Heh... Your full T6, Illidan-killing guild's MT is not what I meant. I said T5-geared. 60% seems low for a bear at that level of gear, though. That's only like ~54% dodge... (I'm a dodge freak, but) I've got 63% dodge with Idol of Terror on, and I haven't even killed Kael.

I'm about the T5 geared level you're on about. I get around 52% avoidance raid buffed.

For the bear I did take the Bear form at first but the bleeds are quite intense on healers in the group I run it with so we swapped in a warrior to take bleeds as they get the damage reduction of defensive stance. But often we're running 2 ferals as tanks now anyway so doesn't matter much.


I had a question regarding the Spreadsheet of Voldin's. I've had it lying around for a few weeks now and during a silly boss wipe on Teron last night when the constructs refused to despawn, I had a play around with it. I stuck all my gear in and I press the item button. It goes through the fields and adds in comments of what items are upgrades (I think).

For example this is the output from my helm:

I'm confused as to what the numbers mean. I think the first number is unbuffed DPS, and the third number is raid buffed DPS? But what are the other numbers. Is it DPS increase over my current gear? So like Cowl of Defiance would be a 0.5 dps increase unbuffed or a 2.2 dps decrease raid buffed? Sorry if I've missed any obvious legend or key but I couldn't see one.

With 4/5 T5 and T6 head i have 50,6% avoidance with the normal raid buffs (no GoA). I can get it up if i use moroes trinket and change some enchants but, if you consider that we OT most of the time 60% avoidance is a problem for fast threat build.

As far as tanking ZA bosses, I solo tank the lynx boss with 2 healers without any problems. The lash only hits for around 12k every 5s or so on top of his regular 3k or so hits. You can solo tank the bear boss as well with 3 healers, but doing it with 2 is next to impossible, alternating avoidance trinkets helps a lot if you were to try. The dragon hawk boss doesn't require any additional tank, a dps warrior smashing them works just fine for us with only 2 healers. The only special thing to be aware of is stunning flame casters that break MC (if you use MC) and feral charging scouts.
Hex Lord is also fairly good for a druid as you can shift out during his aoe phase and tranquility, remove CoD, etc. Same for dragonhawk during bomb phase.

That's absolutely correct, though I'm not sure if it's counting breaking sets or not, as I'd guess you're using T4 helm for set bonus.

My showing Spur's gear was as a comparison, a warrior can gear for avoidance just as easily as druids can, Defense (1% per 20 rating + .33% Block) and they have talents for 7.4% avoidance compared to our 4%. So while we're able to win the avoidance matchup fairly easily, they won't be horribly far behind unless there's a huge gear gap.

Hit rating:
A while ago I used to have very little hit rating on my tank gear, probably only around 14 from the DPS head enchant. When we reached Leotheras, I suddenly had a very important reason for stacking hit. With the hit/expertise neck from heroic badges I was able to get up to 70hit/21expertise (100+ hit with edgewalkers and Opera trinket - more hit than my DPS gearset lol). Then I realised something, my tanking stats had barely been affected; sure, I lost a tiny bit of armour+dodge+stamina, but I still had plenty of everything I needed.
I found myself rarely using my full tank gearset anymore. Trash mobs/heroics/Al'ar/Zul'Aman - stacking hit rating was awesome for all of it.
Gaining such a huge amount of hit rating for such a small loss in mitigation and HP seems like a bargain.

While hit rating / expertise is important in certain fights, it does not help you survive. IMO the best way is to have full tank gear with every enchant and gem focused on survival, and replace some pieces with dmg gear in case you need hit rating / expertise.

For example when i tank Leo i wear about 100 hit rating and 10 expertise. I fill the crit gap with [Recipe: Elixir of Ironskin] in such cases. Works really nice.

What? No, avoidance trinkets won't help, considering the majority of damage comes from P2 bleeds (even without taking Mangle into account) which cannot be dodged/avoided.

Yes but it does help the survivability of the DPS in your raid. What happens if you get 4 parries/misses at the start of the fight? You get a dead healer/dps. Not only that but if you can significantly increase your threat with hit rating, you increase the damage of the entire raid, no other group or raid buff can boost your raid's DPS so significantly. (excluding threat drops, FD/vanish etc.)

I'm also a firm believer in the offtank roll of ferals, if you gem/enchant your gear purely for tanking, you cripple your DPS.

I use the pvp belt instead of the belt of natural power to give me my resilience boost, alternatively the 10defense rating from a fort flask covers the gap.

Well i did not say to offtank in full tank gear, did i.

What i say is that there are fights where you need only to survive, nothing more. So you should have gear for that. When i tank Tidalvess i wear full tank gear because survival is more important than threat. If dmg dies, he can be ressed or you can do it without him (his mistake, anyway). If you die, wipe. If you are tanking Karathress, no one is going to touch your target for around 5 minutes.

So having tank gear enchanted for threat gimps you in these situations. You cannot make your "threat enchanted" tank gear more survival, but you can allways alternate pieces of your tank gear with pieces of dmg gear with expertise and hit rating to generate more threat.

Use the trinkets to avoid the bleeds until mangle wears off. I've tanked the entire thing before when our other tank died in p1, but I definitely wouldn't want to try to repeat it. :/

I guess what I'm trying to say is that threat-enchanted gear gimps your tanking stats far less than tank-enchanted tank gear gimps your threat.

