7. Talent overview:

The necessary talents for a bear are all in the feral and restoration trees; balance does not have anything of interest. As with our previous 101 articles, italicized talents are considered optional or situational, and those with a strike-through should be avoided.

Feral:

• Ferocity: Mandatory.
• Feral Aggression: If your raid doesn't have an improved attack power reduction (from a DPS or protection warrior's improved shouts, a paladin's Vindication, or a warlock's Improved Curse of Weakness), you should put 5 points here. If someone else can supply it, don't bother. The boost to Demoralizing Roar is generally superfluous for 5-mans or for any content you outgear.
• Feral Instinct: Mandatory. You're going to be using Swipe a lot.
• Savage Fury: Mandatory.
• Thick Hide: Mandatory.
• Feral Swiftness: Mandatory.
• Survival Instincts: Mandatory. One of only two survival-oriented cooldowns at your disposal until 4-piece tier 10.
• Sharpened Claws: Mandatory.
• Shredding Attacks: Rage generation in raids is not going to be an issue, and the Shred component is only useful when you're in cat form. It's slightly more useful for 5-man work, but overall the talent's just an OK place to dump 2 points that have nowhere else to go.
• Predatory Strikes: Mandatory.
• Primal Fury: Mandatory. One of the engines behind bear rage generation.
• Primal Precision: Mandatory, unless you're in the unusual position of being expertise-capped from gear alone. Because we share gear with classes/specs who don't want expertise beyond the soft cap, this is quite difficult.
• Brutal Impact: Players who focus primarily on 5-mans sometimes talent into this for more frequent interrupts (as you simply cannot depend on your DPS to do it). Otherwise, this should be considered a PvP talent only.
• Feral Charge: Mandatory. Feral Charge provides a way to close the gap between yourself and an enemy, and the bear version also immobilizes and interrupts (though not versus boss-level mobs). Tremendously useful in 5-mans, and just as useful for raids.
• Nurturing Instinct: Cats only, and even for them primarily a PvP talent.
• Natural Reaction: Mandatory.
• Heart of the Wild: Mandatory.
• Survival of the Fittest: Mandatory. This talent is what makes bear tanking possible in the absence of leather with +defense.
• Leader of the Pack: Mandatory.
• Improved Leader of the Pack: Personally, I think this is the best talent in the whole tree, but it's optional. The +healing done can really add up over the course of an encounter with heavy tank and raid damage, but versus bosses that don't hit as hard, almost all of it's going to be overheal. The mana return is useless in raids, less so in 5-mans and while soloing. The effect does not stack; if there is another feral in the raid with ILotP, you do not need to take this, but it's generally of more use to a bear than a cat (and most bears do take it). On a side note, if you solo a lot of older content or have the misfortune to encounter extremely bad healers through the Dungeon Finder, consider the talent mandatory.
• Primal Tenacity: PvP only.
• Protector of the Pack: Once titled the rather more elegant "Mother Bear" in the Wrath beta, this is mandatory.
• Predatory Instincts: Cats only.
• Infected Wounds: This is technically optional as you can get the debuff to attack speed from elsewhere in the raid, but most bears take it anyway for both 5-mans and multi-tank fights.
• King of the Jungle: An OK place to schlep extra points (more so if you have 4-piece tier 10 and thus a reason to use Enrage as much as possible), but optional.
• Mangle: Mandatory. The absence of Mangle while leveling is partly why bear-tanking is a fairly uninspiring experience early on.
• Improved Mangle: The talent is taken by most bears for the threat boost, but if you're not having threat problems, consider it optional.
• Rend and Tear: Mandatory. While it doesn't look very exciting, it's a huge boost to Maul (assuming you have a Lacerate on the target, and you should), and Maul is the single greatest contribution to our TPS (threat-per-second).
• Primal Gore: Mandatory. A nice TPS boost, but more importantly, another source of Savage Defense procs.
• Berserk: Mandatory. Extremely useful as both a threat boost and a Fear immunity (when necessary).

Restoration:

• Improved Mark of the Wild: Mandatory.
• Nature's Focus: Restoration only.
• Furor: This was once a 5/5 talent for all ferals before Improved Mark of the Wild stopped sucking, but nowadays most ferals only put 3 points here after putting 2/2 in IMotW. You may find yourself "powershifting" (i.e. shifting from bear to bear) a few times to get the rage proc before a pull if you don't have any rage and Enrage is on cooldown.
• Naturalist: Mandatory.
• Subtlety: Restoration only.
• Natural Shapeshifter: Not really useful for PvE, but you'll need 3 points here to get to Master Shapeshifter if you have points left over from the feral tree.
• Intensity: A mandatory talent for ferals in Burning Crusade, but these days, not of much use.
• Omen of Clarity: Mandatory.
• Master Shapeshifter: If you wind up with points left over after grabbing all the stuff you need in the feral tree, Master Shapeshifter is a nice threat/damage boost.

8. Leveling as a bear:

Shifting Perspectives has a guide on how to level as a druid from 1-80 covering talent choices and rotations. Most of your soloing work is should be done in cat form -- the bear does not have a lot of offensive capability early on, and the rage situation is frankly terrible. Our rage generation is designed around critting and dodging a lot, and at early levels you're not going to be doing much of either. Maul, one of your few early attacks, also destroys your rage supply, as it replaces a white hit (your auto-attack) with a yellow attack. In effect, it consumes not only the rage cost of the skill itself, but also the rage you would have generated from a white hit landing. For this reason, i don't recommend macroing Maul to the use of other skills at early levels, although many bears do so later on.

However, you can easily level via the Dungeon Finder if you want to get early experience tanking, although the bear's 1-60 design as a weaker copy of a warrior gets old fast. Your rotation, such as it is, is going to be a lot of Swipe and Maul spam. This is in marked contrast to your rotation at 80, which is going to be...uh...a lot of Swipe and Maul spam. Really, that's all there is to it. If you want to tank your way to 80, glyph Maul as soon as possible (level 15), use Feral Faerie Fire (level 18) on cooldown, use Demoralizing Roar to reduce incoming damage if you're not struggling to stay ahead of your DPS on AoE threat, and spam the motherloving snot out of Swipe (level 16) and Maul. You should tab-target around the pull to make sure that your two-mob glyphed Maul is being spread evenly around the mobs, as that's good practice for 80 as well.

Heirlooms:

For bears, the heirloom situation is pretty much the same deal as with cats. You should ignore the PvE melee leather shoulders (Stained Shadowcraft Spaulders at 40 emblems of heroism or 60 champion's seals) and pick up its PvP counterpart, the Exceptional Stormshroud Shoulders (200 Stone Keeper's shards). As with cats, agility > raw attack power for bears. Unfortunately, there's no agility on the melee leather chest heirloom (Stained Shadowcraft Tunic at 40 emblems or 60 seals), so you're stuck with that.

The heirloom weapon of choice is the Repurposed Lava Dredger, available for either 65 emblems of heroism or 95 champion's seals, and the only useful trinket is the Swift Hand of Justice (50 emblems or 75 seals). If you win the Kal'uak fishing derby, you can add a Dread Pirate Ring to the set.