If you really need threat, you could just tank with [Staff of Primal Fury]. If you are MT for anything, you will get inspiration buff almost the entire fight, capping your armor despite not having armor on your weapon. The high dodge on the SoPF is actually higher than that on the [Wildfury Greatstaff] and the stamina is just 5 points less. The threat generation is superior to both of the other two options. If you are not MT, then the extra armor is nearly pointless balanced against the loss in dodge.

So my guild just downed Azgalor for the first time, and I was fortunate enough to receive the t6 gloves. I proceeded to gem them with a Solid Empyrean Sapphire and enchant with 15agi. I won't be able to replace that gem for some time, if ever, since my guild is holding gems for best-in-slot gear only. I actually have the first BT gemmed piece of gear in the guild. I would have gotten the 5agi/7stam, but that pattern hasn't dropped for us yet. Was 15 stam a better gem choice than 10 agi?

Important bits of info: I tank Azgalor, since our best geared tank, who was also the guild MT, just had to quit raiding for RL reasons . So stam is becoming a lot more important to me, since it looks like I'll be MTing more often, which I've never done post ZA. I run at around 21.5k raid buffed HP, a little more with commanding shout. My unbuffed dodge is 36.5; I forget that it reaches with full dodge buffs. In that case, should I forsake agi in my gems and enchants and go straight stam, or am I at a comfortable enough HP lvl that I can start stacking more agi for better dodge?

My current armory profile (as of Feb 28) is my boss tanking set: The World of Warcraft Armory

In the long term, you'll want a huge amount of stam for Sunwell... glass cannon high-dodge bear went splat on both Sathrovarr and Brutallus whereas 25k hp gave a nice big buffer even for the worst case spikes, even if they happened negligibly more frequently.

It's probably practical at this point to start planning ahead. 2.4 isn't -that- far off.

Yeah that's a really good point. I've also already got the badge ring and badge pants on my "I've got to have enough badges by the time this vendor becomes available" list, which used to include the gloves till I got T6. I may go for the chest too, since I'm currently using S3 for the resil. With the resil head enchant, the def enchant for cloak, and resil enchant on the badge chest... I could probably be uncrittable despite the badge ring's lack of def. Those badge pieces will *significantly* boost my HP, which I'm really looking forward to.

Your post gave me an interesting idea: in my guild most of the healers are swapping Spellsurge/+Heal Weapons depending on proc and cooldown.

it should be likewise possible to have an addon switching between [Wildfury Greatstaff], [Staff of Primal Fury] etc based on inspiration proc.
Of course this should only be happening during 1,5sec GCDs like Lacterate, Swipe, to avoid giming ones Threat.

I'm re-evaluating my gear now.

As both our Prot Warriors were away this week I ended up MT for all of MH and Naj/Supremus last night. My main issue was that on fights where threat matters I was running into issues with rage starvation. Quite simply I was getting dodge streaks so badly that I was having to work really hard to stay ahead of the Warlocks/Mages, even up to the 50% mark when they could Invis/Soulshatter.

Great news for our healers of course, but ultimately on farm encounters they should now have the experience to keep me alive without me having to mitigate every last point of damage I can. I'm looking at gear and thinking about dropping down to about 45% buffed dodge in exchange for +hit, expertise and more ap/crit, this is probably going to mean dropping some high armor items such as the rings/neck/staff in favour of more dps/threat oriented gear.

I did a quick and dirty gear swap for Supremus to test out - I'm wearing the gear here: The World of Warcraft Armory


Although it's a small thing, the AP scaling on Lacerate in 2.4 is a welcome change for me. Every little helps when your dps start gearing up this far.

Yeh got the boots. Main issue with using dps bracers is that the S3 bracers are so good when you factor in the +resilience.