My full tank gear is gemmed/enchanted with very little hit, mainly agility and stamina. If I need threat I can swap out the neck+boots+trinket for a significant boost with very little gimping to my tanking stats. I maybe lose 500 armour, 10stamina, and few % dodge. That's a very small gimping for such a huge hit gain.

Doing that would gimp my tanking stats too much
I have very little dps gear with hit rating on actually.

I kind of disagree here. Where do you do dmg in your tank gear - on trash? It is not important as much as smooth survival of the tank.

My opinion is that feral druid's value is not that it can do both dmg and tanking in one fight - since one of these roles will be gimped significantly. The main value is that you can change roles between fights. E.g. you need 3-4 good tanks (in terms of survivability) for Karahress, yet you need none for Leo. Feral druids let you switch pure dmg and pure tanking roles and adapt to an encounter.

You could change raid setup for each boss, but i am strictly against this. We do all encounters with one setup and so far it wasnt a problem. However i heard that MH/BT might be different story - hopefuly we'll see soon.

Re: Nalorakk, I don't see any specific limitations to druid tanking, insofar as I managed to tank it in very basic gear (HC set, t4 helm and gloves, t5 shoulders and belt of natural power, and the rest blue/kara/rep gear - nothing extraordinary for the level of difficulty at which ZA is supposed to be, my gear was rather entry level for this instance actually). I tanked the bear and another druid (with even worse gear) tanked the human form, so there's really nothing special to mention as far as "t4 druids" tanking it are concerned. So the bottom line is that any vaguely decently geared t4 druid can tank it, be it human or bear form, and there's little need to split hairs on such a basic, tank and spank fight

As Boevis and I pointed out, though, a warrior + druid combo is preferred overall for this instance, but I've not seen anything in the encounters design that would not work with pretty much any combination of tanks. All in all ZA looks to me as being very intensive on healers requirements, much less on dps/tanks requirements, not only first fight but all fights. A badly geared tank is much more likely to die from healers not keeping up (also due to raid damage in general) than from spike/unlucky damage (as in, a bleed is a bleed no matter what your class/gear, and proper execution by the tank is going to help much more than just crossing fingers not to get a 3x crushing thrash in 1 second as in another pro-warrior encounter that shall not be named).

I usually tank the Hunter on Karathress, which we kill first. Meaning my threat and damage is both useful. As for Leo, I usually main tank (the only boss I usually do maintank) - during the demon phases I just dps like everyone else.
Also, you shouldn't underestimate feral DPS in tank gear. With all the buffs recently, I have some very nice dps stats in tank gear (although lacking a little crit %).
I have DPSed on SSC trash before while completely unaware that I had full tank gear on! We're the only class/spec that can do that

I've updated the main post with a Zul'aman tanking list, based on the one Anathor posted. If there's any changes that need doing, just say.

At the moment Cat DPS is sitting in a pretty good spot IMO. WF might be a bit much, especially at earlier raid content. I could see it being revised once the expansion hits to keep scaling going, but really as long as we get some decent itemization in Sunwell I think they have Cat DPS right for this expansion.

I agree. Granted we don't have rogues/fury wars in full T6 with bladed of azzinoth, but right now I feel my damage is very competitive compared to rogues/fury wars, especially given the extra utility and dual purpose that a feral druid brings.

I'd say my dps gear is for the most part a tiny bit worse than our rogues (mainly a few highly wanted slots like trinkets, which they obviously get before me). On Teron, our rogues in the melee group (enhance shaman, fury warrior, 1-2 people with drums) will do about 1500-1600 dps atm. I do 1100-1200 dps in the hunter group (Just had trueshot aura), without bloodlust/etc, and only me using drums. Based on personal experience from when I'm in the melee group, I gain between 50-100 dps from those buffs (While we don't get windfury, +10% AP when we have such insane AP values is quite strong). Add to that the fact that a lot of our itemization is still somewhat poor (especially when it comes to high end DPS weapons), and feral druid dps is right around where I would expect it to be, I just hope they improve our itemization some for sunwell.

This is not technically true of expertise, since reducing parries is in fact an indirect form of reducing incoming damage.

The bug where parries trigger a mob auto was fixed.

For T6 geared Druids, I'd suggest tanking almost all of ZA in DPS gear. This way, for all the trash, you only need one tank. On packs of 4 trolls, have a priest MC a Flamecaster to ease the burst damage. With this kind of setup you have the AoE threat of a Protection Paladin while doing significantly more DPS and much much higher single target threat. Just wildly swing your Paws around spamming Mangle, Maul, and Swipe and let your DPS classes go wild.

I like wearing 2/5 T4 + 2/5 T6 + S3 Helm + 2 DPS Rings + PvP Wrist/Belt + Battlemaster and Shadowmoon Insignia. I wear this for all the trash, the Eagle boss, and the Lynx boss. For the other bosses, I wear my normal tanking gear (and double mounted Bears and double Beserkers). This way, all your DPS, save maybe a crazy Destruction Warlock, can get a blessing other than Salv to further increase your raid DPS.

We roll with a Resto Shaman and a Holy Paladin for healing, coupled with a Shadowpriest. I tank and we have a Fury warrior off-tank on the Saberlash-style fights.

The Hexlord fight is cheesed with Dampen Magic + Shadow Resist Neck + Shadow Protection Buff. Our last kill Dropped him within three siphons.

Solo-tanking the Bear boss is nearly (if not completely) impossible with current itemization without an overly stacked group ie. three Resto Druids (or something similar), and even then, its still risky and who wants to take four Druids to ZA? :p