Please, for druids everywhere who tank, don’t let those at blizzard, who are responsible for the state of bears anywhere near druid again. Druids are absolutely bottom of the barrel tanks when that usually goes to Brewmaster. Every tank class blows guardian out of the water its not even close. I could literally fart on my Blood dk and destroy mobs with noxious gas while still remaining full health. I blow CDS on my guardian druid and I barely survive massive pulls.
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Must be a nice problem to have. Whenever I do massive pulls, I survive just fine but at least one dps dies. Actually, even when I do small pulls, one dps often dies.
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Not true, from what I remember, brew has neven been the bottom of the barrel, even at the starr of this expansion when brew was at worst state, top brews still competed the first page with pwar and BDK.
This is true, if you try bear and prot, you will be able to tell the difference between them is like day and night.
Bear is deadge, most of players rerolled or just main another tank now.
yeah true
tank with the worst track record is actually bdk, if anything brew is usually good
(going off bfa > SL)
bear has magic mitigation problems and i really feel it when tanking on my bear
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Is Guardian really that bad? I main a Brew and have a blast on him and yeah it’s a really good tank right now, but was thinking of an alt tank and the only one that really catches my interest are bears but Reddit and the forums really poop on them are they really that bad at mitigation in M+?
No, they’re fine. Really quite survivable. Even the concern over magic damage isn’t bad if you know where the big hits happen, which, if you’ve already done these dungeons a lot on your current tank, you already know where they are. If you were coming from something like DK or PAL you’d notice the lack of abilities to deal with with casters at range, but coming from Brew you won’t really notice any difference.
I only tinker in the mid to high teen keys, but my brewmaster felt more stable at 395 than my bear did at 405. Even knowing when the big hits are coming, there are still plenty of times that I was hoping my healer wasn’t sleeping on me when my cds fell off. That is the biggest problem with running keys close to 20s on my bear. Once I cycle cds, if a pack isn’t dead then I may be. On my BrM it seems like there is always a button to hit to get out of a sticky situation. Having stagger to soak some of the massive hits is also way more reassuring than seeing my bear hp get chunked by abilities that don’t seem to phase my other tanks.
My bear only started feeling pretty stable after getting some absorb trinkets and making some weakauras to track their uptime so I wouldn’t overlap defensives with them needlessly.
Bears still aren’t on par with the other tanks. Just because some of us are able to tank decently hard keys with them, they are still a few synced casts and a lack of cd from death.
They just need to give back the massive hp, and boost the heck out of mastery scaling and I could maybe look past getting hammered on pulls. As it is, the dungeons can be done, it’s just more stressful than most other tanks.
10.1 I will stick with feral and I’ll probably only tank as BrM unless they swing in with something to toughen bears up a little.
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If you play only bear, then bear isn’t that bad. But if you also play anything else that’s not bear, you will sometimes get mad by your bear.
For your mental health, stay away from bears if you intend to play any serious content.
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Very sad to hear, I think the concept of a big ol chonky bear as a tank is really cool, hopefully they’ll see some buffs soon.
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You’ll do just fine up to 20s if you’re familiar with tanking/dungeons which you seem to be. It’s a fun class and i recommend giving it a go regardless 
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The best point of playing bear is you can easily be a high ranked bear with very low rio in comparison to other tanks.
It’s also amusing that sometimes you will find healers leave the party because of you joining, or sometimes you hear “oh it’s a bear, I haven’t seen any bear so far, how is it ?”.
For other tanks, keys 20 week 1 is something normal, for guardians, it may become your entire end game purpose.
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I switched to warrior, and hate to say it, but I doubt I"m going back to bear unless something MAJOR changes.
I can’t believe how much better everything is.
I miss having a group speed boost, a battle rez, after the wildfire… but Warrior just has so many more defensive and offensive tools. Its absolutely unreal how bad Druid is in comparison.
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This. EXACTLY THIS.
I surpassed my bear after 3 weeks in Prot. I never felt in danger, so I just kept pushing my keys up (I only pug) instead of downgrading them like I had to on my druid.
