Feral DruidsFollow

Not long ago I made a druid and at level 15 decided I wanted to level to 80, with out getting the 100 quest achivment. Well I am now level 31 and have been threw more Scarlet Graveyards and RFCs then I thought was possible and now I have a question.

Is tanking as a druid at 80 accepted. I know this might seem like a stupid question but on my main I rarely see any Druid tanks in ICC pugs or even VoA pugs for that matter. Are druids bad tanks, or are they just better dps/healers? Or is it just a mater of people liking Moonkins, cats, and trees more then bears?

My server has a few other dedicated bear tanks.

Most of them do DPS or heal though or only tank heroics.

I've recently started bear-tanking in an ICC-10 group and while it's certainly the easiest rotation (I've tanked with all 4 classes) and gets boring pretty quickly, there's a side benefit: It's a lot easier to see what else is going on. You can watch the raid, call out important timers and incoming, etc far easier when you're not watching cooldowns, procs and runes.

Sure, with the right macro you basically spam one button most of the time. But having the ability to retain optimal threat without distraction is kinda nice. Especially great if you're raid leading (which I'm not right now, but have in the past).

Just wanted to add that little tid bit. Cheers!

#showtooltip
/cast Lacerate

True story, Horse.

On a serious note, I'm guessing it's something like:

#showtooltip
/castsequence Faerie Fire (Feral), Mangle (Bear), Lacerate, Lacerate, Lacerate
/cast !Maul

Or something like that.

Though theoretically, considering T10 and all, you'd get more from spamming Swipe instead of Lacerate once you've got it stacked, only using Lacerate once in a while to refresh. Because of that conditional, I'm guessing there's no max threat macro available, just a "keybind all keys to this macro and /facedesk to win"

Edited, Jun 28th 2010 10:51pm by Mazra

Yayaya, I know Swipe is sexy.



Well, when you've got DPS breathing down your neck to do more and do it faster, you kinda tend to prioritize the extra Swipe instead of Demoralizing Roar.

If there's a Ret Paladin or Warrior in the group, they can do it.

You can use PowerAuras (and other similar addons) to either announce when your target isn't Demo debuffed, or to keep up a timer showing the debuff active. Also good for tracking Lacerate stacks, Rip/Rake timers, Roar, etc.

Not at my gaming computer now but iirc my tanking macro is:

/castsequence reset=5 [nomod] Mangle (Bear), Lacerate, Lacerate 
/cast [mod] Swipe 
/cast !Maul 

... but I keep FFF in another keybind with a mouseover modifier and pop it whenever it's up (which generally sticks in the last sec of the sequence waiting on cooldown).

/cast [@mouseover,exists,nodead] [exists,nodead] Faerie Fire (Feral)

If you're in a regular raid group be sure to coordinate debuffs between your tanks =)

Feral tanking has got to be the easiest tanking in the game.

Up until not too long ago bear tanks had the most health out there and mitigation via dodge and talents on par with that of a well geared warrior with none of the range or dps issues and comparable or better panic buttons to boot.

As for their rarity, I think it's just a throw back to the days when the idea of a bear tanking for a raid was a joke and most ferals were under pressure from their guilds to go heal/boom.

When feral tanks were finally made viable, not many druids swapped class due to having already built caster sets and not wishing to/being able to build up decent bear/cat sets.

The difficulty of raising a feral druid at lower levels simply added to this problem - sure, people saw the bear with twice the health of the best warrior they'd ever seen before and were impressed, but that impressed attitude faded somewhere between levels 10 and 30 when its most miserable being a druid.

Now toss in the viability of being a dps kitty (as well as the lack of responsibility - let's face it, it's easier to blend into the crowd as dps then heal/tank) combined with the expense of maintaining two sets of raid level gear, then add the improvements that have put warriors on par or better then us for health and mitigation (especially in IC25 - that dodge debuff sucks) and sadly, the bear tank is becoming an endangered species again.

I don't overly mind though as the rarity just adds to the fun aspect for me - I hear "Woot - bear tank" a lot now a days, probably due to the fact that the only ferals that stay with it are competent - we're an elite club now with a first rate reputation - uphold it and enjoy the woots. ;-)