Don’t get me wrong, I love being a bear tank.
So long as I don’t have more than, say, two targets to tank, I’m all good.
Blood Princes is about my favourite fight in the world, because I have two bosses to tank, our paladin takes care of the Orbs and the other dude, while I generate a massive threat lead on the rest of the raid, so much so that half way through the fight I could probably go grab a coffee and I’d still not have dropped threat before they were dead. It’s not boring because it’s easy, it’s just one fight during which I never feel like I have to struggle to say on top of the DPS, which frees me up to worry about other things like effectively mitigating damage where possible, and trying not being sent flying across the room. (although that is kinda fun, makes me sad I never got to tank Stalagg and Feugen in Naxx)
But thats two targets, lets dive in a little earlier on in Icecrown and look at….. say…. lower spire trash. Big packs of four, five or six mobs at a time. As I said earlier, I run with a Protadin as a fellow tank. We agree before a trash pull, most of which are arranged in a lovely symmetrical formation, “You go left, I’ll go right”. So we charge in, and he does all his fancy yellow spells and I swipe spam, and he gets four mobs and I get two. Now, I’m not usually one to complain about *not* getting smacked in the face, but it highlights a little disparity in the effectiveness of a druid’s toolbox for aoe tanking, and the paladin’s.
I wouldn’t mind this if I thought it were a fair trade. If I were significantly ahead of him on single targets, that’d be fine, but most times when we fight for threat we’re about even. Neck and neck on the threat meters, which is kinda cool actually and might be a good thing when we come to Heroic Deathwhisper.
Anyway, I’m looking forward to Cataclysm, provided Blizzard keep to their promise of making CC a requirement in 5 mans again, and having DPS focus down single targets rather than just gather up a big pack and AoE it down. Because as a bear, I can’t compete with simultaneous flamestrike, blizzard, seed of corruption spam AND rain of fire, which is why I hate tanking five mans.
Also, we get some new AoE threat ability.
I’m a little hesitant to complain too much, because I’m not necessarily trying to encourage homogenisation. I don’t really think a bear SHOULD be as powerful an AoE threat tank as say a paladin or a DK, I’d just appreciate it if people saw me and thought “hmm, maybe I shouldn’t AoE spam here.”
But, you know, that would require people in random pugs to actually think. Which could happen, maybe, one day. But I’d guess we’ll see rocket packs for pigs first.
