Just did an SM Cath run as a refresher, and…yep, just like phase 1, Bear still struggles compared to Warrior/Paladin/Shaman.
Every pull I was ragestarved due to having to spam Lacerate nonstop just to barely hold threat. It does pitiful threat until you get 3-4 stacks up…on each individual target. Taunt was pretty much on cooldown the whole instance due to DPS pulling off of me so easily. I’m full BFD BIS at level 40 and struggling to hold threat off of 37/38 DPS in quest greens.
I tried swapping to Mangle, and…yeah, it’s even worse. It does only a little more threat than Lacerate, but has a 6 second CD and higher rage cost. And does not get any damage increases over time like Lacerate does. It’s literally only useful when Berserk is off CD. Why are Mangle and Lacerate on the same rune slot? It makes no sense when Lacerate benefits so much from Mangle.
On the positive side, I had 2900 health and a thicc 52% armor reduction, so the healer was happy being able to just spam DPS spells most of the time and not worry much about healing me. Damage taken felt great, and I don’t even have SOTF active.
Now, compared to the other tanks…it’s still awful, threat-wise. On my Warrior, generating rage felt okay enough with Blood Frenzy, and I could effectively just tab-spam Rend and spam Thunderclap on cooldown in between sunders. Threat wasn’t too much of an issue. Paladin and Shaman were even better, since both of them have AoE abilities that hit 4/5 targets for a large amount of threat, on a short CD. Shaman in specific, Molten Blast just generates so much threat that I can tank entire dungeons with it and nothing else. Just rockbiter autoattacks and Molten Blast easily holds threat on everything.
But then you look at bear’s Swipe, and…3 targets, 36 damage (before enemy armor…) with NO attack power scaling or threat mod, what? It’s literally useless. No point in ever casting it. It is, by far, the lowest threat-per-rage ability you have. Even if you hit all 3 targets, it’s less than half the threat than a single Lacerate.
So why are the other tanks okay but bear is left in the dust? We can’t even use the new Berserk rune becase it only applies to Mangle and not Lacerate. We still don’t have a “tank” rune for the leg slot. (no, an interrupt is not a tank rune, esp when we already have feral charge WHICH IT SHARES A COOLDOWN WITH LMAO) Why are Mangle and Lacerate on the same slot? Why are we forced to choose between Wild Strikes and Survival of the Fittest? There’s just so much wrong with bear runes that it feels like nobody on the SoD dev team even plays the spec. The only change we got for all of phase 1 was a slight rage reduction on Lacerate and Mangle, but that did very little to address the spec’s issues.
The main issues with Bear right now are:
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Pretty much no AoE threat
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Low rage generation
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Berserk only works for one rune ability and it’s not the main one Bear uses
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Windfury and Survival of the Fittest are on the same slot, so you pretty much never use Survival since every raid will want you running Windfury
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Snap threat is pretty bad too; Lacerate does awful threat until 3 stacks
A few simple fixes would really bring Bears up out of their current borderline-unviable situation:
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Give Swipe attack power scaling and a threat mod; doesn’t have to be crazy, could make it do similar threat to Thunderclap or something. Just give it SOMETHING to make it actually worth having on your action bar.
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Increase rage generation from damage dealt and/or damage taken; right now bears are super ragestarved compared to warriors which just makes their threat issues worse. When you have to tank by pressing as few buttons as possible and barely holding threat to conserve rage, something is really wrong.
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Swap positions of Survival of the Fittest and Skull Bash, that way bears can have an actual tank rune on the leg slot, and don’t have to give up Windfury for it.
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I’m not entirely sure which runes would be best to swap, but swap Lacerate with another slot so that bear can have Mangle and Lacerate at the same time.
