The ECOBLOG

This entry is a provoked result of this TankSpot thread from December 2009. Now both Kalon and Darksend (God bless you two) gave great responses, but I don’t think it’s been given nearly as much attention as it deserves. I’ll also be flavouring the subject with a few of my own perspectives.

Tankeroshie asks: “Why did druid tanks disappear?”
He furthermore addresses the following:

• “You never see bear tanks anymore.”
• “It’s very difficult to find any good information sites like tankspot and maintankadin for druids.”

As always it’s practically impossible to verify or falsify the first statement with data as we can’t access any. However, I’m going to wager that it’s at least somewhat true. Although a weak argument, based on a personal experience I can safely say that I’ve noticed an increasing rarity of druid tanks on my own server. All of this is of a speculative nature, so I won’t be touching it any further.

As for the latter statement I can agree wholeheartedly. To my knowledge there are no significant feral tanking community site out there. Nothing like what Maintankadin has for paladins and TankSpot for warriors. While both of thing tese have information for druid tanks, this is very limited. This doesn’t mean that there aren’t any good sources for feral tanking theory — these are just not as accesible as abovementioned community sites. There is for instance both Darksend’s Mother Bear and Kalon’s ThinkTank – I included both of these in my blogroll as they’ve been invaluable to me over the last year in the learning process. I’ll also mention the Feral Tanking Discussion thread on EJ, although I must also warn you about a fair bit of circle-jerking. Aside from that I know of no other solid, quality sources for bear tanking theory and my research hasn’t led me to any such sites either. Yet I still have to mention one last name, which is Rawr. Rawr is an optimisation tool for most of your druid needs. The bear tanking aspect of it is always updated and very customisable. As such it also takes a good while to get used to it and you will need to alter some settings for it to actually be useful — but I won’t cover that here.

So, we assume that there aren’t many bears left and there aren’t many sources of bear information either. But why is this? Tankeroshie adds “anymore”. Suggesting that this is a new development and that there has been a larger number of bear tanks in the past than there is now. I remember no real bear tanking in Vanilla and I have little BC experience, so I will assume that bear tanks started to sprout during Burning Crusade. But with Wrath of the Lich King they are diminishing again. This seems a bit off, though. Bears are in a really good place, we’re very competitive and I find myself doing just as well as our warrior and paladin tank if not better on some fights. I wouldn’t dream of complaining. So what makes feral tanking unappealing?

There are several answers to that question, but the most important one is misconceptions:

Number ONE — Chill of the Throne and other “nerfs”

This is one is far too common. The idea is: druids avoid with nothing but dodge and Chill of the Throne affects just that. Therefore bears are suffering more from 20% less dodge than any other tank. This is wrong. It’s been covered in depth by a fair few people, so I won’t be taking any credit. Namely Kalon has two great posts on busting this horribly myth. Go there for the intermediate results. In TL;DR I will cite Kalon:

“Chill of the Throne is the least harmful to druids. It is a relative decrease to damage taken compared to other tanks. It also will likely make effective health more valuable, which only favors druids even more. In short, druids will be in a better position relative to other tanks than they were before this, and are in all likelihood the best overall tank in generic terms for any given encounter.“ – Kalon

A similar idea was developed after the 3.1 10% stamina Heart of the Wild nerf. Our outrageously large health pools were cut down a bit. Although imagine where we would be sitting if that hadn’t been implemented back then …

Number TWO — Druids are boring?

It’s stupid to start debating on this on as preference of class is a matter of opinion. Feral tanks have fewer abilities by default than other tanking classes. That doesn’t mean we’re all just spamming a macroed swipe. I’ve spoken with people who were too fixated in the jack of all trades, master of none idea. This isn’t true. As of 3.3 druids excel in every spec, we’re doing great and I see succesful druids all the time. I can’t say whether or not they are having fun, but I surely am.

Regardless, the class isn’t ever any more fun than you make it yourself. For me the fun is the amount of effort, time and thought I put into my character and to improve it. This touches upon gear, playstyle, routine, user interface and much more. Knowing is half the battle — and half the fun.
Anything will become entertaining if you get somewhere with it. Any class will get boring on boring content.

So why did druid tanks disappear?  I don’t know, I’m not even sure I can prove that they have. I think they have, and I think it has to do with a set of common misconceptions.