laughable damage output with thrash dot rampup time
Bear damage was by no means low before Corruption. It will be fairly high in Shadowlands with Berserk and Thrash leggos.
spending 50%+ of the time swiping
This is annoying that it’s swipe, a fairly boring spell, but it;s appreciated that there is always somethign to press. That’s not true on all tanks.
getting destroyed the moment your ironfur is down
Greatly exaggerated outside of very high keys.
waiting on the GCD to cast FR and then laughing to yourself at the non-existent healing granted
As it stands, Bears are currently high healing tanks, and often outheal the healers in raw HPS.
Look… I’m gonna level here. Bears have issues. But Bear players largely make those issues worse by playing against design, and while I admit that is the fault of Blizzard and it’s poor balancing, the primary problems with Bear are being hidden by too many stats in the late game.
I’ve said here quite a bit that I don’t gear my bear normally, and I always mess with different layouts. I am very partial to dodge builds over vers builds, because vers is, by design, a bandaid stat that is there to fill in raw throughput. Its power as a stat also tends to scale exponentially, and the more of it you have, the more valuable it is.
This means late game/gear cycles, Vers tends to be overwhelming, and in the case of Bear Druids, who get most of our avoidance mitigation through crit, we end up sacrificing our designed play of high dodge meat shield into just an extra sturdy meatshield.
Primary bear concerns are lack of control. No slows, very little group control outside of talents. At least playstyle wise.
Mechanically, the concern is our high end survivability is lacking, and this is largely due to who powerful other peoples tools are, and not really how weak the Bears is. Mechanically, Stagger is broken. Block and critical block on warriors outperforms raw armor. And, because Bears have to sacrifice our avoidance for raw chonk (and all tanks do, at some point), the flaws in bear design really begin to come to the forefront when raw chonk stops being enough.
Standard practice in life is that small gaps in performance become large gaps in performance the harder things are pushed. There is no appreciable difference between bears, warriors, demon hunters, etc on 15-17+ keys, which is already more than 99% of people play.
Which is also another part of the problem. Blizzard balances for the majority.
Bears have more health than Warrior tanks, for instance. But warriors can slam down a DR shout on a consistent basis to help combat that.
Problem is, as content gets stronger and stronger, the balance shifts between more health and a DR should being roughly equal in nature to the DR getting more and more and more powerful the harder content gets.
Bears currently have a similar thing with Earthwarden, where it is extremely undervalue in low keys, but super powerful on high keys.
The trick to fixing bears for “most” people is to address the gameplay problems, I.E. lack of mob control. This is a relatively easy fix.
High end problems that stem from mechanics? Well, that’s a different beast entirely, but not really as pressing of a concern