First time in AA on my warrior, and I got to VEX in a 16/17, I was like… well here is where it gets hard as a warrior. Nope. Nothing. On my druid… rofl… that Vex pulse is easily half to 60% of my health per second. Warrior… maybe 25% health over the entire cast.
At this point, there is almost no bear “main”, most of bear players I know already play another spec/tank, and at best try to keep their bears not outdated.
Let’s keep things in perspective here.
Late into the season shenanigans where you’ve got a full roster of over geared character to choose from to carry you and funnel you gear as needed (m+ and raids).
Can be done with any tank
And even with that set up, it’s usually a 2-3 week ordeal, 3-4 if you PuG, and able to dedicate 20-40 hours a week to playing WoW.
This your Druid?
Should have been able to do it in 2 by your claims.
Also:
Comparing CD damage intake to unmitigated damage is a bad comparison and makes for a weak argument.
With your Druid having 500k health, and your Warrior being not as geared (we’ll be generous and say 400k health), you’re claiming that Mana Bombs does 1,200,000 damage to your Bear, but your Warrior is able to absorb/mitigate 1,100,000 of it in 4 seconds?
Try comparing apples to apples next time to make a stronger argument.
Such a huge sample size will surely make for great data points! Keep up the good work!
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No I was saying about full pug tanks. And I did that myself, no gear funnel, no raid. I dont raid.
You can jump 2-5-8-11-14-16 easily with pugs. Assuming there are some human mistakes it should take you around 6 hours, the progress from 16 to 20 can take a a bit longer, 6 to 10 hrs. You can tank 20 with 390-400 ilvl (this have been done by many players, including my BDK and ppal). With crafted gear, catch up gear, and m+ loot, you can easily obtain 390+ in a few hours.
Depending the build, most popular build has only 10% DR from moonfire, you dont have enough defensives for vexia’s tank bursters, so you mostly tank it naked. On the other hand, warrior can spell reflect half of vexia’s tank burster, demo cry the other half. Even without shield wall, last stand, a warrior has 15% DR from defensive stance, 50% from ignore pain, 20-25% from spell reflect/demo cry, 9% from shield slam. The difference in dmg intake between bear and pwar isn’t close, it’s 10% DR vs ~70-80%.
Let’s remove vers out of equation because it varies from players to players.
If a mana bomb does 1M hp to 500k hp tank. bear takes straight up 900k, for warrior, 1M x 0.75 (spell reflect) x 0.91 (shield slam) x 0.85 (def stance) -150k (ignore pain from 30% hp) = 430k. Prot war survives just fine, but your bear is blown out of its existence.
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I think that sums up bears fairly well.
You cab do 20s on them, but they aren’t a good progression tank right now compared to others. You’ll want to be geared around the key level you’re attempting to push rather than continously punching up like other tanks can.
If you expect to progress in tank spec as fast as you could as dps, bear isnt for you. If you’re cool with slower progression and having better geared dps in your keys, bear will eventually get to similar key levels to the other tanks.
Took you a few weeks to hit tanking 20s, and you ran with repeat players (many who were well over geared), then just so happened to clear 4 bosses on normal and turn around and clear 3 bosses on heroic in the raid.
As the Nightborne like to say: “Somethings not quite right”
Let me reiterate:
The
I’m slowly becoming convinced that you guys don’t know what DRs Druids have and only play with Mangle Maul Moonfire on your bars =/
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Lol. I was bored and wanted to have some “raid experienced”. I was geared to teeth when I raided that a healer whispered me “why do you join this raid when you are so geared”. Raiding doesnt fit me that’s why I stopped.
No my first 20 on paladin was first week. MY BDK who played at the start of the season had 20 at week 3 because most players, including me, were learning dungeons, and the dungeons were overtunned af.
Actually you are the one who has no idea of tanks’ mitigation.
Lol. Right??!
Yeah…. Druids don’t have that.
A short c/d DR. What’s that like?!
Fixed that for you.
Why is this paladin on the Druid forums talking about Druids???
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