Irrelevant, irrelevant, irrelevant. Unless you're somehow armor capped AFTER stomp, you can never have enough armor. If you drop Brutallus with 1500 less armor on stomps from not having an armor-buffed staff equipped, that's good for you.

The point people are trying to make is, your armor outside of stomp means absolutely jack - how many times have tanks died outside of stomp compared to during stomp? If I can push my armor from 21k to 22.5k post-stomp (35k/2, plus ironshield, plus Devo, not counting fort/insp), by throwing on Wildfury, I'm definitely going to do it. Threat is pretty much a non-issue on Brutallus.

It's not even a subjective issue about practical experience here (of which arguing about, as Boevis said, is pointless as people have killed Brutallus with pretty much any logical gearing choice). You are, however, from a purely numerical standpoint on stomps comparing ~1% dodge to taking ~2.5% less damage per hit. Shadow Embrace is another 5% for comparison's sake.

You are armor capped with a staff with no armor, interesting stuff you seem to have.....
Even if you use ironshield on brutallus, it is not worthwhile to use such a weapon, the increase in tps is not relevant, you should not have any issue with tps on this boss. You even better to use [Shard of Contempt] instead of another trinket

TPS is a relevant part of the fight, for me it was the first fight where i really had to do something to increase my aggro generation. Using [Shard of Contempt] is normally not an option for brutallus because the expertise does nothing for your mitigation here. I noticed that using Badge early in the fight (10 seconds beforce the first stomp) does increase my tps by a large amount. The first minute of the fight is mostly the time where we had wipes through dds pulling aggro. Perhaps it is a good idea to swap the weapon before stomp hits, and use a tps weapon whenever not affected by stomp. (I had nearly 49k armor outside stomp.)

I don't really think you should count AF/Inspiration as being armor capped =\

Being nearly always up is not the same as always up

When's the last time you died outside of stomp? Nobody cares about your damage intake outside of stomp, its easily healable, the only time a tank can die is during a stomp, and every bit of armor helps.

If you take the worst possible spike, 5k stomp + about 12k mh/oh combo (for me and my armor at least), that's a good 17k damage. The next mh/oh that'll hit is another 12k, which means you need a combined max hp + incomming heals of 29k. If you have raid buffed 22k hp, that's 7k heals that need to land in the next 1.2s for you to survive. If you use a dps staff and fucked over your armor during stomp, you could easily take an extra 1k+ from mh/oh combo, making an extra 2k required healing to keep you up.

It doesn't matter if you dodge or not, because you're going to get healed regardless, your healers can't afford to gamble that you're going to dodge and hold back on your incomming heals.

Hey, I'm still a bit new at tanking. Could someone point a link to (or briefly discuss) the differences between these two theories.

I'm an armor+stam > dodge thinker, simply due to my own experiences, but if someone could flesh out the thoughts above, it might refine my thinking a bit.

Survival: Take the very very worst damage spike you could possibly take, and see if you can survive with the RNG being completely onesided (normally taken as a string of pure crushing blows).
Mitigation: Long term damage intake over a fight.

By swapping 10% dodge for 10% armour, you may lose a total mitigation (i.e. overall damage taken over fight) of 5%. However, in the worst possible survivability position, you gain 10% survivability (i.e. damage taken by 5 crushings in a row is reduced).

Dodge is always random, armor and stamina is not.

@Goedel: I'll have a look at it.

Thank you. So for Brutallus take the max amount of damage you can get with Stomp + MH + OH and gear to be able to survive it with 0 dodge.

I get it.

Is there a link somewhere to some math for those values (mit v surv)?

The value of any theory crafting of mitigation compared to survival is pretty suspect. To really get anything remotely close to a true comparison you would basically have to model healing based on the consistency, skill, classes, and assignments of your healers, and then say what percent chance of a wipe is acceptable. For instance, as a bit of an extreme, say you had 4 or 5 resto druids in the raid (sounds extreme, but since our feral druids are often going to respec resto right after the raid anyway to go pvp, we were having them do it right after azgalor instead). Having at least 3.5k of lifebloom ticking every second, 4 swiftmends available, 4 rejuvs, 2 renews, 4 regrowths and an earth shield all ticking away vastly increases the value of mitigation compared to sta/ac. There's essentially 0 chance of the tank actually getting 1 shot, and since the hots are constantly ticking away, there's no risk of where the tank dies mid cast for all the healers.

Its very similar to saying which is better, mana regen or +healing. Well, both. If you don't have any mana, there's no point in having 3k +healing, but if you don't have enough +healing, all the mana in the world isn't going to keep people alive. For a tank, if you don't have the ability to survive a mild string of bad luck, it doesn't matter that you mitigated a lot of damage. Conversely, more mitigation vastly lowers the number of bad luck strings you need to live through. Especially when used in conjunction with tank trinkets or healer reactive abilities like swiftmend, favoring mitigation, and counting on getting a bit lucky is fairly effective.

If you're setting up to ensure there's a 100% chance you won't die, survival is the way to go. However, you're probably delusional. Even if you figure out that in a 3 minutes of tanking fight there's a 50% chance you'll die, which is pretty high, expecting it to take 3-4 pulls to get a bit lucky and kill a new boss is far from crazy. We've found that for any boss with a damage requirement that we were best off dropping below the normal number of healers, having the tanks go a bit heavy on mitigation, and overloading on damage. Sure, that means there's a chance we may wipe completely beyond our control, but its a lot more likely that 1 tank is going to go a whole fight without getting too unlucky than it is that the average of 18 some damagers are going to be lucky enough to pull the whole RDPS up noticeably.

