Garnett0288

So I'm in need of some assistance. I'm upgrading a couple pieces of gear and am not sure which pieces are better than the other as they are all very comparable, and want to make sure that I make the right choices. The gear that I am upgrading are bracers & waist. I will be both pieces for my tanking set as well as a second piece for each slot for DPS. My guild is just starting 25 man content, but I have friends in higher guilds that will craft for me.

For Tanking my upgrade thoughts are:
Belt of Natural Power or Waistgaurd of the Great Beast for a new Waist slot

For DPS my upgrade thoughts are:
Vindicator's Dragonhide Bracers, Master Assassin Wristwraps or Swiftstrike Bracers for a new Bracer slot
Belt of Natural Power, Belt of Deep Shadow or Bladeangel's Money Belt for a new Waist slot

Any help at all would be greatly appreciated.

 

Grimmock

How far should I go to avoid wasting item points on crit reduction?

My situation is that in my current gear, I run just under 30k armor and slightly over 14k health, with only Mark of the Wild on. I still use the Heavy Clefthoof Vest and Leggings, both gemmed with Solid Stars of Elune in every slot. As my guild moves into our first 25-mans, I am looking to boost both my armor and avoidance, since I anticpate offtanking more than MTing.

In my current gear, I'm slightly over the cap for anti-crit, between the defense on my rings, cloak, HCH pieces, and S1 shoulders. My next logical upgrade slots are head, chest, legs. If I get the S3 chest, the 2piece bonus will activate, putting me waaaaaay over. If I choose the S3 Helm instead, and get Vestments of Hibernation for the chest, the same thing will happen.

I am reluctant to change out my rings since I'm not armor capped yet. (Unyielding Force/Grand Protector)

RAWR puts me at between -0.6... and -1.2....% chance to be crit with any of the guaranteed (badges/arena/honor) upgrades available to me.

Is this a huge problem? Or should I just live with the wasted item points until there are more choices?

 

Pyre

Going to the Druid Wiki link in the original post will answer both those questions for you, as you'll be able to use Rawr and Toskk's work to determine relative value of tanking and dps gear, respectively. The answer to both your questions is highly dependent on the rest of the gear you have now, and those tools allow you to enter the rest of your gear so you can make a more informed choice.

 

Pyre

It's not really a huge problem. Defense over the cap isn't worthless, it's just expensive from an item budget perspective relative to stamina or agility. If you have gems or enchants that add defense, I'd recommend swapping them out to add stamina, agility, or both, but otherwise natural gear upgrades will probably solve this problem for you.

[e] sorry for the repeat posts, somehow missed the multiquote.

 

Tinweasele

You are correct, assuming that you are the only attacker. You could in fact reduce a raid bosses health to time to live vs a 12000 dps raid, but its just annoying to deal with. So for the purposes of a rogue or other dps we try to keep it in terms of personal dps and armor pen has increasing returns on personal dps.

 

foxglove

I'd add to this point that agility gives the added benefit of more threat (via the extra crit and predatory instincts) and more rage generation (via the crit and primal fury). The scaling of threat gen with agi is one of the reasons bears have such powerful snap threat; crit mauls and mangles are very effective for establishing aggro.

Plus (I'm sure this has been mentioned already), there's the added bonus that agi is generally the best stat budgetwise for cat DPS (at a raid-geared level), so when you're OTing and then shift out to DPS, your tank gear is still useful.

 

Grimmock

I tank with Badge of Tenacity and the Pocketwatch. Which of the following usage conditions are likely to give the best results?

1. Pop the Badge right away on any fight. Let the effect drop. Then pop the Pocketwatch. The idea being that avoidance bonuses will have high uptime.

2. Spam them both on cooldown for a brief period of nigh invincibility every two minutes.

3. Save them for emergencies to survive healer fears/silences/etc. or chain crushes, etc.

 

Moxie

I've looked through much of this thread, and can't seem to find the exact answer I'm looking for. I realize hit rating is important, and I'm doing pretty good in cat dps form (7.9%). However, my hit rating in tanking gear is worse than an embarrassment. What is the number I should aim for in tanking gear? Any advice as to how to get that number? I'm going to work on my lower city rep for the expertise ring, but I'll still need some help after that. I'm having a hard time finding good tanking items with hit rating (I'm still at the Kara level, gear-wise).

Thank you!

 

Allev

Tanking is about threat and mitigation, and ferals generally don't have to worry about threat because it is inherently very good. Doing more threat on the T6 deaggro fight (Bloodboil) could get you killed, because you need to stay near the threat of other tanks for transitions. So I would argue that at the T6, optimizing tanking is entirely about mitigation. Certain mechanics favor dodge (stacking DoTs on Bloodboil, for instance), but those are special-case and not for the "standard" gear set.

