We got the Swipe buff (thank god) and made it actually useful and not a complete waste of rage/global. This was a great change!!
The Lacerate shadow-buff was awesome as well and made it clearly the bear option for most PVE situations which was again a great needed change.
Our rune choice for legs as a bear are extremely lackluster in everyway… we get a slightly changed Feral charge called skull bash which costs double the rage and has less max range… only bonus is it can be used at point blank range and shares a CD with feral charge.
When you compare Skull bash to the leg rune for every other spec/role for druids it is severely lacking in power/usefulness since you will already have feral charge.
as for Cat taking Skull bash… it shares a slot with Savage roar which is irreplaceable for cat form in pve/pvp thus no cat druid will ever take this rune.
this brings up the point of our chest runes Bears really are forced to take wild strikes over our main tanking rune due to threat issues and raid comp issues.
My suggestion is to swap rune slots of Skull bash and SoTF this would be much more balanced for bear AND cat details on why/how below.
Feral Cat would then be able to take skull bash without taking a 30% damage nerf if they didnt have to provide wild strikes to their group I.E in some PVP comps, if there is another Feral Cat or a bear in said group. this would increase the usefulness of this interrupt and ability for players to actually take it.
this also solves the problem of later raids of 20m/40m content and not having to stack a bear AND a cat in the same group in fact wasting 1 LOTP just so the bear could have proper TPS via wild strikes and being able to take SOTF.
another change I personally would love (but this prob wont happen XD) is Id love for Mangle bear to have at least a small threat modifier as it is right now it has 0 and is just modified via Bear form. I personally prefer the Mangle playstyle over the Lacerate one.
The other option would be to allow us to have lacerate and mangle at the same time to help solve our snap threat issue as lacerate is so low threat until 3+ stacks.
Honestly, bear is in a good spot currently with the buff it got to swipe. I’m happy.
edit: yeah, our choice for chest runes kinda sucks and bear legs have no real option, which also kinda sucks. if they want to fix that, it’d be icing on the cake.
Bear tanks are in a great spot right now. You dont need Survival of the Fittest, Wild Strikes is better. I take hardly any damage even without SotF. The reason you take Skull Bash is because it is a 10 sec CD that interrupts at melee range. That is incredible and gives a tank TWO interrupts which is huge. Bash is on a 1 minute CD so Skull Bash is huge for you as a tank and you should be using it on the regular
Without SotF I have had healers ask me to MT over a Warrior due to how much less damage I take. SotF is massive overkill at this point in the game.
Bash doesn’t interrupt, only stuns. thus on bosses who are immune to stuns it has no effect.
and yes we dont “need” SoTF in gnomer as I have said but in the future when tank damage increases we will. another point is if the move happened you would still be able to take Skullbash if the fight needed it and u can make that choice.
I am not talking about 5man tanking this post is about raid tanking.
Gonna keep posting the dev team is super small maybe this was pushed to the back burner as we do function decently atm… maybe it was missed maybe forgotten.
Correct but bash is still great for pesky trash mobs. Bear tanks are just fine, all my remarks were made in regards to raid tanking. They generate plenty of threat, are super thick, and have a multitude of utility abilities they can use. There is literally zero reason to complain about bear tanks in raid right now
If you happen to have a feral dps, then you can switch out runes and run SotF but it is FAR from necessary and wont be needed at 60 either. Bear tanks are already hands down the best early game tank, always have been.
SoTF is basically a PvP only rune, and even so if you are playing with mele the will still want you to run wild strikes . So basically it’s a dead rune I guess?
As of now it is a dead rune because you do not need it at all. Maybe end up running it for bosses like Broodlord but there isnt a single boss in vanilla MC or SoM MC that you will need it for.
I would disagree with it being a dead rune completely… it is extremely useful… and to point out again in my OP Savage roar is MUCH more valuable than skull bash… making bears choose a much lower quality rune due to no other option is just bad game design.