Personally whenever I encounter serious problems in a dungeon I tend to chalk it up to the fact that I suck. I find this to be an efficient and typically accurate means of pinpointing the source of an issue. However, my fellow Druids, our problems may actually be more wide-ranging than that.
I don't mean this to be an inflammatory post, because I despise forum threads whose theme appears to be "LOL BUFF MEH." When Wrath hit, I was pretty sure the future was bright for feral tanks, and I continue to believe this. I also don't believe that the issues being discussed in this article really apply outside of 5-mans and heroics -but by golly, are they ever a nuisance there. This is about a problem with bear tanking that just so happens to conflict badly with players' approach to Wrath dungeons -namely, the desire to just AoE trash packs down and get on to the next pull. We are the tank least equipped for that task.
Do I think Druids are bad tanks? No. I think we're excellent tanks, and I see plenty of guilds using them in a main tank capacity on both 10- and 25-man raids. The mechanics of Druid tanks make them superb at raid tanking.I have a confession to make. This week's Shifting Perspectives was originally meant to be a full guide to gearing your Restoration Druid at 80, and I'm still going to post that, either this week or next.
A lot of people have (correctly, I think) observed that this column has historically paid more attention to Feral than to Restoration or Balance, and it's my aim to balance (har!) that out a bit. Part of it is just that the people who play Druids on staff here at WoW Insider are usually feral, and part of it is that -at least as of the last numbers we had on it -most people playing Druids are also feral. I confess I would love to see the demographics on Druids post-Wrath, because I get the sense that Balance in particular has become markedly more popular.
But the Resto post is going to have to wait a few days, not least because my eyes are swimming from so much Wowhead. We found out today that Swipe's threat is getting a significant buff, but over the course of reading the pertinent forum thread and some back-channel discussion here, I ran across a few things concerning bear tanking that really made me sit up after the hell of tanking last night's heroic Old Kingdom and go, "Wait. It's not just me?"
Do I think there are a lot of situations in 5-mans and heroics where the Druid tank is at an unintended, but fairly serious, disadvantage? Yes. And I think the whole "unintended" part was partly the result of more inventive dungeon design that had a somewhat ghastly side effect for a tank so dependent on positioning.
After seeing the forum thread on Swipe, I tracked down another thread referenced there (and one that I'm still not sure how I missed), "Least Favorite Tank To Heal and Why" in the new Healing forum. Long story short, Druids and Death Knights are currently competing for the dubious honor of the forumgoers' least favorite tanks. There are two consistent themes (before it evolves into a more unhelpful clearinghouse of Druid and DK defensiveness, and the usual catcalls of L2PNOOB):
Bears are hard to heal and have problems holding AoE threat.
That's if you can find a Druid tank at all.
#2 is one of the things that keeps me wondering what the class demographics look like right now -I literally went the entire span of my time in the beta without once healing a Druid tank, and I don't often heal Druid tanks on live -but #1 bothers me a lot, and it certainly plays a role in #2. And so I started to think about the possible causes of what people are seeing in 5-mans and heroics.
Druid Spec
It's entirely possible that players who are having bad experiences with Druid tanks are simply running into people who are tanking on cat specs without talents like Thick Hide, Natural Reaction, or Protector of the Pack. And that's fine, because that means the Druid isn't really meant to be a tank, but that also means they should have the good sense not to offer to tank for heroics.
One of the things that I noticed immediately about tanking 5-mans in Wrath is that it is typically much harder to LOS mob packs here than in BC. The nooks and crannies that you abused all the time to force mobs to move into a narrow area just don't seem to exist as frequently -and where they do exist, they seem to be largely ineffective. Whether this is intended, I don't know, but it does make mob placement -something that Druid tanks are very dependent on -significantly more difficult, particularly in the following contexts:
1. Heroic Azjol-Nerub: The three mob packs before the first boss are very hard, bordering on impossible, to position correctly. The caster just never wants to move, and there's no truly effective means of LOSing him.
