Not a necessity, especially not for dungeons once geared.
Doesn’t really work in TBC as well as it does in Classic by virtue of smaller raid teams, and less consumables/external buffs to abuse. In lieu of the latter, there are new class utilities, meaning you will often need 1 of a certain spec, but because of limited raid size, any more than 1 starts to see tremendous diminishing returns in ways not present in Classic. The individual players in a raid matter a lot more in 10 and 25 man, especially considering the more complex mechanics overall.
So you end up with one of each of these necessary utilities, followed by class-stacking in the rest of the DPS. This was a problem all the way into MoP(well after the “bring the player, not the class” design choice was announced, ironically. Destro locks and fury warriors were uncontested.)
It seems like many people are just using the wrong model to think about BC raiding.
In Classic/Vanilla, your raid starts with one Druid, one Priest, one Mage, 2-3 Warlocks and either 3 Paladins or 5 Shaman. That’s 8 players out of 40 at the worst. Once you’ve got that baseline, you can start filling in with roles - tanks, healers, dps.
In BC, your raid starts with one Druid, one Priest, one Mage, 2-3 Warlocks, 3 Paladins and 5 Shaman. That’s 14 players out of 25. Moreover, those remaining 9 slots are constrained by the availability of slots in specific Shaman groups and the fact that certain dps classes bring raid-wide benefits while others don’t.
If you’re a Rogue, there are probably only two slots in that 25-man raid you’re even eligible to fill - and you’re competing against Warriors and Hunters for that slot.
So while your dps might justify picking you over another player of a similar spec, it’s never going to justify picking you over someone who brings critical buffs/debuffs to the raid. Rogues easily out-damage Enhancement Shaman. But those Enhancement Shaman ‘slots’ in the raid aren’t available to Rogues because the overall impact of an Enhancement Shaman who does the bare minimum is much greater than the Rogue who plays every card in his deck.
When people say “bring the player, not the class”, remember that the phrase originated as a reaction to BC-style raiding where it was very much bring-the-class-not-the-player due to the enormous power of those buffs/debuffs and the severe constraints they put on building raids.
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Of all the hybrids in TBC, enhancement usually had the highest individual DPS.
Most DPS ranges in Tier 6 were 2k-3k DPS. The key is calculating the increase in DPS, TPS, or mana return triggers to offset that personal DPS deficiency.
When looking at classes like Feral, Boomkin, Enhance, Elemental, Shadow, or Ret, available group structure and the stat weight of that utility must also be calculated. Those values will shift through content and itemization AND will depend greatly on your particular raid structure.
An example is a Holy Paladin tank healer. In Tier 4 and 5 group structure can grant mana return through an SPriest or Tide/Spring for FoL casts.
However by Tier 6, with the ubiquity of sustained AE raid damage, that same Paladin doesn’t need mana support…because Spiritual Attunement is granting that Paladin 2k mana per minute alone, while FoL is sub 5k mana per minute at those levels of spell crit. Itemization and setting altered the needs of that class in that specific role.
It’s also one of the reasons why we see very strong SPriest representation in Tiers 4 and 5, but that representation falls off moving into Tier 6. Players have access to more regen on gear and CoH becomes a very powerful healing tool later in the game.
The reason Hunters and Warlocks are strong in TBC isn’t measured merely on an individual fight basis…its because with TBC content those classes scale well and perform well in every fight. They might not always top meters in EVERY fight, but they do well consistently across content.
Then factor in the World Buff nerf in TBC, and for some guilds, with limited melee slots, Rogues and Warriors can be a hard sell unless you know the player is highly skilled.
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This right here is something I did not remember but it makes sense because Spiritual Attunement isn’t spec specific, even though I only think of it as a Protadin thing. I do remember my Paladin healers never running OOM very often but this makes a lot of sense. T6 and onward had loads of free damage tossed around.
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I think it’s probably all too soon to tell how TBC will shake out, and anything stated on the forums should be taken with a giant mountain of salt. I base this on my classic experience. I think bears are fairly well accepted by now, but I remember early classic people saying that they’d never be brought along for anything based on wrong information being passed around by people who claimed they knew what was up.
There’s still a guide up saying that barkskin is a valuable defensive cooldown for ferals and claiming that frenzied regen is a “powerful defensive cooldown”.
There were warriors claiming that bears couldn’t tank due to crits and crushes who would then turn around and DW tank (and get crit and crushed).
There were people claiming that warden staff was the best feral tanking weapon, blademaster leggings were BIS, and that ferals should wear dodge enchantments.
