Contents

1 Introduction 2 Overview 3 Talents and Glyphs 3.1 Spec 3.2 Glyphs 3.2.1 Prime Glyphs 3.2.2 Major Glyphs 3.2.3 Minor Glyphs 4 Gear 4.1 Stats 4.2 Gems 4.3 Set bonuses 4.4 Enchants 4.5 Professions 4.6 How to Gear 5 Rotation 6 Raid Utility 7 Mechanics 7.1 Vengeance 7.2 Armor, Dodge, Base stats

[top] Introduction

This post contains information about tanking as a feral druid in a high end raid setting. It should be enough for beginners to gain a solid grasp on the fundamentals of the spec, and should also be a reference for players who have specific questions about our mechanics.

We'll go into more detail later, but if you have specific gearing questions you can use Rawr - Rawr or Tangedyn's spreadsheet - Simple Bear Mitigation Spreadsheet | The Inconspicuous Bear

Important note about Rawr:
This comes up constantly so make a note of it right here - Rawr is completely dependent on the settings you use. If your settings are wrong then you will get wrong information. Take care when using Rawr that all of the settings are correct. If you're still confused by the results then post the Rawr profile you used so that others can check that your settings are correct. Failure to do so will result in infractions.

I will do my best to keep this post up to date, but if you find something that is old or just plain wrong please send me a PM so that I can fix it quickly. Thank you.

[top] Overview

As a tank you have two main jobs: Keep the boss from attacking the other players in your raid and take as little damage as possible. At this time holding aggro is pretty simple so most of the suggestions made in this post will focus on reducing your damage intake.

You may also be called on to help the raid in other ways, such as interrupting, using Innervate or Rebirth, or even helping dps during periods of time that you don't have to tank. Look for opportunities to use all of the tools available to you as a feral druid.

[top] Talents and Glyphs

[top] Spec

For choosing Feral as your spec you get Aggression (increases your AP by 25%), Vengeance (will be discussed later), and the ability Mangle. We also get a 2 part mastery, one for cats and one for bears. The bear portion of our mastery is called Savage Defender and increases the damage absorbed by Savage Defense by 4% per point of mastery.

For tanking you absolutely want to take Feral Swiftness, Infected Wounds, Primal Fury, Feral Charge, Thick Hide, Leader of the Pack, Survival Instincts, Endless Carnage, Natural Reaction, Rend and Tear, Pulverize, Berserk, and Heart of the Wild. A basic spec will look something like this: Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft. Here is my personal take on how the optional talents stack up:

Perseverance - Really strong talent, any full time tanking build needs this. Only consider skipping if you are building a hybrid dps/tanking spec and can't spare the points.

Master Shapeshifter - Pretty expensive but generally worth the points.

Fury Swipes - Not strictly necessary to tank, but it's a solid damage increase and there's almost always room for it. Drop something else unless your build is very specifically tailored to a single fight and every point is already taken.

Furor - Pretty weak but you need at least 1 point to advance down the tree and Predatory Strikes has no use at all while tanking, so you may as well fill this out.

King of the Jungle - You can use Enrage on cooldown now so this is free damage. Like Fury Swipes, there's usually something else you can drop in favor of this. And you absolutely need this for a hybrid spec.

Feral Aggression - Convenient for getting a full stack of Faerie Fire up right away, but not a necessity.

Stampede - Very slight threat increase any time you feral charge, you can skip this pretty much every time.

Primal Madness - Pretty weak for the cost considering you need 3 points in KotJ to even get here, but can be worthwhile if you need the damage and have the points to spare.

Brutal Impact - Required if you have to interrupt or stun ever, useless otherwise.

Nurturing Instinct - Will give you a really strong Tranquility if you get the chance to use it, but useless otherwise.

[top] Glyphs

There is only one glyph that affects your survivability as a tank, so there is plenty of room to mix and match.

[top] Prime Glyphs

[Glyph of Berserk]
[Glyph of Lacerate]
[Glyph of Mangle]

None of the other prime glyphs affect you in bear form, so for full time tanks these are what you have to work with.

[top] Major Glyphs

[Glyph of Faerie Fire]
[Glyph of Feral Charge]
[Glyph of Frenzied Regeneration]
[Glyph of Maul]
[Glyph of Rebirth]

The Frenzied Regen glyph is the only one that affects your survivability and it comes with a drawback. Faerie Fire, Feral Charge, and Maul glyphs are mostly for quality of life.

