Your instincts are accurate. You usually want to hit with pounce within the last .5 sec of the enery pulse, to account for latency. It is possible to hit it after the .3 mark, though it is inconsistant, and you'll frequently "miss" the tic. (Though, sometimes, you'll hit the tic, and it will give you an extra 1-10 energy, which I can never get a SS of, and is pretty anecdotal, but I swear it happens alot!)

You really don't want to give up brutal impact in PvP. You can no longer pounce and mangle->shred, and when you need to bash->heal in bear form, it's much harder.

Giving up brutal impact is something you should do if and only if you are completely dedicated to PvE bear tanking. No PvP, no cat form PvE grinding...

For me, the sacrifice I made to keep Primal Tenacity was 2 points in savage fury (20% less cat mangle damage) and 1 point in natural shifter.

Yeah, I wonder how much good Primal Tenacity actually does you. I put the 5/5 into unbreakable will on my most recent priest re spec and I can't say that I notice a HUGE difference in resists.

3 points for 15 percent seems like a lot when there's so much other good stuff!

You can definitely live without it, but it makes your day when you get a resist. Whether it's in PvE against things that deaggro when they fear, or in PvP when you resist a priest fear and have 24-30s to beat on him. It also lets you live 1.5s longer against a warlock.

How is druid tanking these days? I'm incredibly annoyed at it and feel it is mostly broken. I feel druids are relegated to extremely specific tanking situations and are mostly crappy in others.

I tried running through SL Heroic with a feral druid, not uber geared or anything but quite decently geared. Spamming my max rank healing touch on him, when tanking malicious instructors, I could barely keep him alive and at one point he even died despite my spamming.

For anything 25 man it feels like you're a giant mana sponge

Perhaps 2.1 will change that with better itemization, but right now it seems to me that druids are second rate tanks. Cheer me up please

Druids are only really inferior when it comes to real content(25 man). Bosses just hit too hard and you need last stand/sw/sb. The fact that a druid takes alot of damage from instructors doesn't have much to do with him being a druid.

I'd say our experience was due to that druid rather than bears specifically. Malicious instructors barely tickle even on heroic.

As for 25 mans? Haven't stepped into SSC, but the feedback I get from our healers is that they prefer healing me over our warriors, even our well geared prot ones. Any druid who gears just for stam/AC can be highly survivable but a bit of a mana sponge (but if the healers are having no mana problems, is this an issue?) but throw a nice dose of dodge into the mix and this becomes less of a problem.

I run with 35.5% unbuffed dodge (and 2.2% extra miss from defense) With raid buffs this puts me at over 55% avoidance whilst still maintaining 22k+buffed AC and healthy HP. Compared to my prior 25k+AC, 20% dodge setup this seems to have increased my overall survivability a good deal whilst reducing the load on the healers.

The only boss I currently think we just "can't" tank is Doomwalker. It's fine during the normal phases (5-6k hits, 10ish k crushings) although it still hurts a lot, but once he hits enrage we just don't have the abilities to deal with it. Zero sunders on me, 23k armour and 17.8k health and he one shot me with a 18.9k crushing blow.

Other than that, I think we can MT just about anything, as long as healers are on the ball. Obviously lack of shield block lends us to OTing any mobs that aren't boss-level to reduce that crushing chance as much as possible, and as long as you gear for it, still put out some pretty decent DPS too. I'm looking at just having one set of gear for most raiding post-2.1, with Zierhuts getting an armour buff, 4-5 piece Malorne, and PvP items for the other bits, along with DPS stuff on the rest (cloak/neck).

A quick question for others, I've had that same experience a few times. Three times I've taunted Doomwalker during his enrage, and three times I've eaten a crushing blow that one shot me. Has anyone Druid that picked up Doomwalker during enrage taken a non-crushing blow?

I am curious to see the truth of this statement. I am MT in my guild, MT'd whole Karazhan, Gruul's. I only haven't tried Nightbane yet (let a warrior stance-dance), but I hear that's easily doable by a Druid MT as well. My stats fully raid buffed are approx. 22K health, 23K armor (around 27K after patch), 43% dodge (non-crittable of course). I keep reading that warriors will be much better MT's in 25-instances, but when will that start to happen? Is it solely gear related, that there will come a turning point when warriors have gathered enough Tier4/5 gear?

The reason I MT Prince and Gruul is that is it just easier on the healers. We tried warrior MT's but that made the encounters harder (I first started OT'ing Gruul for the hatefull strikes, but the Warrior MT got killed too often, so we switched roles).

Tublade

Then you obviously have to little hp, I have the about the same armor as you, but I would have 3-4k hps left after that blow. Avoidance is only good as long as you are already over the worst case scenario treshold with armor+hp.