I've recently made my way through most 10man raids as main tank. Most of the challenges we faced were with dps (and healing the dps), and rarely with my survivability. I've close my soft cap with regards to survivability and have the best avoidance/reduction of any tank in my guild. (I am a feral bear, and the other tanks are a pally and warrior).

However, upon starting to raid 25man last week (seems to be going as well as 10mans) I was told that they would not be using me as one of the primary two tanks in most fights and they were choosing the other two.

My bruised ego aside, the arguments they were making sounded valid... my mitigation/avoidance is based on dodge... and they were scared of the gods of RNG smiting me with spiky damage and that being the main problem.

My total Mitigation on RAWR is around 85% but my survival could be higher. What are your thoughts? Would I be able to compete with the other tanks? Are druids not viable as primary tanks?

I know there will be a armor buff for druids soon... perhaps then?

I have run into a similar situation, I have managed to figure out the other 1/2 of it though. Our guild is also just starting to progress through 25 man content, and our raid leader insists on only running five somewhat under geared healers most fights, occasionally he'll run six. This leads to long stretches where the tanks are simply not getting healed, and where you're taking 3-4 hits between heals, RNG can creep into the formula. Due to this, I've had to go against everything I've learned here and stack all stam for jems/enchants and reforge dodge, I've lost over 6% dodge in the process to gain close to 20k hp. I do admit this is a really bad way to set up a bear, but with the healers I'm currently working with it is about the only workable solution. My survivability has gone up substantially.

This may be due to the healers having to focus more heals on me, pushing their mana pools hard. Which is forcing the raid leader to crack down on dps taking avoidable damage. There are a lot more mechanics going on in a raid than simply maximum bear performance. Sometimes what works best on paper is simply not the best for your specific situation.

Having said that, I really look forward to the day I can ditch the stamina and go back to setting my bear up properly.

I would agree, I've yet to see the extreme cases where I get hit in the worst sequences. From most of the logs and graphs I have looked at on our previous fights, my DPS-received never peaked much higher than the lowest part of the other tank. (Mostly looked at Cho'Gal 10man... and we swapped rolls once or twice).

I am fortunately still included in all raids, and will try and get them to let me tank now and again, so that they may feel more confident that RNG and the inverse law of averages will not be my undoing.

PS: It does not help that the two other tanks are guild leaders... heh. They're nice and competent players tho, but it sometimes feels like they don't consider all the merits.

To note with the 4.0.6 patch the armor on the normal Unidentifiable Organ has been reduced to 541, while the heroic version has been reduced to 611 armor, the petrified twilight scale has also been reduced to 651 armor for normal and 736 armor for heroic. These changes might have some impact for those of us who were still using them based on their statistically large armor values for trinkets.

I believe the default gem template for bears uses red, purple and blue gems. Check that the meta-gem requirements are still being met in your current gear if you swap out for a Mask of Vines with a red, purple, or blue gem.

At a 353 ilevel rawr is advising me to reforge everything to dodge. I did this and gained a lot of dodge, but at the expense of expertise/hit and even a little crit. The overall impact on threat doesn't seem to be too significantly negative though - measurable but it's not making the difference between threat on trash or bosses.

So in other words, are other feral tanks of similar ilevel seeing the same suggestions (regardless of threat value and buffs) from rawr, reforge everything to dodge? Or would reforging only haste, and maybe also hit, to dodge be more beneficial?

"Everything to dodge" is the right recommendation for minimizing incoming damage per second (at this raiding tier).I get the same by utilizing various spreadsheets (like this ).
You may also get recommendations to stack agility and get non-stamina trinkets, in that case you must have in mind the fight specifics and have a few pieces and trinkets with lots of stamina for when it's needed.

I am having a hard time believing anything rawr says in the stam vs agi debate, particularity because of the presets for the survival soft cap. The 11.9 setting of 525k with 75% physical reduction suggests a target health of only 131k, which is absurdly low.

Heroic bosses regularly hit for 50k, and sometimes for as much as 80k, with magic on top of that. It would seem that magic damage is completely ignored currently, but even with purely physical damage 131k gives the option of getting two shot.

What I'm asking is how you get 525k as the survival softcap?

Based on "feel" (which is no good basis, but its all I have) it should be something more like 800k.

The current version of Rawr (4.0.20b) has a bug in the bear armor computation that increased the armor from leather and cloth by ~27% over the true amount. This is causing problems with optimizing for the survival cap because Rawr thinks the bear will take much less physical damage than it actually will, which makes it devalue stamina greatly.

The bug has been fixed but is pending a new release of Rawr.

You must be doing something wrong. I'm at 573k and Rawr shows my health fully buffed at 171,209. Regarding what constitutes a sufficient level of health, that is debatable to some extent. But, at my level of health, I have yet to notice any problems surviving heroic encounters that could have been prevented with another 20k health.

Yes and no, the new system for boss damage seems quite powerful and able to include magic damage, but also quite confusing. There are currently no values set up for Heroic raids, and while changing the drop down from easiest to average to hardest changes weights slightly I don't see the damage numbers changing anywhere, and still get results weighted toward gemming all agi and ending up with 150k hp.

I cant, or don't know how to, just manually put in 200k melees on a 2.0 swing timer like I could for the old way. Whenever I try adding a custom boss with some basic parameters I get errors.

At what point in the computation was/is this error? On the stats page I still get values for armor and armor reduction within 1% of what my character pages says ingame. Was this bug a result of double counting the recent change to thick hide?


That all being said, I still feel pretty good about my current gearing. Starting into heroic tanking I shot for ~190k hp. I am now maintaining about the same amount and gemming more toward agi as I get more 372 pieces. The justification for this was that 80k melees are not uncommon and I want to be able to take two hits and maybe some aoe without dying. I'm just looking for a more mathematical confirmation of this.