Yeah, that cloak boggles me, Hit/Dodge, no AP, Crit, Agi, Defense, Resil. Having only 3 stats and one of them being Dodge (really not desired by any class by itself)

Given that cloaks are a reasonably low item-mod slot, I find it hard to justify using anything except [Resolute Cape]. Of all the BoE & self-craftable epics I've farmed the mats for, that is the one I have never ever regretted.

Just to clarify what I'm saying there - the new Hyjal cloak looks like a piece of junk to me, and even the [Phoenix-Wing Cloak] is a pretty underwhelming sidegrade. 21 resilience > 22 defense, dodge rating as people have pointed out is far too expensive vs agility, and I'd take 1300 extra armour over 7 extra stamina, and use the extra armour to let me put more dps gear in other slots (i.e. gloves).

Since when?
Resolute Cape has no agility or avoidance if you prefer.
It depends on your gear many end-game geared druids say that they want to find ways to reduce their armor item points and use them somewhere else. Still dont know myself since i passed the T5 to prot warr and healers.

Err since 22 defense provided 0.36% anti-crit (and 0.36% dodge) and 21 resilience provided 0.53% anti-crit.

Defense is the worst place to get your dodge. And yes Resolute Cape would be nice with some agility, but it's already fantastic.

You might want to start using some capital letters by the way.

Not to mention:
Resilience Rating: The reduction to the percent chance to get a critical strike now also reduces the damage dealt by damage over time effects by the same percentage.

Don't forget the anti-hit. That makes it 0.53 % anti-crit vs 0.36% anti-crit, 0.36% dodge, and 0.36% anti-hit. Do you in general weigh 0.17% anti-crit higher than 0.72% avoidance? That seems like a very poor trade-off to me, unless you desperately need to eke out every last bit of anti-crit.

The change to resilience to affect dots might impact the evaluation at the resilience vs defense, but I doubt it. On the few encounters present or future that use heavy dots, one can switch to resilience gear before the fight.

When you get your anti crit through resilience instead of defense that leaves a lot of "itemization" that you can then use to gear up with Agility or if you want more Stamina. Approximately 55 points that you don't have to spend on defense rating can add up to a lot of Agility which point for pointhas more avoidance than defense and has other benefits.

Bears are already socketing/enchanting AGI or STA most of the time, so going Resilience over Defense on gear doesn't really free up any significant amount of the item budget across your items to spend on extra agility, unless you acquire it by using gear appropriate to tanking that is already AGI/STA/Armour/Resilience based, and that's for all practical purposes the PvP gear.

Thus, in a world where AGI/Resilience was common on PvE gear or one where bears were socketing defense gems to reach crit avoidance (that could thus be replaced by the better-for-avoidance agility), I'd certainly agree with you, Zeln, but that's not really the case where PvE gear is concerned.

Take the example of the [Resolute Cape] vs [Gilded Thorium Cloak]. Yes, it does free up 0.17% anti-crit or about 10.2 defense rating, and to get 0.72% dodge to match the avoidance you only need about 10.6 agility (or 9.3 if we take BoK and SotF into account), but where are you going to make that tradeoff if using standard PvE gear?

When you hit T5/T6 and can drop some of the extra armour on rings, cloak &etc due to higher tier gear armour and thus can consider using STA/Resilience items in the miscellaneous slots, there would appear to be even better defense variants available through PvE, which is why the switch at that time is likely to [Phoenix-Wing Cloak] rather than [Resolute Cape].

In the end, the vast majority of PvE gear just isn't itemized to allow the player to take advantage of the potential item points freed by going AGI/Resilience over defense.

Yeah I think that point is a fair one. We're working on Kael, so I'm still super happy with the [Resolute Cape]. As I get more avoidance & more armour comes to me via tier upgrades, I will ultimately be able to make a shift. But to be honest in that situation the itemization is massively lacking at the moment. Consider for example a version of [Thalassian Wildercloak] with the attack power reitemized into +def or +resil. That would fill a fantastic itemization gap. But I guess that's the point of the last page or two.

Deliverance - much though I appreciate what you're saying, considering ONLY PvE gear is a bit crazy. What bracers would you use? I scarcely PvP at all, but even I thought it was worth spending a weekend in AB & EotS to get the [Veteran's Dragonhide Bracers]. Socketted up with a [Shifting Nightseye] gives you an item with all 3 of nice anti-crit, nice dodge, and nice stamina, and as you mention in your post, PvP gear is generally very good for tanking Druids. Given how little effort it takes to get a couple of pieces of Glad gear (I'm working on this at the moment) and the PvP Bracers, it seems almost lazy not to go down that road to improve your gear, not even thinking of the drops it frees up for other classes.