In a nutshell: there’s a lot of idiots out there who claim to be an authority about things they know nothing about.
I personally think that there won’t be very man DPS warriors TBC. However, we’ll have to see. Maybe they’ll be popular due to lack of mana and good cleave. We’ll have to see.
I think they’re fairly accepted by the same types of people who were already accepting of them prior to Classic’s release: people who don’t care about min/maxing.
Of all the logs in Naxx, roughly 10% of the tanks are Feral and 89.9% are Warriors. Of the top 50 groups, only 1% of the tanks are Feral.
The people saying Feral would never be brought along were, at worst, exaggerating the point about their inferiority.
Hell, my main for a time was a Feral Druid (I took over main tanking because our Warriors were garbage), and I spent the entirety of that time wishing I was a Warrior because of just how much better they are.
You can use Barkskin before the pull, which is arguably when a tank is most at risk of dying due to healer movement during the initital positioning. The ~13 seconds or so that you have it, you’re taking 20% less damage, which is undeniably valuable. It also has a short cooldown and can be used before tank swapping, e.g. on Four Horsemen.
Frenzied Regeneration is… well, not really powerful, but it is at least still a defensive cooldown, strictly speaking.
True, but that’s notably different than people saying that Fury would be the best DPS… because it objectively is… followed by Rogues and Mages.
No one was really wrong about Balance and Ret being terrible DPS specs, so using claims about the lack of viability of Feral tanks due to crushes and crits is sort of weak as far as an argument about whether people will be right or wrong about melee in general generally being weaker in TBC goes.
Suffice it to say, the quality of a DPS spec is far more straightforward and easy to quantify than tanks. More damage = better. It’s not so easy for tanks.
Well, Warden Staff objectively is the best mitigation weapon, but every single Feral, even prior to Classic, knew Manual Crowd Pummeler was the best threat weapon.
Blademaster Leggings were the BiS mitigation legs at the time, and dodge enchants are still the best mitigation option. If you tank Patchwerk, you’d know how valuable the 2% Dodge really is.
Hunter has equally as good cleave and most of their mana issues are resolved with Aspect of the Viper and Black Bow of the Betrayer once they get it.
Whatever benefit Warriors have in the cleave department is heavily outweighed by the MASSIVE DPS loss overall.
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I don’t think warrior dps will be trash, they’re actually OP up till Cata, at least in the later stages of an expansion.
The problem for warriors is the removal of world buffs which make them considerably weaker, and Rogues and Enhancement shaman simply have a better toolkit for survival or raid buffs.
To be fair, if you really care about min/maxing in classic you’re alliance. This is doubly true for horde ferals since we get a totally useless WF buff. Horde ferals are essentially double memey. This guy is an investment in the glorious TBC future when I’m going to mangle stuff in the face.
The problem with Barkskin is: (1) if you’re MT it not a good idea to lose 25% of your threat on the pull. Barkskin is kind of the anti MCP; (2) if you’re the OT, who cares about blowing a crappy defensive CD on the pull, and still losing that threat.
Blademasters were never good, warden staff is a meme, and I’ll never enchant dodge while in classic. It’s bad enough I have to wear the stupid parry belt on patch lol.
As far as the thread is concerned, I largely agree with you and you can see that from my earlier responses. If I had a DPS warrior or rogue I’d be seriously considering what I’d switch to come TBC unless you’re married to the raid leader.
They’re middle of the pack, at best. Cope all you want, dude. They’re not worth bringing.
Nah, even an extra 20% crit and 800 AP wouldn’t bring them up to the DPS of a BM Hunter. The problem is they’re just really weak.
Yeah, that’s true, but it only lasts 13 seconds or so, and if you’re worried about dying, which is the only reason you’d use Barkskin in the first place, 25% attack speed reduction isn’t a huge deal.
It is still a good defensive cooldown, regardless of how it affects your offensive capabilities.
As for off tanking, I’m not sure what you mean? I’m talking about tank SWAPPING, as in you run in to taunt the boss. You Barkskin before doing so to take less damage. You don’t need the threat at that point because the tank you’re relieving has been generating a massive threat lead in the meantime.
They remain 6th best for mitigation even now, and were not replaced for that purpose until Phase 4.
Have you never tanked the adds on Garr, or whelps in the suppression room, for example?
Eh. It serves its purpose well, being miles ahead of the option defensive options, but yeah, I think I’d generally not be using it because MCP exists. Even on bosses like Patchwerk, I’d value the higher DPS over whatever mitigation is offered me.
