Using Toskk's spreadsheet the Idol of Terror IS better than Everbloom assuming the 85% proc chance stays the same.

For pathing, I just follow the inner ring back and forth and fall back into the outer ring if a beam is going to be close (sort of like the video). Me being the first or second tank varies from week to week depending on who the other tank is. Like the below quote says, I doubt we have abnormally high rogue damage on the flames alone - we're still limited by threat and beams (first tank will have an MD and BS/UR, but we still don't use any totems).

Not to derail the FR gear discussion, but I was hoping I could get some advice on more general choices. I've always considered myself primarily a tank, it's what I prefer to do; but some fights in BT, like Teron gorefiend, are single tank encounters, and the warrior class lead is more or less de facto tanking it.

So, my guild then realized my dps is low, and I'm finding myself on the WL far too often. A lot of my gear is gemmed/enchanted for tanking, and I will be looking to move stamina gems to agility, but let me know if there's any other options I should consider. Since we're working on tier 6, I don't have much of a chance to go back to tier 5 instances for farming, they're no longer on the raid schedule. One of the upsides to this is that I'm missing the tier5 helm/gloves: so I have the 2t4 set bonus naturally. That said, I can't swap in the tier 5 helm and put on tier 4 shoulders, if that would be a suggestion in the first place. I could put on tier 4 shoulders, but then I'd have 3 tier 4, 2 tier 5. This may be worth it with the shifted enchants...

[Stag-Helm of Malorne] +defense/dodge enchant, stamina gems. I'll move this to hit/ap + agility
[Worgen Claw Necklace]
[Nordrassil Feral-Mantle] stamina/defense gems could be swapped
[Royal Cloak of Arathi Kings]
[Nordrassil Chestplate] agility/stamina/defense gems, could up dps gems
[Veteran's Dragonhide Bracers] already agility
[Gauntlets of Malorne]
[Belt of Natural Power] agility/stamina purples
[Boots of Natural Grace]
[Band of Eternity] (The melee DPS version, I'm not sure how to link the right one due to them having the same name.)
[Ravenclaw Band] I also have [A'dal's Command] but since my hit is at +7.17% (including the band) I figured the +hit may be worth keeping the blue.
[Hourglass of the Unraveller]
[Romulo's Poison Vial]
[Everbloom Idol]

[Wildfury Greatstaff] Yes, this is horrible for dps, and probably a large part of the problem. I will get the [Pillar of Ferocity] soon; I probably shouldn't have passed on the first one that dropped. Never got the one from kara.

My spec is pretty standard except that I don't have furor. (armory link) I know, I know, powershifting is important, but I've never liked it, and I was primarily tanking. With the changes in 2.3 I will probably go for it. How much dps does it add now, how much do you estimate it will add in 2.3?

And in general, considering that things like leader of the pack won't show up in wow webstats, about what % of rogue's damage should I show in the logs to be successful? The dps group is usually just a warrior or a hunter, then rogues/me. Shamans are not common.

Couple of easy things to do:

-re-gem the helm
-use the Ogir'la bracers and trinket over your current selections
-make Shadowprowler's if you want to keep the T5 chest for tanking
-try to get enough hit through other means so you can use A'dals ring

Overall though your gear is pretty solid and you should be able to do 70-75% of what your rogues are doing dps wise, sometimes better and sometimes worse. Depends on the fight. Therefore you might want to look at how your are spending your time dpsing. Are you doing the standard rotation of shred to 5CP's and waiting until 75+ energy before ripping?

Get the deep shadow belt, if you ever run T5 again. [Belt of Deep Shadow] socketed for DPS is a LOT better than BoNP for DPS purposes.

Adal's is better. Better is better, unless you notice yourself making mistakes a lot with your rotations.

Finally, don't compare yourself to a rogue or a good DPS warrior. Remember, on a fight like Gorefiend you're essentially adding the DPS of one player who got ghosted with your battle rez, along with the crit you give your group. It's all about solid rotations; once you get ahead, you can keep a good crit streak going pretty long.

Furor is must if you OT, you will miss the 10 rage when you will want to build threat as fast as you can. Den Mother's with agility enchant is equally good for tanking and dps (i dont think anyone has stamina problems at T6 gear). Also are the head and the gloves the only T4 items you have?

I am searching for expertise cap but cant find anything. Has someone tried to count it? Is it the same for every fight?

Its approximately 6% dodge and 12% parry against a boss level mob, so you would need ~24 expertise (~100 rating) to get rid of dodges and half the parries, and ~48 expertise (~200 rating) to eliminate everything.

Quite simply, it's not going to happen with the gear that's in the game right now/2.3 for ferals (or for warriors either, afaik).

