We've been drooling all over Agility for a long time, so it wouldn't really be a big change, I'd actually be more in favour of an agility -> Armor conversion then raw AP. We'd have very little stats that affect our migitation, but that's really a hard thing to avoid if they do not change parry/block/blockvalue to benefit us in some way, we simply have less ways to increase our TTL, resulting in a smaller number of effective stats.

In this regard, the "best" way to give us more stats that affect our migitation as well as encourage us to pick up PvE gear (I stand correct on my previous PvP gear statement), would be with crit rating and AP. This however has the downside I was talking about before, a large difference between our raid buffed and unbuffed migitation. Not so much if they make it off our crit rating (as opposed to crit chance), but I'm sceptical of an AP -> Armor conversion where AP from buffs is not counted.

The counterargument here is that if you're a tank specced feral druid, you will be falling more in the 10-20% difference range, well below other classes without aggro dumps (which was the basis for your original argument), like enhancement/elem shaman, boomkin, ret paladins, etc. If you're actual a DPS specced feral druid, and you're only 5% behind the pure DPS classes and in a position to be highest non-tank threat, then you're missing some extremely key bear talents, notably Protector of the Pack, Thick Hide, and to a lesser extent, Natural Reaction. Those three talents together are a huge survivability boost, and even if 75% of your gear is the same between full tank full dps sets, you're in no way in a condition to survive tanking a raid boss on progression content.

You're right, I totally messed up the numbers (shouldn't try to calculate after a day long full of excel-sheets). Sorry, about that.

The idea itself isn't as bad I think. Increase the armor-modifier from Thick Hide and switch it with a deeper feral-talent (for example Nurturing Instincts as stated) makes it a needed tank-talent, but through the deeper position won't be interesting for arena-restos.

Another idea to give us another stat (this time I don't even try to guesstimate numbers =)).
Reduce SotF to just make us 1/2/3% crit-immune, but broaden a talent to increase mitigation based on defense rating.
As someone pointed out, there should be a difference between kitty and bear. Now, when bears need some additional defense rating to become crit-immune there won't be just a form-shift infight and become tank.
With such a change the tank-rings for Warriors/Paladins/DeathKnight? (don't know anything about them) would be useful for us too, or at least a some of them as some have parry rating.

A problem I see with this is that it would be very hard to get 3% crit reduction from defense only using non-leather gear. Since we would still need more defense we would have to turn to other gear, but the is no more leather gear with defense. This would put us back into what we had in TBC and force us to use resilience from pvp gear, which Ghostcrawler has said they don't want.

While this is true, it would be silly, because the whole point behind this fiasco, in their eyes, is so we don't overvalue armor trinkets to the point of wearing trinkets that are well behind the progression level. You could say they could make increasingly better armor trinkets, but again, since armor is that good, we would still use JUST those trinkets till it capped.

Hey there, long-time reader, first-time poster here.

The recent Bluepost made me register here so i can contribute my ideas concerning feral armor. I agree that simply increasing the bear-modifier to balance the armor "loss" wouldn't work as it required an absurdly high percentage.

My suggestion would be to return the bear-modifier back to 400% and make agility based armor be affected by it.
I haven't played the beta but im assuming a raidbuffed bear should have somewhere ~1k-1.2k agility (correct me if I'm wrong here) which would result in ~12k armor thus bringing us back (along with the increased modifier) to approximately the same armor as pre-"nerf".

Using agi instead of AP does have some advantages im my opinion;
- it makes us less dependant on "temporary" buffs like Battle Shout and Unleashed Rage (I assume every 25-man raid will have BoK and Str-Totem can be put down by about any shaman).
- as far as I know gemming for Sta is more efficient than Agi because of the Agi:Dodge nerf and DR, this would raise the value of Agi gems again (oh, and by the way, reducing SotF to 3% again would force us to more or less only socket Defense gems and this shouldn't be Blizzard's intention).
- the 3 other tanking classes fully benefit from Defense rating, they all need Dodge/Block(except for DK's?)/Parry and being uncrittable while we just need Dodge out of these four, so choosing DPS necks and rings would generate less competition between tanks and satisfy the needs of a feral tank even more.

Well, I might have forgotten something, but my main thoughts should be covered, hope I could explain myself well enough.

And one quick question about Kitty DPS (can't remember if this has already been answered): should I always build up 5 CP's and risk loosing one because of a crit at 4 CP's or just finish with four? (Rip/FB)

If the talent gave 3% crit reduction, we'd only need 2.6 just like it was last patch and all of TBC. I'm also pretty sure almost every feral druid gained crit immunity from non-leather items, or maybe used PVP bracers(or some other PVP leather) in combination with rings/neck/cloak/trinket, which still seems viable come wrath, so that isn't really a valid concern.

Rather simple, I would think. Making anti-crit (a.k.a. Resilience/Defense to uncrittable cap vs. +3lvl) not nearly totally worthless as a stat spreads the priorities around for someone who's looking to puzzle together a tanking set.

As is, you run a raid instance and some trinket with armour and Defense drops. The feral tank goes "Meh - give it to the warrior" unless he or she is within range of making stacking agility less appetizing than adding dodge from Defense(?).

If you retuned the anti-crit talent to 4% anti-crit, that trinket would all of a sudden have value. Not all that much with the recent mad nerf to armour trinkets, but nonetheless.

Making defense matter more than it does currently in Wrath for feral tanks, but less than it did before, gives us a larger pool of components to pull from, and makes it less of a hassle for the devs to itemize the raids, since it spreads points around for all classes. Granted, this would homogenize us to some extent, but not very much if we just had to make up 1.6% anti-crit. It would be borderline trivial, but still mean that gear with Defense or PVP gear wouldn't be as undervalued as it is now relative to the other tanking classes.

In other news I think the nerf to armour on trinkets was a little harsh. They should still be good, just not THAT good.

I'm absolutely delighted by the armor-change news. I was advocating it on beta because I did not want to be pigeonholed into a badge of tenacity situation again, or worse - a mark of tyranny situation.

This will only be beneficial though, if they come up with a good counter-balance / solution. Some here have mentioned talents, and x -> y conversions, but no one so far has mentioned Bear - Form in itself. Surely they could bake something into the shapeshift itself, such as 'double effectiveness from defense', or 'x -> armor conversion'.

What I'd like to see, personally, is agility and enchants (such as armor to cloak, or that LW armor to gloves) benefit from the bear armor adjustment.

You realise theres absolutely zero benefit of doing this? At best it will mean we're already crit capped from the jewelery we wear and at worse it will force us to once more bring dire PvP items into the mix for their resilience. There is no positive in doing that.

As I think I started the discussion about not being crit-immune with SotF (see here), I feel to answer here too.
My suggestion was to give an additional benefit to defense rating through talents.
The whole idea is to give ferals another stat to being interested in.

But on another note, I had another idea how bear-mitigation may be improved after those armor-changes.
I see myself more as a brainstormer than a mathematician and my written numbers may be totally off.
Nevertheless I post it, just to share my idea, the concept of how it may be implemented.

For a first mathematical run I would suggest x1/x2/x3 to be 20/40/60% and y about 7% (stacking to a total of 21%, but keep in mind that the original 12% from current PotP would be overwritten).
As stated these numbers may be overpowered or crappy as hell, so don't judge the numbers.

I see pros and cons with such a talent.
On the pro-side the talent gets a higher and more reliable uptime the better your gear becomes. It also makes the talent usable for solo-play, whereas the current PotP completely lacks.
On the other side, for lesser geared bears the buff may drop off which result in higher incoming damage.