I have seen rumblings that since the adjustment to our armor multiplier and talents that bears are sponging mana noticably faster than our brother tanking classes, but no numbers yet.

Anyone in the beta that can shed some light?

Reading these blog entries...

http://teethandclaws.blogspot.com/2008/10/on-tank-homogenization.html
http://teethandclaws.blogspot.com/2008/10/healing-tanks-in-wotlk.html

...seem to show there is little difference in healing any tank.

Its a minimal nerf at best. We are probably talking about a couple thousand more armor. Some of the other nerfs are probably more troubling. The loss of 30% less AOE damage... that's gonna hurt.

Overall, they'll get us balanced, but as with the beginning of BC, bear tanks were the premier tanks and they nerfed us because of warrior and everyone else's fear. If you recall back in the beginning of BC, they nerfed us because bears were just too good. The same issue cropped up. I think they just don't have a good grasp of how bear tanking works to be honest. Theres a lot of cross buffing that gets pretty insane.

I read those posts last night. I hope that theorycrafting and more in game experience put to rest this perception that we take 'just a little more damage' than both warriors and paladins, because we all know the eventual outcome when that early perception becomes conventional wisdom. It would be a shame to give up our unified feral tree only to still be limited to OT status because after all the changes we have inferior avoidance, oh crap buttons, and mitigation, too.

Odds are high they'll screw it up and have to retune us again... but that's just from past history.

I love how people say the developers "don't get" how a class works, when they're the one behind the scenes making it work to begin with. I always get a bit of a chuckle out of it ( being a programmer and having been accused of not knowing how my software works as well ).

ore it's a disagreement on the users point of view on how they expect it / want things to work and how the developer(s) designs it to work.

Every class is going to be re-tuned, and probably a few times over. They only have so much data to go off of right now, some of it is theoretical, some of it is real gathered from raids. I foresee the future for druids, it has buffs and nerfs. Shocker right? ;)