The discussion was about optimizing tanking gear; as such, your comment about being a druid in a fight, while quite true, is not your original claim, which was only "for bears".

 

• Caniki

I use them in emergencies. It'd be terrible to have them on cooldown when you really need them.

 

foxglove

I do it this way for a few reasons:

• If healers are having trouble healing me when the trinkets are not up, there's a problem with my gear, their gear, or the healing assignments.
• In my experience, my healers don't typically have mana problems, and when they do, potions/IV/Mana Tide/etc. are better ways to address it.
• I don't want to give my healers a false sense of what my incoming damage is like. (Ideally, my healers should be spamming me regardless of what my incoming damage is like, but in reality they're going to get a false sense of security when I'm dodging over 75% of the time during trinket uptime).
• We ferals don't have shield wall or last stand, so the trinkets server as my "oh crap" buttons.

Edit: Keep in mind that your #1 priority as a tank is not to die. If you're dead, nothing else matters. So, save them for when they'll help you the most (dodging an attack that would otherwise kill you).

 

Zeln

I tend to save them for when my health gets uncomfortably low. But for boss fights where I am the hateful/hurtful strike target I tend to keep them popped as much as possible. We did TK last week to key a few and on Void Reaver the knockback timer was spot on, so I used the trinkets as much as possible to avoid the knockback/deaggro.

 

dukes

I stand by my statement that agility is worth more point-for-point than anything else for bears, within reason. In fact, for emphasis, I'll quote myself because I believe in it:

I have never said armour is a bad stat, nor that reaching the cap is a bad thing. It is merely that, for my own personal reasons, I prefer not to use a gearset that gets to the cap because it is too limiting on what other gear can be used for me. I recommend other people against getting to the cap because that's my opinion and tanking is, quite simply, not a set thing. If I were pointing people towards stacking strength and intellect for a DPS role, sure, flame me lots (I'm not saying you're flaming right now, in case you get the wrong idea - it's just a bit of a discussion over the finer points which is what forums are for).

On the point of threat: Extra potential threat is never wasted. Never. I would like to see a situation where having too much potential threat is a problem. I have always had problems with threat because in the situations which I tanked due to the ridiculous DPS of the people playing with me. If you are generating too much threat, you aren't playing properly and that's a problem with your playing/paying attention, not with gear.

I would also argue that at the T6 level you are wanting to optimise DPS and survivability against the particular situations you are put in, not blindly stack mitigation "just because".


I was about to post this as part of the main post, then realised it got too close to a direct flame:
I can't actually work out if that's just me being pissed off at other things (dislocated shoulder recently and work sucks atm) or if it's really me. There's definitely something in this particular discussion that is annoying me more than shows, anyway. It might just be that it's one of the things it's better to agree to disagree, rather than keep on going mindlessly.

 

Jaxton

Keep in mind that when you up your dodge in such a large fashion you are in essence increasing your chances to be crushed, relatively speaking. I would use one routinely, communicate with your healers when you do this, and use the other in an "oh poop" type situation.

 

dukes

Common misconception - you retain the exact same chance to be crushed.

50% dodge, 5% miss, 30% hit-normal, 15% hit-crush.

Activate trinket -> 60% dodge, 5% miss, 20% hit-normal, 15% hit-crush.

Same total chance to be crushed.

 

Jaxton

This is correct, that is why I used the word relatively. Upping your dodge reduces your chance to be hit, not crushed, until you are above 85% dodge. In essence, the higher your dodge rate gets (below 85%) the harder you will be hit, when you do get hit. Healers seem to be of the mind that when we pop trinkets, and our dodge goes through the roof, that we are essence providing the same mitigation that a shield wall would which isn't the case and will thus take little or no damage. True as long as you are dodging, very wrong when you do actually get hit.

 

dukes

A good reason to never tell healers when you use your trinkets

 

foxglove

To be fair to both sides of the AC versus Agi discussion, this will always come down to that classic cop-out of "situation and personal preference." It depends on your playstyle. It depends on your gear level. It depends on how good your guild's DPS and healers are. It depends on the encounter and on what you're tanking. It depends on who else is also tanking on the encounter.

I personally lean towards using my highest AC and sta gear when I'm MTing a boss, especially a burst-heavy boss like Tidewalker; but using higher agi, hit, expertise, etc. when I'm offtanking. I see my character's strengths as being her flexibility in switching between the DPS and Tank roles, even midfight, and her quick, powerful threat generation even when she's not getting hit regularly. So, I tend to gear and gem for those strengths. I also have lots of gear choices in my bags at all times.

However, someone who's almost always used as an MT, or raids with super-low-threat DPS and/or reactive healers, might have more reasons to sacrifice some agi to get to the AC cap.

