Feral Druids - the Bear guide

[BATISTTA]

I really think thats is a good point. SI is by far our shield wall. When I am raid buffed I have about 100k hp now with it active and my trinket. I mean that is really going to give the healers a chance to top me off. SI is very important!. I think you will see its value when you start running more in the high end game stuff. Consider that most of the druids at 25man level are running about 62-65k hp buffed. It really is our advantage we need without the mitigation affects the other tanks have.

[arel00]

Mihir,

I have a question on your set up for one of my guildies. I see your hit is like 155 can you drop back on that when your armor pen is so high? He is like 1000 armor pen now and was wondering if he should go higher armor pen. What are your thoughts?

This is a Bear thread /shoo

I can understand all that, but I'm having a hard time understanding why Survival Instincts is a must. 30% health boost for 30 seconds on a 3 minute cool down that I have to activate and then the hp is lost at the end. Sounds like a very crappy Lay Hands to me when I'm pushing 44K health before it. I can understand where it might be considered a good 'Oh god, I'm about die' button to give the healer a few seconds to hopefully heal me, but that's really about it. I would mind some reasoning as to why SI is considered a must have otherwise.

There is nothing to argue about. We are tanks. SI is a survivability cooldown. By not taking it you're nerfing your own capability of staying alive in dangerous situations.
Tanks shouldn't worry only about threat. Our main goal, which is what defines our role, is "being the one that takes the hits without getting killed". Threat makes sure you get the hits. Survivability makes sure you don't die. Lacking one of those means being a bad tank, period.

There is no valid reason, at all, to skip over SI.

[Richmond]

I really think thats is a good point. SI is by far our shield wall. When I am raid buffed I have about 100k hp now with it active and my trinket. I mean that is really going to give the healers a chance to top me off. SI is very important!. I think you will see its value when you start running more in the high end game stuff. Consider that most of the druids at 25man level are running about 62-65k hp buffed. It really is our advantage we need without the mitigation affects the other tanks have.

SI is our version of a warriors Last Stand, Barkskin is our equilivant of Shield wall, not sure of the numbers, but i believe its a 60% Damage reduction on a 3/5 minute CD? Were as ours is 20% on a 1 minute CD. (Only got my warrior to 46 so i dont know them all that well)

And not taking SI is a really bad idea, for so many reasons. Its like a bear picking up KoTJ (See my previous posts / rants why this is also a bad idea) instead of MSS.

Its 1 point, where else are you planning on putting it?

[Sunshine]

The main problem is still for people to hold back on their initial aggro on groups, I really feel bears are badly equipped here compared to the other tanking classes.

A few weeks ago, I got my paladin tank to 80. I've heard all these complaints about how hard it is for bears to hold aoe threat and how easy it is for paladins, but I have to say, after experiencing it, I can't understand why people negatively compare bears to them. I don't have any issues tanking on her (it's mostly just a different way of thinking and a different set of buttons), and there are definitely a few things that it would be nice to have on a bear (a ranged interrupt, for example). That said, nothing can compare to a spammable aoe move that we can bring to wherever the mobs are.

The combination of maul + swipe is very powerful for groups. Mangle one mob if people are focusing it or you're starting to lose aggro, but otherwise just maul+swipe and tab. (Note that when you tab, it de-queues maul, so make sure you're letting the mauls go through before tabbing and then requeueing it after.) Grabbing the maul glyph really helps for the aoe pulls as well; having our best threat move hit an additional target is always a good thing. Never lacerate when there are multiple mobs unless they're going to be up for a very long time (e.g., bosses like Twins).

SI is our version of a warriors Last Stand, Barkskin is our equilivant of Shield wall, not sure of the numbers, but i believe its a 60% Damage reduction on a 3/5 minute CD? Were as ours is 20% on a 1 minute CD. (Only got my warrior to 46 so i dont know them all that well)

Warriors get 40% on a 2-minute cooldown (glyphed + talented) or 60% on 4-minute cooldown (talented).

And not taking SI is a really bad idea, for so many reasons. Its like a bear picking up KoTJ (See my previous posts / rants why this is also a bad idea) instead of MSS.

Taking Imp Mangle and using the extra points for KotJ (or imp bash, or whatever) is just as viable as taking MSS. It's personal preference. (And SI should be in either spec, of course.)

[Auroro]

I can understand all that, but I'm having a hard time understanding why Survival Instincts is a must. 30% health boost for 30 seconds on a 3 minute cool down that I have to activate and then the hp is lost at the end. Sounds like a very crappy Lay Hands to me when I'm pushing 44K health before it. I can understand where it might be considered a good 'Oh god, I'm about die' button to give the healer a few seconds to hopefully heal me, but that's really about it. I would mind some reasoning as to why SI is considered a must have otherwise.