And if I had the choice, I’d probably be using Hand of Rag on Garr/Suppression type fights, but I never got so lucky as to get that, so it was Hammer of Bestial Wrath + Totem of Infliction for me.
I don’t see why not. Every decent player, regardless of spec, should be bringing some gear to swap out depending on the encounter. Feral is no different, and fights like Patchwerk or main-tanking Loatheb seriously favor mitigation and avoidance over threat because threat is rendered largely unnecessary by the mechanics.
For example, this gear set up will put you at armor cap with a GSSP (and no parry belt):
https://i.gyazo.com/304f9b75536a22d6da85fe5fa8bc8ffb.png
It would allow you to put 1% Dodge arcanums on your gear without sacrificing anything on your offensive pieces, which would instead be:
https://i.gyazo.com/08ff5cbe046536ddc22fce1e0df6e0ac.png
I think a lot of people are going to have to do that regardless of class. Holy Priest is still good in TBC, but they just don’t nearly as many raid slots available to them as they do in Classic.
Warrior has the unfortunate case of being bad on top of not really having much room for them even if they were good.
We’re also outnumbered by Warriors at some ridiculous ratio 
Prepop Barkskin is for OT Patchwerk.
I think that would be a bad idea. Hear me out.
Patch is carried by the healers. I just need to make sure I have enough EH. The healers aren’t healing reactively, they’re just pumping heals on their target all the time.
If I’m taking 20% less damage, then start taking 20% more damage in the middle of the fight maybe I screw that up. Maybe the healers start getting ideas. Dangerous ideas about maybe not pressing that heal button near the beginning of the fight lol.
Whether I live or die has nothing to do with me. My responsibilities are to have 13k life + AC cap, and don’t do too much threat and get the MT hateful striked. Whether I dodge, or take 20% less damage on the pull amounts to nothing if everyone follows the plan.
Loatheb I might worry more about avoidance, but I doubt I’ll ever MT loatheb.
At the end of the day all that matters is 4H still need to drop my pants.
Edit to add: even with hateful strike bonus threat, generating adequate TPS is still an issue. I know there’s certain DPS that get threat capped on that fight. Lack of salv also doesn’t help. I’d still rather have haste over dodge.
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Definitely, but there’s a reason for that, is all I’m getting at.
Feral works, but it’s not optimal by any means, and this late into the game there would’ve been more people who would’ve gladly taken the objective data and concluded that Feral was worth bringing over Fury/Prot if that were the case.
Instead, Feral actually became less popular throughout Classic as the need to optimize increased with each raid.
2.8% of the top tanks in AQ40 were Feral. 20% of all tanks in AQ40 were Feral.
5.4% of the top tanks in BWL were Feral. 13% of all tanks in BWL were Feral.
4.6% of the top tanks in MC were Feral. 10% of all tanks were in MC were Feral.
The data actually seems to – pardon the pun – bear out the notion that Bears became more accepted… until it started mattering more and they fell out of their lead.
Speaking from personal experience, healers are doing one of two things: paying attention and canceling their heals if you don’t need it, or brainlessly spamming you regardless.
In either case, it won’t matter that you take 20% less damage or not, because your health is still getting dropped to like 50% and you’re still getting hit.
This is objectively untrue, and the tanks in Instability proved this to me.
Our first clear of Naxx was a disaster, and we immediately got wrecked by Patchwerk because of our tanks. They were not wearing mitigation gear, and they were not using GSSPs. We had them start doing so and we killed it.
While Feral has less of an issue in this regard because even their threat gear leaves them with a huge chunk of their primary mitigation stat, there’s going to be a noticeable difference in the damage taken of a bear who wears gear with armor cap and lots of Dodge vs a bear that wears threat gear.
It’s funny you say this, but later edit to add this:
I find the two to be rather contradictory. If you’re having issues generating threat even with Hateful Strike, I find it difficult to believe you’re at risk of pulling aggro off the MT.
If you are at risk of that, that’s all the more reason to wear mitigation and avoidance instead of threat gear. Reducing the damage you take is beneficial, and I can tell you that as a healer.
Of course whether or not it’s beneficial depends on if your group can do frogger properly and whether your Priests and/or Shamans want to give you the ability to walk over the slime instead of having to dip into it and have everyone eat. Being able to just go right into the next trash pack is a big time saver, but if you’re going to eat anyway, there’s no reason not to just end up oom regardless for more throughput.
