Shifting Perspectives: The disappearance of the bear, part 3
by Allison Robert 
Oct 21st 2009 at 11:00AM
Complaint #7: If the raid needs more tanks, it's easier and faster to gear up a plate class than a druid.
"The plate +defense gear's been going to offspec for weeks, but the hunters get dibs on the next Twin's Pact or Hellion Glaive, and the rogues are still rolling on non-set. We need another tank, but they'll just respec one of the death knights for the next boss."
Remember what we said about #3? Plate tanking gear is stuff that absolutely no one else in the raid wants, and it goes to offspec pretty quickly as a result. It's for this general reason that it's easy to gear a holy paladin, resto shaman, resto druid, or plate tank; the competition for their gear is limited (when it exists at all). An Arms/Fury warrior, Retribution paladin, or DPS death knight will have little difficulty assembling a decent-quality offset once the regular tanks have their drops. By contrast, a non-Feral druid who wants to tank is at the back of a very long line comprised of the raid's tanks, melee DPS, and hunters before they'll get a crack at rings, cloaks, trinkets, necklaces, leather DPS gear and weapons.
My take: This probably does have an impact on who's most likely to get a shot at tanking from within a raiding guild if an existing tank has to retire or goes on break. While it wouldn't explain the immediate decline of bear tanks, it might play a role in how likely we are to bounce back. As with #3, it's a problem that eventually solves itself given a sufficient amount of time spent farming a raid, but odds are still pretty good that a plate DPS class is going to finish and update a viable tanking set long before their druid colleagues do. Ergo, the first option for a "replacement tank" within a raid is likely to be another plate tank.
Complaint #8: A druid who's dual-specced into healing or DPS has more difficulty returning to tanking than other classes.
"Look, I know you really want to tank this fight, but all three of our tanks have excellent attendance and I don't want to leave any of you out of the raid. The warrior's going to tank, the pally's going DPS, and I'd like to have you come boomkin or heals because melee sucks on this fight. Would you seriously rather be benched?"
Balance and cat DPS were both hugely improved in Wrath, and Restoration also had two prayers answered in the form of a flash heal and a group heal. Between that and the introduction of dual specs, druids are in the position of selling themselves out of a tank job if they become known as a competent DPS or healer. They're also the only tank who can spec into ranged DPS or efficient group heals, and both can be huge advantages in melee-unfriendly fights and encounters with high raid damage (which these days is close to being all of them).
And -- remember points #3 and #7? -- there's limited competition for leather +spellpower gear in the raid. Any druid who's been raiding for any length of time can build a decent healing set just as quickly as a plate DPS can build a decent tanking set, and should be able to jerry-rig a functional moonkin or cat set with some effort. Depending on your competition, it may actually be easier to build a Restoration off-set than it is to upgrade your tanking gear.
My take: I honestly think this is the single most important reason behind the disappearance of the bear in raid content. On a more depressing note, it's also completely unavoidable.
It's somewhat related to #5 -- as we've observed, many of the advantages conferred by the use of a bear tank are advantages conferred by the use of a druid, period, and it's a lot easier for Balance, Resto, or cat druids to heal, battle-res, and innervate. That's a strike against us on any fight where the opportunities to pop out of bear are limited (if they exist at all), but oddly enough, tank parity is an equally significant disadvantage. If no tanking class brings any particular advantage to a fight, a raid leader's thought process is pretty straightforward. They're people too, and most of them don't like the idea of benching a consistent raider. While most raid leaders in serious raiding guilds grudgingly benched part of the tank corps in classic and BC content to build a raid for 1- or 2-tank fights, they don't have much reason to do so in the age of dual specs. What's your second spec? Come as that.
Ghostcrawler's referenced both the continuing popularity of the warrior tank and the death knight's having carved a niche for themselves in Wrath tanking, and what I think is happening is this; the Protection warrior spec and the death knight as a whole have both enjoyed explosive popularity since Wrath went live, and in the months after the expansion's release, complaints about a tanking glut started to surface with unnerving frequency on the Tanking forum. Paladins and druids are being squeezed out of tank positions, not because they're bad tanks, but because there is enormous pressure on these players to respec and come as something else when it's either that or get themselves (or their warrior/DK colleagues) benched on a fight.
Anyone who's played a druid for any length of time will recognize the classic dilemma; do I respec so the group/raid gets off the ground, or do I hold out for my preferred spec and force the group/raid to build around my preference? I've always picked the former, and with the way that druid spec numbers have ebbed and flowed over the years, I don't think I'm alone in that. Unfortunately, when it comes to tank numbers, this does mean that population balance isn't likely to happen anytime soon; the odds of your tanking an encounter are determined more by the overwhelming popularity of plate classes than your actual skill at playing a tank.
