How to tank as a druid, Part 1

I know I said I wouldn't include many specific posts in my advice section, but one can only write about generalities for so long. As such, I decided to write a post about tanking as a druid, something I'm quite familiar with. This post will refer to tanking at level 80, and thus leveling druids will want to look elsewhere. This guide also assume that you understand the basic elements of the game's mechanics and are just new to tanking or druid tanking. With that said, let's begin.

Abilities
Because of the hybrid nature of our class, we may not have as many abilities available to us as other tanks, but that means fewer abilities for you to memorize and adjust to.

Mangle: This is our single greatest single-target threat-causing ability, and the bleed damage increase it applies makes it great when used in conjunction with Lacerate. Unless you are fighting four enemies or more, use it whenever it is off of its cooldown.

Lacerate: Sunder Armor for druids; this ability is useful, but only for the bleed effect. Swipe causes more instant damage than Lacerate, so Lacerate is only worth using if the target will live long enough for the bleed to cause damage. As such, it is worth using on bosses and trash that takes a long time to kill, but otherwise, it's hardly worth using more than once or twice.

Maul: Heroic Strike for druids, and an interesting ability, this; it increases the damage (and thus threat) caused by your next regular melee attack, while also preventing that attack from generating rage. It's good to use when you have extra rage, but if your rage falls bellow thirty, stop using it so that you can guarantee that you will have rage for your other abilities. Otherwise, spam the hell out of it. Any druid tank worth his salt will want to glyph this ability, which will make it great for holding threat against two enemies at once.

Swipe: This ability is simple enough; it causes damage to everyone around you. It's thus most useful when you are facing a large crowd of enemies, though it's also good for when you have five full stacks of lacerate on the target and Mangle is on its cooldown. Swipe causes about a fourth of the damage of Mangle, so if you are facing four targets or more, you'll want to simply spam this ability.

Growl: The spell's description is simple enough, but I'll elaborate. This spell not only forces the target to attack you for a little while, but if someone has caused more threat than you, you will instantly cause the difference in threat. If you have 2000 threat against an enemy and your mage somehow has 10,000 threat, this ability will cause 8000 threat. Also note that this spell is not subject to the global cooldown, so you can use it any time it is off of its own cooldown. It's worth repeating that this will be next to useless if your target is already attacking you. I say next to useless because, in order for someone other than you to catch a mob's attention, they need to cause 110% more threat than you if they are in melee range or 130% if they are farther away (forgive me if my numbers are wrong). Thus it's worth it to use this ability if you have threat meters and your rogue is hovering around 108% threat or your warlock is hovering around 128%. Also note that many bosses are immune to this ability, but it's still worth using if someone else draws aggro, just in case the boss is not immune. Finally, because this has a thirty-yard range, you can use it on an enemy that runs off to attack a party member when you don't want to rush over to help them, due to positioning or something like that.

Feral Charge - Bear: This ability causes you to rush your target, while also stopping them from casting any spell they are casting and making them unable to move for a short while. If one of your enemies runs off towards a party member, this stops them dead in their tracks and gives you some time to build up threat or use Growl. If no one in your party can interrupt spells and you are facing a boss whose spells need to be interrupted (and Bash is on its cooldown), keep in mind that you can use this ability as a last resort. Just back up and charge back in. You'll loose threat from not being in melee range, but those are the sacrifices we make.

Bash: Stuns the target for four seconds, making them unable to move, attack, or do anything, really. I often use this on trash by stunning a target when he is about three or four seconds away from death while moving on to another target to start causing threat. Most bosses are immune to the stun effect, but you can still use this to interrupt their spellcasting. Keep that in mind if they have a spell that causes large amounts of damage.

Faerie Fire (Feral): This does decrease the targets armor, but it's really not worth using too frequently. It's a good ability for pulling an enemy because it causes some damage and thus gets their attention, but the extra damage caused by the decrease of armor is only really worthwhile on bosses, so once you are in combat, don't bother to use this ability unless you are fighting a boss and it has run out.

Demoralizing Roar: This makes enemies cause less damage to you (about 30 less damage every second, if the AP conversion rate is the same for mobs as it is for players.) The thing is, the damage reduction is often negligible (1800 over one minute), so it's only really worth using on large crowds when it will make a bigger difference. Otherwise you're just wasting time that could be spent causing threat.

Enrage: This ability does exactly what is says it does, though I have found the armor reduction to be not worth worrying about. This ability is more useful at lower levels, but considering that most trash pulls in high-level dungeons allow you to go from zero to 100 rage in ten seconds, it becomes situational at the level cap. It's good to use before a pull when you have very little rage to start with, and it's also good to use in conjunction with Frenzied Regeneration, which will eat up your rage. If you have less than 20 rage before going into a fight, use this.

