It doesn’t even really have to be custom, they can just add feral attack power to every 2h weapon they add. That’s what they did in TBC. It really isn’t that hard to tack on some feral AP to the 2-3 new 2h weapons that they put in Gnomer.
Take your own advice with warriors… lol
Before any of you say i dont know what im talking about, i run bfd everyweek twice a week with my war,pally, and feral tank.
https://vanilla.warcraftlogs.com/character/us/lone-wolf/jinxe
Opinion rejected.
If you’re taking more damage on a Druid than you do on other Tanks… you’ve forgotten to hit your Bear Form button.
There’s no reason to be stupid on purpose when what you’re really angry about is a lack of hard hitting/scaling AoE. Lacerate + Wild Strikes does just fine for single target. Druids are likely to get at least one AoE-focused rune in the future, so expect an empowered Swipe, Thrash, or similar.
Ferals are also stuck in an awkward place for talent points since they need the 11pts into Balance, and top of Feral is kinda weak. Phase 2 will continue to be somewhat awkward because everyone is going to want Druids to be LotP, but there will be no points left over to get Omen. On the other hand, you get Dire Bear and all the Feral goodies.
You lumped in your survivability in a cry post about AoE. That’s dumb.
See above about AoE. Cats have zero AoE skills and Hurricane is pretty bad for Balance, so expect an AoE rune.
No they don’t, it just competes with Lacerate, and Lacerate wins on anything that can be bled. TPS is just a matter of “do we have the tools together to do the job” and the answer is “yes” with or without a “shield slam” style ability.
You do, its called a melee range kick, but compared to the power that slot gives to other specs, Skull Bash should probably swap with Survival of the Fittest. No one is going to take Skull Bash over literally anything else when Rogues get it for free.
Do Bears really need a defensive CD? Does any Tank? It wasn’t until WotLK that anyone had to deal with rotated defensives to survive Doom-Punch-Reaper-Strike.
The MoP ability was called Incarnation and it was a big CD that amped the Druid form up to a huge degree for a short time. Pretty much all of the MoP lvl60 talents would be good inspiration for such a rune. Soul of the Forest was a passive (as opposed to Incarnation’s CD) that improved each form in specific ways and Force of Nature gave every form a specialized kind of treant buddy.
The next three rune slots could literally be “Choose your flavor of treant”, “Choose your flavor of form improvement”, and “Choose your flavor of AoE spell” and Druids would be in a much better place.
Oh and swap SotF with Skull Bash.
EDIT: It would not surprise me as well if Blizzard phones it in for the last rune slot at lvl60 that’s just “YOU CAN PUT WHATEVER YOU WANT HERE” and let’s everyone pick one additional rune from any previous slot.
while I agree the feral AP is needed and easy for them to do we do need a bit more than just that as i stated above.
If for some reason they really dont want bears to have mangle with laceraqte (idk why) maybe add a new ability via the runes for p2 that is a bite attack in bear form on a 6-12sec CD that hits like a shield slam or a TBC mangle.
Unsure why they have never added a bite attack to bears 
1st. Swipe not scaling is important as it makes the ability USELESS you may as well not even train it… if you had looked at data mined runes yes we will get thrash however that fills a different role than swipe and having an ability that is clearly broken (cuz they fixed it in TBC) is not great game design and needs attention this isnt classic #nochanges this is SoD…
2nd. your point of “no they dont” in reference to me stating we lack a “shield slam” ability… respectfully disagree man… you need lacerate to have decent TPS overall and with that we do LACK a “shield slam” type ability… the need of this ability is because lacerate does garbage threat until 3+ stacks and again that is 3 globals where the DPS either has to wait or become the tank forcing the bear to either taunt or just let them tank til 3+stacks… this is poor gameplay design in action… there is no reason this has to be this way/stay this way…
Currently we dont have a useful leg rune for bear next phase most bears will be running LoTp and have feral charge from talents not to mention everyone else has interrupts too most bears I know run savage roar so when they are not actively tanking they can do decent Cat DPS which personally I would be fine with if we didn’t clearly have an issue with threat that could be solved by giving bear a valid leg rune.
you also state survivability isnt an issue… which imo is true BUT only when using SoF and since that means I dont get wildstrikes it presents yet another problem.
in conclusion… with all the nerfs/buffs to all the classes and specs… why has bear been completely ignored…
Another big issue is that bears just don’t have an option to trade survivability for more threat like other tanks do.
Warriors can opt not to use a shield and either DW or use a 2h weapon in order to generate more rage in easier content.
Shamans can run Shamanistic rage over Way of Earth to make sure they always have resources. And they can choose to dual wield rockbiter instead of wearing a shield.
But the way bear form works is that we have no option to do this. Bear form is our threat modifier but it also ties us into what is effectively a sword/board playstyle, because you can’t change bear attack speed. This is the biggest reason why bear is so godawful to play in the early dungeons this phase. If you tried playing a warrior with a shield it was just as bad, but you don’t have to use a shield to use defensive stance as a warrior.