Every week, Shifting Perspectives treks across Azeroth in pursuit of truth, beauty, and insight concerning the Druid class. Sometimes it finds the latter, or something good enough for government work. Whether you're a Bear, Cat, Moonkin, Tree, or -- for some unaccountable reason -- stuck in caster form, we've got the skinny on Druid changes in patch 3.2, questions and answers on new Bear and Cat forms, and thoughts on why you should be playing the class (or why not).
"The plate +defense gear's been going to offspec for weeks, but the hunters get dibs on the next Twin's Pact or Hellion Glaive, and the rogues are still rolling on non-set. We need another tank, but they'll just respec one of the death knights for the next boss."
Remember what we said about #3? Plate tanking gear is stuff that absolutely no one else in the raid wants, and it goes to offspec pretty quickly as a result. It's for this general reason that it's easy to gear a holy paladin, resto shaman, resto druid, or plate tank; the competition for their gear is limited (when it exists at all). An Arms/Fury warrior, Retribution paladin, or DPS death knight will have little difficulty assembling a decent-quality offset once the regular tanks have their drops. By contrast, a non-Feral druid who wants to tank is at the back of a very long line comprised of the raid's tanks, melee DPS, and hunters before they'll get a crack at rings, cloaks, trinkets, necklaces, leather DPS gear and weapons.
My take: This probably does have an impact on who's most likely to get a shot at tanking from within a raiding guild if an existing tank has to retire or goes on break. While it wouldn't explain the immediate decline of bear tanks, it might play a role in how likely we are to bounce back. As with #3, it's a problem that eventually solves itself given a sufficient amount of time spent farming a raid, but odds are still pretty good that a plate DPS class is going to finish and update a viable tanking set long before their druid colleagues do. Ergo, the first option for a "replacement tank" within a raid is likely to be another plate tank.
Complaint #8: A druid who's dual-specced into healing or DPS has more difficulty returning to tanking than other classes.
"Look, I know you really want to tank this fight, but all three of our tanks have excellent attendance and I don't want to leave any of you out of the raid. The warrior's going to tank, the pally's going DPS, and I'd like to have you come boomkin or heals because melee sucks on this fight. Would you seriously rather be benched?"
Balance and cat DPS were both hugely improved in Wrath, and Restoration also had two prayers answered in the form of a flash heal and a group heal. Between that and the introduction of dual specs, druids are in the position of selling themselves out of a tank job if they become known as a competent DPS or healer. They're also the only tank who can spec into ranged DPS or efficient group heals, and both can be huge advantages in melee-unfriendly fights and encounters with high raid damage (which these days is close to being all of them).
And -- remember points #3 and #7? -- there's limited competition for leather +spellpower gear in the raid. Any druid who's been raiding for any length of time can build a decent healing set just as quickly as a plate DPS can build a decent tanking set, and should be able to jerry-rig a functional moonkin or cat set with some effort. Depending on your competition, it may actually be easier to build a Restoration off-set than it is to upgrade your tanking gear.
My take: I honestly think this is the single most important reason behind the disappearance of the bear in raid content. On a more depressing note, it's also completely unavoidable.
It's somewhat related to #5 -- as we've observed, many of the advantages conferred by the use of a bear tank are advantages conferred by the use of a druid, period, and it's a lot easier for Balance, Resto, or cat druids to heal, battle-res, and innervate. That's a strike against us on any fight where the opportunities to pop out of bear are limited (if they exist at all), but oddly enough, tank parity is an equally significant disadvantage. If no tanking class brings any particular advantage to a fight, a raid leader's thought process is pretty straightforward. They're people too, and most of them don't like the idea of benching a consistent raider. While most raid leaders in serious raiding guilds grudgingly benched part of the tank corps in classic and BC content to build a raid for 1- or 2-tank fights, they don't have much reason to do so in the age of dual specs. What's your second spec? Come as that.
Ghostcrawler's referenced both the continuing popularity of the warrior tank and the death knight's having carved a niche for themselves in Wrath tanking, and what I think is happening is this; the Protection warrior spec and the death knight as a whole have both enjoyed explosive popularity since Wrath went live, and in the months after the expansion's release, complaints about a tanking glut started to surface with unnerving frequency on the Tanking forum. Paladins and druids are being squeezed out of tank positions, not because they're bad tanks, but because there is enormous pressure on these players to respec and come as something else when it's either that or get themselves (or their warrior/DK colleagues) benched on a fight.
