. In raids I usually push between 13-17k, purely singletarget.. That is probably the main reason I enjoy druid so much, it certainly makes tanking a lot more fun when you can actually put out some considerable damage aswell as being an excellent meatshield.

And of course, the best part of being a bear tank is the ability to relentlessly teabag your dead companions after you kill a boss.

"Bare durids is 4 funs when u can charje & stun & haf sum armors lol." - Alamo.

No we are not the official high dps tanks, druids' niche is not doing more damage than the other tanks. Look at the latest bluepost, that's the reason why all our coefficients are lowered. We are meant to do the same damage as the other tanks.

Strange time to give up on your bear. I could almost see it in 4.0 until 4.1 because of many issues (primarily in 5-mans; raiding bears apparently didn't have these issues - aoe threat or damage taken), but since 4.1 the bear is overpowered in every way. It's not faceroll easy, but it's certainly not hard to tank with now in any situation, and the bear not only does more damage than any other tank - single target and AoE - but takes the least damage at the same time (both single target and AoE).

So, I'll bite - why did you give up now?

I wanted to test the swipe and thrash change which introduced in 4.1. I've tanked so many times the two new zandalari dungeons and of course the usual raid bosses. First of all, i'm not complaining about threat, it is ok at the moment, i don't know how the recent nerf will effect it but thats another topic.

I have a paladin and a warrior tank, both don't even have the same itemlevel like my bear has. But the logs and the personal opinion of me and my healer are approving my opinion. In single target situations there are no problems, but in any situation where some adds are the incoming damage as a bear is very spiky. My warrior or paladin are both smoother and easier to heal.

The problem is SD doesn't scale as good as block, period. SD is capped by vengeance, block is not. I'm not qqing for some paladin/warrior nerfs, instead i'm hoping for some fixes for dks and druids. Blizzard bandaids the SD problem with more passive damage reduce in natural reaction, This will cause many problems. In 4.2 Druids will be the best tank for single bosses with large spell damage fights, because they will be godlike in these situations. 18% damage reduce + 6% spell damage reduce through perseverance. This will lead us to nerfs, sooner or later.

Savage defense works very well now, but I can see a time when it won't work as well because either

• Our dodge goes way up, so we don't get much vengeance, so our attack power is low..... so when we get an SD bubble it'll be small, and when we're finally hit it's for a whopper
• We avoid dodge, and just take a lot of hits to keep vengeance up.... and our overall damage taken will be pretty high

For the time being, SD is balanced pretty well - though from what I can tell a bear takes less damage in both AoE and single-target situations than the plate tanks (They probably won't get away without doing something to SD by 4.3 because of the dodge/vengeance issues.)

Savage defense is better than the first version, but it's still not as good as block. Why do you think is blizzard looking for ways to prevent block capping paladins and warriors? It is too good. If warriors and paladins reach the block cap with 4.2 gear, they will at least block 30% of every incoming hit. This means the bosses will need to hit harder in order to be a danger for block tanks. But they can't raise the damage of bosses without looking at dks/druids who can't block. The problem lies in there.

Either dks/druids are too bad or warriors/paladins with block are too good.

If you're seeing something else, most likely you're geared wrong, gemmed wrong, reforged wrong, and enchanted wrong, besides just playing wrong.

Playing a bear is not rocket science, i've tanked since BC with my bear. I've all agi gear, gemmed agility, reforged haste and the 2nd worst stat on the item to dodge.

[Iron Dome]

It's tough, but if you know what you're doin gand have the right specs and gear and enchantments you shud be good. Perhaps you should tell the group "wait 5 seconds to attack after i pull"

[Findme]

It's tough, but if you know what you're doin gand have the right specs and gear and enchantments you shud be good. Perhaps you should tell the group "wait 5 seconds to attack after i pull"

wtf are you talking about? How is "waiting 5 seconds to attack after i pull" a solution to incoming damage? I didn't read any discussion about threat. Waiting to attack helps only in situations where threat is a problem. Nobody is talkin about threat, you should read before you type