Feral at Heart: tanking

Update: changed the tanking build suggestion at the end of the post.

It's been some time since I wrote part 1. Many things have changed, but now I feel they have stabilized enough to give an outlook on how we will tank come WotLK.

Blizzards says, that druids are the best tanks by far in the current beta build - generating the most threat, having the biggest health pools and taking the least damage. Ghostcrawler has stated that we should expect some nerfs in the near future, but they will take care not to overshoot their goal this time :)

Basic Mechanics
The first change is: No more crushing blows.
Yes, you read right. The thing any plate-wearing tank is focusing on most of the time will be gone.
The second change: all tanking specs will do more damage.

If you combine the two you have tanks that do more damage, can equip more damage-enhancing equipment and for the first time actually have threat that scales well with gear. Of course this necessitates other changes. No more threat reduction buffs or auras: Blessing of Salvation and Tranquil Air Totem are gone.

Mitigation
With crushing blows gone, Blizzard feels we have no need for items with exceptional armor. That means no more items with green armor values (this even works retroactively; meaning that existing gear will be changed as well). But there will still be rings, trinkets, etc with armor on them.
We will be in the same ballpark as the other tanks from now on, armor-wise.

But we get two other ways of reducing received hurting. Predatory Instincts gets changed to reduce AoE damage by 15% (instead of 15% chance to completely avoid). This change does not really reduce overall damage taken, but makes incoming damage less spikey and is simply more reliable.
The other is a new talent: Protector of the Pack. This will reduce incoming damage by 3% per party member (12% in a full party, you yourself are not counted). Finally a way to reduce magical damage - Yay!

In addition we now have an active way of reducing incoming damage: Infected Wounds. With this talent our Mangles and Mauls will apply a debuff that reduces the target's attack speed by 20% (stacks two times, 10% per stack). It is no Thunderclap, but still very nice, as it also reduces movement speed by 50%.

Health
In this area we will still have more than other tanks. Not much, and it will not be to compensate for less damage absorption. So don't be afraid we will be the nightmare of all healers ^^

Avoidance
Avoidance has a long history of troubles. In the entry level raids we were way behind other tanks, and in T6 content we were so high, that we came close to not being hit at all (bears were the main reason they introduced Sunwell Radiance).
With the new 6% crit reduction via talents, we no longer need to stack any defense (or resilience) at all, so we will only want to go for higher dodge. Currently in beta we need around 42 agility for 1% dodge (level 80). This is quite a jump from the 15 agility we were used to, but much higher stats on items compensate for that. Also we get an additional 6% dodge via the new talent Natural Reaction.
All in all, we should be able to reach decent dodge percentages.

Threat Generation/Damage
As we now do more damage, we also generate more threat. Especially we druids, who always have been scaling well with damage.
This was achieved in part by increasing the base damage and damage multipliers on abilities. Talents play another important role.
Savage Fury now once again increases damage from Maul and Mangle(Bear) as well. Mangle's cooldown can be reduced to 4.5 seconds via talent. The new talent Primal Precision will give us 10 expertise - not only increasing our threat, but also reducing the amount of parries, which reduces incoming damage a bit. Maul will now benefit from any debuff that increases bleed damage (e.g. the Mangle debuff). In addition it will also do 20% more damage on bleeding targets. Thanks to Lacerate all our targets should be bleeding.
This means, Maul will hit like a truck - as it should, considering the real rage cost is somewhere around 25 (because it replaces a white attack, which would have generated rage). Also, there is a glyph which will change Maul to hit two targets instead of one. Very nice.

Concerning AoE threat there are good news as well. Swipe no longer has a target limit (but still only hits stuff in front of you). Also the talent Feral Instinct now increases Swipe damage by 10/20/30%. Combine that with Maul hitting two targets and Maul+Swipe becomes a really nice AoE tanking combination. If you are afraid that we will not have enough rage for that: The talent Natural Reaction also generates 3 rage for each dodged attack. Rage should not be a problem any more in this situation, even with very high dodge values.

Oh, if you are wondering: the 15% threat increase that was on the talent Feral Instinct is now integrated into bear form form itself.

Panic Buttons
"Panic Buttons? Is that something I can eat?" - this is what druids have to say on this topic on live. We have none. Yes, we can use trinkets, and in some situations can use a cumbersome macro to shift out, chug a potion/healthstone, and shift back (which has a high chance of not really working). Crutches, nothing more. I won't even mention Enrage or Frenzied Regeneration.

But fear not, brothers. Things will change.
Let's start with Frenzied Regeneration. Instead of restoring measly 250 health per second, it will restore 3% of total health - 30% of your health over the whole duration. It still eats up your rage (1 rage per 0.3% restored), but finally scales. Also you can improve it via glyph to also increase healing received by 20% for the duration.

Next on the list: Enrage. "But this is no panic button" you will say. Well, there are two types. One saves your butt when you really get hit hard, the other type makes you hit really hard to prevent you from losing aggro. This is of the second type. Using it really improves rage generation (less armor = more damage = more rage). Now you can also take the talent King of the Jungle, which increases your damage by 15% while Enrage is active. When your healers can take it, using it on every cooldown should improve your threat generation considerably.

Another small change worth mentioning: We can now use stuff in forms. We will no longer have to beceome one-hit-wonders to use a potion or healthstone. But thanks to potion sickness (only one potion per encounter), it is not really that great.

This brings us to the third existing ability that gets changed: Barkskin. Well, it stays the same, but is now usable in all forms. Basically a small Shield Wall on shorter cooldown. 20% less damage for 12 seconds once every minute? Sign me up.

