Personally the changes to druids are a bit indifferent at the moment. it’s like we have someone changing our stuff to sort PVP or dps issues and then someone comes along with totally different ideas to make changes to tanking and survivability.

Consider before previous patches with my character.

I had 50% crit over 51% dodge and armour mitigation in the 70% mark. We also had extra 10% stamina bonus.
Of course those days are gone and we have what we have.
Around 30% crit and dodge and 64% approx reduction and a lot less stamina than we could have had.

So druids have been stacking heavy stamina for last couple of patches and its worked fine and indeed help with Boss fights with savage defence as the vengeance ranks up.
But many boss fight mechanics now call for tank swapping or running about up and down a spider’s web for instance. In this time we have the chance to lose our vengeance stack and thus our AP goes back to normal and I’m back to my 6kish SD shield that may or may not be up when I engage the boss or target again.

Add to the mix now the removal of basic threat on most of our rotation attacks as bears. We can't always use berserk for every pull or when threat is sticky, we can’t always rely on misdirect or melee /healers not to over aggro in switches of fight mechanics.

Now one thing i have been doing is using my dps trinkets in trash pulls. This works and from gear that other druids have got from recent stuff in firelands the added agility and base damage they are kicking out we have less of a threat issue ( I normally switch to unheeded warning and fluid death ). The dps trinkets solve hit cap base damage and also add around 700 agility very quickly .
Agility as we all know is dodge, AP and crit etc and we don’t need to harp on about that , but the “get me out of jail” usage of the tank trinkets and the stamina is missed when things get sticky.

So I think until druids start to gear up ,we are going to have this stamina vs. agility question for a few months.
Personally i like having tonnes of stamina but the other tanks now are about the same, so we have to look at our next best friend which is agility. So I'm trying out changes , i have reforged to get hit and soft expertise cap to help with both threat but also if you miss, dodge or parry you don’t get your 50% chance at a SD proc.So whatever you got in the way of stamina or agility it won’t matter if you are just not landing hits enough times when it counts. So the caps solve 2 problems we have at THIS TIME(probably be different in a month or 3 of gear gains).

I've then gone for agility and with Pulverise up i got 40% crit or more. I also have more armour, AP and dodge all of which work before vengeance is even ticking up so pull wise and changing tank or mechanics mid fight I’m better off. Let’s face it the tactics needed in many fights now don’t allow for tank and spank for a good percentage of the fight.

So I’ve gemmed to match my sockets: Red=agility, blue=stamina (the odd hit gem) yellow =dodge+stamina. This way I get more out of my gear for my gold spent and also if I have to go cat mode when a tank switch occurs or it becomes a one tank and spank phase at the end of the fight I’m not as useless as I would be full of stamina

I say give back 50% dodge days
Regards
Wired2thebrink

I've got a question regarding the add-tanking at Alysrazor. Since threat doesn't matter, what would be the best damage-rotation a bear could do ? and do you change items or reforge for this fight ? For example dodge -> crit or something like that ?

I personallly, would do my standard rotation Faerie Fire(feral), Mangle, Lacerate x3, mangle and Maul OR mangle and Thrash. Maul as the rage dump and extra damage.

Keep in mind, Mangle is your strongest direct damage ability. Lacerate (via Berserk talent) damage proc's resets the CD on mangle thus you can hit more often with mangle. So if you're looking for pure damage, Mangle will do it but, don't neglect Lacerate x3 + Thrash + Maul.

Lacerate and Thrash amplify the damage of Maul, which isn't too terrible of damage. 4.2 made Maul suck compared to its days of glory but, currently it's still good damage if you have both bleeds active.

Leaving out Pulverize is a mistake when it comes to Bear DPS. The 9% crit is no joke. You Maul when rage allows (which on Alysra Hatchlings is all the time - and its damage isn't small), but otherwise, it's the same priority system we would always use. Priority, not rotation.

Expertise is far and away the best stat for Bear DPS(next to weapon dps). The Hatchlings are level 87, so you will only need 24 expertise if you choose to reforge for more DPS.

Also, asking your resto druids to keep Thorns up is not a bad idea. The avg. hits for me were around 22k, with a little under 700k damage done on the kill attempt. Sure, not game breaking difference, but it's 'free' damage.

Worst case scenario, you can cast it on yourself before the Hatchling is up, but you might lose a decent amount of rage by switching out of bear.

Edit: Ok that was a bit whiny, what I'm looking for is confirmation / other opinions on bear trinkets:

I'm not really sure which direction to go with trinkets in firelands. The passive mastery trinkets don't seem great for bears, and neither do uses that prevent/absorb for 20k damage. I played with [Scales of Life] for a bit, but 1 hit prevented from a dodge seems to far outweigh a 17k heal, especially during large damage phases.

I'm using [Moonwell Phial][Vial of Stolen Memories] for the stam/dodge at the moment, and would probably switch to either or both of [Matrix Restabilizer][Stay of Execution] ultimately, but its still a hard sell.

Trinkets are hard to quantify and they depend so much on the specific fight that the only advice I can give is to try them all. I cycled through about 6 last night before I felt I'd hit the right ones for the encounter we were learning.

For example, I picked up [Ancient Petrified Seed] last night and was quite enjoying it for our first Beth'tilac heroic attempts. I wouldn't normally suggest it for most fights (maybe Alysrazor heroics for killing adds faster) but given the nature of P1 and Smouldering Devastation, the uptime is quite high for P1 (about 1/3rd of every top phase) and then the nature of P2 it climbs to 50% uptime on your tanking portions, really good value in my opinion. Whilst the Vial and Phial have more dodge, I felt having this every time I taunted onto me in P2 much more effective than that Vial I was using in my other slot.

Warrior tank post hotfix: World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis
Druid tank pre hotfix: World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis

I truncated the druid tank parse so that the time should be the same. Note the bear was gemmed agi at the time and did not use the baradin hold trinket and consequently took more inferno blade damage but less melee and decimation blade damage. I have not looked into the parses too deeply but it appears that the damage is roughly the same. You can look at some of the other attempts if you want a larger sample size, just make sure not to include the post berserk swings on the tanks.

looks like druid damage is a bit more spikey from that post, but the total damage is so close it seems to show they are atleast competitive. Still looking for more input on this, esp the concept that blocking is better than dodging for this fight

I thought decimation blade couldn't be mitigated but it could be dodged or parried.

Higher attack speeds actually make dodge more effective, as it is more likely that it will be statistically accurate (IE, if you have 30% dodge the more attacks you take the more likely it is that you actually avoid 30% of damage).

Here's a point in druid's favor: they have the highest base mitigation against physical and magical damage of any other tank. In other words, they take the least damage in the worst case scenario.