Anyone who's played a druid for any length of time will recognize the classic dilemma; do I respec so the group/raid gets off the ground, or do I hold out for my preferred spec and force the group/raid to build around my preference? I've always picked the former, and with the way that druid spec numbers have ebbed and flowed over the years, I don't think I'm alone in that. Unfortunately, when it comes to tank numbers, this does mean that population balance isn't likely to happen anytime soon; the odds of your tanking an encounter are determined more by the overwhelming popularity of plate classes than your actual skill at playing a tank.
Every week, Shifting Perspectives treks across Azeroth in pursuit of truth, beauty, and insight concerning the Druid class. Sometimes it finds the latter, or something good enough for government work. Whether you're a Bear, Cat, Moonkin, Tree, or -- for some unaccountable reason -- stuck in caster form, we've got the skinny on Druid changes in patch 3.2, questions and answers on new Bear and Cat forms, and thoughts on why you should be playing the class (or why not).Filed under: Druid, Analysis / Opinion, Features, Classes, (Druid) Shifting Perspectives
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 6)
Zhiva Oct 21st 2009 11:28AM
To get to part 2 and 3 of this article I had to manually type URLs. Your link buttons are broken.
dulper Oct 21st 2009 11:32AM
verified
Ron Oct 21st 2009 3:46PM
Worked Fine for me
Agerath Oct 21st 2009 11:29AM
How depressing :(
I miss face-tanking my way through BC.
/sigh.
Anthony Collini Oct 21st 2009 11:38AM
From my experience grouping on my server, pallies are by far the most common tank, then warriors, then DK's, then Bears.
I have a druid with a tanking offspec and I can relate to all the points metioned. For me the kicker is others not being able to see any kind of visual progression unless they inspect you.
Volker Oct 21st 2009 3:25PM
Same here. I'm a resto with a minor in bear form... a barky-butt if you wil :)
The only workaround I have found is that when I'm running as a tree, I'm always looking for tanking leathers. It's off-spec, but I am in a guild choc-full of ret-pallies. My tanking skills arn't great, but I switched from Boomkin because everytime I looked around, if people were not yeelling for a healer, they needed a tank of any form.
One other side note. As I am the top druid in my guild, and one of the better healers, my old main, a Hunter, never got to raid. The druid was an alt of mine that has unseated my hunter, and as a result, the hunter is barely out of blues.
SmokeTheBear Oct 21st 2009 4:57PM
I was a bear MT/OT throughout the Burning Crusade expansion. I raided as a bear 75% of the time, 3-4 nights a week, for over a year. I can also relate to all of these points.
I can say, though, that I don't think it's really any one of them more than the others, even necessarily for one person. I can't pinpoint exactly when I decided to switch to full-time resto, but my impression is that it was Blizzard's schizophrenic flailing about with major changes to "fix" all of the myriad problems we had coming into WotLK that pushed me away from tanking. The gear consolidation complaint and the other complaints related to it hit me really hard, but feeling jerked around by a dev team that didn't seem to know what it wanted to do with us or how to get us there was the nail in the coffin.
I think, though, that one other point was missed: OT/DPS got stupidly complicated.
Many of us bears were not full-time main tanks, so we went kitty occasionally. One of the things that happened in WotLK was that cat DPS received an odd mix of changes that resulted in insane potential for DPS *if* a very strict and precise sequence of abilities were triggered at exactly the right time. There was very little "average" cat DPS; we were all either scrubs who couldn't hit the right button at the right time or virtuoso powerhouses who put out startlingly high numbers. And for those of us who spent most of our time in bear form, going kitty became a painful, clumsy, and embarrassing endeavor.
With all of that facing me, I went resto, and enjoyed it. I raided as resto all the way to Ulduar, before deciding to abandon the druid class altogether in favor of a priest. That decision was largely aesthetic, though if those other concerns weren't a factor, I might have just gone back to bear tanking. Alas, my druid now sits on a shelf, collecting cobwebs, wearing his weirdly itemized, hideous gear that you can't see anyhow.
Torokk Oct 25th 2009 5:37AM
Hi i Play a Tree/Lazer Chicken on Whisperwind, and i agree Blizzard needs to think up a way to make your gear show through your forms, even if a Better Geared Tree has More leaves or a Tougher Bear is Bigger it would be nice to see something. Blizzard has shown the ability to check our gear levels with the introduction of Fights like Flame Lev , WG and recently the Occ 5man.
snowleopard233 Oct 21st 2009 11:41AM
That birthday bear broke my heart. :’(
Poor bear.
Gennifurfur Oct 21st 2009 1:11PM
Me too. I can't believe it would be possible to feel so bad for a drawing, but I do! Man...
Jorges Oct 21st 2009 3:04PM
Yes!. That drawing totally represents how I feel when I say to my raid "I can tank this fight if you need another tank"... they just look at me and say "really? you?"
