I'm going to steal Gurgthock's words for this one.

"Spike Immunity > All"

Dodge doesnt warrant you full-proof spike immunity, it may or may not work, whereas Armor and Stamina are constant (I'm ignoring defense because I assume at this point you are already crit immune). You need to evaluate your gear versus the encounter at hand, and guard yourself against the worst-case scenarios, because there will be moments where your Avoidance (dodge/miss for druids) will just give up on you and you'll have a bad string of unavoided hits, and it will be up to your Armor and Stamina to give your healers time to react.

Dodge saves healer mana in the long run. Armor/Stamina saves everyone.

I suppose that's a good way to look at it. Well, back to my really high armor set then, I suppose.

and healers running oom will kill everyone. its really about finding the sweetspot for the encounter and the tanking job, theres no single best solution. some spikes you wont outlive in the best "spike gear" while the avoidance might rescue you, patchwerk wouldnt have been possible with 0 avoidance for example. most healing setups counted on 1 parry dodge miss per 6-7 hits.

I should've included this in my previous post, but didn't because I didn't want to overly complicate or extend it.

You're absolutely right, it is all about finding the sweetspot. If you broke down and analyzed deeply into every fight, you would come up with a wide variety of different optimal tanking sets for each one of them. A general rule for tanking is that you want to attain spike immunity on that encounter first, and then you start adding avoidance into it, it's almost methodical, step 1 and then step 2, which was the point I hoped to make, but trying to make now.

True, Patchwerk might not have been possible without that avoidance, which was expected and accounted for, but we all know for sure that tanks sitting under ~63% physical damage mitigation had no hope of withstand his hateful strikes on a reliable and long basis.

You need both, but you need one before the other.

Ok, well I'm at 64% physical mitigation with that dodge. Thoughts?

try to find the best gear solution that provides max sta+mitigation+avoidance with some lower limits you want for sure.

going below 60% mitigation is not really an option, going below 25% avoidance shouldnt be one either, going below 12-13k hp unbuffed neither.

then adjust to the encounter. having a full bank of gear and using it, was and is, what a raiding tank has to do.

for example im using Illidari Bracer of the Monkey (33sta, 21agi, 115ac) and the t4 head instead of umberhowls collar and the stylin purple hat. its more total but not lacking in any part of the equasion. having the other gear banked to achieve more one sided stats on cost of others is a good option. get the good+easy to get stuff first, then get the more rare parts.

Any earthly idea why they made this change? I thought they were actually in favor of meleekin. Tree of life... well, I don't see why anyone would bother. Not much of a nerf, but more of an, "um, why did this matter" sort of question.

Apart from that... wow. Must say I'm slightly shocked that they did as promised and made changes that seem to maintain druid tank viability heading forward.

Being a feral most of the time I'm particularly pleased to note that we've been thrown a bone and given back some PvP viability. I'll be interested to see how feral's fair in 5v5 arenas with these changes as it will mean we're a bit less useless once forced into bear. The reduced mana cost of shifting should allow us to stack more AP and crit without using our utility.

I'm disappointed that the issues with restoration PvP haven't been addressed though. The notable difference is the change to barkskin - I would really like to have seen an armor buff for ToL, perhaps a removal of the (ridiculous) snare, and the means to dispel in ToL form.

Is anyone else unhappy with the changes to armor values on the T4 and T5 items? It seems to have forced us into using that and the Heavy Clefthoof.

The changes made seem to have forced them into continuing the same stupid amounts of armor on anything that is remotely like a druid tanking item. It would have been much more sensible to have reduced the armor on some of the quest rewards and kept the same multiplier as pre 2.0.10

What were you planning on using instead of T5, seriously?

Nope.

Just posted this on my guilds forums, but it might as well belong here too.

Well technically the first isn't from testrealm, but to show the difference wearing practically the same gear, the first is bearform on normal, second is bear on test. Check the armour/dodge/health - I swapped the clefthoof boots because they're clearly better on test now than the green ones.