The one major glyph that I strongly recommend for all feral tanks is actually the Rebirth glyph. Even as a tank it's usually possible to toss a quick Rebirth at some point in a fight, and there is a world of difference between resurrecting someone mid-fight with 20% health and 100% health. This isn't quite as good now that battle rezzes are available to other classes, but Rebirth is still the strongest since you can rez at 100% health so if possible you should still try to use yours.

[top] Minor Glyphs

[Glyph of Challenging Roar]
[Glyph of Dash]
Glyph of Mark of the Wild
[Glyph of Unburdened Rebirth]

These are the only minor glyphs with any possible in-combat usefulness. Feel free to use other minor glyphs for quality of life purposes.

[top] Gear

[top] Stats

General information on combat ratings can be found here: Combat Ratings at level 85 (Cataclysm)

Armor
Arguably the most important stat for tanks, armor consistently reduces your damage taken from physical attacks, which is almost always going to be your highest source of damage taken. With the Thick Hide talent and the Austere meta gem we have a 4.393752 multiplier on armor from leather gear. The amount of armor on gear is directly related to its item level and you can't gem for it, so the only way to "stack" armor is by using an armor trinket.

Agility
Agility increases your attack power, chance to crit, and chance to dodge. It does not provide armor anymore. Each point of agility provides 2 AP, which is good for both threat and Savage Defense. It takes 324.85 agility for 1% crit and 243.58281085 agility for 1% dodge (see the above link for details on diminishing returns). Agility is one of your primary mitigation stats. Like armor and stamina the amount of agility on gear is tied to item level, but it can also be affected by the presence of gem slots.

Stamina
Stamina is one of your most important tanking stats. With Heart of the Wild we gain 18.6984 health per point of Stamina (19.63332 with Mark of the Wild). Like armor, the amount of stamina on an item is directly tied to its item level. Stamina also increases your Vengeance cap by 1 AP per stamina.

Dodge
Although none of our gear (aside from possibly trinkets) comes with dodge on it, you can reforge your gear for dodge. It takes 176.71899 dodge rating for 1 point of dodge. The mechanics of diminishing returns on dodge can be found in the above link.

Mastery
It takes 179.28 mastery rating to gain 1 point of mastery. Each point of mastery increases the size of your Savage Defense shield by 4%. Mastery and crit interact in a fairly complicated way when it comes to Savage Defense, so you should use Rawr or the spreadsheet to help you determine which is better for your current gear setup.

Crit
You need 179.28 crit rating to gain 1% crit chance. Increasing your crit chance increases your threat and also increases your Savage Defense procs.

Hit/Expertise
You need 120.109 hit/expertise rating for 1% hit/expertise. These are the best secondary stats to increase your threat and have marginal effects on Savage Defense uptime. Mobs do not parry-haste anymore so expertise is no longer a significant defensive stat, however expertise is twice as effective as hit up to 6.5%, since it works on both dodge and parry. As of 4.1 you need neither hit nor expertise to interrupt.

Haste
You need 128.05701 haste rating for 1% haste. Haste increases your melee attack speed, which will increase your threat. It also has a marginal effect on Savage Defense uptime. However, in both cases haste is very weak and should generally be avoided in favor of something else.

[top] Gems

Your only real meta gem choice for tanking is [Austere Shadowspirit Diamond]. In specific cases you may find [Effulgent Shadowspirit Diamond] or [Powerful Shadowspirit Diamond] useful, but generally speaking Austere will be just fine.

For the rest you'll mostly want agility or stamina. If you're ever in doubt you can default to [Delicate Queen's Garnet], but be sure to keep your meta gem activated. Use Rawr or the spreadsheet to help you figure out what you need.

[top] Set bonuses

The 2T13 bonus causes Mangle crits to have a 100% chance to proc Savage Defense if you have Pulverize up. This doesn't change anything in terms of rotation or gear, but it's now more important to make sure you have maximum uptime on Pulverize.

The 4T13 bonus turns Frenzied Regeneration into a raid cooldown. This let's you be part of a raid cooldown rotation on fights that require it, but in those cases it also relgates FR to an absolute last resort as a personal cooldown. Unless and until someone provides evidence to the contrary, Xenoborg's work is the final say in the mechanics of this bonus:

Thanks to Xenoborg for his testing on this topic.

