The proper question is, who gives a crap about the exact values of threat? Really now. It's kind of impossible to lose aggro to something else than another tank after 3.0.

I think it's pretty safe to say that there are plenty of curious people here who would want to know just for the sake of knowing, even if Blizzard was incapable of designing an encounter in WotLK where threat matters.

The numbers are 10 pages back or so, but swipe becomes better then lacerate when your average swipe hits for 531 or more, at level 80.

Perhaps I'm doin' it rong, but I haven't found this to be true. Or maybe you meant once aggro is established and you have some rage?

My 67 bear can hold against geared 70s now, as long as they give him time to hit and get hit (or dodge). But it's hard to get that initial aggro snap unless you start with a 30+ rage. Admittedly, not harder than pre-patch, but we are still vulnerable to aggro hounds who dps right away, while from what I've seen, other tanks are far less so. FFF threat helps, but it's not quite enough. I had a couple pulls go ugly when my first white hit missed. I was very glad for ranged growl and a smaller CD on challenging roar.

I'm coming to a different conclusion. When you get pretty much every talent that effects FB plus the 15% from T6 it easily out damages mangle even at two combo points. While doing questing in Netherstorm and SMV this weekend I was killing most mobs with FFF, rake, mangle, FB. The rake is purely an enabler for RnT since it is ticking 0-1 times. But even treating rake + FB as a 70 energy combined ability, it was still doing about 50% more damage per energy compared to mangle.

And the beauty of going with this build is that it only gets stronger as the mobs get more hitpoints (which I'm assuming will be the case in Northrend) because it allows you to add a mangle to your sequence. So your 2-4 combo point FBs become a rare 3 and mostly 4-5 point FBs. Also, you no longer have any danger of wasting any excess energy on FB because R, M, M, FB is 128 energy and you'll have a total of 130 energy after the three seconds of regen you'll get while doing R, M, M.

Fixed. Found my information.

My druid is in t6 gear and since the patch I've seen a huge increase in threat and cat dps. Pre-patch I was getting maybe 1800 dps max and now I've done 2400-2500 fairly consistently using 4pc t6 and 2pc t4 (with a feral druid tank to keep up mangle). I go 0-50-11 (pure cat spec) and keep up rake and rip using shred in between. If you ever reach 5 CP with 8+ seconds left on rip (rip is 16 seconds now with the glyph) use ferocious bite then tiger's fury and get back up to 4-5 CP for your rip. As far as tanking goes...pretty much nothing should ever be able to pull aggro on a boss, maybe on aoe damage though. I consistently reach 3k+ sustained single target tps, spiking to 5k during berserk. While having to respec between cat-feral and bear-feral is annoying, the fact that our dps is actually respectable is a nice change, threat is never an issue anymore, and we actually have some ability to save ourselves when our healers aren't quite going to.

Don't forget that damage has been buffed considerably too. It is possible for some classes to pull aggro - admittedly it's a lot harder than before but nonetheless possbile.

Although Blizzard have mentioned that they wanted to remove much of the threat balancing act, it's still there in raw terms and I expect once that everyone is level 80 and geared up it will be a lot closer than it is at the moment.

I just noticed the glyphs to change the appearance of our forms are marked as Depracated now, see Druid Glyphs - Items - World of Warcraft
I hope this doesn't mean they were removed

Well, I'd say "mission accomplished" then. You're saying that both sub-specs work at a competitive level, which was part of the mission statement for 3.0 druids, and both lore and mechanics-wise, having bear and cat druids be similar but not identical is great.

They were removed a long time ago. Blizzard has stated they still want to give us the ability to change our form appearance some time in the future, but decided to not do that through Glyphs.

Go check out Rawr. This isn't the place for those questions. Please do your research before asking questions that are easily figured out somewhere else because it's kind of obvious you didn't look for the answers.

[e]: Rawr Thread

Sorry but what is Rawr? I assume it is some kind of program for weighing stats but I have never been one for computations and all kinds of numbers, and honestly Parma ... why the attitude? Sure I may have been able to do alittle more research but I guess I'll google it =(

Irrespectively of the "ask in the Rawr thread" thing, there's one important thing to notice here. You're stating you get more armor, but less effective health, out of the trade.

