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).

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?

Omen of Clarity is the best talent for cat dps in the game. Any build that skips it will not be competitive in dps. However, OOC is of very limited use to tanking since you generally have more rage than you can spend anyway, so the free procs are worthless. Berserk, on the other hand, is great for building a nice threat lead at the start of a boss fight, so it's taken in almost every serious bear build.

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.

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.

Being that it is a spell (can't cast when silenced, can be resisted) pretty much has to be based on spell crit. 22% I would assume is raid buffed, although does still seem a bit high for feral gear unless you are stacking a lot of crit rating.

The threat/damage modeling would be done on something around 35-40 seconds depending on how close you want to push the chance of letting the debuff fall as it is on a 6 second CD but has a 40 second duration. You won't be refreshing it every CD as there's much better ways to spend your GCDs. But 30 seconds isn't unreasonable either. I know I start refreshing debuffs more frequently once I have a nice threat lead.

Not usually. FFF > Lacerate > Swipe for single target threat, even in Sunwell gear. With scaling, that may change, but that's how it is now, and looks like how it'll be for quite a while at 80.

I do it every 30 seconds because currently it cannot be cast if it's up; I'll consistently get the 'more powerful spell in effect" message.

22% crit is probably reasonable raid buffed. Between moonkin aura, int, kings and random things that buff spell crit 22% seems close to reasonable, if a bit high. I'm just going off a night of raiding's overall value.

On the "more powerful" bug, has anyone tested if it's because of temporary AP buffs? Since FFF damage scales with AP, it's possible that the "power" level of it is still determined by AP at casting too (like Rip), even though it doesn't actually affect the debuff portion.