I've tanked almost all BC and I know I'm a capable tank, maybe more than some of the tanks of my guild. But because I'm the kitty that can battle rez, innervate and stay on the top 5 of the dps, they never let me tank (even if I'm parry/hit capped and have 41k hp and 32k armor in bear form).
My point is, it doesn't matter if we can tank and do it better than a warrior (some of us can). We're not plate wearers, and the riduculous popularity of plate tanks has relegated us to other specs. So, unless Blizz do something about it before the next expansion, bear tanking is doomed to be an old leyend.
Kolenka Oct 21st 2009 4:01PM
I'm in a situation where the only reason I still get to tank is because I'm the guild's most regular tank. I've proven myself to the guild as someone who sticks it out in a casual guild when we've lost tanks and recruited new ones, lost those, and so on. And as it is a casual guild, we pretty much take anyone, regardless of spec/etc. And on top of that, I've proven that I can help clear content and help the guild in progression fights to get new bosses down.
Lately, we wound up with an influx of tanks, more than we could ever really effectively use in raiding. But because they are all friends, it was hard to say no. I'm finding myself being pushed into ranged DPS (granted, something the guild tends to lack in a lot of runs), but it isn't what I want to be doing. It is boiling down to: these new folk have only a tank set, or only a tank spec, and so if we need them to fill a spot, they take the tank spot by default. Only if we have extras for the run can we even ask them to sit, regardless of their skill. In some ways it is getting frustrating, because I'm still needed to tank progression, but being asked to DPS on Ony, and Tank ToC makes it that much harder to gear up my feral set when Ony has the current BiS tank weapon for bears.
Serrota Oct 21st 2009 11:03PM
Oh, I know. Such a simple picture, but so much emotion.
Poor bear!
/sends birthday cake to the bear & a new feral staff
catharsis80 Oct 21st 2009 11:45AM
I'd have to say that, on the whole, as a healer, I haven't had a harder time healing one class than the other. One thing I do know is that the druid that was MTing Ony25 last night was the last tank alive and did superb the whole time over the other two tanks -- a pally and a DK.
WoWie Zowie Oct 21st 2009 11:47AM
i think there is skepticism of cats and bears using mostly the same gear. the only distinction you can make between the two is which graphic you see in front of you, its less about the gear.
its easy to measure a plate wearing tank by how much stam and defense he has though.
sooo what then is the shining advantage of using a bear to tank rather than a plate-wearer?
DKs are exceptional against magic-based attacks, palies are still the premier AOE tank, and warriors are still the best as single target boss tanking/mitigation.
what are bear tank strengths? simply just high armor and stam? really as long as the tank can aggro and survive though there shouldn't be any problem. but still, i think people have a hard time gearing for a spec that they can't pinpoint exactly what they need gear-wise.
Dere Oct 21st 2009 1:20PM
Good point something i didn't think about. That is something that as a plate tank i know i need is D cap then Stam then any avoidance i can get my hands on.
Maybe Bear tanks should wear plate. LOL. For real though a little more help on gearing a bear tank would be a good idea to drive more people to them. For Blizz not the OP, i think you do a good job with your class write ups.
Jorges Oct 21st 2009 3:18PM
Druid tanks are Crit Inmune from talents, we'll NEVER get a crushing blow. We need to be parry capped and then, if possible, hit capped. Stam and armor comes naturally from gear/gemming/enchants. Defense is good, it reduces damage, but it's not really important for us like Dodge, wich is very nice and one of the bear strengths. Also, savage defense reduce the damage from the next attack done to us by 25% of our attack power every time we crit (and maul crits a lot).
It's not hard to gear a bear tank in terms of what we need. The problem, as the article points out, is that our tanking gear is also our dps gear, and the dps gear of other classes. That's why is so hard to gear a bear tank in terms of wich drops from a boss.
WoWie Zowie Oct 21st 2009 3:23PM
righto, but again i'll ask, what's the advantage of using a bear tank?
Jorges Oct 21st 2009 3:24PM
Also, I dare to say that we can hold single target aggro way better than any other tank. I can generate 120k TPS in a few seconds on one target and not even a trigger happy hunter that forgot to use MD can steal the mob from me.
Plate wearers are overrated, really. But it is Blizz fault. If I were a RL I'd prefer to gear a Plate tank too. It's much easier and faster.
WTB Edit button for comments...
Jorges Oct 21st 2009 3:29PM
I think there's no real "advantange". In terms of use, you could put us nex to a warrior. Is almost the same tanking, but even if we can AOE and heal ourselves in a pinch, people is almost guaranteed to take the warrior.