I feel really dumb, but I tanked my first run today as guardian.
Do we really not have defensive CD in our rotation anymore? It feels like the only rage spenders are DPS oriented. And aside from CDs we do not have any defensive abilities?
My rage spenders are now just maul, mangle and swipe?
Please tell me I am missing something? Currently it just feels like, you hold aggro and heals has to keep you up 100%
Forgive me its been forever and a day since I bear tanked back in WotK. There was no ‘active’ mitigation, no iron fur, no frenzied regeneration. TBH I don’t even remember if Survival instincts was a thing lol.
Most of your mitigation was baked into your rotation with things getting proc’d when you attack… I remember Swipe was more meaningful back then it applied a buff to you that was removed on being hit…so keeping swipe going was a thing. Other than barkskin on the pull … tbh thats all I remember for the time being. You might have to pour over the guardians abilities in the spell book/talent tree to refresh what does what to proc your defensive bonuses.
Crazy how much i’ve forgotten of the simpler times. Wish you luck. Wish my memory wasnt so bad lol.
In Wrath, bears have a very easy rotation.
That said, gearing was a little weird compared to retail. Crits gives you a 25% damage reduction. It does it for only one returning hit. This means you want more crit than you might assume at the start.
Assuming you have the rage to do this (most of the time you will). Mostly, you just tap your fingers on maul, mangle, and lacerate for single/dual target. For multitarget, you do the same, but swap lacerate for swipe.
If you have 3 targets or less who you want to die fast, you pop berserk and then hit maul and mangle as fast as you can. You make quite a few dps cry. This means you can also get so far ahead on threat that bears can start a raid boss and make it hard for dps to ever overtake the threat the tanks will have.
Defensive, use bark skin when you will take more damage than expected. Use SI with bark skin when you are taking a LOT more damage than expected. Save Frenzy Regen when you need a lot of extra healing rather than threat.
FFF actually does a nice amount of threat. Demo Roar should only be used if you do not have a warrior in your group. You CAN interrupt with charge, even in the middle of a fight, it just takes know when a cast is about to be done or a long cast. Just run a little bit away, then charge.
There is actually a decent amount of stuff you can do, it is just that the basic rotation is ignorable for the most part. Even in MoP, you could tank non-critical fights with a macro:
#showtooltip
/castsequence reset=6 Swipe, Thrash, Swipe
and
#showtooltip
/castsequence reset=6 Lacerate, Thrash, Lacerate
There was a time when I had an even more lame one that just cast mangle and SD at the same time since SD was not on GCD.
just feels really weird outside of 2-3 min CDs there is literally no defensive abilities. But yeah, there is berserk, barkskin and SI. Might be missing one CD but that is basically it. I was sitting there tanking, going through my spell book being like surely that is not it right? Yep that is it. Hope you crit and hope heals come in fast enough.
This’ll sound weird but our other defensive was really just having a HUGE hp pool.
Lots of bears were tanking 3 drake sarth because at the time we were one of the only tanks who could do it without needing to rotate extternal CDs. We could just survive the breath.
There is another quirk that was changed in WoD. Bears still get really high dodge rates. In fact, the defensive ability you get before than was just, more dodge. It made damage taken spiky, but high health made it so you survived most hits.
Bears were, and to a certain extent, weird with defense.
Wasn’t wotlk bear the top tank choice? I thought they had insane dodge chance back then too. I forget though so I could way off…
That was BC when you could hit the dodge cap, removed in WoTk. Bears were the anti-magic tanks , could absorb the tank buster spell damage that would gib other tanks. Back when stamina gems were sometimes socketed to make a fat bear more chonky.