Is Blizzard intentionally killing druid tanking?

Quite a lot of people, who joined World of Warcraft recently, probably don’t know that in addition of paladins, warriors, druids and now Death Knights, there was one more class that was able to fill the tank role – shaman.

Shamans were capable of tanking all the content, up to and including Burning Crusade heroic instances and Karazhan. They had no issues with aggro generation and only minor problems with damage mitigation, thanks to mail armor and shield.

But with Wrath of the Lich King, shamans became purely damage-dealers and healers. Who has even seen a shaman tank in level 80 content?! Blizzard decided that shamans should not be able to tank and removed that capability.

And now, more and more it seems that Blizzard wants to do the same with bear tanks. First there was an armor nerf with WotLK (roughly 25%, see chart here), then there was bonus armor nerf with patch 3.0.8 (patchnotes: “The mechanics for items with bonus armor on them has changed (any cloth, leather, mail, or plate items with extra armor, or any other items with any armor). Bonus armor beyond the base armor of an item will no longer be multiplied by any talents or by the bonuses of Bear Form, Dire Bear Form, or Frost Presence.”) – and there are fewer and fewer items with attributes wanted by bears.

What kind of items do bears want? Armor, agility, stamina and dodge – in random order. Remember seeing leather items especially aimed for bears? Let’s see some epic leather armor for level 80 with +agi, +sta, +dodge rating – from WowHead. Oh wait, there is none?!

There is plenty if you remove dodge rating requirement. Fair, bears are supposed to get dodge from agility anyway. So let’s see about bear trinkets. None with +agi/+sta. There is one high-level trinket with sta and dodge rating,  Heart of Iron. And that has on-use effect for dodge.

There is one trinket with agility, Darkmoon Card: Greatness.

Things are not much better with other slots. Most tanks use Naxx weapon to tank Ulduar, Trial of the Crusader and now Onyxia.

There simply are no bear-oriented items.

Ghostcrawler has stated that they want to simplify the stats and items. It seems that bears are aimed to be a casualty of said simplification. I truly hope it isn’t so.

Advertisement