Feral Druid Tanking Guide for 4.3

The Feral Bear Note: Some aspects of this guide may not apply to your character until higher level. If are interested in getting your character to max level quickly, take a look at this leveling guide.

Feral Bear Tanking

(View on WoWhead)

This is probably the most popular Feral Bear Tanking build these days. Depending on the exact composition of your group you might want to move a couple of things around. This build takes 3 points in Perseverance, for example, which could be spent elsewhere if incoming spell damage is not an issue for you.

With the 4.3x changes threat should not be an issue so your focus should be on damage mitigation.

Feral Talents, 32 points

  1. Feral Swiftness – Rank 2/2 – Increases your movement speed by 30% in Cat Form and increases your chance to dodge while in Cat Form or Bear Form by 4%. In addition, your Dash and Stampeding Roar have a 100% chance to remove all movement impairing effects from affected targets when used.
  2. Furor – Rank 3/3 – Grants you a 100% chance to gain 10 Rage when you shapeshift into Bear Form, allows you to keep up to 100 of your Energy when you shapeshift into Cat Form, and increases your maximum mana by 15%.
  3. Infected Wounds – Rank 2/2 – Your Shred, Ravage, Maul, and Mangle attacks cause an Infected Wound in the target. The Infected Wound reduces the movement speed of the target by 50% and the attack speed by 20%. Lasts 12 sec.
  4. Fury Swipes – Rank 3/3 – When you autoattack while in Cat Form or Bear Form, you have a 15% chance to cause a Fury Swipe dealing 310% weapon damage. This effect cannot occur more than once every 3 sec.
  5. Primal Fury – Rank 2/2 – Gives you a 100% chance to gain an additional 5 Rage anytime you get a critical strike while in Bear Form and your critical strikes from Cat Form abilities that add combo points have a 100% chance to add an additional combo point.
  6. Feral Aggression – Rank 2/2 – Increases the damage caused by your Ferocious Bite by 10% and causes Faerie Fire (Feral) to apply 3 stacks of the Faerie Fire effect when cast.
  7. Feral Charge – Rank 1/1 – Teaches Feral Charge (Bear) and Feral Charge (Cat).
    • Feral Charge (Bear) – Causes you to charge an enemy, immobilizing them for 4 sec. 15 second cooldown.
    • Feral Charge (Cat) – Causes you to leap behind an enemy, dazing them for 3 sec. 30 second cooldown.
  8. Stampede – Rank 1/2 – Increases your melee haste by 15% after you use Feral Charge (Bear) for 8 sec, and your next Ravage will temporarily not require stealth or have a positioning requirement for 10 sec after you use Feral Charge (Cat), and cost 50% less energy.
  9. Thick Hide – Rank 3/3 – Increases your Armor contribution from cloth and leather items by 10%, increases armor while in Bear Form by an additional 78%, and reduces the chance you’ll be critically hit by melee attacks by 6%.
  10. Leader of the Pack – Rank 1/1 – While in Cat Form or Bear Form, the Leader of the Pack increases critical strike chance of all party and raid members within 100 yards by 5%. In addition, your melee critical strikes in Cat Form and Bear Form cause you to heal for 4% of your total health and gain 8% of your maximum mana. This effect cannot occur more than once every 6 sec.
  11. Brutal Impact – Rank 2/2 – Increases the stun duration of your Bash and Pounce abilities by 1 sec, decreases the cooldown of Bash by 10 sec, decreases the cooldown of Skull Bash by 50 sec, and causes victims of your Skull Bash ability to have 10% increased mana cost for their spells for 10 sec.
  12. Survival Instincts – Rank 1/1 – Reduces all damage taken by 50% for 12 sec. Only usable while in Bear Form or Cat Form.
  13. Endless Carnage – Rank 2/2 – Increases the duration of your Rake by 6 sec and your Savage Roar and Pulverize by 8 sec.
  14. Natural Reaction – Rank 2/2 – Reduces damage taken while in Bear Form by 18%, increases your dodge while in Bear Form by 6%, and you generate 3 Rage every time you dodge while in Bear Form.
  15. Rend and Tear – Rank 3/3 – Increases damage done by your Maul and Shred attacks on bleeding targets by 20%, and increases the critical strike chance of your Ferocious Bite ability on bleeding targets by 25%.
  16. Pulverize – Rank 1/1 – Deals 60% weapon damage plus additional (2706 * 60 / 100) damage for each of your Lacerate applications on the target, and increases your melee critical strike chance by 3% for each Lacerate application consumed for 10 sec.
  17. Berserk – Rank 1/1 – Your Lacerate periodic damage has a 50% chance to refresh the cooldown of your Mangle (Bear) ability and make it cost no rage.
    • In addition, when activated this ability causes your Mangle (Bear) ability to hit up to 3 targets and have no cooldown, and reduces the energy cost of all your Cat Form abilities by 50%. Lasts 15 sec. You cannot use Tiger’s Fury while Berserk is active.

