My kingdom for an edit button!

Wheres the Druid love? Feral is so broken in both tanking and PvP right now and all blizz is doing is lol'ing and playing their frost mages

Frost mages got nerfed pretty heavily in 4.06, although they are still good. Blizz stupidly nerfed their pve damage making them less raid viable (although still viable enough I guess).

As far as feral... huh? what? mer? I don't tank as a druid or do feral pvp, but paragon's bear MT seemed to be doing fine (world first 13/13 enough for ya?), and looking at arena junkies, 5 of the top 9 3v3 teams have a feral druid. (feral/mage/priest seems to be a popular comp).

so... whaaaa?

Also, btw, this is just a preliminary patch notes. They will be adding tons of changes and class balances as testing goes on, so don't get yer panties in a bunch.

aww nuts, i fail at life, saw the paw thought that meant feral, not just druid... looks like most of those druids on arenajunkies are resto or balance. So yeah, maybe feral pvp isn't so hot right now, but they still aren't terrible are they?

I'm doing perfectly fine as our guild's druid MT. and even our OT goes on his druid sometimes and does just as well. I don't know where everyone gets the idea that druid tanking is completely broken...

Pocket dispellers don't count. Arena is not everything.

Feral is broken for PuG tanking at least. Raids are a different beast. With only one or two targets to keep threat on, bears are great but I've been finding that bear performance on more than two targets to be rather underwhelming. And the "more interesting" rotation, while certainly more engaging than the way it was in Wrath, still feels like a recipe for RMS.

Tell that to my guild's Feral Druid. He's picked up half of the Guild PvP achievements on his own and racked up about 15k honourable kills in the process. Sounds fine to me.

The main problem with druid tanking right now is that bears only get [Thrash] to reliably tank mob groups at level 81. Before that all you have is [Challenging Roar] as an aoe taunt from lvl 28 onward with a 3 minute cooldown.

Sure, I could switch mobs and hit all of them individually, but PUGs are used to Paladins and Warriors who will consecrate/thunderclap which grabs aggro faster, more reliably and lets groups faceroll dungeons with hardly ever stopping. Can't do that as a bear.

I like tanking, but as a leveling druid I just don't bother at the moment due to this.

@ulrica: Only have thrash at 81? What about thorns, what about swipe?

I did find aoe tanking without thrash (at the end of wrath) to be extremely painful, but once you get it at 81 things open up. Swipe and thrash complement each other well, add in a bit of tab and lacerate, and you'll get some free mangle procs and it suddenly gets easier.

I've mentioned it before in wowinsider comments, but the large caster pulls that are to the right and left when you enter BoT are massive aoe fests, and I hold on to them just fine.

1) Get Tidy Plates/Threat Plates
2) thrash/swipe on CD
3) tab target lacerate
4) click target any nameplate that is turning yellow (threatplates shows as losing threat) and use a free mangle proc

Feral tanking:
NOT broken
NOT easy
NOT fun?

I think the reason the LFD circles seem to think it's broken is because there are a lot of bears running around still expecting to hold aggro with Swipe spam, clueless as to how impotent/impossible that is these days.

I am more casual than I expected to be right now--haven't raided aside from BH, mostly doing randoms, not very frequently at that. But my feral is 347 equipped and can hold aggro roughly as well as my 351 warrior can.

On the other hand, I've stopped playing my bear, because it's just not fun. It's frantic. Frantic CAN be fun--I think warrior tanking is both fun & frantic, and was even more so in the past--but this is not that type of frantic.

So I agree that they need to fix bears, not because they're "broken" in terms of their overall capability, but because the gameplay is just mind-numbing.

The long version of my bear rant: http://bit.ly/hzZDvO

@Aanye
I know what you mean. I don't really seek out to tank all that much but I'll do it for my guild. Right now I get into a fight, I start out ok and then I feel like I'm just (no pun intended) thrashing at my keyboard. At least in Wrath I could spam swipe and there was a rhythm to it as I threw in things like mangle or lacerate or whatever. Now I just mash buttons and try to keep threat. Plus it seems like every time I tank for the guild, I wind up getting a healer having an off-day or at least 1-2 dps that are exactly iLevel 329. I'd much rather find another tank or sit in a queue by myself and dps as kitty.

It's a shame because back in Wrath, especially with the ICC 5-mans, I felt like I could tank just about anything and would help friends get faster dps queues. Now I just feel gimpy.

@lownwolf at level 36 [Swipe] is learned rather late compared to the Warrior/Paladin abilities and doesn't stack up against them very well either

@ Dewd: You're right about the "rhythm" being missing.

The real problem is that, prior to Cataclysm, the rhythm of bear tanking was "Chopsticks". We could weave in Maul or Mangle or Lacerate all we wanted, but we were ultimately still relying upon Swipe spam, which was always sort of a mind-numbing (and RSI-inducing) rhythm, when you think about it.

Now without Swipe spam, we're expected to do more tanking, but haven't been given any more (effective) tools to do so. So the best rhythm we can muster is, oh, say the bass part to "Heart & Soul": http://youtu.be/rKrZiddRphw

Warriors, in contrast, have so many tools to work with, but they must be used in concert with each other in the right way. To extend the music metaphor, they get to play Mozart, Beethoven or Tchaikovsky. Pallies and DKs are somewhat in between... Perhaps John Williams? I guess DKs have dibs on the Imperial March. :P

Anyhow, bears need more abilities, or abilities with greater synergy. Blood & Thunder offers some nice interaction between Rend and Thunderclap, two abilities that a warrior will be using anyway--it provides great blanket threat for a warrior at the expense of one GCD's worth of snap aggro. But even without a Rend, TC does provide good snap aggro--something neither Swipe nor Thrash provide. What is Maul--is it our OOC dump, making it a counterpart to Revenge, or is it (glyphed) our poor version of a Cleave, something that is fairly essential to warrior AoE threat? I say it's neither. And Shockwave is a full-blown Swiss army knife in itself--we don't have anything that comes close to that.

I don't just wish for bears to become prot warrior clones--though it would be an improvement over the current state. But yes, bears need more rhythm and more synergy... more payoff for good tanking.

Tanking on my Druid right now feels like a less fun version of BC bear tanking. At least back then I felt like a beast with my huge health pool and my massive amounts of armor

@lownwolf
Swipes damage (and threat) is very weak and no, it is not at all complementary to Thrash. If Swipe were to slap the Mangle bleed debuff on the targets, then it would complement Thrash, making Thrash hit quite a bit harder. Also, Thrash is a bleed that is mitigated by armor. It's the only bleed I know of in the game that does not ignore armor. We also have no ranged silence, the only tanking class that lacks this tool.

Bear AoE tanking is not impossible by any means; it just not where it could be and should be in comparison to other tanking classes. Read the forums. There's a thread in General called Why Druids are Frustrated by Saviodrood. It covers Bear Tanking issues as well as Feral PvP issues. There are some really good responses in there from some very highly regarded bear tanks. There's even a blue post, although the information in it seems way off the mark. Overall it's a good read.

I'm hopeful that due to all the recent changes to Feral, they are waiting for some more data and taking more time before planning any further adjustments. I do expect to see some changes in the next round of patch notes.