PvE Feral Druid Tank Addons & Macros

Feral Druid Tank

Talents, Builds & Glyphs

Stat Priority

Best Races

Gems, Enchants & Consumables

Rotation & Cooldowns

Best Professions

Best in Slot (BiS) & Pre-Raid Gear

Addons & Macros

In addition to the optimisations you can make to your character and to your gameplay, having useful addons and macros can impact your performance in raids. Throughout Classic and TBC, macros were absolutely essential to Feral tank gameplay as they were required to safely use consumables while tanking; consumables could not be used in Bear form, so macros allowed you to leave Bear form, use a consumable, and re-enter Bear form in an instant.

Thankfully, by the time Wrath came out, Blizzard realised that although Bears not being able to use potions made sense from a role-playing perspective, it was quite impractical game design. Consumables were made usable in form, which means there are far fewer important macros for a tank to have. Nonetheless, I will use this page to list some important addons and macros to help in your PvE endeavours.

Addons

There are loads of addons available in WoW, and which addons one uses is entirely up to the player. However, there are a few addons I strongly recommend every tank use:

• DeadlyBossMods (DBM) or BigWigs
  These addons both provide the same benifit: extremely important information about PvE encounters, such as timers for boss abilities and warnings or instructions for boss mechanics (e.g. “move out of fire”). DBM is the usual go-to, however BigWigs is smaller and slightly more customisable.

• Weakauras
  Weakauras is an incredible addon which allows you to make your own mini-addons in game, which can range from a lit up icon reminding you to use a consumable, to a detailed energy tracker UI, to rotation assistants which will show the icon of the ability you should cast based on information from your character (like rage, energy, and ability cooldowns). Best of all, you can export and import these Weakauras online, and even share them through the chat function in-game. I particularly recommend Weave’s Feral Bar, which tracks all the essentials for Feral tanks and DPS players depending on which form they are currently in. This has not yet been developed for WotLK, but it (or some version of it) will likely be updated in due course.

• Threatplates or Plater (or other nameplate addon with settings that show threat)
  This is absolutely essential for any multi-target tanking scenario. Not only do nameplates allow you to target individual mobs in a group, but these addons will light up in different colours based on whether your enemies are targeting you, another tank, or a non-tank player. They will even light up a specific colour if the enemy is still targeting you, but another player is approaching your threat! This allows you to react quickly, target the correct enemy and Mangle / Growl / etc. to get the target back on you and keep your team alive.

• Details
  This addon tracks useful information during encounters, such as damage done, healing done, damage taken, deaths, and more. People commonly use this addon to track their own DPS and flex on others, but it is genuinely useful in a raid environment to see what everyone is doing and assess in the moment what may be going wrong. The deaths tab is particularly helpful, showing at which time during an encounter players die, the damage they died to, and the healing they received in the moments before their death. This will help you know whether to blame your healers for your death, or whether it was your own fault (for trusting your healers not to let you die). Details also has a Threat meter plug-in, though I recommend using ThreatClassic2 instead.

Macros

While there are a number of macros that may have niche uses for Druids (particularly in PvP), there are only a few that I would recommend as staples for all Ferals.

Startattack macro

This macro activates your attack button when you hit Faerie Fire, making sure that you melee your target as soon as they are within range of you. I also bind it to my Mangle key, just in case I am already in melee range. Note that while casting Mangle automatically triggers your melee swing anyway, if you are out of rage and try to cast Mangle (but cannot), the default Mangle key will not trigger your melee swing — that’s what makes these macros valuable.

#showtooltip
/cast Faerie Fire(Feral)
/startattack

#showtooltip
/cast Mangle (Bear)
/startattack

Enrage macro

This macro uses the ability Enrage if clicked once, and cancels the buff (removing the reduced armor debuff) when clicked again. It is useful to make sure you do not still have Enrage up when combat starts.

#showtooltip
/cancelaura Enrage
/cast Enrage

Focus interrupt macros

These macros are for your Bash and Feral Charge abilities. If pressed normally, they will Bash or Feral Charge your target, respectively. However, if your hold down the Shift key when using these macros, they will instead use Bash or Feral Charge on your focus target. This is very useful for interrupting spellcasts on a secondary target, and can come in very handy in both PvE and PvP.

#showtooltip
/cast [nomod:shift] Bash
/cast [mod:shift, @focus] Bash

#showtooltip
/cast [nomod:shift] Feral Charge (Bear)
/cast [mod:shift, @focus] Feral Charge (Bear)

Thank you for taking the time to read our Feral Tank guide for Wrath of the Lich King. I hope it was helpful, and if you have any questions or suggestions please feel free to leave a comment below, or find me as Oxy on the Druid Classic Discord.