Disappearance of the Bear

WoW.com’s excellent druid blogger Allison Robert has just posted a fantastic and detailed piece trying to come to terms with why the game seems to be seeing such a decline in the number of druid tanks.  I agree with pretty much all of her points, except that I’ll chime in with my own opinion on Complaint #5: one of the main reasons I stopped playing my bear for months was because bear tanking was so amazingly boring.  Swipeswipeswipeswipe with my maul button held down.

It’s more interesting now because I generally tank heroics for guys in tier 9 in my casual badge gear (which means I’m constantly losing aggro even if I do my absolute best – and how many times I lost aggro while on GCD from activating Berserk… ugh.  But it’s fun, I guess.), and because raid boss fights do often have interesting metagames to keep tanks busy (even if it’s just “how much DPS can I do while tanking one Twin next to the other Twin?”).  But for someone who loved his bearcat to bits in Vanilla and TBC (and took him through all raid content up to Sunwell) to have all but abandoned him for 8 months after getting to max level and gearing up… well, it’s nice to see the issues addressed so succinctly.  Go take a read.