Whats there left to talk about? Most of us aint getting DPS versions of our Sunwell gear for a while, and for those guilds that havent been farming Illidan for 10months, youre probably not seeing a whole of kitty time anyway. Its kinda disappointing that: only 2 tanks in raid wouldve been widely regarded as cutting it on the risky side (or during progression times, essentially impossible) for some fights in MH/BT, and so far SP has been a 2 tank instance through the Twins.

I imagine some may be finding themselves out of work if you're not tank1 or tank2. =(
edit: I can only hope Muru or Big K will somehow REQUIRE another tank.

Sidetracking the current conversations, I've been trying to improve on my tanking techniques lately, unfortunately as I raid resto in 25 mans I rarely get a chance to tank and improve or even figure out what to improve as majority of places I am tanking do not require the best possible TPS output. As we don't have a feral druid in 25 mans (yes I know stupid) I don't really know what optimal threat is.

What should t6/well geared feral tank TPS be at? My current cycle is lacerate x3, maul, mangle repeat, throwing in demo + FF when I can. I'm varying anywhere from 1000-1100 TPS.

It is very possible with proper armor stacking and Shadow Embrace to survive MH+OH->Stomp->MH+OH or even Stomp->MH+OH->MH+OH as a druid, something which isn't numerically possible for warrior tanks, and hence why stacking either mit/survival -or- avoidance can work for Druids.

In my experience, generating threat is less about the cycle you use and much more to do with how you gear, what sort of buffs you have and what sort of debuffs are on the mob. More than any other tanking class, a feral tank has the ability to trade mitigation/survivability for threat generation by adjusting what gear they use.

In regards to the optimum amount of threat, it really depends on the threat of the DPS you are trying to hold aggro over, the class makeup of your raid and how much of a headstart you get. Personally, I want to generate enough threat such that all of the DPS can go all out for the length of an encounter. If you are doing 1100tps, you could be potentially threat capping classes that have limited aggro management capabilities (dps shamen, etc.). However, if your raid doesn't have those classes, you could be ok.

In terms of what stats I like to aim for good threat (these are buffed): 3500+ AP (more is better), 35%-40% crit, 25k-30k armor, 80ish hit rating. Also, you'll want 1-2 of the better items with expertise. Since my main worry in generating threat is rage starvation, I try to limit how much dodge/armor I have and counter the 'healability' issues by increasing my stamina. As an aside, I tend to find that 'wearing cat gear while tanking' does not generate the most threat and I use a different set of gear for threat tanking than I do for cat dps.

Has anyone tried out the Shattered Sun Pendant of Resolve for tanking yet? I noticed RAWR doesn't have it listed at all. I am aldor so the dodge proc might be nice.

Couldn't find the answer in any previous posts.

I personally love the SSO tank neck. I'm scryer, so the expertise proc gives me a huge threat boost, and usually procs right at the start of the fight, when you need that threat boost the most. The aldor proc giving you dodge right at the start of the fight could be detrimental though... rage starvation and all. It's rough not having any def on your neck piece, since so few pieces have any at all, but I make up for it with the s3 bracers and helm.

Hey guys. First time poster here, long time reader.

The question I bring to the table is in regards to group composition for the tanks. How does your guild setup its tank group... What classes and more specifically buffs are most important? Right now our guild is working on council in BT and fullclears hyjal in a night. Sunwell is a month or so off for us, so BT is most of the content we're facing.


Our tank group consists of our 3 tanks: Prot Warrior, Myself (Feral Druid), and a Prot Pally; each of us bringing our own unique buffs to the group. We almost always have a shammy for GoA (avoidance + threat) and Strength of Earth (threat), but the last spot is the one most in contention.

Our two choices are either a warlock with improved imp buff or a tree form druid for extra healing on the tanks.


Has there been any statistical comparison between the different party buffs that can be given to tanks, and how important they each are for tanking? I can use Rawr to semi gauge the importance of the imp buff and the totems, but there's no real option to compare the +healing from tree form. Also would be interested to hear how you guys build your tank groups.

For myself i got the feeling that i sometimes loose more dps trying to maximize it through powershifting than i gain.

According to tosks i gain 70 dps for powershifting every cycle which, for the effort is not really worth it to me to build it into my dps cycle. Sure IF i find myself at 0 energy and off the global cooldown i try to sneak it in, latency is your enemy though.

Pressing a button every 12 seconds while waiting for energy to gain 70 DPS is a pretty fantastic trade off if you ask me.

Its not that simple though is it.

Is Shadow Embrace necessary? I didn't know people still took Affliction Warlocks to T6+ raids. Especially on a DPS fight like Brutallus.

It's probably not necessary but some guilds (like mine) do it as a safety feature (more of a mental thing i guess)

Brutallus also isn't THAT demanding on DPS requirement once people stop dying. We use 3 shadowpriests (lolwut) and still pull it off fine.

Assuming you have absolutely no macro or hotkey set up

-Wait until your energy dips under a "magic number" (10 is for me)
-Move your mouse button on your cat form button, wait for GCD to come back up
-Double Click cat form
-You just powershifted!

It's definitely probably the worst way to do it like that, but that's just to illustrate how easy it really is.

david0925- thats not the same thing at all as 'press button once per 12 sec for +70 dps lol', is it. and there are still complications about watching the rest of the fight as well, mana, procs, GCD, ticks and lag.

If you are watching omen, the rest of the fight, your combo point cycle, your cooldowns, and moving around and such, then you're quite likely to mess up slightly and shift wrong. basically, saying that it = 70dps is just unrealistic.

also use macro /cast !Cat Form.