Endangered Species Follow

I am of course talking about the elusive bear tank.

Apparently on my server, Destromath, I am pretty much the only one that plays Alliance. I have had like 2 healers in the last few days say, "Wow I haven't healed a bear in a long time." I also think that at least for one of those healers I was the last one as the name was familiar.

I see plenty of Trees and Boomkins roaming around. I see Horde in Dalaran spec'd feral but they could be cats and usually are more DPS inclined when I inspect them. Same goes for Ally ferals I group with or see cruising around.

So how about everyone else out there? Do you feel like you may be one of the few dedicated bears on your server?

I am just glad I don't suck as that would be embarrassing to bears everywhere.

Seems to be the case, yeah. I found and joined a new guild and have been surprised to find that half of the handful of druids are trees and the other half moonkin. Kinda nice being the only furball.

I've noticed very few feral tanks as well. I play one but I respec on demand as money is so easy to come by. As long as I have my glyph of maul (I can make it so supply is moot) then I'm ready to tank after a quick respec.

Nearly every feral I've run into is cat only and refuses to tank and even the few tanks I've seen that were feral had gear that was just plain bad. This gives us a bad name though it's more the player than the class/spec but that's hard to see when they cannot hold hate and/or die quickly.

Funny, I rarely see boomkins nowadays (despite all their buffs) and my bear tank has plenty of company on my server. It's basically bears and trees. And, frankly, who'd want to level a plate-wearing class nowadays with all the loot competition from DKs?

Since Wrath I have only known/seen/played with one druid tank. One of the best tanks I have partied with too.

I don't know the class at all but this one would stack a heap of agility instead of dodge which ended up giving them a substantial amount of avoidance, high threat (I guess from lots of crits) and would top dps in just about every run I was lucky enough to run with them. I love runs where threat is a non issue due to a great tank.

Perhaps all the changes made to bears scared a good many of them off? Myself, I tried to read everything I could and still am a bit fuzzy on some of the finer details. I still cry every time I see my armor in bear form. I've worked hard, have some decent gear, and am still at only 23k. I keep hearing about the 30k+ armor bears and am wondering what the heck they're doing to achieve that. While my staff and trinkets don't have armor, I'm sure not missing 7k armor from those alone.... (I think?)

I've also noticed that I can't hold threat against another tank while raiding, in approximately equivalent gear. Sure sure, maybe it's me who sucks at playing. However it seems I'm constantly losing aggro to a warrior or DK tank in a raid. Could be me, could be that bears are not putting out enough threat? /shrug. I do fine in 5-mans as the sole tank, can hold aggro off the dps easily.

Anyhoo...so many changes, and sometimes it's not easy to adapt.

my druids main spec is cat, on my server it is so hard to find any heroics or nax runs that are wiling to take one. so ive decided to start gearing towards resto. i figure its the only use that druids will be, havent seen ANY bear druids since ive turned 80. although my friend says he does tank from time to time in his dps gear,(his high agi and crit im assuming)

so now im doing a lil bit of researching for resto, (im very noobish when it comes to resto, not experienced). im not quite sure what kinds of stats are needed for the low lvl heroics....

Ewww. Moomkin Aura and Leader of the Pack are great buffs depending on your group composition and both talent specs perform well in all the content that wow has to offer.

The reason you see a disproportionately small number of bears is that raid composition demands relatively more healers and dps. Typical raids require 2 tanks, 2-5 healers, and a bunch of dps. Couple that w/the fact that a new tank class was introduced (although I haven't seen a ton of DK tanks) and Warriors got a nice boost to their tanking abilities recently and you see a lot of tanks around. More than most raiding guilds can put to good use. On my server there are scads of warriors and death knights playing and relatively few warlocks, elemental shamans, shadow priests, and feral druids.

I have to agree there are less bears running around but it's not for lack of potential in the class, just the way the numbers work out.

haha thats an awesome last line :P
but that answered a couple of the questions i had. thanks

I personally am getting very frustrated with feral. Tanking, now that almost everything is AoE, is just a pain, especially trying to pick up a group of mobs running towards the healer (Gothik I find almost impossible, partly due to Druid mechanics and partly due to 2-300ms lag). I was starting to get bored with tanking towards the end of BC and even though WotLK is not boring, I still don't seem to enjoy tanking.

I do enjoy feral DPS, but it is just so damn hard! My new 80 hunter can come very close to matching my druids single target DPS just by spamming one button, and he has zero epics where Rarebeast has mostly epics. Perhaps if we had a glyph along the lines of rake refreshing your mangle debuff or something like that I would feel a bit more relaxed DPS'ing, but at the moment I feel like I am playing a losing game of "wack a mole" trying to keep up with keeping everything refreshed. I am prepared to say that it is my own ability letting me down, but considering I was near the top DPS in my guild through most of BC and only fell behind a bit at the end in T6 content, I don't think I am too unco-ordinated compared to most other players. The fact that our DPS drops so significantly if we don't come close to full uptime on our buffs/debuffs means that it seems that only very good players will ever be able to do decent damage compared to other classes. Where as any moron hunter or mage can easily do very good DPS if they are geared, and the DPS drop for a lock or SPriest doesn't seem quite so drastic if they have some of their dots drop off for a bit during the fight (let alone not having to worry about combo point generation as well).

Sorry for the major whine, but it's been getting to me for a while and my game PC is busted for a day or two at the moment which isn't helping my mood! Other than that, i'm really enjoying WotLK and even leveling my 3rd toon, am still enjoying all the quests and instances :)

Man, you are missing out on some good stuff with RnT, especially with bosses. It'll do so much more for you than Master Shapeshifter if you're keeping Lacerate up on the boss (or if you have another class present keeping bleeds up, and there's a number them who can do it; Druid, Rogue, Warrior all do a good chunk of their DPS through bleed effects, possibly others too). 4% just doesn't cut the mustard given the talent points you spend to get it (you really have to include the 3 from Natural Shapeshifter, since for PvE content shapeshifting cost is a nonissue). :(

@Immonius:
Rend&Tear > Master Shapeshifter.
The only physical damage done to a boss is Maul and Mangle.
Bleed(i think) arent physical. And every hit is a Maul.
So u loose 4% damage on mangle but get 20% on maul.
Good trade i think.

@Dandwan:
Sry but your built is a complete chaos.
U dont want to go full bear? -> u ARE full bear! except that u lost a ton of aggro by skipping R&T...
If u wanna go hybrid, then leave out thick-hide or natural reaction and take some DPS-abilities.
Cause now u made a mistake for both, bear and cat.
If u seriously go for damage than KotJ is a must have, to maintain your rotations and putting a FB into them for some nice extra DPS.
And never ever ever leave away R&T for cat-dps.

Gift of the Wild isnt really necessary cause normaly a resto druid is with you in raids, so you will get the talented GotW.

Rend and Tear is better than Master Shapeshifter.

Maul accounts for roughly half of my damage on boss fights. That is of course using a Lacerate, Lacerate, Mangle based rotation with Maul thrown in at every chance. Granted I thrown in a Swipe to proc my idol and FFF for the buff as needed but that is the base high threat rotation.

Rend and Tear is a huge threat/DPS boost. More so when compared to Master Shapeshifter. It is a PvP talent designed to help out multiple forms not a specific feral talent design to massively increase some of our main sources of damage and threat. Especially considering the high threat nature of Maul and that typically during a boss fight you are in an infinite rage situation so Maul is always up.

Also bleeds are always physical damage.