Mastering tanks, one boss at a time.
Don’t freak out. It’s still beta; it’s all a work in progress. Bears in Mists of Pandaria are still like bears in Cataclysm but with the cat half of their toolkit cut out and nothing filled in to replace all that flavor. It’s up to us to keep things from staying the way they are. With the power of <announcer voice> CONSTRUCTIVE CRITICISM!
To start out, look at the difference between my beta monk’s action bars and my beta druid’s.
I’ve wanted to do this for a while, but for some reason it has taken forever. Honestly, I think bears are in a pretty good place right now. There’s room for improvement, but with the massive tank changes that were supposed to come in 4.3 (why do you make me sad, Blizz!), it didn’t seem necessary. I never even posted in the official thread! But they are interesting questions with interesting answers.
What type of content/type do you focus on?
Hardmode 10s PvE
What are your biggest quality-of-life issues?
I don’t like that Demoralizing Roar and Faerie Fire (Feral) are on the spell hit table. It’s unreasonable for bears to attain the 17% hit required to guarantee those spells will hit. This is a relic of vanilla WoW that has stayed far longer than necessary.
I wrote about interactive tanking a few months ago, but now that it’s becoming a reality, I feel like I should revisit some of those ideas.
First of all, what can we glean from Ghostcrawler’s recent blog posts about the changes? They haven’t said anything specific for bears, but they’ve dropped some hints.
We define [active mitigation] as hitting buttons regularly that have a meaningful impact on your future mitigation.
As an aside, the Feral druid’s mitigation is arguably the most passive right now, and we’d want to change things like Savage Defense to be active buttons under this model.
From these two comments, I expect they plan on making Savage Defense into Blood Shield. They don’t seem to be a huge fan of Death Strike’s heal, so they probably won’t include that in the feral model. My guess is that instead of proccing a small bubble on critical hits, we’ll proc a large bubble on a specific attack. We don’t know much more than that.
I usually don’t engage in mass blogosphere questionaires because normally they’re boring and irrelevant, but this time it’s tank specific so that at least makes it relevant! There’s also an acute shortage of non-paladin answers.
One of the questions I saw popping up a few times in the Ask a Dev: Tanking thread concerned the lack of active defenses for tanks. That is, tanks rely on passive stats like dodge, parry, block/Savage Defense, and base damage reduction to survive. Death Knights, with Death Strike, Blood Shield, and a handful of minor cooldowns actually have a healthy amount of active control over their defenses, so this question doesn’t apply to them as much as it does Druids, Warriors, and Paladins.
