Can you beat my bear armor?

[JurkenSlynan]

Weapon: Warden Staff (+9 weapon dmg)

Why this enchant? Thanks.

[Grayclaw]

Weapon: Warden Staff (+9 weapon dmg)

Why this enchant? Thanks.

You get this enchant to help with building agro.

[Kaellrus]

A bit unrelated to the main topic, but can somebody explain how bear tanking works? I'm leveling a druid and I wanted to tank on him so I was wondering how good their aggro is. I noticed Maul has no aggro modifiers on it. Is it just the 15% from talents?

[Lorilay]

(B) Druid (credit to Chibi of Shadow Moon)

The threat modifiers for Bear tanks are the same as Warriors: 130% for Bear Form and Defensive Stance, or 149.5% if you have 5/5 Defiance or Feral Instinct. However, the primary bear tanking abilities dont add threat like warriors', they multiply. Each point of damage done by Maul and Swipe does an additional 0.75 threat, before the bear stance modifier. E.g. Maul does 200 damage, so it does 200 * 1.75 = 350 threat raw, or 350 * 1.3 * 1.15 = 523 threat counting the bear stance + feral instinct modifiers...
Growl has exactly the same behaviour as Taunt for Warriors.

In short, you have a base bonus to threat in bear form which can be increased with talents. Maul and swipe cause threat that scales with the damage you do; as your gear improves your threat increases much more than warriors does. Case in point: after the fix to maul threat, I can pull aggro off an equally geared warrior tanking a mob if I start with full rage.

[Armilus]

In short, you have a base bonus to threat in bear form which can be increased with talents. Maul and swipe cause threat that scales with the damage you do; as your gear improves your threat increases much more than warriors does. Case in point: after the fix to maul threat, I can pull aggro off an equally geared warrior tanking a mob if I start with full rage.

^ this. Also, enemy armor has a way bigger impact on druid threat than it does on warrior threat. The bonus threat on warrior abilities is not lowered when their damage goes down due to armor but druid threat is based on damage caused so your threat is reduced a LOT by armor. But on the flip side, your threat is also increase a LOT by crits where as warrior threat isn't increase nearly as much by crits.

It really sucks because sunder armor is amazing for increasing druid threat but that means you need either a prot warrior sundering (and having 2 tanks on the same target is dumb) or a DPS warrior sundering which really lowers their DPS and defeats the purpose of having higher threat.

[Lorilay]

Eh, all our dps warriors start off the fight doing 1 sunder each anyways to get more uptime with 5 stacks. I do wonder what the math is on having a rogue keep up expose armor instead of sunder, though.

[Armilus]

Eh, all our dps warriors start off the fight doing 1 sunder each anyways to get more uptime with 5 stacks. I do wonder what the math is on having a rogue keep up expose armor instead of sunder, though.

Talented Expose with 5 points is better than sunder... 300 additional armor reduction.

Ugh, now I want to build a raid group around a Druid MT and utility rogue with SF, imp expose and imp kidney. Just to do something different It wouldn't be better than standard raid setups but I think it would be totally doable.

Edit: BTW, I think expose armor makes it so that you can't use sunder armor. At least it was like that for a little bit after they implemented debuff priority during vanilla, maybe they fixed it.

[Lorilay]

Eh, all our dps warriors start off the fight doing 1 sunder each anyways to get more uptime with 5 stacks. I do wonder what the math is on having a rogue keep up expose armor instead of sunder, though.

Talented Expose with 5 points is better than sunder... 300 additional armor reduction.

Ugh, now I want to build a raid group around a Druid MT and utility rogue with SF, imp expose and imp kidney. Just to do something different It wouldn't be better than standard raid setups but I think it would be totally doable.

Edit: BTW, I think expose armor makes it so that you can't use sunder armor. At least it was like that for a little bit after they implemented debuff priority during vanilla, maybe they fixed it.

Expose has always prevented sunder armor (hence the "don't expose armor, noob" complaints from early on in vanilla). In fact, iirc it's considered a more powerful spell no matter how many combo points you use for it, so even a 1-point expose will prevent sundering. I tank bosses sometimes, so it's certainly possible to use it instead.

[Undertanker]

Warrior Best Hard hitting, armored boss tank.

Druid Best tank against bosses that do primarily magic damage (warrior can't block/dodge/parry for revenge uptime) Druid has higher HP pool for these magic attacks, and will do more threat based off of damage. Druid can't avoid crushings and can't get crit capped, this is the boss type they excel at.

Pally Best AoE tanking and threat per second on rage starvation fights.

Pro druid tank will have 2 staffs, 1 with +9 and 1 with + avoidance stats. Swap weapons mid fight for what is needed.

"2 tanks on same target = dumb" There are many boss fights where multiple tanks are hitting the same target.

[TheNIF]

Warrior Best Hard hitting, armored boss tank.

Druid Best tank against bosses that do primarily magic damage (warrior can't block/dodge/parry for revenge uptime)

This is exactly opposite. What the druid has going for it is high armor, which is useful against hard physical attacks. Druids have no mitigation against magic, and your health-pool difference vs a warrior tank really isn't that huge at higher gear levels.

Warriors have intrinsic 10% dmg reduction from defensive stance, so they take less damage from all magic attacks. They can also shieldwall, last-stance and eat potions while tanking. So simply put, warriors are vastly superior tanks on anything that does heavy magic damage.

At lower damage physical dmg values (like AOE trashpacks), warriors block also proves superior to greater armor values of druids, because the flat block value takes up a larger percentage of an incoming hit than having a few more percentage reduction from armor does. Not to mention the superior avoidance offered by warriors.

The main strengths of a druid tank are armor and threat. For most competent tanks, threat isn't a problem anyway, so druids should mostly tank stuff that just hits extremely hard with melee attacks. Such as broodlord.