I’ve been thinking about getting into druid tanking, but I keep hearing about how you have to spend lots of time farming pummelers just to tank. Kinda seems a bit excessive just to be able to play the game.
Do I HAVE to do the grind or can I go without?
If your DPS are world buffed tryhards yes you will need
That’s incredibly lame tbh.
Then level a warrior instead and tank on that
Not at all!
As someone who tanked Classic, SoM, and returned to Classic no, but having a couple def helps out a lot.
You can bear tank, even MT, just fine without pummeler for the content during which warrior tanks are still catching up to you threat and effective hitpoint wise, but once they do that, probably sometime during BWL farming, you’re doing the entire raid a disservice if you insist on tanking without pummeler. By the time Brown tanks reach this point, dps are probably generating too much threat for you to not handicap their performance without pummeler.
It is the single most powerful consumable for a bear and what makes them such monsters on threat sensitive fights like Ouro in later content.
Pummeler farm isn’t that bad. You can also immediately delete them from inventory after consuming the charges and Item Restore. You will reliably have a pummeler with 2 or 3 charges restored unless you are horde grouping with a WF shaman.
Often times you can use 1 charge at the start of the fight to get a threat lead then swap to a feral ap wep. So only need 1 mcp for every three bosses. Feral dps uses lots more pummlers
I’m alliance so hopefully threat reduction blessings will help a bit.
Are your guild in the literal top 10 of speed clear teams? If so then you better be.
If they are wannabe zugs then who gives a flying leap over a rolling doughnut.
I guess if your guild is mostly try hard, and tbey are trying to be “fast” then you really should.
Yes. Otherwise you are an inferior tank in every single way. Our niche is high ST threat.
It’s not good design that MCP is the defacto Druid weapon for tanking and DPS, but it’s a reality.
If you don’t want to farm MCP to be a tank, expect it’ll cause problems - especially if we’re talking HC 60 raid content.
Do you need it to perform well in dungeons up to 60? No… Is it helpful at 60 in dungeons? Yes.
Will you be expected to roll with MCP at 60 as Feral Cat DPS or Bear Tank in a decent/competitive guild? Yes.
If you have DPS in the guild who are min maxing and they out threat you…it’s their fault for pulling aggro and killing themselves and others…but it’s also your fault for not utilizing MCP when it’s so huge for threat generation.
Lots of fights in Classic are made easier by simply having high DPS. When you threat cap your DPS because your threat generation is not up to par as the tank…you increase the likelihood of deaths due to threat pulls and or fights taking longer to complete (due to DPS having to stagger themselves in order to play within the confines of your threat generation capability.
If I was in HC raiding guild and the Druid tank was like ‘Yeah I don’t wanna use MCP because I think it’s lame’…Id be looking for a new guild or throwing my weight behind someone else tanking in the Druid’s place.
The tank is one of those raid roles where your decision to min max (or not) has a really outsized effect on the rest of the raid.
It’s not accident that some of the sweatiest most min max oriented players I knew of in Classic were tanks.
I will answer the question by saying in Classic and to a lesser extent TBC that if you want to be taken seriously as a tank that there is some requirement to have as much available to you as you can when you zone into a raid.
A bag full of MCPs isn’t much to ask when compared to the consumes, BOE and engineering items a Warrior should have that wants the MT spot. That’s the role expectation usually if the raid group isn’t pretty casual
For a casual group and 5 mans you could get by fine with basics. That may be all you want to do and that’s cool.
Make sure you are playing with people with a similar mindset because it sucks to be a 110% MT for people who don’t care much (personal experience) and a causal MT doesn’t work with serious DPS
Good luck!
Yeah ok never mind. I might just wait and see if they release a season of classic that fixes the Pummeler issue.
there’s nothing to fix
part of classic is learning to enjoy these quirky things 
like lvl 44 epic mail gloves being BiS for warrior dps, etc
And then you have stuff like this, windfury totem making poisons unusable, etc.