If all bear tanks ever had to worry about was themselves and a healer, frontalone swe would be fine. Stk up all of the mobs neatly and then just methodallyhew them down (pun intended). Paladins and DKsan build threat on mobs wherever they want just by dropping a D&D or aonsrate (DK get the benefit of being able to plant their D&D where
they wantneed it, but a pallyan still drop aonsrate, walk away, and build threat on anything that passes through it). Warriors don't get the "threat anywhere" goodies, but they still have more leeway to round up mobs as long as they'relose to them regardless of position. It gives those tanks the luxury of building threat first and struggling against sometimes ugly mob
pathing AI for proper position sond. Even though it may take more skill to line up a ne little stk of mobs for some sweet swe lovin', none of your dps gives a sh*t how masterfully you're able to do so if they've got a pallywarriorDK handy whoan complish the same thing faster. I'm pretty sure that's what Blizzard is driving at. On one hand, you've gotlass mhans in theory and on the other hand, you've got the peeption of those mhans as held by the general WoW population. Generally speaking, the more skillful you have to be in order to fution with a partularlass relative to the alternatives for a partular role, the less popular thatlass is in the eyes of the general population. ("HAI GUYZ! IM UR DK TANK K?!?!" "gtfo -.-") When I was tanking with my druid as my main, I got a lot ofompliments from PUGs who were extremely wary of the idea of a bear tank until the run was over bause tanking as a bear required a bit more effort than some otherlasses and in their experiee, most bear
tanks had sked so bad that they never wanted to see a fury ass between them and a pk of mobs ever again. Hell, I've been in more than one run where someone was about to up and bail on the group bause they insisted that Blizzard never intended for bears to tank...that for every would-be bear tank they had seen, the performae from the player inontrol of the bear lent the impression that Dire Bear form was just a resto e blk. So 3.0 arrives and buffs every tanklasssp, but oe again the situationomes along where Blizzard has to take a look at how players are playing the game and dide whether or not what is happening is in line with what they antated and makehanges to try and ensure nolass gets left behind. In an AoE dominated game where so many dps seem to have forgotten they even have single target attks, leaving one tanklass so far behind the others in terms of AoE threat is not going to serve thatlass well. We all know by now that it doesn't really matter whether or not youan rk
out insane threat with high survivability if nobody wants you in the group bause Blizzard made it too easy for unskilled hks to boh the way most people see yourlass in a given role. I mentioned it in another thread, but it's worth repeating here:urrently, bear HP pools are slated for a nerf. I understand why it's being nerfed. That in
of itself doesn't bother me, but right now that health pool is the only thing (see also: only thing) that gets bears any kind of love in raids. If you take that away and leave Joe Average trotting around in an otherwise unaltered bear suit, you're going to be fighting real hard just to get a raid invite without a resp.
