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Posts with tag bear form

Shifting Perspectives: Awesome tanking gear and how to get it easily


Bears make some of the awesomest tanks around. There are advantages and disadvantages to having a druid tank as opposed to a warrior, or maybe even a paladin, and we can leave the discussion of which is best for another day. You are probably aware, though, that one of a druid's main advantages in tanking is the extremely high armor he or she can achieve in bear form. Shifting to bear form increases the armor of a druid by 400%, and there are a number of leather items out there which have a higher-than-average armor that can send our physical damage mitigation through the roof.

Let's just assume that you're leveling up your feral druid, thinking about when you reach 70 and wondering what kind of gear you're going to need going into the high-end 5-person instances and raiding. The thing you might not know is, as you're leveling up towards 70, some of the best of these high-armor items are easily available through quests. These may be "just green" in some cases, but that armor rating makes them extremely valuable for a druid for a long time. They often outshine their bluer or purpler counterparts in their bearish tanking power. Continue reading for a short guide to these what these items are how to get them.

Continue reading Shifting Perspectives: Awesome tanking gear and how to get it easily

Around Azeroth: Mommy?


Darkcow of Gorgonnash sends in this rather sad screenshot. How can such decorations make our druid brethren feel? Darkcow provides an appropriately Larson-esque caption for the scene:

Dead as a door... mat? No, that's not quite it. Mom?

Do you have a unique shot of Azeroth or Outland that you'd like to show off to the rest of the world? Tell us about it by e-mailing aroundazeroth@gmail.com! Or perhaps you'd just like to see more of your pics from Around Azeroth.

Gallery: Around Azeroth

Tanking for Druids

Of course druids are a highly versatile hybrid class,  but sometimes you want to maximize your ability in a single area.  And in this case knowledge - knowing what you want to do and how best to accomplish it - is power.  With this in mind, I present Alterreality's excellent post with regards to bear and warrior tanks, which is full of hard, numerical data and clearly shows a druid's strengths in tanking (high HP and armor) and weaknesses (lack of available leather defense gear, inability use shields, etc).  Overall, it sounds like a warrior's access to defense gear (reducing critical strikes against them) starts to be more and more beneficial on more and more difficult bosses, making them the only obvious choice for end-game content.  What do you think - can druids hold up to the tanking ability of a warrior?


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