How is druid tanking in classic? Easy to gear up/be accepted to dungeons/raids?
100% fine for dungeons.
Raids, opinions skew
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Great in Dungeons. Moderate in Raids. Warrior is better than Druid for Raids due to being crushing blow immune, but in Dungeons, Druids are just as good if not better because they do more damage, can battle res, innervate and self heal between pulls which saves healers mana.
My vanilla experience anyway, only have my classic druid at lvl 8 so far.
I’ve tanked ragefire and wailing caverns so far with mine. Both runs were okay. We wiped one time in wc because the lock tab targeted.
Most the issue with a druid tanking, or shaman/paladin tanking for that matter, is that typically players think that only warriors can tank.
They’re fine. Technically war is better, especially in raids, but raids are easy and really don’t need to be optimized. Anyone telling you differently is trying to follow the same cookie cutter meta
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druid is the best tank from 40-59
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Really good threat gen, perfectly fine for dungeons, but they can’t get crit immune (at least not at this point, maybe they can way later in progression with aq/naxx gear but I can’t quite remember) so they can’t tank some bosses. Like, it’s just a full stop, hard no. If a feral Druid is maintanking you’re basically crossing your fingers that he doesn’t get crit/crushed back to back and insta-gibbed, it turns every boss fight into rng. They’re a perfectly adequate offtank in raids though and will do more dps on fights they don’t need to tank than a prot war will.
Although this was on private servers 3 of the guilds I was in had a feral druid we brought to raids and we still had no problem doing 35-45min mc clears and 1hr~ bwl clears. Had no problem killing c’thun, etc. I honestly don’t know how optimal a feral would be if you’re going for split raid speedracer 15 min luci -> rag clears, but generally speaking it’s fine.
People will always say they aren’t needed (and they honestly aren’t), but the second one enters the raid every melee group is fighting to have them in their group lol. The only tough part is raids will only want to carry one at the most (generally), but druids will most likely be the lowest represented class so it’s not like you’ll have tons of competition
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I love druid tanks in 5-man dungeons but I hated them on my healer in raids.
I’ve only tanked Deadmines on my Druid, but so far so good!
Not for MC and BWL… Druids tanks are better due to less gear dependence and better threat generation.
Warriors are better in AQ40 and NAxx
Exceptional survival and kings of threat.
Yes and no.
Yes - Because the gear is often oddball pieces that aren’t fought over nearly as much.
No - Because Classic is Classic and if the one piece you need doesn’t drop, there are no alternatives, but this largely remains true for all class/specs so it really isn’t a Bear specific negative.
Hunter and Warlock pets can tank dungeons, anyone barring a Bear from doing them is doing you a service by sparing you their insufferable stupidity.
Raids are just fine as well, but you will face backlash from folks who don’t know any better and Warriors who want to Tank and can’t so easily swap roles mid-raid like you can. The workarounds for Druids in Raiding (Fear Ward/Tremor Totem for example) aren’t actually liabilities since you have such massive raids and access to skills isn’t exactly hard. Plus most of the Priests I see on Alliance side are Dwarf because Fear Ward is OP.
Learn how to stay alive and hold threat, you’ll be just fine.
Druids are fantastic tanks for leveling, and at 60 they are super easy to play for progression with the proper gear. In raids, they do just fine, there are a few specific boss fights they are not that great at, but other than those they do well.
There are a lot of nay sayers out there that seem to think you need to be crit-immune to be a good tank, but it really isnt as big of a deal for druids as people make it out to be. A lot of healing is overhealing anyway, and druids generate far more threat than warriors can. DPS can go all out most of the time with a druid tank, causing the bosses to die faster, thus saving healer mana, instead of them having to do all kinds of 5 second rule stuff because the DPS are held back by tank threat.
There’s no staying alive when you get crit by a raid boss
No Bear is dying because you got crit by a raid boss. Seriously, Ragnaros swings for 850-1000 against a mostly dungeon blues geared Warrior.
That’s pathetically small.
A normal hit on a Druid is going to be far lower than that, and a critical hit barely higher.
This isn’t WotLK Heroic 25m where bosses could literally 1-shot you from full if you didn’t have an external or personal CD.
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Having a great time with mine, not only doing great in Dungeons as tank but also as DPS and heals (just need to keep a spirit/int gear for healing), really loving that flexibility.
Threat is great too, save for the odd Shaman getting a crazy opening with Windfury you can keep aggro really well, same goes for AOE I was keeping up with mages (all though not sure how it’s gonna go after the hotfixes to Demo Roar).
Druids can tank anything in Vanilla. Including all raids (there are some boss exceptions).
They are not crushing blow immune but they have an insane health pool to make up for it. (Crushing blow is 150% dmg instead of 100%).
They can also achieve the highest armor/mitigation in the game. Anyone who tells you otherwise either hates druids or doesnt know math
So far healing low level dungeons druids seem sufficient for tanking.
Good single target threat. A little more squishy than a warrior. Not seeing very good AoE threat but I think that is because none of my druid tanks had swipe yet.
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Bear threat is all damage based with big multipliers, which only get bigger once appropriate talents have been acquired.
- Lvl16 for Swipe
- Lvl19 for 5/5 Feral Instinct (15% additive threat to Bear)
- Lvl22 for 3/3 Sharpened Claws (6% Crit)
- Lvl26 for 2/2 Primal Fury (5 Rage on every critical hit)
- Lvl29 for 3/3 Predatory Strikes (AP based upon 150% of your level)
- Lvl31 for 2/2 Savage Fury (20% more Swipe/Maul damage)
And so on…
The Druid gets a LOT of bonus damage and scaling as they level up. Once a Druid is approaching the 40’s, they should be more than solid on threat, and by the 50’s they have access to all their damage mods and most of their efficiency gains. The last 8pts of a pure Bear spec is all Rage based.
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Tanked most dungeons up to my current level. I think I did fine. Never asked the healer though, so eh.
Tanking before Faerie Fire Feral was a pain. Initially I could only face pull. There’s Feral Charge, but it costs Rage instead of generating which defeats the purpose. Also, since Maul is my main source of threat and bear’s swing speed is 2.5 seconds, getting dodged / parried / miss is extra painful because I have to wait 2.5 seconds for a second attempt.
Druid is the better tank, unless the warrior is in full BIS. There are 6 raid bosses, that you should not tank as a Druid, while there are others, where a Warrior should not.
If Druid and Warrior are both BIS; then the warrior wins by a small margain, but it´s not anything to be afraid of. Warrior being BIS is such a rare thing in Vanilla, that you must be super lucky to find one on a server, leave alone 2 or 3.
Ofc that is me talking about my Vanilla days, when a community did exist and people with skill, were taken over those with FOTM. Maybe today, a Druid will have it harder, as the streamer and toxicitiy of their fanboys might talk Druids down, but that is just their opinion and not how viable a Druid truly is.
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