I am planning on putting together a tanking set that has both the new badge neck (48stam/20hit/20expertise or so) and the shapeshifters signet, as between them it gives 5% "to hit" in effect, plus the extra hit from the neck (although I'm using pendant of the titans, so I have that already). Getting crit immune is going to be interesting, although I think I've got a set sorted that'll work without having to switch helm/shoulder enchants or use 15resil/12def on chest/bracers, or using gems. It allows a bit more variety in gear anyway.

In regards to Furor --- If you run at least 1 resto druid per raid there is absolutely no reason to spec Imp MOTW. That being said ---> Pick Furor up

Spartakos:

Expertise: We have added a new stat and associated rating called expertise and expertise rating. Expertise rating converts to expertise at the same rate that weapon skill rating formerly converted at. Each point of expertise reduces the chance for your attacks to be dodged or parried by 0.25%

Base Dodge is what? 5%?

It will effectively work like +hit I believe --- 100 deaths > Money belt (Think everything else that is still considered the best dps item for a slot remains.

EDIT: beaten by dukes x-x

After getting 15k+ crit deaths on four pulls straight some weeks ago, aggroing the whole guild on me for being a slacker, I can tell you it's not a position where one wants to be =P

All I did was follow gearing instructions of another druid with previous experience on flame tanking... I'm secretly hoping for him to get crit "streaks" on him as he's still not capped so I could have my vengeance!

The next patch will help enormously with improving your gear via rewards that can be obtained without raiding.


Helm: S3. No doubt here this is superior to everything but the cursed vision from illidan
Neck: Fine (original heroic badge neck is slightly better, but this is a marginal difference).
Shoulders: T4
Cloak: pre-BT raids there's a bunch you could use (Cloak from Kael, Aran, Morogrim etc). BT you have the Shadowmoon Destroyer's Drape which is very good. If you cant get any of those, get a Vengeance Wrap crafted. Its the best you'll get besides all the ones I just mentioned.
Chest: S3. Again very very good. Aside from Nether Shadow and Midnight Chestguard you're not finding anything better than this.
Bracers: Ogri'lla bracers are good for now. The druid Honor wrists post 2.3 are absurdly good (and way overbudget, I expect a nerf). The rogue ones are quite good too.
Gloves: T4
Belt: Deep Shadow if you're still able to get Vortexes. The heroic badge belt that is coming out is quite good too (marginal difference between it and Deep Shadow).
Legs: The heroic badge ones are excellent, as are Skulker's Greaves. Only T6 and the offset T6 equiv pants are better.
Boots: Heroic badge boots are the best you can get post patch besides Shadowmaster's treads.
Rings: Almost all the rings require some sort of either T5 raiding or T6 raiding to get. Otherwise the two you're wearing now are actually pretty good (post 2.3 Toskk's calculator has Ravenclaw as VERY slightly better than A'dal's).
Trinkets: Bloodlust Brooch and Hourglass are the two best post 2.3 that dont require any raiding to get. Crystalforged is very close. Darkmoon Card: Crusade is good, but expensive and really not that much better than any others.

Note that the two ideal pieces of T4 are the Shoulders and Gloves if you dont have the T6 Pants/Gloves. If you do have T6 pants gloves, you should go Shoulders/Chest for T4.

It is a better belt (the best one for DPS you can get in fact), but if you're rarely raiding T5 instances its difficult to get, whereas Deep Shadow CAN be purchased.

If you have the plan for it, Belt of Deep Shadow is close to unlimited supply. Belt of One-Hundred Deaths is pretty much the best melee belt going once 2.3 hits, so there's a lot of competition for it. Sure, I'd prefer it to the Deep Shadow, but I wouldn't take it if another pure-dps melee class wanted it.

You have to consider the wider implications of what you do if you care even slightly about your guild or rate of progression. It's just like the DST - it's the best feral DPS trinket, but I wouldn't ever consider taking it over any of our rogues, warriors or enh shaman because it would get more use and be better used on any of them. It wouldn't ever go to me because of using a loot council, but even with DKP systems there needs to be some sense in it if you don't care purely about self-character progression.

If you look at the difficulty each upgrade item has instead of T4 i think that its the 1 of the 2 pieces you will keep, since T6 drops from Archimonde and Cursed Vision from Illidan (so you can gem and ench your T5 head for dps, if you dont have it too bad ). I think the 12agi +3%crit meta makes all non meta heads worse, no matter the ilvl they have.

My opinion here is that [Belt of One-Hundred Deaths] actually benefits a feral druid more than a rogue. Rogues do not get parries. I would use the belt for both dmg and for offtanking, maybe for maintaking as well sometimes (typically leotheras, void reaver). Expertise is simply lovely for tanking.

edit:
If DST stands for dragonspine trophy, then it is different case. We do far less dmg via white attacks than the other classes you named, so it is obvious that this haste trinket does not go to a druid. Using the same logic, the belt should go to feral druids :-). We benefit from it more.