The correct answer as to which to pick depends on the rest of your gear, and the content you're doing. First and most obvious, for resistance fights the armor is useless: go with the extra stamina. Then, if your effective health at present is enough to soak up incoming burst damage such that you're not at risk of getting insta-gibbed, the extra armor means more damage reduction, which means predictably lower damage incoming for your healers to go through (as opposed to the unpredictably lower damage incoming when you boost avoidance).

For fights where you, personally, are comfortable with the burst, but you're wiping to healers going OOM or having too much pressure, the extra armor is the right answer. On most progression fights, and generally anything that involves silly amounts of burst, the stamina is better under the assumption it provides better effective health. Whether or not it does will depend on the exact values and the rest of your kit.

As a side note, I didn't actually do the maths to check the actual values, but the way you offhandedly equated effective health with stamina leads me to think you're thinking of "health" not "effective health".



where EH is effective health, and DR is the guaranteed damage reduction you get (e.g, 75% maximum from armor, protector of the pack bonuses, etc).

A major rule of the forum is "read the sticky" and "read the first post of the thread". After those two, read the whole thread, after that if you still don't find what you need, then post. Those places tend to provide answers to 95% of questions like the ones you have and are the reason that gear-related enquiries generate that sort of respaonse.

On a wider note, from your question you probably already know the answers. You only need enough HP to prevent a boss from instagibbing you before your healers can react. You only need enough threat to keep it off your dps. Every tank has to make gear choices based around those two factors. There's no "right" set of gear, only what is "right for you".

Maybe I missed it somewhere, but I've noticed that a lot of cat specs are skipping berserk for omen of clarity, whereas bear specs seem to always take it -- is there a reason for this?

Let me explain why I took Berserk over OoC:

1. I tank more than I DPS and OoC isn't all that exciting for tanking, since either you don't need the free rage, or things aren't hitting you hard enough to matter;
2. Berserk's still reasonably good in catform;
3. OoC is great for leveling, but I think I can make it from 70 to 71 without it just fine. I handled 60 to 61 last time around; and
4. Berserk's a new toy and I wanted to play with it for a month.

If I were committed to catform for the next couple weeks, then was going straight into the level grind, I may have gone OoC, but I sense there are a lot more calls to the bear to tank stuff coming, and probably still will be through the grind.

We simply cannot out 'snap' a pool of aggro on the ground that lasts for 8 seconds that is created with a single button push on pulls > 3 mobs (assuming Maul glyph). The nerf to instances has made pallies even more desirable as instance tanks because dps players can be utterly retarded and not pull aggro on aoe pulls. Waiting 5 seconds for me to position the mobs and get a couple swipes in is seen as an inconvenience.

Ghostcrawler has stated that threat will be a factor again in LK, although less of one than in BC. Personally I'm looking forward to it.

The threat/damage changes are amusing, to say the least. I'm doing consistently 1400 DPS as a bear when tanking KJ in cat gear right now, which is some absurd amount of TPS. I realize this is cat gear, not bear gear, but I'm finding that threat and damage scale incredibly well with AP now.

Also, faerie fires can crit damage now. The crit appears to be based on spell crit, not melee crit; at least that's the only reason I can think that the crit rate is so much lower than any other ability over time (22% vs 40ish% on melee attacks). Something to at least consider when modeling its threat/damage and whether it's worth doing it on every 30 second interval on the dot.

I don't know what the case is, but it would seem to me that if it was based on spell crit, you wouldn't be getting 22% in feral gear. I'd expect something more along the lines of 10-15% tops.

Also, why a 30 second interval? The cool down for Feral Faerie Fire is 6 seconds.

I'd have to agree with it being based on spell crit. It doesn't proc ILOTP either.

Has anyone figured out why we're getting "more powerful spell is in effect" errors with FFF?

I had chalked it up to CoR or Hunter pets, but none of our Hunters use the appropriate pet/ability, and our warlocks decided not to show up last week, and I was still getting the message. I've even seen it in 5 mans, with a Hunter (cat pet, no armor debuff), Shadow Priest, Rogue (not using expose), and deep Resto Druid. Is it possible that it's somehow interfering with itself? I'll play around with it a bit once the servers go up.