Survival Instincts, itself give you about 30% more health.

When you pair it with Glyph of Survival Instincts, you gain 15% more health when you pop Survival Instincts, giving it 45% more health.

That why many bear choose Glyph of Survival Instincts, Glyph of Frenzied Regeneration, and your choice: Glyph of Maul, Glyph of Growl, or Glyph of Mangle.

I think you only need for ICC is Glyph of Survival Instincts, Glyph of Frenzied Regeneration, Glyph of Growl/Glyph of Mangle. Glyph of Maul does not help a lot because there is not a lot of fight where you need to hit an additional target.

If you are worry about your threat, take a look at your hit rating and expertise. These help a lot with threat.

MSS (rank 2) give you increases physical damage by 4% while in bear form. With Naturalist (rank 5), you get 14% more damage from resto talent tree while being in bear form. This give you more threat than lowering the CD of Mangle or gaining 15% more damage while being enrage.

[bavarcarus]

While it is a disadvantage that pallies have to get mobs to stand in their consecrate they get better addition threat moves to go along with it. To compare to bear, without glyphing their hammer hits 3 targets while maul hits one, holy shield does good threat to any thing that's meleeing them, shield bash for single target, and they can avenger shield every once in a while. It may be easier to spam swipe and maul but all in all their abilities do more threat than your averaged 1200 swipe hit (in good gear).

[Sunshine]

While it is a disadvantage that pallies have to get mobs to stand in their consecrate they get better addition threat moves to go along with it.

It's easy to build aoe threat on a paladin; there's no question of that. My point was just that some people seem to think bears are much harder to tank with (or impossible to aoe tank with), when I don't believe that's the case.

[bavarcarus]

not impossible, but an equally geared dps can typically pull off a bear in my experience. It's much worse when you don't have 25m buffs dealing with a blizzard or RoF.

[hoot80]

The combination of maul + swipe is very powerful for groups. Mangle one mob if people are focusing it or you're starting to lose aggro, but otherwise just maul+swipe and tab. (Note that when you tab, it de-queues maul, so make sure you're letting the mauls go through before tabbing and then requeueing it after.) Grabbing the maul glyph really helps for the aoe pulls as well; having our best threat move hit an additional target is always a good thing. Never lacerate when there are multiple mobs unless they're going to be up for a very long time (e.g., bosses like Twins).

You obviously don't run with ICC 25 geared aoe classes. Try just spamming maul and swipe when you have a full 264+ geared Afflication Lock spamming Seed. Even with the 2 pc T10 bonus it doesn't out aggro Seed on an equally geared Affliction Lock. On a Paladin, however, not only do they have superior aoe threat, but aoe theat is part of their normal rotation. This means they can keep up maximum aggro on a single target while also putting out way more aoe threat than a bear can dream of all while doing their normal, everyday, 969 rotation. As a bear, yes we can make a super cool macro to spam maul and swipe with one button, but it still doesn't even come close to the threat that a prot pally puts out. Just looking at the numbers that our guild's main tank puts out on the AoE trash leading up to Marrowgar makes me want to vomit. The guy is doing 10,000 dps (or more!) and of course even more than that in threat per second and that's without MD or Tricks. Show me a bear anywhere in the world that does 10k dps on aoe pulls...

[Sunshine]

You obviously don't run with ICC 25 geared aoe classes. Try just spamming maul and swipe when you have a full 264+ geared Afflication Lock spamming Seed. Even with the 2 pc T10 bonus it doesn't out aggro Seed on an equally geared Affliction Lock.

I do run ICC 25 with my guild of ICC 25 geared classes; it works quite fine. Can I pull more threat than a paladin? Who knows. Can I pull as much dps as a paladin? No idea. Can I keep threat on mobs? Yes, and that's all that matters.

[arel00]

I do run ICC 25 with my guild of ICC 25 geared classes; it works quite fine. Can I pull more threat than a paladin? Who knows. Can I pull as much dps as a paladin? No idea. Can I keep threat on mobs? Yes, and that's all that matters.

Well said.

Regarding that: I play both classes at ICC level, both in tanking role. It *is* easier to hold threat with a paladin, and in ICC it's even easier because you can rely on Holy Wrath as well.
It doesn't mean Bears are bad tanks.

