While the post is a bit old Blizz has stated that tanks getting PvP gear to tank is not anything they want to see. This as things stand as of now is not the case, especially with the new armor changes and what not.

How and if they address this will hopefully be at the same time they adjust us for the change to armor. As they have to do something to make the raid gear better than PvP gear for raiding.

Agi is all ready a bad choice due to DRs but Sta would be worse as it would exaggerate the PvP superiority. The ILotP idea would help as PvE stats would give it more procs than PvP gear. Almost any offensive to defensive conversion would be a great benefit to this issue seeing as how PvE gear has greater offensive stat budgets compared to equivalent iLvl PvP gear.

Regardless, I ground out honor for gear in tBC and while I found it distasteful if need be I will do it again if I have no other choice.

They already said that resilience was going to take up a larger proportion of pvp gear's budget. It'll therefore be "under budget" for pve use, but will still serve as good intermediary gear if you're unlucky with drops or prefer to farm BG's than mats for a crafted piece.

Cat is a bit better for reaching hard to reach places as well. It will sometimes leap over pathing obstructions that bear charge can not. I can think of a couple of spots where bear charge errored saying no path available where cat charge worked. That said bear charge is far superior on anything that is moving or likely to move soon. Cat charge you almost always end up well outside of melee range on a moving target.

They've said this, but it turns out not to be true in practice. In practice the budget spent on resilience is comparable to the budget spent on haste, armor penetration and a bit of AP/crit. So yes, you're wasting budget on resilience with PvP, but you're wasting budget on damage stats (some of which are particularly poor) on PvE.

This is all true, but for the non-5 piece set it's immaterial. Most people will be able to get these pieces close to immediately since they require rating but not arena points. And of course, they don't count towards any set bonus.

The ilvl 200 gear is also best in slot for pre-naxx gear for many of the slots as well, which is helpful for gearing up to do Naxx, but isn't as big an advantage.

Also depending on team size it is trivial to get 500 points a week (assuming you are half way decent). Why deprive a rogue or kitty druid a clear upgrade for something that you are guaranteed to trash in two to three weeks?

This is why adding some sort of attack power to mitigation is need so the PVP gear of equal item level is always inferior to the PVE equivalent. Basing anything off stam (which is what iLotP changes would do) just compounds the problem and makes it even worse.

Are druid tanks the only ones with this problem? There are no other tanking classes that would favor PVP vs PVE gear?
If so what are those classes suggesting?

Hi, everyone, like a few others I've been lurking here watching the discussion, without being sure I had anything substantial to contribute.

I've seen a lot of discussion here about how to scale as a tank in Rogue gear and I'd be happiest to see those options which see us taking loot from a variety of sources to increase our opportunity to pick up loot and our ease of getting vital items, which has been something of a problem in BC, with having to wait for a specific staff item to drop to give us a real weapon upgrade.

The discussion of mitigation in the form of Time To Live has been illuminating for what gear I'll be needing to tank in for the future, but what I haven't seen is a discussion of what else we can do to improve our situation if this gear isn't provided and tanking becomes a matter of why we should be taken as a tank, when others can do a better job with their stats. In other words, how to convince Raid leaders it is worth taking us, when our spots are not already cemented. I'm well aware this is a perpetual argument and that skill and raid-integrating personality plays a large part in this; what I haven't seen is a comparison of how fast a boss goes down when we're tanking. We have arguably got a fair damage boost on the other classes even with Lich King and the other classes catching up on us for damage, so perhaps we need to be thinking of our contribution not only in terms of Time To Live (TTL), but also in terms of Time To Boss Death (TTBD), which is an important factor when racing Enrage timers with progression gear and is a real reason to look at taking a Druid tank. It doesn't fix the itemisation issues, but it does mean a TTL/TTBD equation may become relevant. If a boss dies faster when we tank it, is our mitigation worth slightly more to us in the greater context of preserving healers' mana pools and potion cooldowns, etc? Any way we can make complex issues of our class simpler to explain to non-Druids and reduce the perception our "nerfs" make us "inferior" tanks now is a good one. I honestly have no idea what sort of a difference TTBD makes for us.

I fully support the moves suggested to give us reason to stack DPS gear in our armor slots, since that's what Blizzard wants us to have access to, I also support it in terms of giving us a decision to make for the Trinket/ring slots. Choice is good and having access to DPS gear in these slots allowing us more opportunities for drops to improve our tanking is a good thing and means we can be firm in leaving the parry/block/defense items for our tanking brethren inother classes. Improving multiple tanks on one Boss kill is something which would have proved remarkably difficult in BC and if we can somehow come out as a Tank/DPS hybrid, yes all the other classes will whine a bit, but we will pick up the things Blizzard is intending for us. Also, nothing will really have changed. In BC, we already had a significant damage advantage over other tanks and it helps reduce my most hated aspect of BC, running around with 3-4 bags of gear in instances just in case. Thank you to the people who've suggested the mechanics by which we could gain noticeable benefit out of stacking DPS gear through AP, Agility, armour and crit.

As for the improved LotP idea to give us extra health on a crit, we already have this mechanic in place with the Innervate glyph, where we get a proportion of the mana ourselves. I know this mechanic changed recently, but it can clearly be done to benefit the caster. Whether it can be done to benefit only the caster as proposed or it's not as imbalanced as we might think compared to the paladin equivalent is difficult to say. Differences between the classes are vital to the shape of the game and giving Tanking druids a bonus to their capacity to heal themselves is very muchin the spirit of Frenzied regeneration. Hmm, that's a point. We could potentially remove the cap to LotP while Frenzied Regen is up, to increase the use of our panic button and enhance something we already have use from. May lead to us needing a slightly different cooldown for Frenzied Regen, but it's a workable idea.

This and to what someone above saying that the Naxxramas gear will be more readily available, I'll agree with you on the point of the main pieces of head/shoulders/chest/legs/gloves since those require very high ratings to get the Deadly. However, I know at least the belt only required honor points and a 1640ish rating to get the 213 item lvl slot item. Considering I won't be jumping straight into 25-man Naxxramas, that's quite a nice upgrade especially since I won't need anything else until Ulduar unless they make PvP gear unappealing in some meaningful way.

As for killing the boss faster, other than going for record times, achievements, or beating enrage timers (the only important one) I will almost always favor living over threat. If the boss dies at 2:10 instead of 2:30, it won't make a lick of difference to me really.

I think the only other viable alternative to this pvp-gear dilemma would be to reintroduce Int as a major stat on the pvp gear. It would eat up more of the item budget, and at the same time, quell most of the qq'ing about feral mana pools. Since the mana pool issue is pretty insignificant for us in a pve environment, and really is only an issue in pvp, I think it would be perfect. Of course, this means that they would have to retool all of the pvp feral gear, but I don't think that it would be such a huge problem.

Another difference between bear charge and cat charge is that Feral Charge - Cat doesn't put you into combat (not sure if is intended or bug). It is a bit anonying when i was farming low level mob for timbermaw rep, kitty charge to a mob and see them still walking away in daze ignoring you.

I actually made a macro as follow ~

/cast feral charge - cat
/stopattack
/cast prowl
/cast pounce

Hit the macro twice fast and you can get a quick kitty charge+stun combo if you start as non stealth and not in combat, might be useful in arena too.