Quote Originally Posted by jjflanigan View Post
Out of curiosity, why would you say the feral tank would be harder to macro than the paladin? I see the majority of teams being pally tank + what-ever (4x shaman, or what-have-you). Currently I'm running a bear tank with my shaman and I have 4 total abilities to keep track of with the bear. In all honesty, if you get a nice weapon, you can toss out a faerie fire, and then just spam swipe all day and not have to use a single other ability on the tank.

My bear is currently running at about 5500 gearscore, and I just spam swipe in combat (single target, or AoE). This let me put my shaman spells onto my numpad rather than using a click macro and I got their single target DPS up to around 4k on each of them in heroics. Being able to fully control the use of wind shear, flame shock, lava burst, LB and Chain made a HUGE difference in the dps they put out (went from 2100 or so using the click macros to right at 4k using numpad sequencing).

Granted, I may not understand paladins well enough t o understand the major reasons to use them as a 5-box tank, but, for me at least, bear tank is amazingly easy.
Paladins bring avengers shield, stuns that are better than bears, a simple, no-nonsense, no-thinking tank macro. It's basically just ease of use. Paladins have only one button, and threat is ridiculously easy on a paladin regardless of the content, and it can all be macro'd perfectly.

Sure you can use just swipe in heroics, but try that in a raid, or if you're undergeared vs. your dps, and you will lose aggro. My paladin uses the same button for heroics as he does for icc25, and he never loses aggro on anything, and it's just easier to put all that into a macro for a paladin than it is for a druid.

Everyone recommends paladin because ANYONE can figure out consecrate, holy shield, shield of righteousness, hammer of righteousness, smashy smashy

WIth bears keeping lacerates up, faerie firing (which I hate putting in macros), keeping mangle up, etc etc, it's just more complicated to play the class optimally threatwise

Which is a better tank? Meh go argue that on EJ

Which is an EASIER tank to play well? Paladin

So yes, newwbies, we all think you are wearing helmets and riding the short bus to work, so we recommend the 'there's no WAY you can screw THIS one up' -type tank