[top] Enchants

Head: Arcanum of the Earthen Ring (90 stamina/35 dodge, revered Earthen Ring) or Arcanum of the Ramkahen (60 agility/35 haste, revered Ramkahen)
Shoulder: Greater Inscription of Unbreakable Quartz (75 stamina/25 dodge, exalted Therazane) or Greater Inscription of Shattered Crystal (50 agility/25 mastery, exalted Therazane)
Back: Major Agility (22 agility) or Protection (250 armor)
Chest: Greater Stamina (75 stamina) or Peerless Stats (20 to all stats)
Wrists: Agility (50 agility)
Hands: Glove Reinforcements (240 armor) or Heavy Savage Armor Kit (44 stamina) or Greater Mastery (65 mastery) or Major Agility (20 agility)
Legs: Charscale Leg Armor (145 stamina/55 agility)
Feet: Heavy Savage Armor Kit (44 stamina) or Assassin's Step (25 agility/minor run speed) or Major Agility (35 agility) or Earthen Vitality (30 stamina/minor run speed)
Weapon: Mighty Agility (130 agility) or Windwalk (600 dodge/increased move speed on proc) or Mending (heal on proc)

[top] Professions

Blacksmithing offers more agility than any other profession once you're able to fill every socket with epic gems, and the second most stamina. Leatherworking offers more stamina than any other profession. Once every sockets can be filled with epic gems Jewelcrafting becomes markedly worse than most of the other options.

Alchemy: 120 stamina from [Flask of Steelskin] or 80 agility from [Flask of the Winds]. Resistance flasks or armor elixirs are also possibilities. You also gain access to [Lifebound Alchemist Stone], which is potentially useful for a new tank.
Blacksmithing: 2 extra sockets for up to 150 extra stamina from [Design: Solid Deepholm Iolite] or 100 agility from [Delicate Queen's Garnet]. The best profession at this time.
Enchanting: 120 stamina or 80 agility from ring enchants.
Engineering: Quickflip Deflection Plates - Spell - World of Warcraft boost armor by 1500 for 12 seconds on a 1 minute cooldown or Synapse Springs boost agility by 480 for 10 seconds on a 1 minute cooldown. Also Grounded Plasma Shield - Spell - World of Warcraft
Herbalism: Minor heal and 480 haste for 20 seconds on a 2 minute cooldown.
Inscription: 120 stamina or 80 agility from shoulder enchant.
Jewelcrafting: Up to 78 stamina or 51 agility from Chimera's Eye gems once all sockets can be filled with epic gems. Among the weakest professions at this time.
Leatherworking: 155 stamina or 80 agility. Gives more stamina than other professions and can also be useful for the level 80 resistance enchants.
Mining: 120 stamina.
Skinning: 80 crit.
Tailoring: Swordguard Embroidery - Spell - World of Warcraft chance to proc 1000 AP for 15 seconds.

[top] How to Gear

Generally speaking you want to look for the highest item level agility gear you can find. This is because armor, stamina, and for the most part agility directly correlate with item level. Agility jewelery is better than even perfectly itemized strength tanking jewelery. You'll want to reforge haste/hit/expertise to dodge, crit, or mastery if possible. Use Rawr or the spreadsheet to determine which of the three is your best bet.

As a tank you need to be ready to alter your gear between fights if needed (note: trinkets are an excellent way to easily swap around large amounts of armor/stamina/agility). There is no one gearset for tanking that applies equally well to all fights. Again: There is no one gearset that is optimal for tanking for all fights. Test out different gearing strategies and talk to your healers to determine what's best for your raid.

[top] Rotation

For the basic tanking rotation you want to follow a short set of rules:

1. Keep Demoralizing Roar up
2. Mangle on cooldown
3. Keep up at least 1 stack of Lacerate
4. Thrash
5. Keep up the Pulverize buff
6. Keep up a 3 stack of Lacerate
7. Faerie Fire
8. Lacerate as a filler
9. Spend excess rage on Maul

Keeping up Demoralizing Roar is the most important part of your rotation. If you Mangle on cooldown and spam Lacerate in between you'll hold threat over 98% of dps players. Keeping up Pulverize is very important defensively, especially with the 2T13 bonus. On multi-target/AoE situations use Thrash and Swipe on cooldown while spreading Mangles, Lacerates, and Mauls around. Also keep in mind that different situations may call for slight differences in priority. For example, Pulverize can be moved up in the priority if every ounce of survivability is critical, but at the cost of some threat/damage.

[top] Raid Utility

As mentioned above, as druids we offer a lot of potential raid utility even while tanking. Most fights have downtime or tank swaps that allow you to use Rebirth or Innervate if needed, so keep your eyes open for these opportunities. If you have a fairly extended period of time that you aren't tanking you can use Tranquility as well, which is quite powerful now. Ferals are great at interrupting with 2/2 Brutal Impact thanks to the 13 yard range on Skull Bash, so help out on interrupts when needed. Also be aware that with 4T13 Frenzied Regeneration becomes a raid cooldown, allowing you to help out in situations of high raid damage.

