07-29-2006, 01:17 AM
Quote:Gear advice
I did a lot of math with my old guild to try and help one of our feral druids understand what he needed to get in order to successfully tank, so I'll just repeat it to you:
Armor: You'll need approximately 11,000 or more armor to seriously tank raid mobs, ideally much more once you start turning purple. You do not have block, defensive stance, parry, or access to viable defense gear. If you have less than this armor you should not tank raid bosses until you do - every percent of damage mitigation is vital for warriors and doubly so for druids, who don't have as many tricks for survival.
Defense: Don't even bother getting defense gear. Treat it as an almost meaningless stat. I say this because I got into a lengthy argument with a feral druid from old guild who insisted that his +33 or so defense worth of gear he had cobbled together was too valuable to give up for more armor or stamina. Because of this insistence, his character had terrible mitigation and hitpoints, because he didn't understand what defense actually did or it's value, which is actually very little if you are not mitigating crits on hard-hitting raid bosses.
The point value of Defense is determined specifically with Warriors in mind. Warriors get both Parry and Block with Defense, while Druids do not. Warriors can viably get immunity to crit with Defense, while Druids cannot. Defense is a close to useless stat for Druids that plan to tank.
Quote:L2P advice
There are a handful of fights in the game in which it can be better to have a druid tanking than a warrior. They are:
1) Shazzrah. Shazzrah does low physical damage to the tank so poor mitigation is not as much of an issue. However, the added mobility of feral charge allows you to pursue Shazzrah immediately after a teleport, which is valuable.
2) General Rajaxx. While it is generally good to just have the tank with the best mitigation and highest hitpoints tank for this fight, all things being somewhat equal, druids have a few advantages while fighting Rajaxx. His disarm will not work on a feral tank, and his knockbacks are less dangerous when they can be followed by a feral charge back into melee range.
3) Following these patterns, any fight in which the trickiest component is the mobility of the enemy. Druids have easier access to their in-combat charge, so they can get rampaging mobs back under control more easily. I suspect the Tiger boss would be another example where a druid could do well. Bear tanks are also very good for tanking summoned adds, as in the first phase of Razorgore. Majordomo as well, as you say, although he's easy to tank with one character if you get placement right.
Quote:L2P advice. I can tank 5 man instances fine. I've watched good main tanks handle raid bosses. That's the sum of my knowledge and it seems short of where it needs to be.
The important thing about raid bosses is that tanking a raid boss "fine" is not good enough, in a sense. If you are just learning to take down a boss and still gearing up, you need the absolute best tank possible doing the main tanking. Having even 3% less damage mitigation can be a huge deal and can be the difference between healers running out of mana with a wipe and a successful encounter with no deaths.
Quote:Do you always stay bear? Can you shift out to innervate a healer with a raid boss on you or is that suicide?
Against a raid boss that would be suicide. While tanking a boss add, maybe, if you have a lot of health.
In many ways, druids really are best suited for off-tanking. When you kill your add, that provides a perfect opportunity to shift back and throw around innervate/combat rez/heals around as necessary.
I'd like to stress though that Druids do not mitigate damage as well as full specced and geared main tanks, so you shouldn't have any illusions that you will be your guild's permanent main tank or whatever. It's certainly possible to use a Druid to main tank Molten Core once you have the instance down, but while you're still pioneering through content, the task will go to the character with the best damage mitigation which will inevitably end up being a warrior.
You will be most effective if you embrace the hybrid nature of the role, being a secondary tank, healer, and cat-form DPS as necessary. Adaptivity is the most important trait in feral druid players.