Top one, Ela. Staff of Primal Fury beats the Pillar of Ferocity any day.

I've started using [Brooch of Deftness] in my cat gear. Using 1.8 AEP for hit (and expertise, not sure if this is correct) it comes out to:

22*1.8 + 21*1.8 = 109.08 AEP

It's a step down (lot of points spent on stamina) from the [Haramad's Bargain] I used before, but it puts me right at the hit cap (I only have 2 +hit/agi gems socketed right now). I just want the gloves from Al'ar and the Vashj belt now - so annoying having rips or clearcast shreds dodged

As much as I value hit, [Brooch of Deftness] isn't the best way to get it. The [Choker of Vile Intent] has a fair bit of hit, as well as agility. As far as expertise goes, the [Shapeshifter's Signet], [Belt of One-Hundred Deaths], [Shoulderpads of the Stranger], and [Gloves of the Searing Grip] will all net you a fair bit of expertise without gimping your other stats -- a total of 4.5% reduced dodge.

I certainly agree it's not optimal - I got it for my off-tank/threat set originally and just started using it to hit the cap - but of the expertise items I only have shapeshifters currently (and I won't take the others over pure dps'ers who want them so not sure I'll ever get them) and that seems like an even bigger drop in power to use over other dps-rings.

As of late, I've felt that Innervates going to Shadow Priests do far more good than to a healer. As you said healers haven't had many mana issues, and in 2.3 many of them got even more longevity than before (updated Intensity/Meditation, Water Shield for Shamans). Whereas the Shadow Priest can use the Innervate to increase mana regen for their entire party.

edit: Re: Brooch of Deftness for DPS. I wouldn't. However, I have made it a mainstay in my tanking set (don't need the defense on Juggernaut) and it's a very solid boost in threat. My "miss" section has shrunk considerably since the patch.

My current tanking gear is:
Helm: [Merciless Gladiator's Dragonhide Helm]
Neck: [Necklace of the Juggernaut]
Shoulders: [Nordrassil Feral-Mantle]
Back: [Gilded Thorium Cloak]
Chest: [Nordrassil Chestplate]
Bracers: [Veteran's Dragonhide Bracers]
Gloves: [Nordrassil Handgrips]
Belt: [Belt of Natural Power]
Legs: [Nordrassil Feral-Kilt]
Boots: [Boots of Natural Grace]
Rings: [Ring of Unyielding Force] and [Violet Signet of the Great Protector]
Trinkets: [Spyglass of the Hidden Fleet] and [Commander's Badge]
or [Badge of Tenacity] and [Moroes' Lucky Pocket Watch]

As always having a single list is a good start, but once you get some reasonable gear then you will find certain items moving up or down depending on your other stats.

Programs like RAWR give a better view as to what specific items would be better for you but again it depends on your preferences and making sure that you have enough of the stats that you value.

There is also a another version available for Emmeralds site as a download from this Forum post that includes S3/2.3 items.

I don't quite agree with that notion. Generally each role is best left to the people who excell at it. If a healer tosses the occasional damage spell, I doubt anyone would credit that damage to what made the difference between beating the enrage timer, or wiping to it, because in reality whatever damage they did is not even worth mentioning when compared to the damage the raid did.

Can that regrowth save someone, or be used very successfully? Oh most certainly, especially on a fight like Archimonde. I generally just keep myself alive if I get doomfired, until the ticks are down enough that it won't cause much strain on the healers. Likewise, if melee get knocked back and one of them is doomfired, that regrowth can be the difference between the person surviving to make it back in healer range, or dying, which increases the risk of wiping to a soulcharge.

That said, I don't think overusing it will be very effective. The 2k healing vs 2k damage is an oversimplification. It's probably more along the lines of 1.5k healing (the hot aspect will likely be wasted because anyone low enough to cause you to shift out to heal will have plenty of heals incoming) vs 3k+ damage (have to consider potential energy wasted from shifting, your cycle getting messed up/mangle dropping, etc). While healing has a very noticable effect on any fight (when anyone's hp's drop to zero they die, obviously a very noticable effect), damage, or lack thereof, can have just as serious an impact (even on fights without enrage, eventually attrition will get the better of your raid if damage is too low).