I don't know, I mean I am slightly frustrated that there's not much gear to look forward to, but at the same time I've been pretty chuffed that I've been able to get absolutely top tier gear via the patterns & trash drops from SSC/TK. I haven't looted a single boss drop from either SSC or TK yet, but my gear is tolerably good enough to cope with everything that tier 5 instances can throw at me. Now I just need the damn [Wildfury Greatstaff] to drop on a raid I'm actually at... I think our shamans each have one.

I can certainly see the merit in using the Veteran honor gear as other options those slots are very limited, but in no way would I prefer Merciless Gladiator stuff over Tier gear, the tradeoffs are just too severe, even if you only go for 2 piece to get the 35 resilience bonus. Minus the Intellect and arguably the Str vs Agi ratios, our Tier stuff is brilliantly itemized for tanking.

PvP bracers + Boots of Natural Grace (or ultimately Treads of the Den Mother) + Belt of Natural Power = all those slots sorted.

Yeah, by my calculations if you are wearing PvP bracers, BoNP, BoNG, and full tier gear gemmed for stam/agi, 2 tank rings, a tank cloak and a tank necklace, you are going to end up roughly 0.1% short of being crit immune.

I guess at that stage it's trying to work out where you want to get the last bit, but I'd hazard a guess that you'd do better to switch in a +def trinket like [Adamantine Figurine] or similar, rather than downgrade to Earthwarden.

[e] Just to underscore the value of resilience vs defense, in the situation I am talking about, taking the +resilience to chest enchant would get you over the top, leaving you still able to use a combination of AP & avoidance trinkets.

Basically you are right yes. If you progress further through the 25mans you are as feral tank "forced" to have (at least one i would say) PvP/Arena reward(s) or enchant/gem for crit immunity against boss mobs. The other slots (Rings, Neck, Cloak, head/Shoulderenchant) will not be sufficient i think.
Trinkets are imho no good place to put defense items since [Badge of Tenacity] combined with Moroes or some random Stamina trinkets are just to amazing to be left out when you are really needed as tank.
And for a hybrid role in some fights the question is anyway if you need to wear full tank gear.

Are you including an [Elixir of Ironskin] Farr?

No, I wasn't actually, mainly because I never see them on the AH & I tend to end up using Fortification as well, but those give you a massive amount of leeway in your gear, if you can handle having to repop them every time you have a silly death.

There is allways trinket from Hydros,not so far away now that he drops 3 loots, and Bloodboil.

The reason I chose to focus on PvE gear is that the other tradeoffs, for most slots where both PvE and PvP gear exists, are too large with PvP gear unless either a) the PvP gear severely outlevels the PvE gear or, b) you need the PvP gear to reach critimmunity while using even better and higher level PvE gear that is short on both resilience and defense.

Thus I do use [Veteran's Dragonhide Bracers] socketed with [Shifting Nightseye] just like everybody else around my gear level except those who chose to use the rogue version - but that's because they are a well designed PvP item item about 20 item levels higher than the closest PvE contender I have access to.

And while I agree with you that arena gear is useful for druid tanking too, it comes with significant trade-offs. Compare against the weakest raiding Tier set, T4, S2 gear provides -32 AGI, +70 STA, -654 base armour (~ 5137 armour less than T4 if you include T4s bonus and thick hide), and +123 (158 with bonus) resilience.

It is good for tanking, but that's not really a very impressive upgrade for being 16 item levels higher, and, due to the lower armour, you aren't likely to be using the "saved" itemization points to replace other defense-items for agility-items to improve your avoidance - you'll be sticking with the highest armour rings, cloaks, and trinkets to make up for the 5K armour, and those are pretty much armour/STA/defense, or you'll be a squishy tank. Things look to change in T5 content, but at that point the PvE item levels are catching up too.

Now, in practice, you and many other druids (including me ) are saving up for/have bought two pieces of S2 (probably Helmet/Chest) to get a hefty chunk of anti-crit via two items and will happily use that together with those wonderful bracers, and that's good, especially because it allows you more freedom in switching out other armour pieces as need be, but especially the concerns about maintaining a decent level of armour suggests that this'll probably only be a strictly better solution than going full PvE gear with PvP gear where no good Pve gear exists (bracers! ) when one is mid-T5 and start approaching the T6 level of itemization.

In either case, it really does not support your initial general assertion that resilience > defense, and that [Resolute Cape] is likely to remain a better item for you than [Phoenix-Wing Cloak] . In purely mathematical terms, there's no doubt whatsoever that resilience/agility > defense, but in practice, there are just too many "buts" and "ifs" around that are dependent on the actual itemization.