Now on to the new stuff: Survival Instincts. Basically a Last Stand for bears. Grants 30% of max health for 20 seconds; on a 5 minute cooldown. That is nice, and well worth the talent point.

The other new ability: Berserk. Breaks fear, makes you immune for the duration and, most importantly, makes Mangle (Bear) hit three targets instead of one. To make it even better, it also removes the Mangle cooldown for the duration. Very very nice for burst threat. With the three minute CD, I'd not consider it useful for fear breaking in PvE, but you can use it every other pull to establish good threat right away - and to make sure you do not lose aggro on a boss where your DPS is a bit overzealous.

So we go from "Not really having any panic buttons" to "Holy crap! Which one should I use?". I like it :)

Other stuff
There are some other changes as well. Not only can we use all items in forms (as well as eat and drink), weapon enchantments that proc now work also. Mongoose, here I come! Increasing agility also increases dodge as well as crit for us bears - more avoidance FTW.
Feral Faerie Fire has also been altered. It can be trained now instead of having to spend a talent point on it (with Survival Instincts taking its place). Also, its threat has been increased substantially (only when used in bear form), and it does a little bit of damage now (5% of AP + 1). This makes it a better ability for pulling, and as it is free, a good source of threat when you are rage starved and have a GCD to spare. Another nice aspect of this change is, that it now "tags" a mob, so when soloing you no longer need to get in melee distance to make sure a mob is yours.
Another changed ability is Bash; it now also has an interrupt component. This is independent of the stun, so you even can interrupt stun-immune mobs.

Looking at all these changes, I think we will do well with the expansion. Assuming, of course, that we well not be nerfed into uselessness (which I don't think we'll be).

As a nice ending to this post, let me give you an example for a tanking build: 0/60/11
I've not taken Rend and Tear (stronger Mauls are nice, but not worth 5 points) and Brutal Impact (a stun/interrupt every 30 sec instead of 60 sec may be necessary for some encounters, but I hope not).
Edit: changed the build to go for 2/2 Improved Mark of the Wild and 3/5 Furor. Thanks for the suggestion, Felkan!

The good news first: Blizzard wants all four tanking classes to be equally capable of tanking everything. Guilds that do not have a protection warrior will be able to tackle everything just as well. Every class will get their niche in which they are strongest, but no encounter will need a certain class.
They even go as far as saying that even non-tanking builds can do 5-mans well.

Now the bad news: Not to decry Blizzard's good intentions, but some of the blue posts indicate that they do not really know what to do with bears and in which niche to put them.
What they aim for:

Warriors get the best mitigation
Paladins stay kings of AoE tanking, with improvements for single targets
Death knights will specialize in magical damage
Druids get the most health

Combined with the fact, that quite often druids are not mentioned when the other classes are, this does not sound encouraging. Who would take a MT-druid that needs more healing when they can get a warrior who does the same, but takes less damage?

I'll return to that point further down, but first take a look at how things are now.

The Current Situation

Today the premier tanking class is the protection warrior. No matter where you are, you will not go amiss having one with you. Some encounters even require their abilities.
Pallies are the best by far in 5-mans (and Karazhan), and are very nice to have in Hyjal. But they take more damage than warriors and run into threat problems on long boss fights (and when offtanking).
Druids are the best OTs, pretty good on hard- and/or fast-hitting bosses (high AC) and generate the most single target threat, but require a bit more healing and have no emergency buttons whatsoever.

Druids and warriors are pretty much the two tanks of choice in 25-mans, especially when tackling new bosses. Most raids also have one slot for a protection pally to handle AoE situations.

The biggest problem all tanks face is game mechanics (followed by overzealous DPSers).

There are two aspects you have to focus on: Holding aggro and staying alive.

In order to stay alive you have to stack AC, dodge, parry, block and defense (druids rely on dodge and AC only).
What makes this really difficult are crushing blows. They are a mechanic where a certain percentage of attacks hit you for 150%. Here comes the fun - their random nature can lead to nearly unavoidable wipes. If you are unlucky, you take several in a row. That is an amount of damage which your healers cannot compensate. Especially fast hitting mobs are a problem in that regard.
To counter that, high-end tanks try to get crush immune. That means either you use active abilities (Shield Block, Holy Shield), or you stack your stats high enough to reach around 103% avoidance to be passive crush immune; something only warriors and pallies can do. Druids can reach maybe 80% passively, and have no abilities (which is one of the reasons we get that much AC).

All of that would be good and well. But the problem is the other part of the tanking equation: Threat.

The threat you generate does not scale all that well with tanking gear. The abilities have a fixed component and their damage multiplied by the factor you gain from Defensive Stance, Bear Form or Righteous Fury. That means to increase your threat output, you have to increase your DPS - but you cannot do that, as your equipment is focused on taking lots of damage. If you rely on passive immunity, your gear is gimped threat-wise, and if you go for active immunity you spend far too much GCDs and rage/mana on keeping your abilities up.
In addition as a druid or warrior with better equipment you tend to get problems generating enough rage, as a paladin you run out of mana (which you gain by getting healed). As an example: In full tanking gear my feral druid tends to be around 65% dodge (even more with a shaman in my group). That means less than one in three attacks actually hits me and generates rage.

So, as your raid increases its DPS with every equipment upgrade, you actually tend to decrease your threat output. Combine that with damage dealers that do not watch their threat and you arrive at one of the reasons why tanking becomes so frustrating in high-end raids: you do not fight the boss - you fight your own raid.

See the second part on how this will change and what Druids can expect.