 

wuffles

You seem to be at a point where gear upgrades could come quite rapidly given a little luck (with set tokens and rolls/bids/whatever your guild uses) and time investment (badge gear, vidicators pieces, arena gear) and you should probably just stay how you are until you get an upgrade and will possibly have to gem/enchant a new piece anyway. If you have the t4 helm I'd probably get the s3 chest first and I would certainly keep the rings. As someone else already suggested, if you have some gear that you won't replace soon and it has any def or resil socketed in it, see if you can't replace those with more stam/agi. If you're using the Necklace of the Juggernaut, consider picking up the Brooch of Deftness - not exactly an upgrade for your avoidance but you pick up some other nice stats and lose 22 def (and unfortunately 19agi).

This is just a suggestion, but if your role is going to be OTing for the upcoming content and you still have plenty of resil/def to be crit immune, get the s3 helm next to go with the chest - enchant the helm with a glyph of ferocity and socket the meta with a relentless earthstorm diamond. The yellow slots in the helm and in the BP are decent places to meet your meta requirement (if you're going to be using them to both tank and dps)with 4agi/4hr gems, and stick either shifting nightseye or delicate living rubies in the red bp sockets(and +6 all stats enchant). If you're lucky enough to get your t4 shoulders off maulgar in short order you can enchant those with your respective aldor/scryer dps enchant (if you've still got excessive def/resil to spare) and use the t4 gloves with 15agi. Now you have 4 pieces of gear that are gemmed/enchanted well for both dpsing in cat and tanking in bear. On a fight where you get to wear your dps gear you'll have the best cat gear/enchants/gems in those respective slots until t6, and on fights where you must tank something first (such as maulgar or mag, although I always got stuck tanking mag myself), you'll do more damage when you inevitably switch to cat and dps after your tank target is dead (and produce more threat in an OT situation like on gruul).

edit: I know I didn't mention gems for the shoulders, if it were me I'd socket 8agi in both but you could easily do 4agi/6sta or 12sta depending on your preference.

 

Thorek

I personally use Shadowmoon Insig + Moroes. I really like the +defense that Shadowmoon gives me for becoming crit immune. The two together is what we've started to call "Bear Wall". I actually bound it to a macro to yell it out and pop both trinkets... In the words of another raid member "its like a raid wide heroism. you pop bear wall and everyone gets pumped" I can't tell you the amount of times that 'bear wall' has saved my life in sticky situations...

For example, a fel raged target dies and goes right back on me at 5%.. BEAR WALL!!! Dodge, Dodge, Dodge.. yay!!

...

I actually have one question about something completely different. Sometimes when DPSing I'll get lucky with the omen of clarity, malorne bonuses, crits on shreds, whatever! I find myself sitting at 5 combo points, and there's no way rip will have ticked off by the time I would hit 80+ energy.

If I have anything that won't let me re-apply rip... I can't do it until its ticked off. I sit at max energy just waiting to start the next cycle.

So my question is, what is generally accepted as "more" DPS. Doing another shred to delay the energy? Re-applying mangle? Or sitting at 100 energy for 2/3 seconds?

It doesn't happen very often - but was wondering what you guys had to say about this.

 

• the KRIS

You could also incorporate the "bearstand" macros folks have been talking about post-2.3, and pop a super pot + master healthstone in the same millisecond that you pop both trinkets. Assuming that none of those things will trigger a GCD and prevent instantaneous bear shifting.

 

wuffles

I can't give you any hard numbers but on the rare occasion that happens to me, I always go with an extra shred unless, due to some imperfect cycle, mangle is going to run out before rip finishes - then I'll re-apply mangle. Anything would be better than sitting at full energy for 2-3 seconds...even using Tiger's Fury.

 

• Vykromond

This was actually analyzed in a previous feral druid thread, in the context of re-apply Rip vs. Shred again. If I recall correctly, the conclusion was that you shred again if the time on your Rip exceeds two ticks, otherwise reapply Rip. If your Rip is un-reappliable, you would naturally Shred rather than sitting with full energy.

This is actually a decision I have to make very frequently, which makes me question how useful the Malorne 2-piece bonus really is after a certain point in crit & sustained haste (in terms of chain Bloodlust & Drums).

 

Legorol

I am looking for gear advice on Main tanking Hydross. I have looked through this thread and the previous bear threads, but all discussion seems to concern druids in an off tanking role.

If a bear were to main tank Hydross either with Nature or Frost resistance, what options does he have?
* How much resistance can he/should he get up to? Should he aim for 365?
* Can he still stay crit immune?
* If you can't achieve both the desired level of resistance and crit immunity, which one is more imporant to achieve, and why?
* What resistance gear is the best for the job? (JC crafted items + green "of frost/nature" items?)

Your insight would be greatly appreciated.

 

seminarca

edited