There's enough incidental defense to go around to get crit immune without sacrificing useful trinket slots (or go half/half - Scarab of Displacement is a mini Pocketwatch on use and has tons of crit immunity), but you pretty much have to enchant for defense (head/shoulder) instead of for dps. This definitely hurts for if/when you need it to dps.

You give Treads as an example then go on to refute your own point (which I can definitely see, even if my circumstances don't allow me to agree) by mentioning Tier gear! Suppose you do get crit immunity in those 3 slots, what rings are you going to wear? The Violet Eye and Unielding / A'dal's combination is far and beyond our best options, but the defense is wasted if you're crit immune via Gladiator gear. You could start wearing high Agility DPS rings or Warrior rings, but then you're becoming more and more of a dodge tank dropping armor as you go .. which may or may not be fine depending on your situation.

I am currently in a position where I have to MT for my guild, so at the moment I'm not worrying about reusing tier stuff for DPS. I just need maximum mitigation, healthy hp/avoidance and enough threat that our DPS don't feel capped. And all the reading/research I did on this leads me to believe Tier is better in the 5 slots that it competes against Gladiator, and crit immunity is easily gotten in other slots.

Farstrider, not everyone is a leatherworker for Boots of Natural Grace and I'm quite a ways off BT. But yes, I certainly do plan to rethink my odd choice of shoes at some stage =p

Lets do some math here:

We need 2.6% anti crit to be crit immune.

39.4 Resiliance gives 1% crit reduction
2.4 Def Rating grants 1 Def Skill -> 1 Def Skill gives 0.04% crit reduction

Sources of crit reduction everyone should have:
Veteran's Bracers: These are ideal since there is nothing else that really fits this slot. Gives 17 Resiliance.
Helm Enchant: 16 Def rating.
Shoulder enchant: Aldor = 10 Def rating, Scryer = 15 Def Rating
Total = 0.8648 % crit reduction low end for aldor

We therefore need 1.7352 % more
The enchants to chest/bracers seem like the next best place to add resiliance. All combat ratings have a 1.000 Stat value as do all stats but Sta which has a 0.667 Stat value. Therefore, exchanging 6 Sta and 6 Agi for 15 resiliance gives us better item budget value as does exchanging 12 Sta for 12 Defense. Therefore:
Enchant Chest: 15 Resiliance
Enchant Bracers: 12 Defense Rating

[top] 0.5807 % crit reduction
Total: 1.4455%, 1.1545% remaining

Rings/Necklaces
The heroic badge necklace is pretty similar to most of the neck pieces available to us for tanking. Further they all have roughly the same Defense Rating on them so adding that we have:
22 Defense rating (Juggernaut as an example)
Take the Kara Exalted Ring and the Mag's Head ring and we get another 39 Defense rating. Note: upgrading to the Band of the Abyssal Lord or other non-armor rings, results in either no loss of Defense rating or a gain of it.
61 Defense Rating

1.01666% crit reduction
Total: 2.4622% crit reduction, only 0.1378 remaining.

0.1378 Requires either 9 Def Rating or 6 Resiliance rating to get (less if you're a scryer since you have an extra 5 Defense rating). With such a small amount left almost any good tanking cloak will have the required Defense ratings. In fact a cloak with over 21 Defense rating will allow you to enchant your bracers with Sta again. This also leaves all your tier slots, your trinkets and your belt/boots free to use whatever you want in them without needing to worry about crit immunity. Another option at this point is to get a single 8 resiliance gem (or one of the 5 defense/6 sta ones if you're scryer) and that leaves a slot open between neck/cloak/rings that also doesnt need defense on it (Necklace of the Deep instead of a defense neck for example).

The CE head enchant, [Item not found!] is frequently used as a helm enchant, since it can easily do double duty, whereas the [Item not found!] is purely for tanking. Dodge rating is also not the best itemization for us. So I wouldn't take that 16 def for granted, especially given the plethora of +defense trinkets with interesting on-use abilities.

Personally at the level (early T5) that most people are talking about, I am very happy with the S2 helm. It is 10agi, 84 armor before multipliers, and a smidge of str vs 22(!) sta and 29resil.

This allows you to do two things: worry much less about crit, and enchant/socket your T4 hat for DPS. The DPS meta is actually a big deal, and most people agree that 2pc T4 is the best for DPS at least until 4pc T6. Comparing the stats, the head/gloves are usually the ones people keep, and get rid of the legs first.

My sentiments exactly. I'm still using 4 piece t5 and s2 helm for pure tanking despite having 3 parts t6 - and will most likely continue to do so for the forseeable future. S2 helm, veteran bracers, adals\violet rings, thorium cloak and the badge neck give crit immunity comfortably without having to waste any ipoints on gems/enchants, and these were more-or-less my first choice for tanking anyway without specifically going after crit immunity.