The bear tanks in Dire Bear Form, which multiplies the armor on your gear by 4.6 and adds 1,240 health. Forever ties your paw to your weapon: your auto attacks keep the equipped weapon's damage per second but always swing every 2.5 seconds. Those swings, every critical strike through Blood Frenzy and the boss's hits fill your Rage. You spend it on Primal Bite every 6 seconds, five stacks of Lacerate and Maul on your next swing.

You are reading the Threat build, the default of three. On a one-minute single-boss fight its threat is 1,233.7 TPS, which places it 2nd of 3 threat tanks. Mitigation and Balanced sit behind the switch above the page.

Strengths and weaknesses

Strengths

• Packs of bosses. Swipe hits three enemies, and Berserk lets Primal Bite hit three for 15 seconds with no cooldown. The Threat bear leads the tanks on all three three-boss fights, with 2,406.1 TPS on a one-minute fight against three bosses.
• A burst at the pull. Berserk goes out at the pull with Manual Crowd Pummeler and, for a Night Elf, Elune's Light. On a one-minute single-boss fight Berserk is worth 7.0 % of your threat, and the bear ranks 2nd there.
• Rage from crits. Every melee crit pays 5 Rage through Blood Frenzy, worth 11.1 % on a one-minute single-boss fight, so the crit on your gear buys Mauls as well as damage.

Weaknesses

• Crushing blows stay. A bear can't block or parry, so dodge and miss never fill the boss's attack table, and 15 % of its swings land as crushing blows for 150 % damage on every fight. A shield warrior pushes them below 2 %.

• Long single-boss fights. Berserk's three-minute cooldown gives you one, at the pull. On a three-minute single-boss fight the Threat bear falls to 3rd of 3, behind the warrior and the paladin.
• A bigger health bar starves you. In our engine the Rage a hit pays shrinks as your maximum health grows, so Stamina scores -0.16 Agility a point and Flask of the Titans costs threat. Blizzard's 8 October notes dropped health from that formula.

How tanks are measured

Every tank faces the same level-63 Dragonkin. Its swing comes every 2 seconds, starts at 3,000 damage before its attack power and can land as a crushing blow. A single boss is paired with healing of 2,000 health every second. Against three bosses it refills you after every swing, since three bosses landing together kill any pre-raid tank in one burst, and that leaves threat as the real test there. The three builds each rank on a number of their own:

• Threat ranks by threat per second.
• Mitigation ranks by Survival: how many of the boss's normal hits your health bar takes, corrected for the share of swings that miss, crit or crush. Health and armor count at full value there, dodge and miss at half.
• Balanced multiplies the two: threat per second times the seconds your Survival buys against the boss's swings, which we call threat per health bar.

Every build has to take at least 4 normal hits from full health, a line the Threat bear clears by a little. With that healing, your chance of dying in a single-boss pull is 0.0 %. Nobody else tanks in the sim and nothing taunts, so compare tanks by these numbers rather than reading them as proof you keep the boss.

On every fight

Your threat nearly doubles on three bosses, where Swipe hits all three and Berserk's Primal Bite does too. On one boss it falls with the fight's length: Berserk's 15 seconds are a quarter of a one-minute fight and a twelfth of a three-minute one. Each fight in the table opens the guide on that fight.

Races

On every fight the best Alliance bear is a Night Elf. Elune's Light gives 10 % crit for 15 seconds at the pull, and Forever lets you use racials without leaving form. The gap to the Horde is widest on one minute, where those 15 seconds are a quarter of the fight. The table below has each race's number. For the Horde, Tauren lead: Endurance's 1 % hit counts while your set sits below the 9 % cap.

The Skyborne races, High Order and Windshaper, sit below both on every board.

What a Druid brings to the raid

Leader of the Pack adds 3 % crit to every spell and attack in your party while you hold a form, though it won't sit on top of a Moonkin's aura. Of the druid buffs, it is the one melee specs value most. The table puts a number on each druid buff for the specs it touches on this fight.

Changes

One row for every simulator or game-data update, with the build's score on this fight afterwards. Follow the link to the Updates page for the reason behind each row.