Frankly speaking, the added global cooldown between weapon swaps pretty much makes swapping in a DPS weapon for threat moot point. You might as well just stick to Wildfury and focus on the environment more.

hello ppl and nice to find u im a full t5 feral druid with very good gear for tanking about stats and threat! the only bad think that i have in my gear is the earthwarden! since the pillar never drop for my guild in our runs! i write here since here i think is the druid source of knowlege! i read all the mega thread try to find a solution in my problem! my problem is that i have low threat and dont know what im doing wrong! i mean i have the gear i have the experience and still my tps is low. and sometimes is kinda hard to reach our MT warrior to threat so the raid can go full out or change aggros likes in blooboil fight! my tps goes around 500-600-700-800 and dunno why:s only in criticals my threat goes up to 1000+ im very disapointed about that and dont know what to do! my skills rotations is that: mangle-5 stucks of lacarate if the mob accept the bleed or else swipe until 4sec of mangle CD and then maul(if i have rage) and magle again! u thing is there any problem in my rotation? in forum i find out a macro about mangle 3 lacarates mangle again and so on. doesnt help me much tbh. my calculations and from what some ppl told me shows that maybe my weapon is the problem since my white hits and ap is kinda low. but im a druid! is it posible to not reach a prot warrior in threat? if u can help me pls and sorry if i bother u with this big post! )

Your rotation is fine, other than maybe you need to use maul more frequently if you find yourself rage capped. Against mobs that don't hit quite as hard, you can sub out 1 or 2 pure tanking pieces for hybrid or DPS pieces (without sacrificing crit immunity)

On another note please don't use excalamation mark (!) as much; it kind of hurts my eyes, hehe

Can you elaborate? I assume anyone attempting those bosses seriously would be uncrittable and close to armor capped as would be expected. Are you saying that 20k with high dodge won't cut it?

Has anyone had experience to the contrary? Seems like this would be good to know for gear prep for 2.4... I imagine some people are like me and have a more dps-heavy role... choices of enchants and gems have left my tank set leaning more towards agility than stamina.

Changing talent for a energy recovery move is much more important than having T4 bonus moved to newer items. We'll just end up using that item until something drastically better come out, and this "petition" of moving energy recovery proc will start all over again. Adding it to feral Tenacity will be good, as 15% stun/fear resist, while good, is lackluster for a talent that deep into any tree. Most classes with said talents get it in their first 3 tiers.

On a sidenote, Sunwell Shoulders+ Helm (lol Kil'jaeden) combination will only lose to T4 helm/shoulder by about 7 dps when fully raid buffed, consumabled, boss having squishy armor (6200) and fully debuffed with everything possible. This set up also has about 2% more -avoidance to mob than T4. At theoretical DPS of 2100, 7 DPs is really, really minor, and some people will choose the consistency that the T6.5 pieces offer.

Sure, ideally a talent to recovery energy would be amazing, however I just don't see that happening. If they did, they'd have to do the same for rogues, as I don't believe they have either.

Combat Potency?...Chance on hit with OH to gain (I believe 15 energy). Of course Blizz will never give us a energy procing talent as we have OoC.

So I've been using Voldin's spreadsheet. And I've been using RAWR. And they don't quite agree. With all the same gear and buffs set, I'm getting different results. My suspicion is it is based around hit/expertise and the two models treating the cost of a miss differently.

Examples:
RAWR claims the shapeshifter's signet is a -4.3 dps downgrade. Voldin's claims it is -.2 dps downgrade.
RAWR claims Shadowmaster's Boots are a 3 dps upgrade. Voldin's claims it is a -.4 dps downgrade.
RAWR claims Don Alejandro's Money belt is a .8 dps upgrade. Voldin's claims it is a -1.8 dps downgrade
RAWR claims Belt of One-Hundred Deaths is a 2.1 dps upgrade. Voldin's claims it is a 4.9 dps upgrade.


