Hey everyone! Thought I'd write this guide to help people understand the ins and outs of druid tanking.

Overview: Druid Tanks are awesome. Yes. Completely, 100%, awesome. Why, you ask? Well, lets see some pros:

1) Rediculously high armor values! - The conversion rate is 400% from armor from items. Note that this does NOT include armor from enchants and other items like that, only armor present on the items in your character sheet. Still, druids can be armor capped (~37000 armor i believe, 75% mitigation) well before Sunwell Plateau by stacking armor and agility. Right now, I have 27.7k armor, which isabout 70% mitigation on bosses.

2) High Stamina values! - The conversion rate is 25%. Same deal with the enchants not getting the bonus. Druid tanks can get easily above 16k health. I have about 14.5k right now just self buffed. Druids tend to take more "spike damage" than other tanks, but this is helped out by their greater health pools.

3) High Dodge! - Soon, just from talents, druids will have a BASE +10% dodge. /joy. Since druids can't block or parry, dodge rates are great and come from most leather armor, along with dodge from agility!

4) Look like a bear! - Can you even complain?

5) Great 1-3 target tank! - Swipe helps a lot, but druids can also lacerate multiple targets and refocus on the main target.

6) It's okay to growl and drool! - I do it all the time!

7) Can dps easily when needed to - At the press of a button!

8 ) Does want some mangel? - I know I do!

9) High Aggro Generation - Does more damage than most tanks, so can generally get more threat per second.

Now, some cons:

1) Can't Parry or Block - lame! Also hurts when a tank item drops, but it also has block or parry. Darn you Blizzard!

2) Need Defense - 415 will get you to where you wont be crit by bosses. THIS IS VITAL. Unfortunately, leather gear with defense is very rare, so upgrades are very hard to come by. You can also use resil. Aim for -2.5% crit, that's what you need.

3) Not good for >3 targets - Aside from Swipe, druids only have Challenging Roar to get AoE aggro. This is on a 10 MINUTE TIMER. Horrible. Horrible.

Bear Tank Gear

Important Stats, Always - Agi, Stam
Important Stats, Mitigation - Armor, Dodge/Resil
Important Stats, Aggro/Rage - Feral Attack Power, Crit

Skills of Druid Tanking

Mangle - Your base attack. Gives high damage, and therefore great threat, and also a neato debuff. Use as often as possible. Great for single target tanking

Lacerate - Druid Sunder Armor. Stacks to 5. Hits for very little, but when it hits, it does a great deal of threat, no matter how low it hits for. Also applies a small bleed, which helps threat. Also great for single target tanking. Two applications of this will generally keep a mob off a healer for a while. Reapply as needed to keep the bleed up. Least affected by low Feral Attack Power, so easy for new 70s to use this to tank. But thats no fun.

Swipe - Hits three targets for a moderate amount of damage. Will break CC. If you plan on tanking 3 mobs with this, you'll need slightly more Feral Attack Power than 70 greens will give to keep aggro off the healer. So don't completely rely on it, throw in some Lacerates (more on that later). Sidenote: don't worry about spamming this for rage considerations, you get +rage for all three hits, and it generally will crit at least on one target, which gives even more rage.

Maul - Druid Heroic Strike. Does high damage, sometimes even more than Mangle. Note that it will not count as white damage, which means that it will not give you as much rage when it crits, and won't give you ANY rage when it doesn't. Spamming this will make you out of rage pretty quickly. Only use it when you are above 70& on your rage bar. Helps to give druids that bonus aggro generation, just be careful not to go out of rage.

Feral Faerie Fire - Great for pulling. Decent debuff. Better for PVP than PVE, so I mainly use it to help out melee dps and to pull.

Some meh skills: Demoralizing Roar (ragedump), Bash (PVP)


Feral Druid Tips and Tricks

Paladins get threat by spending mana. Warriors get threat by spending rage. Druids get threat by doing damage. So when you're looking at gear, don't forget that you shouldn't nerf your damage too much. Else you'll be Lacerate spamming, and that's no fun.

Lacerate Macro: /cast [target=mouseover,exists] Lacerate; Lacerate
How to use it: target the kill target, pull, hit main target with mangle, mouseover secondary target and hit the macro. I put it on one of my extra mouse buttons and it works wonders.

Great Druid Gear for Tanking -
Badge of Tenacity - http://thottbot.com/i32658
Braxxis' Staff of Slumber - http://thottbot.com/i31186 (OMG GREAT)



That's it guys, post a reply if you have questions.

Savage

this is for TBC, making a new one in a new thread, eventually.