For me the no cooldown on ILotP is the best option. It gives us the benefit of scaling with almost all the stats that appear on the gear that is meant to be used by druids, and it also removes the need to have to use two different sets of gear. The health % healed should be modified to match the values of the blocking mitigation of shield tanks.

I don't think that overhealing would really be an issue. Overhealing would be similar to the case in which a warrior dodges an attack, all his block rating was useless for that swing. Think of ILotP as a permanent HoT on the bear, that gets more frequent and stronger as the gear scales.

First time poster...

Thanks to David for the information about the 2 tier 4 proc, I didn't know that it's going to be useless. I'm going to be doing my leveling in 4/5 PvP gear (partial brutal/vengeful) due to the speed increase, but with the amount of competition there's going to be on any quest mobs, it'll help with the opposite faction just in case...

I really can not see a downside to splitting the two up and I can only see perfectly logical reasons in favor of splitting them up.

The feral talent tree is a mix of 2 specs. If you want to go tank you learn the ones most important to tanking (you don't even look at cat form) and vice-versa.
Since 3.0 there are not 3 talent trees but 4 since the difference between cat or bear has become much bigger. Dpssing in bear spec will nerf your DPS very much.

You say the gear for feral druid is about the same either cat or bear. True. The same can be said for balance and healing. No reason to mix the two together now is it?

There will be a lot of people from hybrid classes that will spec healing and dps, healing and tanking or dps and tanking.
Talking pve: Very useful for raids and also very useful for instances. Missing a healer you will heal. Missing a tank? Tank! Etc.
Talking pvp: Whole different ballgame. Better look that up in the PVP section of the forum.
For healing/tank people; cat dps is not important. Let them at least have the option to read only information relevant for tanking? Same goes for cat dps.

As it is for most of us here now, we love cat and bear equally. No one prevents us from following both threads.

Please tell me about the downsides to splitting them up.

1 thread. Ferals will always be asked to switch specs to fit the needs of the raid. No other class has one single talent tree devoted to two separate roles, which would rather obviously lead to a fair amount of talent overlap. If you're not dual-speccing to tank/dps then you're gimping your guild and your raid.
Convenience for the thread's users and lurkers who like to catch up every day.
Minimizing bloat on the EJ forums. We already have a Boomkin and a Resto thread, no need to have 4 druid PVE threads.

Just a minor typo correction, this should read "reaching 0% at level 80". The downward scaling of the 2T4 proc percentage is from 4% at 70 to 0% at 80 at a rate of -0.4% per level.

While feral is still one tree and the two raiding roles are overlapping here and there, when it comes down to discussing tanking and dps mechanics, it's apples and oranges. It's not because one spec won't fit all anymore, rather than there are two completely distinct roles with different mechanics that it's best to be discussed separately. It was always mildly annoying seeing the odd cat dps post in the middle of a heated tanking discussion or vice versa in the old thread.

The point of these threads (in the pve section - pvp is a whole different beast) is sharing opinions on how to maximize efficiency while performing raid roles. The fact that between fights or during the same fight a feral might have to switch from bear to cat is more of a tactics discussion than a class mechanics one.

Hi everyone!

Make it in to 2 separate threads. My main specc is going to be DPS (Cat form ^^) and it's much easyer to keep up on one separate "pure" cat dps thread which will be the one I be most interested in. Will still be reading the tanking thread, but not as closely as the DPS one.

I have to agree with this, if only on principle of being "different". Might make druids overpowered, but that's what fine tuning is for. Druids will take more damage also heals themselves for more.

Only problem is it dependable or worthwhile healing? I fear there isn't enough granularity in your healers to take advantage of a bear healing itself approximately every 3 seconds for 4% max health(which is diddly-squat really). Even with no cooldown, with iLoTP will be wasted or more of the healer's healing will be wasted.

LOTP is not a particularly strong healing contributor on a druid tank which is receiving significant damage and consistent damage. Over the course of the fight, the accumulated healing is noticeable, but I don't feel there isn't enough healing / time during any critical (spike dmg) moment to be event altering. I agree that to make it truly functional, removing the cooldown is the ideal way to go for druid tanking scaling.

At previous poster: ImpLoP actually does 50% overhealing as other healers usually do. The main problem of ImpLoP is that it doesn't display into recount as healing done by you but if you sum up ImpLoP healing recived by all the raid you'll be stupified. In a 10 men I usually have 10-15% of total healing and a good 5% in 25 men.

I don't see the problem in a quicker but lesser healing done by ImpLoP.

As for making 2 separate thread, I agree. The works will be easyier, obviosly we will have some overlap, but overlap is better than confusion.

Talents morely overlap because one talent does two things. Druids in fairness have 4 talent trees, and one is combined. There are talents that are the same for cat as for tank, but aside from that they are actually 2 different trees.