As for DPS getting threat capped, none of that really matters. They can surpass you all the want, so long as they aren’t in melee, and it’s highly unlikely any melee are going to be passing you in threat when you’re rage capped from losing half your health every 1.5 seconds.
If there’s a tank I’d most consider Feral to be good for, it’d be Loatheb. They’re capable of putting out enough threat to hold off before the DPS get spores and still not dying.
Good luck, brother.
There’s some wisdom to this to be sure, but frankly I’d love to have as much Dodge as I can squeeze in while having the 11k+ Health, Armor cap setup I need to guarantee survival of a 40k Hateful during the <5% enrage, even if the Healers are just straight bombing me anyway.
Also note that if you effectively use three OT soakers, your healers can reactively heal because there is enough time to do so safely, so it isn’t strictly bad.
I mean Druids have always been an unpopular class, even when we are really strong (think Wrath/Cata especially). I get a lot of that is based around power from the Vanilla days but Druid in general just does not appeal to so many folks, regardless of what we can pull off effectively or better than other classes.
This is more perception than reality for a lot of this, especially given the ease Ferals have in meeting threat demands while pumping out solid DPS and not risking death. Plus you have significant drop-off in how many people are in those runs to begin with MC/BWL being run daily but AQ40 still having a bit more choosey-ness to it.
Ultimately DW Fury Warriors will outpace us and with enough gear, speed, wbuffs, and a fair amount of luck, the top of the top parses will go to Warriors for that reason.
Or you’ll see some of the shenanigans I’ve seen where a really well prepped raid tries to use DW Warriors as OTs for Patchwerk and they’re dropping to sub 5% if they’re lucky… and then they just wipe.
I mean… its certainly possible… As a fury war I can hit 11k buffed in miti gear, and push that to 13 with a flask. Thats more than enough to DW patch, esp with a GSP (Lets not call Stoneshields GSPP guys. Thats clearly Greater Shadow and acronyms are confusing enough as it.)
If you dont have the gear, arent willing to consume and/or you’re 3 tanking it… its probably a bad idea though
Well my point being that the advantage Warriors have over Druids is that they can gain tons of DPS while Tanking if they DW while using heavy DPS options elsewhere. The trade off back in MC/BWL was the fact you were rocking Leather items, but then again nothing was really crushing your health either.
I’m not sure where the inflection point is for Warriors TBH. A Druid can sacrifice very little EH to really start pumping up bigger numbers, with MCP and Kiss of the Spider being the easiest huge jumps. But with every swap from an item like Gloves of the Hidden Temple to Gloves of Enforcement, you gain a bit more TPS/DPS and lose a bit more EH. If both a Warrior and a Druid put themselves right on that 40k EH line for Patchwerk (max swing Hateful while enraged <5%) to guarantee you avoid the 100-0 burst death, I honestly don’t know where the chips would fall.
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I see what your saying, but I believe it to be a faulty premise.
MCP burnout is a thing.
Spending 3 times the time farming consumes week after week after week, for many players, simply becomes unacceptable.
Bear threat from AQ farming is insane. Even with a Warrior in full Tier 3 mitigation set they only take 3% less damage than a Bear.
Bear capability is more than fine. Their damage is less than a comparably geared Warrior, but that’s really about it.
Bear is just a Pita to prep week after week. And if you skip the prep work needed to perform at that level…then you shouldn’t really bring a Bear unless its for trash or small OT duties.
An MCP is a 33% gain in DPS and TPS from the haste. A small portion you can replace with FAP…but it’s a significant loss if you don’t use one.
I guess. It’s a big part of why I swapped mains, but that was mostly because I personally enjoy healing more and was only tanking because our Warriors sucked. I was intending to be Resto, which is incidentally also pretty bad (Druid just gets the shaft all around, sadly).
It is rather unique as far as “consumables” go, insofar as you can’t just buy it, which makes it a deterrent for many of the lazy credit-card swiping players that plague Classic.
Hmm, I’ll take your word on that, but I imagine it’s more than that. They also have Shield Wall, better DPS when not tanking, better AoE, better cleave.
I think there’s more to what makes Feral unpopular than farming for MCPs, even though I’m sure that contributes a good deal. Hell, the MCP being so integral to their viability is part of that, I’m sure, even ignoring the effort that goes into it.
I’ll admit that bears usually only beat warriors in one specific scenario…heavy mit fights like patch or sapph when the warrior doesn’t have cooldowns. So pretty niche lol. Warriors are pretty godly in classic, there’s no denying that
Warriors clearly og dev favorites 