Bear rotation in 4.0

bears were always prettu much screwed at low levels, if you went feral then you were in for pretty much hell until 20 and you got cat form

it wouldn't surprise me if low lvl feral focused on cat form, being you get it at 8 now

Shoju wrote:How in the hell do low level bears tank?

You missed out Feral Faerie Fire at level 24. Take this with a pinch of salt, since my Tauren druid dinged 13 last night and my last attempt at a NElf druid is stuck in the mid 30s somewhere, but in a 3.x world FFF did a ridiculous amount of threat at low levels. If I hit a mob with FFF, it was mine from then on. I could get by with FFF every 6 seconds and autoattack.

I don't know if that's true in 4.x, but I'll get bear form tonight and see how Ragefire Chasm goes without FFF :/

Ok, after spending the evening tanking instances from levels 15 to 18, I can confidently say this about low level bear tanking: it sucks. No part of that was fun. I'm going to spend a lot of time in dungeon runs faced with scenes like this:



Levelling dungeons are properly srs bsns and all that, but jeez.

Do you have thorns? If so you will hafta use it every pull, aoe wont get better until you either get very geared or hit lvl 81 and get thrash. Swipes nice but it wont stop dps from hitting the target ur not focusing on. I remember even when I hit 80 my swipe just wasnt cutting it.

If you could cast thorns while in bear form, or it lasted longer than 40 seconds it would be great. Right now, Thorns is GARBAGE.

I'm doing "ok" when I do tank, I have tanked ~6 dungeons so far, and when I get a good group, it is fine, but with a stupid group, it is the worst time ever.

I have debated posting something about it on the official forums, but man.... that just seems like a flame fest waiting to happen.

The big problem with bear tanking? The view never changes. South end of a north-bound bear.

Shoju wrote:I didn't want to post another topic about bear tanking, so I will just ask here.

How in the hell do low level bears tank?

I had thought about swapping my voodookin to a bear to tank a little while leveling, but when I'm looking at my bars (just dinged 29) I would have.

Mangle (Single Target Damage)
Maul (Single Target Damage)
Demo Roar (Debuff)
Enrage (Rage)
Skull Bash (interrupt)
Challenging Roar (3m CD AoE taunt)
Feral Charge (movement)

That's.... 2 damaging abilities and no AoE....

REALLY? Am I missing something? Are bears not supposed to tank before level 36, and even then, they are doing so with 3 damaging abilities?

Glyph maul and keep it on perma CD, and hope people follow your target. Thats all you can do.

Shoju wrote:How in the hell do low level bears tank?

Mangle (Single Target Damage)
Maul (MULTI-target with glyph)
Demo Roar (Debuff)
Enrage (Rage)
Skull Bash (interrupt)

REALLY? Am I missing something? Are bears not supposed to tank before level 36, and even then, they are doing so with 3 damaging abilities?

When my bear was leveling, i used swipe all the time, and then Mauls. Clearly, that won't work now. I'd say that, with Glyphed Maul, you want to Mangle and then maul the crap out of things. Also, try to conserve as much rage as you can: the more you save for the next pull, the easier it is to tab target and Maul a few things, and then rely on Auto+Mangle or Auto + Mangles to hold aggro. The key seemed to me to be saving Rage until later. Now that Maul no longer replaces white hits, that should be a smidge easier.

Marking a kill target, so you know which to expect to get pulled from you, likely helps a lot too.

Kelaan wrote:

Shoju wrote:How in the hell do low level bears tank?

Mangle (Single Target Damage)
Maul (MULTI-target with glyph)
Demo Roar (Debuff)
Enrage (Rage)
Skull Bash (interrupt)

REALLY? Am I missing something? Are bears not supposed to tank before level 36, and even then, they are doing so with 3 damaging abilities?

When my bear was leveling, i used swipe all the time, and then Mauls. Clearly, that won't work now. I'd say that, with Glyphed Maul, you want to Mangle and then maul the crap out of things. Also, try to conserve as much rage as you can: the more you save for the next pull, the easier it is to tab target and Maul a few things, and then rely on Auto+Mangle or Auto + Mangles to hold aggro. The key seemed to me to be saving Rage until later. Now that Maul no longer replaces white hits, that should be a smidge easier.

Marking a kill target, so you know which to expect to get pulled from you, likely helps a lot too.

Rage normally isn't an issue, but the problem is, even marking targets people are too stupid lately to bother. After having tanked half a dozen runs, I'm not sure bear is my cup of tea. I will keep trying from time to time when my bear gear gets enough q rewards to not be awful.

A healer inspected me in my bear suit and was furious that I was using a caster trinket, and a caster relic. I explained that I'm main spec chicken, and put those on for the bear suit as well because the relic has stamina (I have no other relic) and the caster trinket I put on has stamina, something my other trinkets (heirloom int trinkets) do not.

Armory Uhmanara I think that was the troll druids name -_-. He was rocking a lot of in general caster gear. First bear Tank I've seen use headmasters charge and Whitemanes Chapeau (sp) for tanking along with a few other various caster cloth pieces.