I know that's a concept we struggled with for a long time pre-TBC. Dps slacking can just as easily cause a wipe as healers "letting someone die", which was seen as the primary reason for wiping (nevermind the fact that people died because healers ran out of mana on a fight that lasted several minutes past what it should have).

Anyway, before I ramble on too much, my point is that a smart regrowth here and there can be really helpful, but constantly shifting out to "save people" seems like it's just a complete waste of dps. In reality, most those people you are saving are probably about to receive heals from the actual healers anyway, and if they aren't, chances are your ~1.5k regrowth won't make any difference. It's just situations, like for example Archimonde doomfired outside of healer range, where smart use of our heals can really help (and of course tranquility is always nice, I'm a big fan of using that when the situation calls for it).

I have a very dumb question, but to which I found no answer in the EJ pages I skimmed :
so far, the base attack table used in both calculators I tried looks like this (for a feral cat fighting a level 73 boss) :

Miss 9%
Dodge 5.6%
Glancing Blow 25.0%
Those are base values, excluding hit rating/expertise impact, and assuming no block/parry since our cat is smart enough to attack from behind.

Are these base values correct (id est, are they unquestionnably used by the whole community) ? If yes, was it officially released by Blizzard , or experimentally verified by several raiders ? If it was (as I believe) computed using combat logs, do we have any reliable sources available , and where ?

If you looked a bit harder you would have found:
[Rogue/Warrior] Weapon Skill Adjustment Discussion
There is now a new thread 2.3: Miss rate vs Boss mobs?
The first thread is long but if you want to dispute anything in it you should read it all to see how they got there.

Was reading the whole post thinking of tranq, but you didn't forget it ^^. When I was feral I loved barskin+tranq or just tranq, it wastes a lot of dps, but if your group is low enough, even with no healing gear at all it heals for very high amounts. The only time I'd shift out other than that were during knockbacks and such, since you're going to have to run back to the mob, might as well throw an instant heal while doing so, exceptions being when you're high on energy(knockback at ~40 and it ticks right after, waste of energy to switch out since you'll come back in melee at 80-100 depending on distance) and when sprint is up.


As for the list linked, I used it not long ago, I'd say you can replace quite a few pieces with heroic badge gear(not sure it was updated at 2.3 since I switched spec), but it's still a good list to find the easy to obtain items on a new druid. Once you start raiding tho, you probably need to consider set bonus(2T4) and what you're doing in the raid(pure dps/offtanking) as well as the gear stats based on the rest of your stats(capped hit, crit immune etc).

All instant spells reset your swing timer as a druid anyway, like any class other than shamans or paladins. It has always been like that I believe. In the early days a community rep said on official forums this was because shamans and paladins are true hybrids, which was a shocking message to the druids back then.

I'd be curious if anyone has done any testing on whether this means the Silence-affected bear abilities or Feral Faerie Fire in Cat have the same effect in forms. I've been trying to cut down on uselessly spamming FFF when waiting for Energy, just in case.

You disagree then state the same thing we are saying =). Neither of us chain shift out to heal. I let the healers do the vast majority of the healing =). But if someone within range just took a massive hit then my instant regrowth + a priest shield could mean he survives the next hit instead of dying. Neither of us try to top the healing meters, or will regrowth every time. It is purely an emergency thing. I would say half of the time that I instant shift and heal him, he gets other heals within the next second. I could have gone without the heal and done a bit of extra DPS. However the other half of the time, its made a clear difference to the fight. At the beginning of Archimonde tries I would use an instant regrowth on our tank before a fear (yes he was not buff capped) justt o top him off and help out.

