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Interesting point. I don't tank a lot but when I do it almost aways with a friend who has a Mage. I alway find my self worried that I'll break the polymorph.

I can kind of see both sides of what Horsemouth is saying. As an infrequent Bear having Swipe cover a full 360 degrees will make my tanking a little easier as I'm not use to running around and gathering up the mobs. But I also see that gathering the mobs is one of the things that would make tanking as a Druid more challangeing.

Right now I basically DPS as kitty and occasionally either tank a 5 man or OT on certain bosses. For example I always OT the back bosses on the Four Horsemen. For the first time I went on a guild 25 man last Friday as one of the OT and did Patchwerk, a fight that alway gave us trouble. We one shotted the fat ******* :) I'm like to say it was because of me, but I think it was due to having a better group/mix of healers then in past runs.

Oh, but it will increase tps. Not by a huge margin, but it will increase your tps. Every second you spend adjusting your position so that you can land a threat generating attack is lost tps.



Not really. It just brings it more in line with what other tanking classes are capable of.



That's more a sad commentary on poor dps than it is on the strengths/weaknesses of a given class.



No, it makes all bears have an easier time, good or bad.



2 GCDs is one or two GCDs more than any other tanking class needs. That's the point. My pally is good for rock solid threat on up to 6 mobs with my initial two attacks, and that's not counting Consecrate. DKs take a little longer and warriors have to work harder for their threat on large groups than any other class, but they still have a 360 degree threat generator.



Actually, Consecrate is usually the 3rd or 4th attack in a rotation, depending on what the pull requires.



Druids don't have that many threat attacks to begin with. Compared to the other three tanking classes, druids have the fewest tools to work with.



I'm sorry to say it, but that's just weak tanking. Ideally you'd be using Berserk + Mangle every time Berserk is off cooldown. You'd be alternating Mangle in some form of rotation with Swipe so that you can contain threat on targets being held for your (primarily) single target dps. You'd be dynamic and rotate in all of your threat tools based on what the situation requires, not because lackluster dps let you get away with less but because you want to be a solid all-around tank that can fit in with any group.

I can tell you straight up that Maul + Swipe with the rest of your ******* reserved for mobs that you have low threat on would not hold anything through the massive onslaught of a geared dps warrior. I encourage you to try it...find yourself a warrior (or any other dps class, for that matter) that pushes a consistent raid buffed 4000-4500 single target dps and bring them along on a raid. Tell them to go bawls out and not worry about Omen and offer to pay their repair bill. You'll see what I'm talking about. Druids are not an AoE tanking class and if you play them as such the results will be mediocre.

Multi-target swipe was an afterthought that was badly needed to keep druids from becoming obsolete as a tanking class. You're looking at it from your point of view as a bear tank in a starter raid guild that is slightly behind the ball in terms of progression. I'm looking at it from the point of view of someone who has tanked raids with both my druid and my paladin with a little non-heroic tanking under my belt on my DK. I'm also looking at it from the point of view of dps in raids who would frequently /w me 15 mins into a run after I was away the previous raid night telling me they were happy I was back because the druid and warrior tanks made for a very boring run from a dps perspective. When I wasn't there, they spent more time watching Omen and doing fast math in their head than they did unleashing hell and having fun doing what it was they wanted to do. And it's the nature of the classes that force dps to wait a little longer with one class than with some others, so when you're talking about a change to an ability that gives a bit more versatility for catching runners and wonky pathers, it's not dumbing down the class. It's making you a more viable tank.

And rogues (fan of knives is only effective on very large pulls) and DK (AoE dps only accounts for a portion of their dps...the bulk of it is single target).



There are trash pulls in Naxx where the mobs rarely line up "just so" off the pull. The spider pulls where they pull you around on the web are an example. If you need to be facing a certain direction and have them all bunched together for a frontal cone threat attack, you're not building threat as fast as a class that has full circle AoE.



We're not talking about threat potential under ideal circumstances. We're talking about threat potential in less than ideal circumstances. It's as though some druids are of the mindset that full circle swipe will offer limited/no benefit while at the same time saying they wish they had something else in their ******* of threat tools.

So which is it? Druids need more or they don't?

You can still position them if you want to...you just don't need to anymore. You're not going to be standing in the middle of a pack of mobs getting smacked around from behind just because you can hit them with Swipe without having to face them...that would just be sloppy tanking that would drive your healers nuts. I'm positioning mobs all the time no matter which class I'm using to tank...that doesn't change just because you have a 360 degree threat attack.

Who the H are you to tell me that?

I've been enjoying Bear for years now, and that's not about to change because of one ability. It's just a shame Blizz has chosen the lazy way to "fix" Bears rather than put some thoughts into it.


This is not about epeen. Go to the O-Boards if you wanna discuss that.
We're talking about enjoyment. If you can't see the difference, there's hardly anything I can do to explain.


Agreed, it's not gonna happen. And yes, positioning will still be required in a way, only less crucial. But there would've been nothing wrong with some sort of Bearclap instant AoE-threat to grab a mob and then, as you position them anyway, start using Swipe and re-use Bearclap as it comes off CD.

Bottom line: I don't think anyone here is truly arguing about effectiveness. It will be effective, sure.
But it's gonna be just more of the same, with slightly more dead brain cells.

That's a caricature. Positioning mobs into your raid AoE isn't exactly hard. Swipe's "cone" is much wider than people seem to think. As long as I move along the circle of the raid's AoE, nothing is lost/wasted, as all mobs remain in the AoE.

Realism went out the door the second the first Gnome Warrior was created. There's no way you could deflect blows of something 10 times your size, it would crush you.

Edited, Mar 20th 2009 12:50pm by Norellicus

*shrugs*

The sooner you get to swipe and the more targets you hit while doing so, the sooner you'll proc Savage Defense. Surprising that amongst all the whining about the lack of skill involved nobody happened to think of that.

i personally dislike the idea of a 360 swipe because it takes something that was a challenging part of druid tanking (as challenging as tanking gets these days anyway) and makes it about as mindless as can be, right up there with pally aoe tanking (hit consecrate, spam HoR, repeat). one thing i love about shockwave on my prot war is i get a real sense of satisfaction when i move the mobs just so to get them in a nice little row and bunched up just the way i want before i let loose with the aggro-wave. if they made shockwave have some kind of small pbaoe effect in addition to the cone....well....that would really kill the fun of it (and make it even stronger in pvp for that matter).

generally for aoe thats all you *need*. obviously single target + aoe goes differently, but those kinds of pulls are few and far between.