I think the AC change will help make bears better "natural" tanks. If they buff Bearform AC mutiplier and remove the need for specialised trinkets I would imagine the leap from quest gear to entry level raiding gear wont be as big as for some of the other tanking classes. We already dont have to worry about being uncrittable. Now, if i understand the change correctly, they are saying that we no longer need to seek out our most valuable stat since they will effectively be building it into bearform, though we dont know how yet. This is not unlike to the situation when BC launched and bears found themselves the best tanks straight out of the blocks, but once gear started getting better (and blizz nerfed us heavily) that position started to change.

I could see it all just ending up in crazy hunt for rare +dodge trinkets and rings unless - as someone has alluded to already - they go and change existing gear heavily.

On the question of feral staves. We do have to hope they convert the +AC to somthing usefull for bears, otherwise why would you not just always go for the dps staff now? They usually have agility on them so will likely end up giving more avoidance, (no numbers to back that up at the moment so feel free to flame.). They will generally give more threat. It's too ealry to know, but I'm hoping they spend a serious amount of time re-itemizing to give us some geniune "tanking" gear or else they might as well just remove those staves from the game and only give us dps staves.

on a side note: I miss maces and 1-handers. I know they are trying to simplify itemization but i would love to see some feral one-handers and decent off-hands so i could have some variation with my gear selection. something like +hit off-hand/+stam off-hand/+dodge or AC off-hand etc.

I agree with the view that some other base tanking stat would be nice. At least in BC i had to think about dodge + def + AC + stam. In LK, it looks like I will only have stam + dodge to choose from. I can see very little reason - at least at the moment - why bears would not all end up in exactly the same gear. There seems very litle reason to personalise playstyles since blizz seems to be removing the stat wiggle-room that allowed many of those personal choices

As has been said before, it seems that the natural way of implementing this Feral armor change would be to (greatly) increase the Dire Bear Form's armor multiplier, well past even the TBC-release value of 450%.

Given the above, and given that only actual leather armor items will receive the multiplier, doesn't that mean that raw ilevel upgrades would be extremely valuable to a Bear tank, if only because of the large armor increase?

That is, I envisioned the possibility of rolling on Naxx-25 gear as an upgrade from Naxx-10 simply because of the higher ilevel and subsequently higher armor, without even looking at the stats.

I'm worried that instead of getting into a situation where Bears get armor capped by T4 and have to wear archaic armored jewelry, that they instead will need to roll on anything and everything that's a tier higher than their current gear.

Blizzard has no qualms with niche itemization even in the midst of their vaunted homogenization program. We still see block value on plate tanking boots (useless to Death Knights), tanking-specific weapons (useless to Rogues/Shaman/etc.) and an entire repertoire of Holy Paladin spell power plate (useless to all other plate-wearers).

Stamina is NOT mitigation. It's the stat i am very iffy about when it comes to playing with simulation. While I am not dismissing stamina at all, it will be nice to not overvalue stamina, which is something simulations do a lot (mitigation and survival points assume unrealistic situations, which while provide good numbers, need to be looked at with a grain of salt).

In regards to dodge, people need to stop avoiding it like the plague. The only reason it is in the game is to prevent avoidance from scaling too well. Regardless it still scales damage taken in an exponential method. The diminishing return just prevents someone from reaching melee immunity as well as make the exponential jump not as steep.

This would have to be implemented in a deep feral talent, or the TBC arena restoration druid supremacy would be repeated.

Dual spec.

We do not know how far down the road that is. It could be before after or at the same time as the feral changes.

That said the armor change would not be burden to DPS/OT viability if they tacked it onto a talent ferals are going to take anyway. LOTP for example no sane druid is going to skip, if they tacked the extra armor onto that talent it would boost all ferals with no impact on balance or resto.

Whoa, let's be reasonable here. Yes, bear form is a powerful tool for restoration druids, but it was hardly the single determining factor. There have been many other changes to PvP balance and we shouldn't jump to conclusions about level 80 arenas.

As I said in a previous post I dislike this change:

Before = Armor trinket were godly.
Now = Armor trinket are trash. Armor actually has less than double the TTL value of stamina or agility, with the change will be more than half = useless.

But if they really want to go that way, it's really better and more balanced to put an AP = 2-3 armor modifier (in full Naxx10 fully raid buffed you will have 6-6.5k ap) than a modifier to armor. With a modifier to armor you will value too much armor on leather, decreasing more than now the scaling choce.

Been looking at a few trinket replacements these are the two I'll probably run with after this nerf:
Darkmoon Card: Greatness - Item - World of Warcraft
[Valor Medal of the First War]

I also like the below but I think we'll be swimming in expertise anyway, no need to add more to it.
[Mark of Norgannon]

Its largely dependant on the proc rate/internal cd.
Essence of Gossamer - Item - World of Warcraft


Also got a question. I heard a few weeks ago from beta that parry was getting changed to parry/dodge (if you couldn't parry it was classed as dodge). Did that ever come about?

I believe that was only for a single item, Defender's Code. At one point, the On Use effect was written as something like: "Increases parry dodge by 455".

Not being in the beta, I can't tell what exactly it did, but apparently it increased your parry if you could, or your dodge otherwise.

Of course, it's been converted to just dodge now, making that point moot.

EDIT: Googling "Defender's Code Parry" reveals a forum discussion where all it ever did was to increase your Dodge, ala Moroes' Pocketwatch. Apparently the 'parry' was just a typo, and it still has a typo with the omission of the word 'rating'.

Is it just me(having missed previous discussion on this) or is the 4piece bonus of the Dreamwalker set very bad?

It can't really be 3sec longer barkskin can it?