Bluepheonix331: Armory shows you in Resto gear for me. Some easy expertise gear to get would be the [Brooch of Deftness] and [Shapeshifter's Signet], along with some +hit gear. If your healers aren't having significant problems, switching in more threat gear while staying anti-crit capped (which PvP gear is good for) is probably a good option too. It's probably more to do with the stuns too, especially at the beginning of the fight, which as Merple said, you can use Free Action pots on. You may be able to outrange the stun too, although I've never had to tank Kaz so I couldn't say if it's possible.

You may also be getting Crippled. Make sure this gets dispelled, as it can have quite an effect on threat due to lower AP and much slower attack speed.

Sorry, i thought it would show my Tank gear. Well its 5/8 T6 all gemmed and enchated Def/Stam. Cloak is Silkk's, Wildfury Greatstaff/Pillar for MH, idol of terror, Pendant of the Titants, Belt of Natural Power, Treads of the Den Mother, Band of the Abyssal Lord & Violet Signet of the Great Protector, Commendation and Badge of Tenacity. Thats my main tanking gear (not for RoS and special fights) Sorry for not being more specific earlier.

Are you sure you filled out your profile correctly? The only Whytephire I can find is The World of Warcraft Armory which is not on Shadowmoon and he is not unguilded either. I assume that's also the one Dukes armoried because that guy is indeed in Resto gear. I also tried searching for your name on the EU armories but without luck. So what gives?

(I got suspicious after reading you socketed all your tier pieces with "Well its 5/8 T6 all gemmed and enchated Def/Stam" so wanted to check that out for myself.)

On a side note, why do so many druids I see recently go with [Band of the Abyssal Lord] over [Ring of the Stalwart Protector]?

I probably havent updated my profile recently. I'm in the guild Pactum Amicitae on the Madoran Server (US) Again, i'm sorry for logging in my Resto gear, that was my fault. As far as the ring i like the little bit of extra Def and +Hit becuase as i mentioned earlier, i seemed to be having trouble with simply getting mangle up on my target.

[Ring of the Stalwart Protector] is generally better for mitigation so there are only 3 reasons to use [Band of the Abyssal Lord] over it:

1) The hit is nice for threat.
2) They are over the AC cap already (but even then it would still be better).
3) They need the Defense to stay crit immune.
(4) All of the above.)

My money is on 1) and 3) in any case.

That ring has HR and def, which helps a lot. I've been using [Ring of Hardened Resolve] along with [A'dal's Signet of Defense]. I was going to use [Band of the Abyssal Lord] but I was short on armor.

Well it looks like Blizzard is going to release the new WotLK talent trees on live realms in ~3 weeks (which just happens to coincide with their competitor's release of warhammer). Who knows how many of the new mechanics (buff to 5p rip, agi changes, speed/roots indoor, glyphs, etc.) will make it, but at the very least it will be possible to get crit immunity from gear and there will be some new talents specs to mess around with depending on what your bear<->cat ratio is in raids.
Much more exciting discussions to look forward to than 3 pages of Muru-gear discussion :-)

Where did you see the "~3"? I've only seen "in the coming weeks", which could still very well be a couple months.

While a bunch of the mechanic changes are buffs I'm extremely concerned with the agi:dodge and agi:crit changes. Both of these going live without a full complement of talents (since we can only get 61 at the moment) could be a pretty big hit for both druid tanking and dps. Now the tanking aspect is probably "fixable" by just going full sta instead of full agi though this does result in problems with some fights (Muru notably). For DPS unless we get a bunch of good talents its going to be pretty rough. The fact we can't get our 51 point talent without losing OOC (which is likened to our combat potency) is just icing on that cake.

That said, new glyphs, the energy changes and the as yet unveiled final druid talent trees COULD make it even if not in our favour. Just things to consider though (start stocking up on some extra sta gems :P)

Keep in mind we went through the exact same process in 2.0. We couldn't get OOC and Mangle in the same build, so this wouldn't exactly be a precedent. The question will also come up as to which version of the trees we get. When the BC talents were released to live near the end of vanilla, we didn't get what was on the beta servers, but a build or two back. So even if they do another pass at the druid talents before then, we have no guarantee that we'll be getting those new, and still untested trees.

That said, I'll be impatiently waiting to get my crack at these new trees.

With the new talent trees coming out, has anyone given any thought to what kinds of spec we should be using for the last little bit of BC? Or will the time frame be so short that no one really cares?