I may or may not have tanked back in the day in a bloody apron but at least I could justify it at level 15-20 because it had just as much armor and stam than all other comparable leather pieces.

Any bear thoughts at lvl 85? Considering trying it out, as I tire from a stringing together wipes in heroics

We seem to have less armor and slightly less HP than our plate counterparts but savage defense makes up for this... I think tanking is very fun in cat with some of the more challenging encounters. Holding Multi-target threat can still be a little hard if u have a DK DnD or a fury warrior as they might WW b4 u get off a thrash .. O and feral is god in pvp if you know how to play it well ^.^

Shoju, not sure what level you've gotten to, but mine is 44 and feral. You will get swipe soon, so things get a lot easier at that point. Demo roar is a good way of getting aoe attention albeit momentarily. Also, before swipe I just kept a good eye on threatplates and one mangle/maul/charge will generally get threat without a taunt, at least with my full set of BoAs on. If they don't follow your marks (which they never do at this level), just don't bother marking and if they can't assist, they can tank a mob or 2 until you get them all rounded up. I got very few complaints with that method.

Anyone able to point me in the direction of some good lvl 85 bear sites? Checked out Bearbutt, but didn't really find a whole lot.

Looking for Stats to shoot for, as I am droping my JP on Agi leather now. Always good to have an off off spec right?

I think I understand the rotation a bit after reading through this posting.

ZeroKewl wrote:Anyone able to point me in the direction of some good lvl 85 bear sites? Checked out Bearbutt, but didn't really find a whole lot.

Looking for Stats to shoot for, as I am droping my JP on Agi leather now. Always good to have an off off spec right?

I think I understand the rotation a bit after reading through this posting.

I'd assume it would be something along the lines of:

Threat:
Agi>hit/exp>crit*>haste

Survival:
Agi>mastery>dodge

I can't verify those from any particular source, so anyone feel free to correct me, but based on what I know/have heard about bears, that makes the most sense to me.

*IIRC crit procs the mastery and may also have a role in survival

Fluid Druid has always been good to me.

wow insider just put up a nice newbie bear guide
not a lot of theorycrafting, but some good pointers for gear, glyphs, spec, some rotation help

take that and your previous tanking expirience and you should be golden

if you want the bear version of MTadin......my best quess would be either Tankspot, or ElitestJerks
honestly, i am not in a progression guild, nor will i be
so im not on the bleeding edge of anything, so those noob guides work great for me and i havent gone out looking for feral theorycraft

Its tough to determine what stat is better than what for bears because certain fights call for different things.

If your just tanking heroics I would say avoidance is best because savage defense is only procd on crit. If you have multiple mobs beating on you, you will be able to have a chance at avoiding every swing that comes your way, however your ability to crit (procing Savage Defense) is limited by GCD. Since you can get hit multiple tiems in a GCD your chance to absorb hits with savage defense is greatly reduced in multi-mob situations.
Eventually our savage defense will become strong enough though to hold up through multiple mob hits thus taking the GCD thing out of the picture, but taht might be later this x-pac.

If your in Raids a fight like halfus with slate dragon would also be better suited for avoidance so you dont stack debuffs as fast. A more basic (tankwise) fight like valiona/theralion would favor mitigation/stamina more. (stamina because you wont be able to mitigate/dodge the magic damage outside of resistance CDs). A fight like omnitron would favor avoidance because when the robot your tanking gets a shield up you dont want to hit it, which meens you cannot proc savage defense for certain parts of the fight.

That being said atm haste is just bad, crit is ok but i'd prolly reforge out of it to a better stat. Agility is a good all around stat that helps avoidance with dodge and mitigation with more AP (stronger SD) and more crit (more often SD). Mastery is pretty good too. I am still playing with dodge, the only problem with it is as you get more geared dodge's returns will diminish making this an inferior stat over time. If this x-pac is like wrath, by the time top tier raid content is out 1 point of agility will have as much avoidance as 1 point of dodge. At the moment its more like 2:1. Hit/expertise is more threat via more hits and more SD procs because teh more often you hit your mobs the more often you will crit.

As far as gemming goes thats where I get my HP up, but since other stats are pretty balanced I would recommend going for socket bonuses. Blue = stam ; Green = stam/mastery ; Red = stam/dodge or stam/agility.

Thank you for your information!

So after yesterday's changes, I ran a guild H VP. I couldnt hold AoE threat worth crap thanks to a large damage nerf to most of our abilities. To remedy this I was forced to reforge into exp/hit. If I can't hit as hard, hitting more often will make up for the difference. Make sure to get expertise first. Since we're infront of the mob, we get parried too. So point for point expertise will allow us to hit the mob more than hit rating.

Single target threat was still adequite. Pally tank had to hold back on BH though cuz pre-patch we were about the same threat as other tanks but did more damage, but now we do the same damage with less threat GG blizz. That was before I reforged though.