I found max avoidance set to be best for Gurtogg, have even seen stacks drop off of me while he's on me. We also highly stack a tank group for avoidance and threat, which worked wonders back when we first were learning Gurtogg so we've done ever since. Double shaman (WF for prot aggro and AGI for avoidance), prot, me/feral, dps war. Make sure you're using AGI food / elixir.

Let the tank keep it an entire round without stopping their threat while offtank keeps up in threat best as possible. If both of you are geared well for avoidance a full round will only be 6-8 stacks tops. When Fel Rage has 3-5 seconds left paladin BOPs the tank that has 6+ stacks and they do not attack. Opposite tank will have aggro and the tank with stacks lets them fade then starts building aggro again.

My short question is how much hit do most druids have while tanking in the sunwell? The moaning and groaning involves my first tanking experiences last night. I'm pretty under-geared, as is much of the raid (the guild illidan for the first time last week) but i have 50 hit rating and the amount of growl resists was irritating. More often than not I would have to growl the demon twice before it would stick. I can only imagine the frustration of a taunt resist on brutallus (which wont come for a while but no reason not to gear for it now). Is there a certain amount of hit i should aim for? I know I will end up losing a lot of hit once i get rid of the s3 chest and t4 helmet i use for tanking but gain a bit from t6 pants. Should i throw a few pyrestones in my gear to get my hit rating up?

Are you sure it's resists and not just aggro building? You have to make a decent effort to keep the Demon off Kalecgos - his threat is very good for an npc. Anyway, I have about 3% hit for this fight, nothing special.

Brutallus has gimped resist to taunt, you will only ever see them rarely - but that's the least of your worries if you're undergeared for him

Unless I'm mistaken, [Madness of the Betrayer] has only 20 hit, not 30.


Regarding Gurtogg, I echo the same endorsement for dodge/avoidance. Like others have stated, I've had the stack fall off while taking without a transition. You can help accomplish this with timing your trinkets, the pocket watch and the badge around the fel rage. Pop the watch 10 seconds before rage and then badge as soon as rage ends. If he happens to refresh the stack, BoP works as well as simply to stop all attacking after 8 stacks or so.

I have 78hit and yes there is a lot of taunt resists on Kalecgos. All of our tanks experienced issues but it's not really a big deal on that fight. With 3 tanks you switch phases and immediately get ready for taunt in that phase, count it down, taunt. If resisted wait on cooldown and repeat.

As Daboran said Brutallus seems to have a flat 1% chance to resist taunt or something very low. A resisted taunt can cause a wipe quickly so Blizzard accounted for this. Tanks do still have to be ready for a quick AE taunt on those resists though. Follow up with a regular growl again as soon as the timer repops after an AE taunt also.


P.S. Sorry for the newb question: Does Challenging Roar only put you at the top of the list for those 6 seconds and then you fall back to your original aggro?

The aggro list doesn't change as far as I know - all Challenging Roar does is force the mobs to focus on you for the duration. If you can't get aggro in those 6 seconds by the usual mechanic then any mob affected just goes back to whoever it would have been hitting anyway. In Brut's case this would be the other tank usually.

Thanks for all the advice on Gurtogg. The two-Shaman idea sounds pretty feasible, though I don't know how much that'll help compared to having a tree in the tank group. I guess we'll find out on Sunday, assuming we try him and not Archimonde.

Thanks dudes

Seriously, you've already been pointed in the right direction once, use one of the excellent gear calculators out there. Besides comparing gear Rawr will calculate DPS, you can then compare that estimate to a WWS report. Finally read the many, many pages of information available...

What is your tank makeup? On BB we usually run 2 Ferals and a Warrior. The Warrior goes in 1st with a Misdirect and the other Druid and I play catch up, this way we can pretty much go all out to close the gap. Sometimes a Dodge string can leave you rage starved, but there's usually enough damage going out to build rage back up(Hell I've even Enraged before to build rage) . Obviously Misdirects and DPS using aggro dumps helps too.

Usually it's two ferals (me and another with very similar gear), and a prot paladin. We seemed to have most of our success sending in the ferals first, waiting a few seconds, then misdirecting the paladong so he can be closer to our threat levels.

I'm not too hip on Prot Pallies, but the times our Paladin has filled in he usually asks to go 1st if I remember correctly. Isn't it easy for a prot Paladin to run low on mana initially by not taking a large amount of direct heals? Which can cause him to fall behind on TPS. Aggravating that I think a large amount of Paladin threat is based on the damage they do back to the attacker? I am probably very wrong, but I think it would be best to let the Pally go 1st, establish a good threat lead with you guys playing catch up.

I don't really understand all the taunt resist complaints, I haven't experienced it at all. I have 3% hit in tanking gear, from t6 legs and the pendant neck. I think it's safe to say this is what most ferals are running with in Sunwell, unless they're using TPS pieces (I've yet to find it necessary). Sure, I've experienced a few taunt resists, but extremely rare, and I don't recall a single time it caused a wipe at either Kalecgos or Brutallus.

I'm not sure if Challenging Shout has the same aggro mechanics as taunt, but I seem to recall it working just fine the times taunt got resisted. Could be it just forced boss on me for those 6 seconds, after which I could taunt again.