We are also hands down the best at swapping between dpsing and tanking in a single fight. You can pick up every major tanking and dps talent in a single spec, you can use all dps glyphs since our tanking glyphs are very marginal, and agility serves both specs quite well. On any boss that allows a tank to dps for parts of the fight, a feral should take that role. This would be my recommended setup: Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft Spend the final 3 points in some combination of Perseverance, Brutal Impact, and Nurturing Instinct. Agility is best for both so gemming overlaps. Lean towards reforging crit/mastery since those are beneficial to both, but if the fight demands it you may have to reforge some dodge as well.

[top] Mechanics

[top] Vengeance

Every time you are attacked while in bear form you gain 5% of the damage done as attack power, up to a cap. Despite the tooltip your vengeance cap is stamina + 0.1*base_health. Vengeance decays over time so you must keep getting hit to keep it up, and is removed completely if you shift to cat form.

Note: At this time Vengeance does not appear to be decaying. Whether this is intentional or a bug is unknown, I'll update this section once we know more.

[top] Armor, Dodge, Base stats

Whitetooth has done an incredible job on the formulas for armor, dodge, resistance, and has base stats information. Instead of repeating it all here just follow this link: Combat Ratings at level 85 (Cataclysm)

I haven't seen any information about testing our new 4pc set bonus so here are some results from last night:
Always gives the raid 30% more hp.
If not glyphed will heal each person for up to 3% of the tanks max health per second.
If glyphed the raid will also get 30% increased healing.

Additionally, after shifting into bear you get a 15s debuff called recently shifted so you will know how long you need to wait to use it.

This sounds odd.

Glyph reads: While Frenzied Regeneration is active, healing effects on you are 30% more powerful but causes your Frenzied Regeneration to no longer convert rage into health.

Yet, the way you make it sound, when glyphed you get the "rage conversion" healing as well as 30% increased healing. Is this true?

Or did you mean to say:
You get 30% increased health and either:
A) 3% of tanks max health per second (unglyphed)
or
B) 30% increased healing (glyhped).

Worth noting that Vengeance does not seem to decay, ever, so long as you are taking some kind of damage every 2 seconds, even if you avoid. I don't know if this is a bug or intentional, but I believe Tangedyn has updated his spreadsheet to reflect this. Dellingr (my warrior co-tank) and I tested it out yesterday, and naked cat whacking him for 31-ish blocked damage was causing his vengeance to go up (albeit slowly) even through the misses, dodges, and parries.

Yeah this is what I meant, sorry if I wrote it in a weird way.

I'd like to know wether it's better to reforge into exp/mas instead of dodge. Rawr has recently suggested exp/mas is much better.

In order to get accurate stat weights, you need to know what the unmitigated boss damage is. Exp/Mastery tend to show better results when the damage threshold is low. That's something we are still working on, though I imagine for normal DS you can get by just fine with an exp/mastery build. Heroic DS, I'd bet my reputation on Dodge still being the superior choice as far as reducing damage.

Rawr4 Repository:
US.Kil'jaeden.Silverose.Bear

It's possible I'm using improper settings, so please let me know if that's the case. Rawr is suggesting exp/mas is roughly twice as valuable as dodge, when reforging. This is true for both 10/25 man raid setups. I hadn't read much about this previously, so I was curious about it, and thought it should maybe be explained in the intro to this thread. Thanks for responding earlier.

I'm having the same issue. If you look at the RSV graph and the mastery RVS is very high, try changing the type of boss under the boss handler from whatever it defaults to on load, to any other one. Before I did that, mastery was valued at near 3x what it was after I changed it. For me, all the RSV were inflated in some way or another, but mastery was more than everything else.

I loaded you up(your boss handler had 13N Easy boss as default) and you had the following RSV listed to start with:
Agi 226
Mastery 165
Armor 147
Exp 145
Dodge 89

After switching to the average boss, and then back to easy(this was the only thing I changed), the RSVs changed to this:
Agi 102
Armor 83
Dodge 66
Mastery 54
Exp 44

This happens on a fresh reload of my profile, and US.Kil'jaeden.Silverose.Bear. I'm no expert in Rawr or RVSs in general, but going through the other bosses listed in both 10N and 10H, Morchok, Zon'ozz, and Madness have very large values for the RSVs. Does Rawr, with a fresh load, do some kind of average of all the bosses to give you a general RSV for that tier?

I just tested the 4 piece druid tanking bonus and it only gives a 15% hp bonus for everyone else, VS the 30% I see in the OP. Let me know if you guys want me to test anything else.

Checking around I've seen claims of both 15% and 30% health to the raid. Screenshots might help clear up the confusion, especially if the disparity is due to strange interactions with other buffs or talents.