So my question is, which model do people think is more accurate?






~~~~~~~~
Context:
I'm a group that has just started MH. We've killed Vashj several times and Kael twice -- loot from them is still pretty tight. Other SSC/TK stuff is obtainable except for trinkets. I'm looking at BT/MH loot and SSC/TK loot to try to figure out my best in class gear -- as epic gems are only being issued for best in class gear. Since we are on a DKP system (seperate for each tier), I'm also interested in figuring out what my optimal purchases are. With the transition to BT/MH, I'm also now rostered as a DPS since we only need 3 tanks and none of the 3 prot warriors are willing/able to go DPS, so tuning for DPS has become more important.

Current Gear:
(all +8 agi gems except for 2 +agi/+hit, +5str/+4agi, and +4agi/+6sta gems, all enchanted)
Head Stag-Helm of Malorne
Neck Mithril Chain of Heroism
Shoulders Mantle of Malorne
Chest Vengeful Gladiator's Dragonhide Tunic
Waist Belt of Deep Shadow
Legs Skulker's Greaves
Feet Nyn'jah's Tabi Boots
Wrist Vindicator's Dragonhide Bracers
Hands Gloves of Dexterous Manipulation,
Finger1 Ring of Lethality
Finger2 Ancestral Ring of Conquest
Trinket1 Hourglass of the Unraveller
Trinket2 Crystalforged Trinket
Back Razor-Scale Battlecloak
MainHand Merciless Gladiator's Maul
Ranged Everbloom Idol

RAWR says I should be 1024 dps. Voldin's say 1098. Buffs are set per what buffs I got being exiled to the OT group.

I won't go into details, since EJ's policy about PTR raid discussion still applies, but basically on Kalecgos, there's a situation where you WILL take a ~10500 instant spike in one attack which also stuns you, guaranteeing you'll be hit for 1-2 more 4.5k melee attacks. (This is at capped armor).

Likewise on Brutallus, you can very well get hit for 5k + 2.5k + 5k + 2.5k in the space of under two seconds, very frequently. That's survivable (naturally :P) but if he does it right after a Stomp, which is guaranteed to land, deals ~5k and reduces your armor by half that shit can hurt... a LOT.

My gear on live was for maximum threat since we were looking at clearing BT/Hyjal as fast as possible each week. After the first night on PTR, I regemmed 15sta's over all the 5agi/5hit and 10agi's (and died a little inside), reenchanted helms, shoulders, pants for max mitigation tanking, and swapped a few pieces around to maximize the amount of armor/stam/dodge I could squeeze out of being just over crit immunity. The difference between 21.5k hp raid buffed and 25k raid buffed on both those fights was like night and day. It's like Blizzard balanced around the higher number consciously. (This is as they are most recently tuned on PTR, to be fair - things can change before they go live)

Both fights have all tanks sharing the MT role - and as a gearcheck they really push hard against the weak links in a raid's tank lineup.

Rogues do have such a talent as stated above.
I think omen of clarity is a great substitute for it, since random energy gains makes powershifting a little bit worse.

Gotcha on the rogue talent. Well, then I seriously doubt they'd add something else due to OoC. Even though making a weapon with this proc would be a temporary solution, it would at least give us more options.

Interesting to hear- I feared the opposite would happen: healer mana would be a real issue and heavy avoidance would be needed to reduce overall damage taken.

I have 250 badges ready to buy the staff and one other item for DPS. I need a better chest, so which is going to be more damage? Embrace of Everlasting Prowess - Items - WOWDB or Tunic of the Dark Hour - Items - WOWDB I'm not hit capped

Tunic of the Dark Hour will probably be more dps than Embrace, but I believe if you're around 3400ap/42%crit then the S3 bp beats them both by a small margin according to Toskk's calculator.

If you have Arena Points to spend, it's definitely worth looking into using that instead. Assuming that arena season 4 hits shortly after 2.4, then the assumed new feral chestpiece [Brutal Gladiator's Dragonhide Tunic] would probably be your best bet, and spending the BoJ elsewhere.