There really are no fights I can name that I feel ensuring someone survives is better than me doing an extra 50DPS. Even if every single time I shifted the person was healed to full before my heal landed I would still be fine with this. Letting a rogue die is a FAR larger waste of DPS. The fact that every week I can say I saved at least 1 person makes it worth it. As I stated earlier, some guilds run healer light compared to others. Our healers get stressed healing all the raid damage fast enough so every little bit helps (6 on Vashj, 7 Archimonde, 6-7 Bloodboil).

Of course shifting out every time someone is low would be pointless and a waste, not to mention run you oom VERY fast (I can shift and heal 6-7 times on a full raid mana bar, maybe). But its not difficult to gauge if the healers are under pressure (<3 grid) and if they are, a few well timed instant heals works wonders. Like a tranquility after an AE (Hi Najentus!). We can heal, we should heal, its just practice to do it only when needed, and T5 makes it a lot easier to be a life saving kitty cat.



EDIT

Easy to test this, just turn on logging and spam FFF just before your next kitty attack. After a while check your logs for the gaps between swings and see if FFF affects it or not. I am curious myself and will check it once I get my internet back at home =).

Yeah. I realized after writing that I'll have to test it tonight or tomorrow and post here. My initial expectation is that the attacks don't get delayed because the bear swings come regularly. Or else I'll be able to delay them forever with just Demo Roar spam. It's a little more likely that FFF could be bugged (I'd call it a bug.) this way though.

By the way, anyone else notice that Mangle (Bear) and FFF in bear have the same 1 sec GCD that the cat abilities have, instead of 1.5 sec? I find it a little funny. And nice. ^^

Pretty sure it's caster form melee swings & spells they're talking about and not Cat/Bear form & FFF, which (I'm just about as positive as can be) don't reset the swing timer.

Couldnt find this anywhere (if anyone has a link to my question and Im just a blind ol' druid) but after playing around in RAWR today trying to figure out bear mitigation and a whole bunch of other crap. I had to ask myself where does the +hit come into play. Ive been filing through hundreds of perfect druid builds and future item needs. But it seems to be lacking on the +hit.

There is nothing more frustrating then running up to a mob, getting ready to mangle and your mangle is misse/dodged/parried. I get so frusted, and Ive been on a mission now to try and increase my +hit rating in bear but. But alas I keep coming up empty handed. Are there any suggestions you guys can give me. I know mangle is one of the key threat generators in bear form. If I cant land mangle it makes tanking on bloodboil extremely hard, especially if im trying to pull it off the MT who has 7 debuffs.

[Item not found!] is also a decent option if you're not shy the defense, especially if you're getting a lot of resilience from s3/pvp3 gear.

For bosses where it's really important that the initial hit lands, swapping in some rogue pieces can help, but what I usually do is just equip my Stranglestaff and then swap back to a tanking weapon once the hits have landed. There's a fair bit of extra hit just on that staff that none of the other weapons have, and if you're building threat without being hit, mitigation from the weapon doesn't matter.

I made a list of the setup that I will be using:


I got a few suggestions like use the S3 chest over S3 helm, but I think I am better off using the S3 chest for tanking, since the resilience helps and I am not defense capped. I did get the S3 helm last night, and overall I think that gear list posted above should put me on pretty high amount of stats for raid dps.

The list looks solid.

In keeping the 2T5 this looks to probably be the best.
The only "flaw" is that S3 chest is WAY superior to the T4 chest and Skulker's Greaves are a fair bit better than T5. For sustained DPS I think its probably worth giving up 2T5 and using the T4 Gloves/Shoulders, S3 Helm/Chest and Skulker's greaves for legs. The T5 set bonus, while nice I find is more usuable in PvP than in PvE. Its rare I'll hit a situation where I can't solve the problem with either a Healthstone or Healing Pot instead of needing to use an insta-regrowth.

re: +hit

Additionally if you are unable to get a [Belt of Natural Power], the 2.3 Badge rewards have a phenomenal tanking belt with some +hit. [Waistguard of the Great Beast]

The 2pc T5 set is amazing, I've been able to save myself or another person so many times in a raid, when the healers were not able to heal, I think it helps a lot when needed, considering raid buffed you are usually around 8K mana pool.