Bear tank viability 1-60

[Kuroyu]

I think theyre a little bit more quirky than warriors so there's a bad stigma against them, everything has its purpose though so don't let trash talkers keep you from trying paladin or bear tank.

[Noselacri]

Druids are probably the best dungeon tanks. In the leveling stages, they do remarkable DPS in bear form. They have fine AoE aggro with Swipe. They can heal themselves between packs and pre-HoT before bosses. They bring a lovely buff, can rez someone every 30 minutes, and their huge armor/health is incredibly powerful during the pre-60 levels where warriors don't usually have prot specs.

In raids, feral druids are excellent offtanks. You shouldn't generally ask a druid to maintank a boss, although there's a few places throughout vanilla where that's valid or even preferable (raid leaders will know when this is), but they make the best dedicated offtanks due to their incredible utility and their ability to switch to DPS whenever they don't need to tank. Keeping one feral druid around is a good idea for any guild as they can basically have a full tank and DPS spec in one, making them better offtanks than fury warriors.

Also, when every piece of feral gear that ever drops for a guild goes to the same one druid, he'll be much better geared than a fury warrior in whatever tank gear has trickled down to him past the guild's prot warriors. There isn't a whole lot of feral druid gear until AQ, but there is some and it makes a difference when one druid gets it all. Contrary to popular belief, they also don't compete much with rogues for gear as they don't use rogue tier pieces or weapons, and favor items like this or this.

Every raid guild should consider keeping one feral druid for these reasons. The druid's DPS, considering the crit aura, is easily on par with a hunter's at the least. They're excellent offtanks with their extreme armor/hp, and where a warrior has to either be prot and thus useless outside of tanking or fury and thus not a particularly strong tank during progression, a feral druid can fill both roles pretty well as long as you don't pretend that he should maintank the boss. The fact that they can't (it's not that they literally can't, they just shouldn't, a few exceptions aside) has led many to believe that feral druids are pointless, but that's incorrect.