Restoration (9 Points)

  1. Natural Shapeshifter – Rank 2/2 – Reduces the mana cost of all shapeshifting by 20% and increases the duration of Tree of Life Form by 6 sec.
  2. Heart of the Wild – Rank 3/3 – Increases your Intellect by 6%. In addition, while in Bear Form your Stamina is increased by 6% and while in Cat Form your attack power is increased by 10%.
  3. Perseverance – Rank 3/3 – Reduces all spell damage taken by 6%.
  4. Master Shapeshifter – Rank 1/1 – Grants an effect which lasts while the Druid is within the respective shapeshift form.
    • Bear Form – Increases physical damage by 4%.
    • Cat Form – Increases critical strike chance by 4%.
    • Moonkin Form – Increases spell damage by 4%.
    • Tree of Life/Caster Form – Increases healing by 4%.

Glyphs

Prime:

  1. Glyph of Berserk – Increases the duration of Berserk by 10 sec.
  2. Glyph of Mangle – Increases the damage done by Mangle by 10%.
  3. Glyph of Lacerate – Increases the critical strike chance of your Lacerate ability by 5%.

Major:

  1. Glyph of Maul – Your Maul ability now hits 1 additional target for 50% damage.
  2. Glyph of Feral Charge – Reduces the cooldown of your Feral Charge (Cat) ability by 2 sec and the cooldown of your Feral Charge (Bear) ability by 1 sec.
  3. Glyph of Frenzied Regeneration – While Frenzied Regeneration is active, healing effects on you are 30% more powerful but causes your Frenzied Regeneration to no longer convert rage into health.

Minor:

  1. Glyph of Unburdened Rebirth – Your Rebirth spell no longer requires a reagent.
  2. Glyph of Challenging Roar – Reduces the cooldown of your Challenging Roar ability by 30 sec.
  3. Glyph of Dash – Reduces the cooldown of your Dash ability by 20%.

Mists of Pandaria note: Prime glyphs are going away, you will have only Major and Minor glyphs, six total glyphs at level 90.

Talents will be completely overhauled, as well. See our Druid page and scroll down for an early concept video of the new talents. Also, many of the Cata talents will be rolled into the abilities list and some of these will be unique to each spec.





Level up all your toons,
Even in Mists,
Fast


Glyphs come in three varieties, Prime, Major and Minor. Prime glyphs enhance core aspects of your class and generally provide the greatest benefit of the three types. Major Glyphs, while not quite as powerful as Prime Glyphs, are still useful and continue to provide a myriad of benefits. Minor Glyphs often times provide small quality of life improvements or visual changes, such as a reduction cooldown times, such as the Challenging Roar Glyph, which reduced the CD by 30 seconds.

Prime glyphs are going away in Mists of Pandaria, new glyphs will be introduced, and many older glyph will change in effect.

The most recommended glyphs are shown in the build above, here they are again, with links and options for alternates.

Prime Glyphs:

Berserk – Optimal
Mangle – Optimal
Lacerate – Optimal

Major Glyphs:

Maul – Multi-target fights
Faerie Fire – Taunting

Minor Glyphs:

 
 
 
 
 

Here are your highest priority abilities.

Mangle – On Cooldown
Berserk – On Cooldown
Maul – With excess rage
Demoralizing Roar – Keep applied to targets
Lacerate – Apply debuff, stacks to 3
Pulverize – Keep active
Faerie Fire (Feral) – Keep active

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

AoE Rotation

 
 
 
 

Your tanking strategy for multiple mob pulls is to utilize Swipe and Thrash as much as possible while also applying your Mangle and Lacerate debuff to each target.

Cooldowns

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

As a tank, your cooldowns largely relate to your own survival. Determining when and how many to use depends on a number of factors from fight mechanics to how much mana your healers have left, making it a sometimes difficult and important personal judgement call.

In smaller 5-man situations cooldowns make things easier on healers, but are generally not mandatory, whereas in raid settings there are mechanics that demand the tank use his cooldowns or die. Proper use of cooldowns requires anticipation of, or quick reaction to damage levels that your healers can’t keep up with or are incapable of handling at that moment due to being dead, mind controlled, etc.

Generally speaking if you feel threatened it’s better to blow a cooldown or two rather than potentially die, because if you do die your team will more likely than not follow soon after.

Your Stats Priority

  1. Agility: Increases attack power, critical strike chance, and dodge chance, providing you with more damage, and therefore more threat, as well as slightly greater damage avoidance.
  2. Stamina: Increases your total health, making you harder to kill and, specifically for tanking classes, increases the effectiveness of Vengeance (which further increases your damage.) The increase in Attack Power also increases the effectiveness of your Savage Defense ability which is also increased by your Mastery.
  3. Int, Strength, and Spirit are not useful.
  4. Dodge: Increases your chance to dodge and therefore avoid damage.
  5. Mastery – Savage Defender: increases the effectiveness of your Savage Defense ability, allowing you to absorb more damage.
  6. Expertise: Reduces the chance of your attacks being dodged or parried. A good threat stat if you need more threat.

Reforging

When reforging gear, it’s important that you look to reforge from your least effective stat into the most effective for whatever gear goal you are currently aiming for.

Reforge everything into Dodge & Mastery. As a feral tank your most important statistic to seek when reforging is dodge, followed by Mastery, and you should always look to reforge into these stats wherever possible.

 
 
 
 
 

Feral Bear Gems

Night Elf Feral Bear

Feral Bear Enchantments

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One thought on “Feral Druid Tanking Guide for 4.3

  1. justin says:

    just a slight bit of information you forgot in regards to stam. because stam buffs your vengence stam actually helps raise AP and subsequently your SD as well.

    [Good point, thanks. I'll update the page. -Rog.]

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