Well releasing the current tree would cripple us as tanks since they have specifically stated they have NOT completed the druid tanking aspect yet.

Also I realize the precedent is there for getting mangle over OOC in BC. That wasn't really an issue since mangle was far superior to OOC. Berserk is better than OOC for bears but I cannot imagine its better than OOC for cat dps, especially with the OOC changes.

I'm not saying this is a huge problem just that its not nearly as clear what to take this time (in terms of OOC/Berserk).

I think people cares (to test the last abilities in raids/farming specs for 70-80 etc), however I doubt the talent trees going to look like they are atm, so very hard to say.

i personally have an outlined spec for 70. i would hope they do get around to us before the patch, but they haven't looked at other classes either (ie rogues) so it's hard to say. even though it is the last patch before the expansion, it will still be live for a while before LK comes out, at least a month (probably more imo).

Well personally, once the talents come out, I'll immediately move to something like Build No.1 - basically, checking out all the new talents and figuring out how they work. If we get the new energy system of energy gain outside of forms, feral charge no longer costs rage, so we probably won't need Furor, thus the entire resto tree basically goes out the window for your basic grinding and PvP duties.

From that point, it really depends on what you'll be doing with your time after the patch. I'll basically be farming, doing dailies and PVPing, and my tanking will be limited to heroics. So realistically, other than pulling a single point out of Infected Wounds and moving it over to Nature's Grasp, I'll probably be keeping a similar spec until WotLK.

If we don't get the energy system, I'll drop R&T and get Furor back.

And of course this all assumes that we get the current trees. Realistically, however, I can't see myself NOT getting Berserk.

To be honest I'm wondering what they're going to do about this, because the number of "effective energy on demand" abilities we've got going on right now are a bit absurd. Tiger's Fury on a 30s CD, Zerk on a 5m CD, as much instant powershifting as your mana can handle -without penalty- due to the energy in human form changes... it's all screams nerf.

Either Feral Druids will become spamming machines, or they're going to nerf Furor in a big fat way.


That said, you're right, furor would probably be a better pick, though having an 85% crit rate on FB would be great for PvP and grinding as well.

It's not like that on beta at the moment, is that a guarenteed change or is that just wrong?

As for talent tree implementation "crippling" druid tanking, I don't see why it would. You an have the same talent build now as you can with the wotlk tree, but you might need to drop a couple of points out of "extra" talents to get the full core build. In fact, stamina goes up (due to 6% SotF), crit immunity is guarenteed, threat stays the same or gets better (mangle on shorter cooldown, more swipe damage, more maul damage, more mangle damage, but 15% reduced from talent). Sure, you might need to make a choice as to exactly what you want (and have to drop Berserk to get OoC too).

I'd probably go with something like this in order to pick up all the good talents (king of the jungle would be nice, but not required). The 1 point in infected wounds is more a filler, it could go anywhere that's useful (brutal impact/nurturing instinct).

I'd also hold off on whining too hard before they release the patch. "The coming weeks" could easily mean "a few months" from previous waiting experiences.

Feral at 70 should be fine since they sledged hammered in +5% baseline to crit and dodge to cover up the agility nerf. Most of ferals problems are terrible itemization and bad scalability at 80, none of which will be present at 70 (well any worse than it is currently).

With the down ranking changes and the potion sickness though, I do question how the expect the healers to keep on raiding the current stuff.

There's no concern that the new talents and spells would be a significant buff to ferals all around. The only concern is if in 3.0 at 70, we get the reduced Agi to Crit/Dodge conversions. As is, I'm getting close to 90% avoidance on M'uru, and ~60% on other bosses... Having those drop to 60% and 45% would be incredibly detrimental to my ability to tank.

Speaking of these numbers is there an easy way to change Rawr so that I can examine the effect on my current gearing the switch in ratios would cause? I mean I could do it manually but that'd be fairly annoying. If the ratio change does go in I may need to regear some pieces (notably DPS ones that stacked Agi).

We don't know yet how we're going to handle 3.0 in Rawr, other than to say that we are going to handle it somehow; we're not going to leave everyone hanging. Right now our priority is releasing b16 (hopefully early next week). After that we're going to split the codebase, and start work on Rawr 2.0 (all kinds of new features), but simultaneously keep working on Rawr b17, which will be just model updates, probably including the 3.0 stuff.