I'd like to propose either the outright removal of strength, or at least the reduction of it, on feral druid tier armor. This is something that has come up from time to time in various druid threads, but I was wanted to see it discussed a bit more directly, so here goes.
For cats, this would mean -1AP and +.04% crit. For most druids, I'm going to call this an even swap, although the exact merits depend on what your starting AP and crit are. Cat threads have talked about the break even points, where once you have enough AP, agility becomes your best stat. Another bonus is increased combo points and more finishing moves. Some may loose out, but this would be mostly the undergeared druids in greens/blues, who don't have the tier armor anyway. By the time you are getting tier 4/5/6, I would think that the agility would be superior to strength for nearly all cat druids.
There should be no problem with ever reaching the crit cap (certainly not by T6 at least):
Feral Druid DPS
Whether or not Blizzard would be comfortable with T6 druids having 50-60% crit, I don't know. It wouldn't break anything per se, it may *feel* broken. Other classes may complain because having 60% crit would make you appear to be stronger, even if you actually aren't. A side effect is increased dodge in catform, which may not be your main goal, but it would certainly help counter the idea that melee dps is more healing intensive and therefore less desirable than ranged dps. A few more cleaves dodged would make your healers happy.
For bearform druids I think the increase is much more obvious. While there's a chance your threat may go down, I feel it would be fairly equal to before. Increased crit rage and the +5 rage bonus would mitigate losses due to increased dodge, and rage is rarely ever a problem anyways. The biggest potential loss with this change would likely be the worst case threat scenario. Average/Best cases, meaning you are being hit at regular intervals and not getting long series of dodges followed by long series of hits, would be very similiar to how they are now.
I happen to fall into the Armor/Stamina tanking camp, but this change wouldn't affecting armor or stamina, only strength. If you can find druids who insist on having high strength for tanking, well, I guess they'd be against this idea. The only concern I can really see here is that it could possibly be *too* good. Mostly for tanking, the increased dodge may get out of hand. I'm certainly not delusional enough to think that by merely posting about it, Blizzard can't wait to redesign the tier sets to my liking, but I am curious what other players have to say about this. Since they seem determined to give both cats and bears the same set, I figured it should focus on stats that they both want. Seems obvious enough, right? The stat the benefits both forms the most (and fairly equally) is agility. Bears don't need strength. Both need stamina, but in different amounts. Both get happier and happier the more agility they have.
Anyone who's more familiar with the itemization formula know how much agility we could get if we removed (A) 50% of the strength, and (B) 100% of the strength on the sets? Help in modelling the effects would be appreciated.