Our guild seems to have a chronic shortage of FrR/NR tanks for Hydross, so I was thinking I'd get myself set up if I can. Besides gear there's no real reason a Feral couldn't do it, right? I know most good resist gear (except the badge FiR gear) is plate, but is there anything available for FrR/NR for bears besides level 69-70 "of X Protection" greens?

It is doable. I have tanked both frost and nature phases (not in one fight, naturally) when our regular plate tanks didnt show up. My unbuffed resistances were around 230-250. With aura and flask of chromatic wonder, you are at 335-355 resist. Or you can use elixir of ironskin to fill crit gap, which may be more important that the 35 resistance.

You want green headpiece with +20 resist enchant, which gives you about 57 resistance. Then jewelry (necklace, ring) crafted by JC. Apart from this, there is only green stuff as far as i recall. You need to enchant it appropriately (stamina, resists, defense - whatever gives the best overall result). +15 resist on back is also good so try to get resist cloak.

Talking about Hydross himself; I regularly tank the adds with no resists whatsoever, discounting what I get from MotW and other miscellaneous buffs; sometimes I'm in the Hunter/Paladin resist group with the Hydross tanks, sometimes not, but either way I get along with the adds just fine.

(edit) The vast majority of my anticrit right now comes from my rings and neck, with a little from my bracers, shoulder glyph, various gems, and chest enchant. If I get seven Dragonhawk X of Nature Protection (level 70 leather greens), with a flask and MotW + 10 Tauren resist I end up with 309 NR. And this way I'm still uncrittable (or at least close enough that it's not a real concern--like 0.01% chance or something, I have to check the numbers).

My only concern here is that if I do this, my threat generation goes straight into the shitpile, since a huge amount of my agi just disappears. Do you Hydross tanks find that to actually be a concern?

I'm curious about the best gear/ability rotation to handle spinning bosses, eg Solarian. When I'm trying, I'm usually top 5 DPS in my (3/4 TK, 5/6 SSC) guild on bleedable bosses, but this encounter proves exceptionally difficult.

After examining the WWS reports, I've come to the following conclusions: because Solarian is constantly spinning to send arcane missiles at people, I'm missing way more than I usually would due to blocks/parries/etc (6-8% with hit-capped gear); and because I'm missing opportunities for shreds, it's taking me a lot longer to get through a cycle, and as a result Rip is not up most of the time (down to 12% of my damage versus its usual 30-35%).

What are cat druids using as a combination for this boss? Should I give up on shred, equip the idol of terror and go for 5 mangle/1 rip combinations? Should I experiment with more Expertise gear? (I'm wearing my only really decent piece, the shoulderpads from Hydross.)

I'm also curious about whether it's worth putting points in improved FB for non-bleedable bosses like VR. I haven't yet due to wanting to keep points in other things, and I've seen the non-improved FB vs. shred graphs, but it's another frustrating fight for me.

The adds don't last very long, stun as fall back is also available once every phase.
I use [Earthwarden] in my resist gear, which helps a lot due to expertise (of course also for defense purposes).

Needing resist on an addtank really depends on how you do the boss.
You can have 4 tanks and aoe them, which will probably take all of them down before the mark reaches higher levels.
Resists here are really only mandatory for tanking the adds up to the 100% mark and further, which will depend on your raids performance and strategy.

Well hey there, cutie. ;-*

Anyway, thanks for the advice. One last set of questions: if I get all those greens and glyphs and flasks and shit, I'll be at 309 self-buffed, and with the Hunter buff I'm at (I think) 379. This is above cap, correct? What is cap? How far BELOW the cap can I be before it starts getting dangerous?

Resistance is non-linear, especially towards the end. Think of it the same way as agility stacking where going from 98 to 99% avoidance is a huge boon for just another percent. Although of course, the actual cap for resist mechanics is 75%. The cap is lv*5, or 365 in the case of boss mobs. Always plan with a hunter/totem in mind, so 295 unbuffed.

It doesn't get 'dangerous' unless you get multiple 50% resists in a row, the probability of which increases the further you get from the cap. My point being there's no real cutoff - aim for the cap, or pray to be lucky.

In terms of greens to go for, Elementalist/Dragonhawk are the best (armor doesn't matter!) and I've got a couple of lv117's too - the names elude me right now. You can put a 20NR patch on the headpiece and a 15resi on the chest... those two enchants give the best benefit in their respective slots in this situation. The others are situational and probably depend on what you can actually scrounge up.

Edit: Some final thoughts - don't get any misconceptions here. A warrior or paladin will fare much better in terms of mitigating damage due to the availability of epic resist gear (and class abilities.. boo hoo), so your raid and especially healers need to understand beforehand that this solution is not optimal and is the result of circumstance. Also, be really really sure to have a pot/HS macro for this, if you don't already. IT WILL SAVE YOUR LIFE. MULTIPLE TIMES.

When the Frost tank is pulling Hydross over the line, try to trail behind Hydross, so that your opening Mangle right as he changes color won't be parried. This also sets you up to pull him back over when it's time. If you really want to maximize your chances of survival, go hard at the start of each transition with your highest DPS staff, then switch to your highest stam one at 100% and consider stopping all attacks (except maybe mangle) to lessen the chances of a parry gib.

Lastly, if you have any say in it, go for tanking the NR phases and let a warrior get FrR gear, rather than the other way around.

I find myself making room for the expertise ring and neck on anything that remotely requires threat generation, and gaining crit immunity by simply wearing 2pc s3 gladiator in slots that don't yet have T6 (when that becomes difficult I'll determine "weakest" T6 slots via Rawr). To me, AP in bear is a tertiary consideration behind expertise & hit, and even hit doesn't feel worth dramatically altering tank gear for.

It's absolutely doable, our guild has never used anything but two druids to tank Hydross, we don't believe in warrior tanks

Our tanks just wear a mixture of green resist gear and enough of their regular tank gear to give them a mixture of 295 unbuffed resistance and remain uncritable. Works fine

Sorry if my post was confusing, I just wanted to get a ballpark estimate on how often people are getting the double mangle debuff to work. Most of the time? A quarter of the time? Just to gauge how I'm doing. I understand there's latency issues, so people may have varying success rates.

I understand using toskk's method that this trinket wouldn't be as good as other trinkets if you did the standard mangle, shred, rip combo.

However what about mangling until the trinket would proc, only then start shredding until rip (or just rip). Has anyone tried this and seen there dps go up?

I'm guessing that since your're adding the human factor of only proceeding until the trink procs it would be difficult to evaluate this method mathematically, so any anecdotal observations would be great.