2. Heroic Oculus: I remember zoning into Oculus for the first time with the hall of dragons directly ahead of me and being utterly bewildered as to where the hell I was supposed to LOS a pull full of casters. Pro tip: you can't. You might as well let the mage tank, because he's going to be doing it anyway.
3. Heroic Utgarde Pinnacle: The gauntlet event for Skadi the Ruthless. This one takes winner, place, and show in exemplifying Swipe's problems as a means of holding AoE aggro. The moving trash spawns are not always, or even usually, within Swipe range of each other, which means that at least one or two of them will be well on their way to the healer by the time Swipe comes off the GCD. The usual means of dealing with this is to turn around and Feral Charge whatever got past you if it's more than one mob, or Growl if it's just one, exposing yourself to additional damage in the process and more likely than not losing aggro to DPS on the ones Swipe did manage to pick up.
Doing UP on heroic was actually the first truly disquieting moment I had in Wrath tanking. We had wiped on the event three times due to my inability to hold aggro to DPS while chasing mobs that Swipe had missed, and our healer was getting exasperated: "Guys, you can't DPS just because she's hit something. She's not a Paladin, she's a Druid."
I squirmed. Ouch, baby. Very ouch.
4. Heroic Gun'drak: Slad'ran (the snake boss) -If game mechanics allowed for it, Gun'drak would have been burned to the ground two weeks after launch, and from a distance you would have seen a bear dancing on the rubble. Swipe and Demoralizing Roar seem completely ineffective at gluing any of the moving adds to you on their way to the healer, no matter how you position the boss.
5. Heroic Halls of Stone: The Brann Bronzebeard event is very unpopular with Druid tanks and for good reason. It combines all of the problems of the Skadi event (moving mob packs) with the very unwelcome element of two spawn points. The proverbial cherry on top is the achievement for doing this event without allowing Brann to take any damage, and most of the responsibility for this lies with the tank.
6. Sartharion (10-man or 25-man): If you're main-tanking Sartharion, no problems. If your guild is trying the event with drakes up and you're the drake tank, no problems. If you're the "portal tank" picking up a phased add with a drake up, no problems. If you're the unfortunate bugger who has to be the elemental tank, may God or possibly Ghostcrawler have mercy on your furry little soul.
7. Heroic Violet Hold: A lot of people have cited the annoyance of the Shadowstep mobs here. I haven't personally had too many issues with them -although they are, don't get me wrong, incredibly irritating -but they do require you to reposition all over again to avoid the additional damage from a mob you can't dodge.
8. Heroic Caverns of Time: Culling of Stratholme: If your group wants the Reins of the Bronze Drake off the Infinite Corruptor, AoEing down mob packs to save time is usually the way to go. Is this doable with a Druid tank? Yes. Fun? Not really.
As far as I see it, Swipe getting a 50% threat buff is going to be a big help on mob packs that can be positioned correctly -and I would argue that a plurality of Wrath mob pulls do fall into this category -and it'll give us time to get Infected Wounds applied to mobs in order to reduce incoming damage.
Healer scaling
Healers seem to have issues healing Druid tanks (with their typically higher health pools) to full in a mana-efficient manner. I think this is mostly a problem of gear at the moment, as healing efficiency quickly outscales tank HP, but I do pour a lot more of my mana bar into keeping Druids topped off than other tanks. For the moment I expect this is working as intended because we're in the equivalent of Wrath's T4 -but it does have an effect on Druid tank desirability in dungeons with heavy AoE damage. Torson of Malygos characterizes it as a sort of healer Spell Lock -"where nearly every available second is spent actively feeding you health" -rather than being able to devote attention to other group members or CC.
Mob scaling and numbers
We're not seeing Shattered Halls-style mob packs for the most park, but the vast majority of Wrath dungeon pulls are at least 3 mobs, and they mean business. Moreover, in many dungeons (more on this below), pulls are set up in such a way as disadvantage the Druids' ability to position them correctly.
Player behavior
This is a version of the old joke concerning how much money you owe your bank. When one or two DPS won't control their threat, it's their problem. When all DPS won't control their threat -or, worse, when they don't have to control their threat with a Warrior, Death Knight, or Paladin tank -it's the Druid's problem.