The two screenshots after are the first stages of epic flight form quest (the very first is from a druid trainer to go to cenarion refuge but i cba counting that :P ). I can't get any further with the flight form quest as (unsurprisingly) theres no herbs on the AH and I'm not a herbalist. Working on getting some herbs transferred with an alt though.

The last screenshot shows just how overpowered lifebloom is going to be with the healing stacks (check how "bad" my +healing/etc is compared to what you can get atm).

yes, i am.
It removes the choices in gear somewhat when something is insanely better than everything else.

i like choices ...

keeping heavy multipliers has the downside of... well they multiply

its hard to balance for example cross class slots+gems like rings for warriors+bears at the same time with those multipliers. the 12sta gem for example was simply too overpowered with the old hp multiplications.

while i dont like that everyone will go for specific tokens now either, its not like crafted blue gear from skill lvl 350 should be the endgame tanking gear for illiadan. that defeats the purpose of loot dropping in raid instances somewhat.

making class specific drops working in the benefit of their class seems obvious. just because itemization sucked for feral druids (pvp parts were some of the best raiding tanking+dps gear choices in the game) and ppl got used to get their easy to get items buffed with multipliers till they can use em, doesnt mean the changes arent right and good.

going into kara, gruul, maggy in clefthoof=good, leaving in t4=working as intended, needing t4 for SC+TK=working as intended.

the only thing missing is expensive epic crafted gear as an alternative to gruul/maggy/kara drops like tailors or blacksmith have.

I think we had an entire instance and half full of offset feral loot. No one was amused.

On a serious note, I'm sure they'll add off-set pieces akin to off-set warrior tank loot. Other than the AQ 40/Green Dragon era (which was a lot of loot for a small upgrade), going with your tiered set was the way to go with warriors back then.

Here's the screenshot of the reward to the flight quest
http://i29.photobucket.com/albums/c2...wiftflight.jpg

Additional idol reward:
Idol of the Raven Goddess
Binds when picked up
Unique
Relic Idol
Equip: Increases the healing granted by the Tree of Life form aura by 20, adds 9 critical strike rating to the Leader of the Pack aura, and adds 9 spell critical strike rating to the Moonkin form aura.

So how does rolling lifebloom interact with trinkets? If I pop a +healing trinket and then keep it rolling continuously, will the subsequent stacks keep the bonus that I had when trinketed?

Can someone test if the coefficients for lifebloom have been buffed? with 1400 healing in ToL (spi=450 or so) with idol mine were only ticking for 197~ or so, even assuming the idol got fixed allowing it to go to 202 (+4/5 seems about right for numbers there..). Having them tick over 200 with 300~ less healing is just odd and something must of been changed somewhere (ToL aura, idol, spell co-efficients).

Re: Lord BEEF, I believe it retains the initial stack, each new spell simply refreshes the duration rather than doing a value-check on the bonus healing you have. So starting off a lifebloom with trinket and constantly refreshing it will allow it to retain its value as if it had a permanent trinket active (ala Earth-shield, healing stream).
No Trinket: 200-400-600-600-600-600
Trinket: [250-500-750-750-750]-750-750

Im only speaking from live here and recalling from back testing, im not on PTR to test it there but I'll retest it when I get some spare time (live), if any resto Druid could test the differences between their initial lifeblooms on test/live, and retest if the trinket application works that way it would be appreciated.

It was a very bad example as he popped the two trinkets and then showed his stats without them.

Even with both active, his +healing and ToL aura should not overcome my own fully raid buffed stats.

Seems correct to me, unless I'm missing something. He is at 1546 with ToL aura and you are at 1512.

Forgive me then, guess im too used to my normal spec where I scaled better with buffs :P

Provided the trinket-initiated bloom is able to be maintained thats over 2000/3sec for me (190+40, x3, x3), only costing 1800~ mana for maintaining this over 60sec, giving a value of around 40,000 healing done.
Given that with my Dreamstate spec I have just short of 200 MP5(sans BoW) then I would be able to maintain it without actually loosing any mana aswell...

This is really an awsome fix but I think it may end up being abit too strong in some respects, the figures coming up in my head feel abit too powerful but I guess untill time will tell =o