Barkskin: A useful spell for all druids, but as a tank, it's main use is as our only no-strings-attached defensive cooldown. It may only reduce damage by 20%, but for a one minute cooldown, that's pretty good. I usually use it at the beginning of trash pulls when the most mobs are alive, but I also sometime wait until we are facing a particularly difficult pull to use it. During a boss fight that requires you to use your defensive cooldowns at a specific time, save this ability for that time.

Challenging Roar: This works like an AoE taunt, but unlike Growl, it causes no extra threat, so it only really gives you a six-second window to catch up with your DPSs' threat. That said, it's useful if an entire group of mobs has gone after the healer and you don't want to take any chances.

Berserk: Remember how awesome Mangle is? How would you like to use it without a cooldown? And have it his three targets? For fifteen seconds? For multi-target pulls with no more than three mobs, this really shines, and it's a good way to start a boss fight where you are facing two or three bosses at once since it lets you build up a large amount of threat on up to three people. It also makes you immune to fear effects and dispells any fear effects already on you, so if you are facing a boss with a fear effect, save this ability for when the boss uses it's fear and use Berserk immediately afterward. That increases the chance it will last until the boss does it a second time. It's one flaw is that it activates the global cooldown, so if you are going to use it for it's multi-mangle capabilities (as you always should, even if you intend to use it to break a fear effect) use it about a second before you intend to launch your first attack.

Frenzied Regeneration: It's unfortunate that this ability is our most potent emergency ability, because it isn't a perfect one. You should only use it when you have full or near full rage and you are somehow generating more, since it needs to consume ten rage with each of its ten ticks in order to be most effective. I have generally found that I can usually keep using swipe, mangle, and/or lacerate with FR up with no problem, but maul spamming with FR up will usually cause you to run out of rage, so don't use maul with FR up. As long as you follow those guidelines, FR should serve you well when your healer lapses or you take some heavy damage and you need some emergency self-healing. Dedicated tanks will want to glyph this ability.

Survival Instincts: I personally don't use this ability, but that's because I mostly run heroic 5-mans, where burst damage is rare. This ability is only useful on a boss that causes easily-healable damage normally and simply causes high damage every once in a while, since if the boss is causing consistently high damage, that damage you take after 20 seconds will only make it more difficult for your healer. If you do use this ability, you will probably want to glyph it.

Savage Defense: This is technically a passive ability, but it's still worth mentioning. This ability makes crit rating worth getting on our gear, and also makes swipe-spamming even more worthwhile, since swipe hits multiple targets, and each of those hits has a chance to crit, and a crit means a mini-shield.

Talents
If spells make the class, then talents make the role, so you'll want to choose a good spec for your tanking druid. This build contains all of the necessary tanking talents with a few points left over for you to play around with. You can put those in talents to further improve the nuances of the tanking role or talents to help you while solo-ing. The decision is yours. This is the build I use, though if you copy it, you'll probably want to take a point out of Brutal Impact and put it in Survival Instincts. It's intended use is to have all of the necessary tanking talents while still having some talents useful for solo-ing, thus making it a tank build and a solo build.

Gear
As leather wearers, we druids need to share armor with rogues, but we can still wear tank gear in the form of our cloaks, rings, amulets, and trinkets. Because of that, there are basically two sets of guidelines you need to follow for gearing up: one for armor, and one for the rest.

Armor:
We druids share itemization with rogues, so you'll be choosing among DPS armor for your tank set. You'll want to look for pieces with more stamina than agility and with hit, expertise, or crit.
Haste and armor penetration aren't completely useless for a druid, but they don't have as much use for a tank as they do for a DPS'er, so look for pieces with at least one of the three above-mentioned stats. Two is ideal, but you can't always get what you want.

The Rest: Tank pieces are pieces with strength, rather than agility. Thus you will want to look for cloaks, rings, and amulets with strength on them, and the rest will generally be stats you need. There are, however, some DPS pieces with strength on them, but you can usually tell the strength pieces apart because they will have defensive stats and much more stamina than strength. Just avoid pieces with parry rating, block rating, or block value, all of which have no use for a druid. As for trinkets, just take what you can get, and try to avoid the chance-on-hit or chance-when-hit trinkets, since as a tank, you'll want to save your trinkets for when you need them. Extra armor used to be an important druid stat, but now extra armor is only really useful on cloaks, since they will get the 370% bonus from Dire Bear Form. As such, look for cloaks with armor quantities in green, but treat armor on rings, amulets, and trinkets like you would any other defensive stats.

Weapons: There are very few two-handed weapons with tank stats, so look for weapons with a lot of stamina and with hit rating or expertise. It's also a good idea to look for weapons with agility on them, rather than or in addition to strength, since agility increases your dodge chance, and is thus a defensive stat as well as an offensive one.

Next week: Strategies and placing abilities on your action bars.