I hear what you are saying and I don’t totally disagree however in late game classic bear TPS = Fury prot TPS… however with all the changes to warrior and all the other tank classes we are lacking as stated a shield slam style ability… bear overall TPS atm is fine its not that much lower than other tanks… its the snap threat we lack and will continue to lack until this is changed…
you are correct about the warriors and shaman points you made however… we also have flex but its different… we can go Cat when we aren’t tanking and do decent DPS since ALL of our survivability is based off SoTf and Bear form no other tank really has that option
warrior is close with the old school fury prot build but as everyone who played one knows our dps was usually lower than the dps warriors when we didn’t have the extra rage from having aggro
Mangle is our shield slam ability. And it’s already better than shield slam which warriors won’t even use at 40 because devastate is far, far better. It’s also a significant raid buff, and one of the issues we have faced this phase is that lacerate and mangle are exclusive. We can’t even use our tanking runes because the party buff runes (wild strikes and mangle) are simply way better.
we can go Cat when we aren’t tanking and do decent DPS since ALL of our survivability is based off SoTf and Bear form no other tank really has that option
This isn’t really true at all. We’re actually the worst at doing this in SoD. Every tank class is simply tanking in their DPS spec, and all they have to do is change their weapon, which can be done in combat just as easily as switching from bear to cat.
Druid OT is still excellent… you are still taking Wild Strikes, Mangle, and Savage Roar…
When you need to tank … go bear … spam Mangle… you will do fine as an OT…
Trash is not our forte… plain and simple.
Yeah, I acknowledge that, and we have no idea what the future runes will actually be. They already told us the datamined ones are not necessarily correct or in their final form. We could easily get a Thrash rune that also empowers Swipe when it hits anything with the Thrash bleed. Swipe itself doesn’t necessarily need to be touched directly to make it better to use.
Having a high TPS move that is instant is really all we need to smooth out the TPS curve. Mangle isn’t a magic fix, it has a CD. Right now Warlocks don’t have any kind of big ticket instant skill they can use for snap threat, they just have nonstop Searing Pain spam with their DoTs that may or may not resist. Every Tank doesn’t need a 6 sec hard hitting ability, spammable high threat skill, on-next hit skill, and reactive proc skill.
I agree, swap SotF with Skull Bash. It isn’t like Cat Druids are going to give up SAVAGE ROAR for a kick either.
There are Druid “Tank” parses with the Druid in cat form using Mangle spam to hold aggro. Rogues are “Tanking” without using Just a Flesh Wound or Blade Dance. Warriors and Paladins don’t bother with shields or any of their survival runes. I don’t know what Shaman are doing but I can’t imagine they’re doing anything other than double stacking Rockbiter with DW.
You absolutely do not need SotF to Tank content right now, and likely won’t need it for most content in the future. If Bears continue to get access to gear that’s bonus armor laden with STR/AGI/STA, they’re going to end up at the hard cap for Armor with gobs of extra Health. This will be especially true if wbuffs continue going forward. Druids survived just fine in Classic without 20% DR or crit immunity, even on tougher fights like Broodlord, Twin Emps, Patchwerk, and Thaddius.
The only fights Druid really struggled on were entirely due specific mechanics: Maexxna because no Shield Wall during Enrage Webwrap and Loatheb because block actually becomes useful
Unless they reshuffle Druid runes, Wild Strikes is permanently picked for party and personal DPS increases.
Yep. What we could really use is a rune that lets us trade off some armor for more threat, just as a warrior and a shaman can ditch their shield to dual wield.
If they wanted to really pull out all the stops, they could give us a rune that applied the bear threat bonus to cat form.
Every bear tank knows things get significantly easier with Dire Bear Form
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It’s not dire bear form that makes things easier. It’s primal fury and the other crit talents.
But even those aren’t helping against spellcleaving living flame mages and hellfiring warlocks. Swipe is useless. Bear aoe threat is diabolically bad and having more armor won’t change that.
Given some of the Cat-Tank parses I’ve seen, that might not be strictly necessary as of yet. BFD is just… sooooooo anemic. Everyone should be stacking pure DPS stats as much as possible right now, and I have a feeling anyone playing Druid and wearing stuff like Hydra Hide Cuirass and Sturdy Hood are just gimping themselves. I’d still snag the items because being able to suddenly take 30% less damage is handy, but running around with super high Armor is just further limiting Rage gained and trading out desperately needed STR/AGI stats.
This.
With Cat having no AoE, better AoE is coming. I just hope it comes Phase 2, not later.
The next raid will be no different. This is classic, it’s designed for people who aren’t spending their whole life playing. There’s a limit to how hard things can hit. And there’s also the fact that we’ll spend a lot of time in dungeons where things also won’t hit hard at all.
Well unless they put something more interesting in RFD than the current gear that is there, next phase is going to be all about the STV content when not doing Gnomer.
Damage, damage, and more damage is the way to play.
Until we get to P2, it’s going to be hard to tell how bears do. Much of the their taking damage problem will be improved by Dire Bear form, and to be honest as someone who typically ends up healing, I haven’t found it any harder to heal a bear than any of the other tanks, and at this point most of the tanks I have healed (even bears) have found the damage is so low that they go strait with the DPS gear and skip the tanking gear which hurts there threat. If you are having threat problems try switching into more DPS gear, the armor doesn’t matter that much at this point, unless you have bad healers.
While I wont say bears wont need more threat, outside of warlocks as I haven’t really healed any of those in BFD, the only ones that have real threat issues right now are Paladins, and while they have great AOE threat, I can’t tell you how many bad boss pulls I have seen with them. I have seen a greater range of those however so might have seen more bad players, while most of the druids I tend to see will opt for dps, so a smaller sample size maybe leading to me only seeing good bears.
Also I don’t know why you care about “shield slam” it’s never been an ability anyone uses, as nobody ever tanks end game in Deep Prot because it has terrible threat.
Bears don’t have any problem with taking damage. They just have problem making threat, because they can’t generate enough rage, and they have no useful AOE ability other than demoralizing roar.
This is the issue though, a bear can’t switch into DPS gear, because his weapon is his face. Warriors/Shaman/Paladins can choose to use a 2h weapon/dual wield for more threat. Druids can’t.