"Druids can't tank"

[Royberg]

I think Druids are better at getting AoE threat than Warriors because of all the prep work they can do at the start of a pull, especially if you need to tank 3+ enemies. For starters you can put your HoTs on yourself (bonus healing on yourself that equals extra aggro), charge up a kamehameha Star Fire on the skull, then let out some Moonfire frenzy on skull and the secondary and tertiary targets while strafing to get a little distance. I find this more fun and engaging compared to Warriors. Warriors tend to need people to be patient and wait for aggro and things can suck if RNG doesn't smile on you; stuff like missed attacks, resisted taunts, and being rage starved. Druids have more of an insurance policy.

But yeah... Druids lack in survivability. The fact they get crit and crushed so often really makes the bonus armor and HP not seem as mighty. Itemization is wonky for feral tanking too, and it's hard to get upgrades when advancing into T2 content and beyond aside from random miscellaneous items scattered here and there.

In the end feral tanks do offer some nice utility by serving as a tank/melee DPS, an emergency healer, and they got the neat toys Innervate and Rebirth.

[Theloras]

I hear Paladins can't tank either...

/discuss

[Ashyx]

I like what I see.

[Guirssane]

No one said they can't tank. They just can't tank as well as Warriors, simple as that.

[TheNIF]

Technically some people have in fact said that druids can't tank (raid-level content). They are wrong of course, but they said it nevertheless

It is also true that warriors will, at equal gear levels, almost always be better tanks. On some unique encounters a druid might equal a similarly geared warrior tank, but on the vast majority of encounters warriors make superior tanks. Mostly due to mechanics (intrinsic magic damage reduction from defenstive stance, not to mention ability to completely eliminate crits and crushing blows), but still largely due to gear too. Many of the best druid tank-items until AQ40 are low-level world-drops or from 5-mans.

Take the Warden staff. A level 43 epic world-drop. Suppose it had an item level comparable to a level 60 epic drop from onyxia, it would have like 350 armor, 20 stamina and 25 defense instead. That's a very significant difference. Same goes for the Atal'ai spaulders, a level 47 rare quality item. Even making it a lvl 60 item would mean a significant increase in stats.

Also, as we progress through raidcontent, the distance between a warrior and druid tank will increase in favor of the warrior because they get their prot sets and so on, this is unfortunately just the nature of vanilla. Many stupid factors were just not well thought-out or planned by the developers and were only getting fixed once BC came out.

Only in AQ does a bit of that itemization gap get reduced, only to be massively reintroduced in Naxx.