What we really miss, on the AoE side, is more snap threat. AS+HotR+Consecration for paladins, TC+Shockwave for warriors, and, in some ways, D&D+BB for DKs, tend to have a faster snap aggro. Often, it's the opening AoE that draws mobs away, and due to how threat works, it makes it harder to hold them back again.
Besides Bear aoe being boring, that is

I suppose that problem will see a fix in the near future. Blizzard, strangely enough, recognized we should have more than one button for AoE, which makes me hope for some sort of short-CD, snap threat ability. We will see.

[Sunshine]

I suppose that problem will see a fix in the near future. Blizzard, strangely enough, recognized we should have more than one button for AoE, which makes me hope for some sort of short-CD, snap threat ability. We will see.

WTB new button, paying soul, PST.

[Bearbutt]

Thanks for the great answers on SI. That really clarifies it for me. Sadly, I won't be seeing an ICC any time soon save for the 5 mans. My guild just doesn't have the man power for it and I don't have the time to go finding a pug for it sadly. But still, that makes all the sense in the world to me now. Hopefully I'll get a chance to try it out tonight and see how things work.

As for Pallies as AoE tanks, yeah, I play one too and yeah, I feel like I can tank anything and almost rarely have a problem holding aggro when the heavy hitters come in with their AoE's. I heard about the new button for Bears too and would love to see something more, even if it is a talent only ability

[Dargoth]

I'm surprised to see people complaing about Bear AOE threat. I've tanked ICC with a second tank of all three classes and I can say that the only one that can reliably generate more threat on AOE is the pally and even then I can usually keep 30-40% of the mobs on me if I work at it. The DK and Warriors I've run with cannot touch my AOE threat, if they are lucky they might hold on to one of the mobs. The best geared DPS sometimes manage to pull a mob off me for a second or two but as long as you pay attention these are easy to grab back. Sure we can't generate more AOE than a pally with nothing more than maul/swipe spam but if we pay attention, throw out the occasional mangle on mobs in danger of being pulled and be ready if a taunt is needed we should have no problem maintaining threat on large groups of mobs.

[meteo]

I'm leveling my druid now and i'm already thinking about what items to get to prepare for raids and mae a set of gear which i want to get before i start raiding with my bear.

The starting set

I didn't consider raid gear and crafted items because i'm completely broke (shadowsedge ist expensive...).


I'd love to get some comments and I hope i didn't make any big mistakes and if so i hope you'll point them out for me

[sr1030nx]

I'm surprised to see people complaing about Bear AOE threat.

It really helps having the t10 set bonus for swipe. A large chunk of the druid tanking population probably doesn't have it yet.

[BATISTTA]

When I got my t-10 lacerate bonus it did make a diff.. for sure. I think that the biggest issue I see is that my dps is now getting some insane set bonuses. I will say though now with the correct macros and hit/exp I am not having any issues with threat at all. I am doing some crzy dps now as well. With maul being number one on my dps rotation now its kinda funny doing more damage than the dps in 5 mans. I know they are prob crappy pug scrubs but hay still funny!!!!! Anyone have any ideas of what a good snap aoe ability would be? Like Thorn patch lol....or something crzy ...big aoe of brambles and thorns we could lay down. Maybe a shout would be cool..like a large bear roar that would act like Thunder clap.
What do you guys think?

[bavarcarus]

whatever the ability is, it should make the bear do a backflip ;D

[Bearbutt]

I took all those changes and advice I got and was able to put them into effect last night, save for grabbing the triumph tanking trinket. Ended up swapping back to my death card for the time being. To test out the talent changes, I grabbed my wife who plays a resto shaman and always complained I take a freaking beating all the time. Needless to say, changing out most of my gems and the talents made a huge difference. We were literally able to two man farm all the trash in Heroic Pit of Saron on our own. The casters gave me a bit of trouble sadly, but nothing a bash or a well timed windshock (whatever it is called now) couldn't stop. We were even able to two man the Ick and Krick fight on our own. Thanks for all the great advice. 5 more triumph and I'll have my trinket, though was hoping to get Ick's Rotting Thumb last night, just ended up with a new chest for my boomkin set. Oh well! ^_^v

Bearbutt

[Deleted]

I have a question on your set up for one of my guildies. I see your hit is like 155 can you drop back on that when your armor pen is so high? He is like 1000 armor pen now and was wondering if he should go higher armor pen. What are your thoughts?

This is more a question for the cat thread, but I'll answer it here. 1 of the attributes of arpen is that it gets better the more you have of it. At a certain amount, it will start blowing every other stat out of the water, including hit/expertise (this is at around 1250+, use simulationcraft for exact calculations based on your gear), and from that point on you should pretty much drop every thing you can if you can trade it for more arpen.