We had a wipe on Kalecgos last night because of the difference in agro mechanics of Challenging Roar. My first taunt was resisted so I instinctively shouted. The warrior intervened me then ran off to find the next portal. He turned and killed the warrior, then ran off and killed a few others until my taunt cooldown came back up. We were both pretty confused at the time. Also, don't forget there is a debuff that reduces hit by 50%.

You can do a Challenging Roar with 6s CD on taunt and immediatly taunt afterwards.

This assumes of course the second taunt doesn't get resisted, too.

I looked at your armory, you seem really under geared for tanking Sunwell. You are using 3pc T4, which isn't good enough to tank Sunwell (at least from my experience) unless you have godly healers. I would focus on getting some gear upgrades and then worrying about HR/Expertise. Also, you are a LW, it might be a good idea to use [Boots of Natural Grace] because of the HR.

I forgot about those boots, I'll probably try to buy the pattern tonight. I know I'm pretty under-geared for the sunwell I just wanted an idea of how to balance my stats once that comes. The avoidance reduction hurts a lot more than I expected.

Avoidance is definitely a good way to go for Bloodboil, especially if you only go with 2 tanks, which is preferable from a threat perspective. If you've got 2 other tanks, it's probably better to let them tank, and try to stay third on agro, as our dps gear has pretty good avoidance. With a bad string of deagroes on the other tank and bad luck on your trinkets, you can get the debuff stacking pretty high, I think on our last kill I tanked the last 10% with above 30. That is way more than is desired. If you have good avoidance and the two good avoidance trinkets, then it's often possible to tank entire phases and by trinketting around the Fel Rage, have the debuff drop off before it get's renewed.

As for sunwell radiance, it changes things quite a bit, but in someways in our favour. Armour and stamina become more important. The scaling for avoidance stats in the average damage taken calculation has been quite considerably reduced, which means all tanking classes have to work quite a bit harder to stack avoidance. Feral avoidance scales a bit faster and was offset by a lower baseline (anaked protection warrior has a 5% parry base and another 5% from talents) which is now less important.

Apologies for the offtopic, but I feel thanks are in order. I tanked Gurtogg again tonight, and we just got our very first kill on our first pull of the night.

Yeah, I don't know either.

But taking into account the advice here and in the Gurtogg thread in Public Discussion helped me and the other tanks get it together a LOT better. Debuff never stacked higher than 12, so the healers had a very easy time of it. I don't know if it was here or that thread where it was mentioned, but the 130% aggro line at ranged helped a ton in getting the debuff dropped.

My faith in avoidance tanking is restored! Thank you all so much

A new "easy to obtain" (ie no high raid level gear) list would look something like:

Helm: T4
Neck: Shattered Sun Pendent of Might
Shoulders: T4
Back: Drape of the Dark Reavers or Razorscale Battlecloak
Chest: S3
Wrist: Vindicators Dragonhide
Gloves: Handwraps of the Aggressor
Waist: Belt of Silent Path (Belt of One Hundred Deaths is better but thats from Vashj)
Legs: Trousers of the Scryer' Retainer
Feet: Nyn'ja Tabi boots
Ring 1: Angelista's Revenge
Ring 2: Ancestral Ring of Conquest (the ZA timed ring is better but harder to obtain)
Trinkets: DST, Shard of Contempt, Bloodlust brooch, Darkmoon: Card Crusade etc. Lotsa options here
Weapon: Staff of the Forest Lord
Idol: Everbloom (Idol of the Raven Goddess if in a high dps group)

The T4 shoulders is almost guarenteed to be better to use than anything in that slot. The helm could be replaced by S3 helm and the T4 gloves could be used and it would be almost exactly the same DPS. The engineering helms (Tier 1 and 2) are both better than T4 as well, assuming you can use either the chest or gloves for the set bonus.

Sunwell gear is also an option if you farm trash or buy it off the AH. The gloves are insanely good, as is the LW chest.

Thats a pretty shitty trade off if you ask me. You'd no longer be armour capped which beats the extra HP and the hit is vastly better than the haste in my opinion.

My guild got 3 MT-grade (non druid) prot tanks already (and I am new here, they are veterans) so they won't let me tank at Brutallus.

But then, I am told my DPS in cat form is too low to be worth a raid spot there and a ret pala is taken instead (for the buffs).
I loaded all my stuff in Rawr (and Toskk's) and I do 100+ more DPS than what those calculators say I should do (it's 1350-1450 DPS in tank group, w/o shaman, but at Brutallus it's lower).
When I am taken, I am put in the MT group because the LoTP buff is considered not good enough to justify a spot in the melee group.

Is there any solid way to prove them the contrary? With some real numbers? In melee group we have a 1700 DPS enh shaman, dual warglaives warrior, 1 glaive rogue, 1 non glaive rogue.


I am currently logged off in DPS gear (the AP shown is wrong, it's like 35XX), my next upgrades being Angelista's Revenge and T6 bracers (hopefully this week).

P.S. I am already using weighstones, drums, powershifting and keeping rip running for most of the DPS cycle except in case of bad crit streaks.

What really breaks me is that if I am put in the melee group, doing the same things, I see basically but 50 DPS more than being in the MT group and that's it.

How many hunters do you bring? Seems generally ferals are more being put with 3 hunters+resto sham while using the epic flight form trinket. If you are doing 1350-1400dps on for ex Teron with that gear there must be something you are doing wrong? Some wws's would be nice.

edit: You mention not using rip when having bad crit streaks, does that mean you don't use 4cp rips?