Once you get past T5 content the worth of an offtank that can still generate good threat while in front of the boss diminishes greatly. Both Hyjal and BT require 1 tank for the majority of encounters, and those that require offtanks do not typically need extra threat (supremus, for example, is based entirely on health). The only real exception is Gurtogg, but even then while not MT'ing you won't be using the expertise very well. Sure, it would help a bit for trash, but do you really want to base your entire tanking setup on trash tanking in terms of future content?

I agree that expertise is nice for tanking, but I would not use the belt for tanking if I had it, due to the PvP belts being vastly superior in the amount of crit immunity they give, along with more stamina (although socket dependant) and armour. Any time that I switch out any piece of gear for something that gets more threat and I die (which happens surprisingly often when I do), I always wonder if it was worth it (and invariably it isn't - 5g repairs ftl).

Considering also that as long as you use tier gear in most slots, it will be quite hard to get the 9% hit cap with the change to weapon skill, the difference between the two belts is pretty small for pure DPS. This differs for other melee classes, because although they may not be at the hit cap, they will definitely be at the hit cap for specials. Due to druid's having the same cap for both, there's little difference between Expertise and Hit for pure DPS, while for other classes Expertise is a lot better pretty much all the time (mainly because talents get you very close to hit-capped with specials or fully hit capped with specials for the other classes).

Quick question: will the 4 pieces of T6 will still be best for dps after next patch and which slots would be best - im thinking of shoulders, chest, gloves, pants and head from Illidan. Right, wrong?

I recently had a discussion with an old warrior friend of mine about rage and threat.
He read somewhere, but I can't seem to validate his claim, that rage gains actually cause threat.

I'm putting together a TPS spreadsheet for druids for my guild, and I wanted to know if anyone could back this up?

Looking at the WWS for Voidreaver from our Sunday fight:
Kameelyan - WWS

You'll see that I had several rage gaining procs:
Primal Fury (5 rage on crit) proc'd a whole 106 times, giving me a total of 530 rage.
I used in Enrage when I wasn't MT due to knockbacks for extra threat, which was an additional 86 rage.
Lastly, Bloodlust (Druid T4 2 piece set bonus) proc'd 10 times, for another 100 rage.

Now, I'm not sure if you even gain threat from rage generation, but if you do and our threat modifiers are applied, that would be an additional 1074 threat. While that's not a lot over the course of an 8.5 minute void reaver fight, I'm trying to be as accurate as possible.

He's right. 1 point of rage generated is worth 5 threat before modifiers.

Sorry for posting this here, but I'm not sure how to get ahold of the author of this spreadsheet. I tried this out today and noticed that it was calculating my stat totals incorrectly. Below are my corrections to the formulas to account for SotF not applying to base stats and always rounding down. I have tested these changes for Night Elves only, but they should work for Tauren as well.

Sheet: Gear_Buufs
Cell D72 =FLOOR((SUM(D10:D67)+IF(Malorne4pc,30,0))*SOTF*HOTW,1)+D68*HOTW
Cell D73 =FLOOR(SUM(E10:E66)*SOTF,1)+E68
Cell D74 =FLOOR(SUM(F10:F66)*SOTF,1)+F68

My health totals are still incorrect, but I haven't had time to completely diagnose that problem yet.

Rage gains from procs, talents, pots, and so on cause threat, rage gain from doing or taking damage doesnt. Basically, if it shows up in your combatlog, you get threat from it.

I've seen alot of 2.3 macros on here, but I'm surprised I havn't seen the following, so I thought I'd post my current PTR macros:

Basically, the idea is that currently I have three "shift" keys.
B (Bear Form), C (Cat Form), and V (Travel).

Now originally, I just had the following:

/cancelform
/cast <form>

The problem here was that there was no good way to get back into caster form.
I essentially wanted B to take me into bear form, if I was in any other form, but I wanted to exit Bear form if I was already in bear form.

Here's my solutions:
MACRO 3 "Cat" Ability_Druid_CatForm
/cancelform [nostance:3]
/cast Cat Form(Shapeshift)
END

MACRO 10 "B Macro" Ability_Racial_BearForm
/cancelform [nostance:1]
/cast Dire Bear Form(Shapeshift)
END

This is untested, but should work, will test and report findings:
MACRO 1 "HawkCheetah" Ability_Druid_TravelForm
/cancelform [stance:1/3]
/cast [swimming]Aquatic Form; [nocombat,flyable]Flight Form; [noswimming]Travel Form
END

Any thoughts?

I also had this idea, but no time to test it as of yet. I'll post my findings once the PTR is back up as it appears to be down. This also assumes you can still do script type coding in macros. (its been awhile)

local nStance = GetShapeshiftForm(true);
/cancelform
/use Super Healing Potion
CastShapeshiftForm(nStance);

The idea here is that you would need only one macro to use the potion for every form.