You say that any good druid would be specced tank/dps? Canceling a raid because you are not able to Heal would be as big as an gimp for the raid. It is all about what the guild demands. If is not a natural decision anymore to be "feral" only.
With often a lot of rogues around no one really needs one more melee. As long as there is a Tank druid, all will get the buff.

More to the point, why "punish" people who will get serious about raiding and tanking in lets say 5 months? (which have for instance been casual balance up until that point). They'll want to read up on this forum but unable cause it is full of unimportant (cat) information.

Yes, i intend to keep the first page up-to-date. I'm now almost done updating the opening posts of the old FDM with new WotLK data, but this is of course not a complete picture. Alot of theorycrafting isn't 100% done yet (the optimal cat rotation) and there are changes to the class in the near future that will affect gearing decissions (bear armor change).

By the end of the day, i hope to have a draft ready to post and the idea is to just create the new thread and update the first post as corrections/suggestions are made, having it take shape over time.

edit: As for the 1-vs-2 debate; The original FDM was created to reduce the amount of Druid-threads on these boards, going to 2 threads would undo this effort partially. Additionally, DPS and tanking have been very different in terms of mechanics and itemization in the past as well while they were both discussed in one thread. The only new thing different now is the talenttree-differentiation.

While it is true that tanking and dps has had different mechanics and itemization, they never had drastically different talents. This is now the case. I feel its enough of a change to warrant two different threads.
We could probably go back and forth like this between 1vs2, without agreeing. So I guess it's in the hands of whoever takes up the work of maintaining the "First Post". If its feasible maintaining both cat and feral in the same post, by all means go for it. If we figure out down the road that discussions get lost and information is hard to find, we can split it up. Nothing is set in stone

Swipe could crit on each individual mob, meaning we would expect 3-4 "blocks" every GCD while tanking 10 mobs. It would be just as useful as block regardless of the number of mobs we're tanking.

Not if you used "You have a 50% chance each time you crit to reduce the damage of the next physical attack received by 10% of your Attack Power" (unless you allow it to stack up...).

Aye, that problem could be alleviated by making it a short duration, stacking absorption shield. Similar to how the [Argussian Compass] works, but with additional crits adding extra charges.

Ive been reading a lot of good information on Feral Tanking and its state in Wrath, still a little shaken tho, after losing 3K of my armor and a sizable chuck of health (Tauren Racial). Then the latest statement about how non-regular items wont get the bear armor bonus (stated in a way "to allow for greater selection in gear." Now most of this problem I assume will go away as I find new and better gear in Northrend, tanking attack rotations have changed probably for the better, I certainly have to think a lot more about my rage and when to throw in a maul (before 3.0.2 I found Maul pretty useless.) I keep hearing blizzard talk about using "other" mechanics, I assume they are talking about agility since we can now gain rage from dodging, we no longer need Defense and/or Resilience, (although apparently after we have our dodge to 50% then def makes sense to bring it even higher. Here is the order of stats desired that I have read elsewhere I would like other input as to if this is agreed or not.

"Gear, Gems and Enchants
Generally, Druids should gear in this order for Tanking:
Armor
Agility
Stamina
Dodge to ~50% then Defense
Expertise
Hit
Strength
Crit"

Thanks in advance for any advice on this.

That's close to the correct order.

The correct order is:

1) Use Rawr*

*(New update coming tomorrow for level 80 content)

To answer a bit more generically - armor is the top stat right now. Stamina scales better than agility does, but you don't need to go overboard on it; typically the answer is this. Stack armor. Stack stamina until you have enough, then stack agility. Favor dodge over defense. Try to get a good amount of threat but don't be crazy.

This, of course, will change following the removal of getting the bear multiplier on non-leather armor.

Does anyone else feel that things are in a rather unacceptable state of limbo right now for level 80 feral tanks? Looking at the itemization through wowhead/mmo-champion/etc it makes me wonder whether we should prefer the rogue/cat-type pieces that are high in agility or the warrior/paladin pieces high in strength/stamina with real tanking stats. To me at least it feels like the rather large impending change to the approach for bear tank mitigation (meaning the boost we get for losing all non-leather bonus armor in our multiplier) means it will be fairly impossible to know which way to go when gearing up.

Presumably at least the new methodology will utilize either stats other than agility (due to DR) or be baked into talents (the iLotP change idea mentioned previously), but it seems like whichever way they go will have a huge impact on what pieces are best-in-slot.

Been waiting with HIGH anticipation for the New RAWR, 2.0.3 is missing some stuff for me and I certainly recommend the program to any and all Druids .

Luckily for us at the moment, we only have Eye/Sanctuary/Naxx to worry about loot, all of which are quick and fairly easy to plow through, even casually. My plan is to grab full Tier 7 and collect up the best I can get for the current mechanics and anything that falls in the cracks that the other Rogues/Druids/Tanks don't want. Once Blizzard pins down how our stuff will work, I can begin filtering/deleting/changing my sets.

Then there is still the issue of PvP gear being so dominant for tanking but maybe the new mechanics will favor the offensive oriented PvE gear more?