In general mastery is going to excel in situations where you will take small amounts of damage often. Mastery is essentially akin to block value in that regard, and for the same reason that warriors and paladins made heroics easier last expansion druids can make heroics easier via mastery in this one. Mastery will smooth out damage intake as well as sometimes absorb close to 100% of the damage from mobs. Dodge simply doesn't scale as well for lower amounts of incoming damage.

I wouldn't gauge how easy or difficult someone is to heal in a heroic compared to raids. The difference between having multiple healers, raid buffs, and significantly larger damage intake is quite large.

Mastery is strictly inferior to Blocking in the scenario of many smaller attacks because Savage Defense only blocks one attack (no matter how small) and must be regained by our attacks. As the number of attackers increases, the window of opportunity for a bear to crit and proc SD decreases significantly and less attacks will be absorbed.

A current example is Halfus Wyrmbreaker. We put our Prot Warrior on tanking one of the spare drakes plus all of the whelps because his significant chance (~44% with his mastery) to reduce each attack by a flat 30% (plus critical block, and he licks to stack mastery) is amazing. In our first kill, he blocked 1.6 million damage taken while I was tanking Halfus as bear, and my SD procs were fully used on every proc since Halfus was hitting slow and hard.

Rawr recommends stacking dodge and expertise (parry hasted 100k hits is the default) while you are gearing up for raids (333-346 blues). If you input a full set of 359 epics, the higher mastery & AP/crit from gear shifts in favor of Savage Defense being the major damage reducer and then suddenly SD is proc'ing more and worth more per proc (higher crit rate from the higher agility, and more absorbed per proc from the higher AP).

I agree. However, when comparing why bear A takes less damage than bear B in a heroic and one stacks mastery vs the other dodge, that's the reason why.

There is no parry haste for anyone any more, so stacking expertise is a poor choice for that reason. If Rawr is doing that because expertise stops parry haste it is wrong. I suspect Rawr recommends expertise because up until the dodge cap expertise is a very efficient way to get more SD procs.

Against lots of small attacks, dodge gets better in comparison to mastery, not worse. A far more likely answer is something like demo shout, actually using skull bash on casts, making sure the adds are in front of you, tabbing around to hit each add with infected wounds, or something like that, rather than a minor difference in gearing.

I tanked Halfus Wyrmbreaker for our raid tonight and last night, we got him tonight after we switched the warrior onto Halfus and me onto adds. I couldn't get enough SD procs to make it worthwhile for me to stay on Halfus, because we had the Nether Scion as one of our drakes, giving him 100% haste.

Coconutowl @ Frostwolf - Game - World of Warcraft

Is this a problem with my gearing or are bears really meant to be a squishier tank than warriors? After we switched to the warrior tank we got him in two attempts, after at least 3-4 hours of wiping overall. I originally was reforged for dodge but I changed to mastery for tonight's attempts with little noticeable increase or decrease in overall damage taken. I guess what I'm trying to say is I can't really improve my gear and this entry level boss was murdering me, is anyone else having a similar experience?

Yellow attacks are on a two roll table where avoidance is rolled first before checking for crits. Your actual Yellow Crit% = c * (1-m-d) where c = your white crit strike chance, m = miss chance and d = dodge chance
In some cases, if your Critical Strike% is high enough ( c > (1-m-d)/2 ), you may even get more Yellow Crit% out 1 Expertise Rating than from 1 Critical Strike Rating

Unless this was changed from WotLK, the SD "block" does not vanish instantly, but there's a small time window where it's still up and blocking even after you got hit the 1st time, Time to do some tests to see if it's still the case in Cataclysm....

It does apply to hit, but since 1% hit only helps half as much as 1% expertise (below 6.5% expertise) you would need to fulfill c > 1-m-d instead of c > (1-d-m)/2. Since 1% crit requires more rating than 1% expertise, its actually feasible to be at the point where one expertise rating gives more proccs from special attacks than one crit rating. When you bring white hits back into the equation you will never (in this tier or the next at least) be able to reach a crit value where expertise gives more proccs in total.

Infected Wounds increases the seconds between swings rather than decreases. Starting with a swing timer of 2.5 seconds and then applying Infected Wounds would result in a very slow swing time of 3.0 seconds, not 2.0 seconds. If you want the post-Infected Wounds swing time to be 2.0 seconds, you should adjust the swing timer to 1.666 (repeating, of course) seconds.

You're full expertise reforged. Convert nearly all of that (sims say all) to dodge instead. That will give you a huge mit increase (will make trash in heroics hell w/o expertise though). Expertise does nothing for survival/mit anymore, and threat is a non issue other than on the pull. I tanked Halfus in a 3 tank strat so he had no buffs and I was getting beat pretty bad. I also had much better than entry level gear (ailvl 352). I'd chalk this up as Druids not being equal to Warriors. I have yet to see a warrior tank in Cata however.

So I'm going over logs from recent Halfus Wyrmbreaker, Maloriak, and Omnitron kills. (I'd post them, but they're set to private for some reason).

What I found is that I'm taking much less average damage per hit as opposed to Warriors/Paladins, but more damage overall due to the lack of block and avoidance. Damage seems to be much spikier on me as opposed to the Warrior/Paladin. Granted, that's how druids have generally always been as tanks - but we also had much larger stamina pools to compensate, which clearly isn't the case anymore.

This leads me to two general questions.

1. Will, as our gear improves, our mitigation improve at a scale greater than that of warriors/paladins to a point where we take roughly the same amount of damage? Unlike them, our mitigation isn't always present and is reliant on our critical strike chance and attack power

2. If not, are there any advantages or any reasons for a competitive raiding guild to take a druid tank over a Warrior/Paladin?

If anyone would like specific data from the logs, I can always transcribe it onto here.