But maybe I am wrong; it’s not the first time I’ve been accused of being too cynical:)

The one thing that used to annoy me with bears, was their poor performance tanking multiple targets (or my poor performance!) – but with their new and improved swipe … tis a great feeling when you’re in the thick of it, the chaos clears and you find yourself in the middle of an arc of dead bodies …. mwahahahaa.

The question at the heart of all this is why is the logical consequence of BBB’s position not acceptable to Blizzard. This is the entire point of GC preface when he says that people look at this whole issue too abstractly. And the answer is, as BBB seems to totally ignore, that Blizzard uses a multivariate analysis when making decisions. Because if you don’t have feral Druid’s in tanking at the highest levels then as a real matter you don’t have a game that feral Druids can play. And if you don’t have a game that feral Druids can play, then why does that spec exists at all. Blizzard has not gone to all the trouble and effort to design a feral tanking tree only to have that tree languish in obscurity. This is the point they have made over and over and over again about Sunwell. They don’t want to waste developer resources on content 95% of players don’t use. And it makes no difference to GC whether that content is called an instance or a class. That is why calls representation matters and matters a great deal. Because if classes aren’t represented then what’s the point of having them in the first place!

“I don’t think that they should be reduced in effectiveness to encourage folks to abandon them in favor of trying something new… any more than I would EVER advocate buffing druids to be better than other tanks to encourage more people to try them on.”

I’m sorry but this is simply a *stupid* position to take. It flat out denies the reality of the game you are playing. You are in a stupor if you think this way. In effect, this position says that there should be just three classes: tank, healer, and DPS; it conflates role with class. If the game is going to have classes then people need to be given reasons to play those classes. If you are not going to give people reasons to play the class, then you should get rid of the class. If making the class OP, as they did with DKs, gets people to play the class that is success. It’s success. It’s always been a defination of success since day one. I’m sorry but the position you take in that sentence is completely irrational. And the fact you can’t see it as irrational is the scariest thing about its irrationality.

How about 2k+ dps with no problems holding agro with groups of mobs because of great aoe dps. It just greatly speeds up runs and makes it much easier on dps. Compare that to my 1100 dps and much weaker aoe threat. Facts are facts no matter how much I like my bear tank.

Heck, I’m planning to level a DK so I can try to tank with it and get a piece of that awesome DPS pie. Is everyone going to need 2 or 3 80s just as a hedge against the nerf bat?

Blizzard seems too narrowly focused on certain aspects of class specs. With bear tanks, they seem to be obsessed with our mitigation. Which is just bizarre. There is so much more to equation than just that one aspect. Plus, with healing in the game so OP, does it matter that one classes mitigation is 5 or 10% better than another’s? I think not.

I know that DKs are getting nerfed which should bring them closer to druids and warriors do seem a little underpowered at times so their buff seems justified (although our main tank is a warrior and I have only rarely been able to pull threat off him). The only thing I can think is that the boosts that we would get from T9 gear would push us ahead of the other tanks just like it did for T6, T7 and would have for T8 before the nerfs we got at the time. I guess if they think we are overpowered I don’t even mind that but I just wish they would figure it out and be done with it finally so I wouldn’t have to spend so much money regemming and re-enchanting whenever they make a change. It can be very frustrating to have to continually make changes to ensure that you don’t somehow hurt the raid’s performance.

There’s nothing wrong with your opinion on what to do (in fact, I think it is enlighteningly straightforward), but the follow-up, and the reason why it’s a tough decision for the Blizzard developers you should be able to see from the rest of the comments: that there are a limited amount of raiding tanking spots, and there are Feral bears who want to tank but are not allowed to tank for various reasons, including the perception that bears are crappy tanks. So, if you nerf them directly or buff their competitor Prot Warriors, the expected result is that even fewer bears will be allowed to do what they want. Now, if you believe that’s an acceptable result of making all classes equal (and certainly it could be), then there is no problem, but it seems to me that Blizzard isn’t quite satisfied with their current representation numbers.

I know he was overgeared for it, but in our last 25 naxx he was an OT for KT. For whatever reason the other OT went down, so he had all the adds on him, and was fine. We couldn’t even tell he was taking extra damage. Then the MT went down when KT was at 25%, so the druid picked that up as well. The druid died at 1% health and we downed the boss. Sadly, the reason he died was that with all those guys on him, he couldn’t see the red insta death rune on the ground.

wtf, If nobody is playing a class in spite of it’s being OP, then leave it the fuck alone. You’re not going to get more people playing it by nerfing it.

Main problem is of their own creation. They made an easy fun tank avialable, now we have too many tanks. And if they dont put in a hero class for healers next expansion, well I predict bad things. Now when newer players want to be useful they are going to level 1-90 a healer? Right.