Apologies ahead of time for the wall of text.
tldr; MCP changes are a huge nerf in later phases. Even with Wild Strikes SoD-Bear is at best equivalent to Classic-Bear, let alone caught up to Warrior tank in classic, let alone caught up to the amazing improved SoD-Tanks. How do we fix this?
As someone who tanked all of classic and mainly played feral OT so far I’ve loved tanking BFD on the shaman, warrior, and lock, but feral just feels lacking. No matter though because feral gets huge improvements later! Once bear gets MCP it solves all of the issues you have with threat! Extra rage gen, extra mauls, extra DPS, and mass amounts of threat. It’s the perfect item to make Bear viable as a raid tank and attack speed scales together multiplicatively making it an incredibly useful stat that scales insanely well for bear! Librams + Gloves Enchant + Iron Counterweight + Warchief’s Blessing all combine with MCP to nearly double your attack speed in bear, it’s absolutely incredible and allows you to push the threat ceiling so high in classic that the extra DPS done by everyone in the raid without worrying about pulling more than offsets the lack of bear DPS itself compared to a furyprot tank. You throw kiss of the spider in there too and bear is almost down to 1.0 attack speed. Gear starts to dry up though once you’re a little farther into Naxx and that’s when bear stops scaling and falls off. It’s a fun run up to that point though and your incredible threat ceiling and ridiculous health pool + armor cap give you enough to overcome your drawbacks and be a solid tank.
The issue? MCP is gone now so how does Bear navigate a post-MCP world? The new “automated crowd pummeler” is MCP but with 84% reduced uptime. Bear was barely able to keep up with other tanks in the past with MCP, now it’s going to be pre-nerfed without MCP (84% of the fight Bear will now have a 50% attack speed debuff essentially) which is a significant hit to both threat, rage gen, and DPS. We’re talking about going from 1.36 attack speed to 2.0. In a typical 3 minute fight this is difference between 125 mauls and 97 mauls. Nearly 30 attacks is an incredible amount of threat, dps, and rage generated allowing you to dump even more attacks into additional threat/dps (primal fury scales with extra attacks too giving even more rage). Well at least we have additional runes now to make up for it, right? Wild Strikes brings that number of attacks up to 116 so we’re still 9 attacks short of MCP numbers. Lacerate? Right now lacerate is so far behind Devastate it’s a joke and requires stacking which gives it next to no snap threat. This again eliminates one of Bears biggest pluses from Classic, Bear snap threat with MCP and huge Maul crits early on meant that everyone could just start pumping without worry. But now Lacerate stacking is far more important meaning no snap threat, huge amounts of reduced rage gen, issues with misses/glancing due to rage starvation preventing Maul on every attack, and then worst of all losing threat early or forcing the raid to wait a few GCDs on pull.
So to recap, Bear threat is down and Bear snap threat is fully gone. Two of the biggest positives of bringing a bear to raid. So let’s look at the other runes, maybe Bear will find a new niche and overcome a lot of the previous downsides? The biggest downsides through classic on Bear tanking were lack of any meaningful survival cooldown equivalent to Last Stand or Shield Wall (especially Shield Wall), inability to potion during fights without risking getting one shot during powershift due to batching (could be played around with in single target fights if you understood and knew the patterns of the fight), vulnerable to misses (missing first Maul kills your snap threat, resisted taunt leaves you extremely vulnerable with no mocking blow, etc.), and lack of DPS (overcome by pushing threat ceiling up). So far the runes given and the other runes datamined (may not be added) don’t seem to overcome any of these. Lacerate kind of gives bear something if Maul misses, but it more or less takes the place of Maul spam since rage generation is going to be an issue. There’s the potential “Renewal” rune which heals you for 30% of you maximum health in Bear which absolutely does not cover for Shield Wall or last stand since it doesn’t give you any additional EHP towards preventing a 1 shot. It will be useful for healer mana and covering healer casting lapses on Patchwork, but it won’t make up for the Bear downside of missing a mitigation CD. There’s the potential for “Natural Reaction” which increases your dodge chance by 10%, and you regenerate 3 rage every time you dodge while in Bear Form, but I’d be interested to see if that’s even worth taking. Generally dodge meant reduced rage generation which lowered your threat ceiling so it was avoided. Maybe this rune just makes it so you don’t mind taking Dodge? Again, doesn’t really move the needle at all, we’re already at armor cap so melee hits that can be dodged are meaningless anyway except for maybe pushing dodge high enough that it helps healer mana on really specific fights like Patchwork/Broodlord?
Overall though, nothing really moves the needle and Bear still looks like it’s below Classic in terms of losing its niche while not really gaining anything. What are some things that can be done? Would love to hear some ideas that aren’t just give us mocking blow, give us shield wall, etc. Some things I’ve seen tossed out there/thought about are a rune to allow drinking elixirs/potions in bear for double effect, modifying the Lacerate rune to also have swipe apply Lacerate to all targets hit, Rune that allows weapon enchants to work on attacks in feral forms and include weapon damage in feral form attacks, or a “Hibernate” rune that puts the bear to sleep for 10 seconds and breaks when taking damage but the next damage taken is fully ignored (huge defensive cooldown that isn’t just a copy of Shield Wall, but requires playing around it and having fight awareness).
Would love to hear some additional thoughts or ideas!
” button. Like you had a bad pull and crap is hitting the fan, a way to wrangle everything back together which is currently missing with a bear tank.