Suggestion wise so far, the armor through strength wouldn’t be a bad way to offset all the strength we will see on tank gear. It seems the most logical rather then giving us a block ability or straight up passive parry that we have never had and then having to balance us around having that ability. We have always been known for sick armor values and our physical mitigation abilities.

Now, I am just throwing it out there but what about allowing thorns (or maybe a talent called rugged fur?) to gain a certain buff from strength? (Let’s hope they increase the timer from 10 minutes to something respectable... 30 or so) Whether it be a passive amount we get healed for each time we are hit (helping physical as well as magical mitigation), or it buffs the damage thorns deal each time we are hit (would help our AoE tanking ability immensely once we drew the initial agro, and also differs from all the new ways the other tanks can AoE tank). If they decide to redesign the tree a bit and actually put in some bear centric talent to allow this it would go along with their post of intent in having bear/cat specific specs to truly excel at one or the other.

Or maybe a bear talent to create an aura around us (to paly like for me but still a cool idea) called Sacred ground that deals nature damage based off of strength to each mob close enough.

The glaring issue with this is that it relies on a buff and not a passive gain from strength (can be dispelled in pvp as well as from mobs with the capability in PvE)

Sounds cool - though I'd be thinking more along the lines of a passive 'block/absorb' value on thorns than increased damage (not that you'll hear me complaining about either). Duration would have to be upped dramatically though. Imagine Supremus WotLK version which is 20 minutes of boredom, except no chance to shift out.
I don't quite see your suggestions working with a Resto/Balance druid casting them on a tanking Druid. That'd be kind of silly (and possibly downright flukey with the new Brambles talent).

Giving a mitigation bonus based on strength is a bad idea. Attack power would be fine though. Remember that you'll likely have rogue gear in a few slots.

Bah I was typing up a long reply, but that sums it up. Another option is some sort of change to Demo Roar, but in a way where only the tanking Bear benefits. It could become the Bear tank Shield Block or something along the lines of physical damage reduction.

Either works for me, but this was largely kicked around cos of all the strength on tank oriented pieces to benefit other classes. Since it's the tank pieces that determine mitigation I think it'd be a lot easier to balance around a stat that -all- tanks get in the same numbers.

//edit; not to mention those 1500 Feral Attack Power staves...

I guess the way Blizzard goes, with DKs as a 4th class able to tank, will be to give every tanking class some sort of viability in "specialized" roles - that we need in 25 man raids - where they really shine over other classes, while every tank will be fully viable in 5man and 10man content.
I think of something like M'uru 2 for example:
Large number of AoE-Mobs for Pally (maybe DK?) tanks, some abilities that must be spellreflected by Warriors, maybe some Mobs with heavy, but low range AoE-Effects that must be tankey by a DK and killed by Ranged-DDs and 1-4 Adds that must die very fast where extreme snapaggro is needed.

edit after reading above post:
Yeah, what about a conversion of Feral AttackPower into armor that gets multiplied by Thick Hide?

Str as a main Druid tanking stat worries me, will trinkets, rings, neck, and stave contain enough stats? I mean as it is now we gain stats from every slot, not 6.

Well, strength is also desired by DKs for parry (correct me if I am wrong, but warriors benefit from str via parry as well right?) so I cant imagine that they wouldnt itemize those other slots we will be sharing with the other tanking classes with strength.

They just really need to nail whatever mechanic they are going to give us if they are taking away our "king of armor" crown.

Hate to state the obvious, but 8 of our 16 gear slots won't be shared with other tank classes.

We'll likely see strength on feral tier gear, but everything else leather will likely be agility + attack power.

All rings, cloaks and necks w/ extra armor will be DK oriented items which will contain str. Str is going to be a huge factor for DKs and to a lesser extent warriors. Also belt, boots and bracers (assuming no t7) are the only pieces that druids will share w/ rogues.

Druids are the only tank in the game that does not have a dual purpose stat other than agil which has been severely nerfed.

No. But who is waiting for another reissue of [Band of the Abyssal Lord], [Ring of Hardened Resolve], [Shadowmoon Insignia], [Pendant of Titans] or [Collar of the Pit Lord] ? Defense already benefitted us less than Warriors/Paladins. Dodge benefitted us less. In WotLk defense won't benefit us at all, neither will Strength which those new tanking items appear to be loaded with (mind you, seeing how that's mostly *leveling* tanking gear all we've got to go by is a statement of intent). 5 slots will still be shared and I wouldn't like to see us having to use gear which is a) better off on another tank, b) doesn't really suit us (again).

I am not sure on the mechanics for parry in WotLK. Currently only defense (or direct parry rating) increases parry. Would like a link to how it's supposed to work in WotLK.

This all makes me wonder if your original suggestion of giving rogues 2AP per 1 strength would help things, I expect it would have too much of an effect on gear choices for rogues but something needs to be worked out.

The latest post by Ghostcrawler gives a lot more insight into Blizzards thoughts than the initial one which, I will admit, concerned me.
It is good to see that they realise the convenience factor doesn't cut it although I expect raids will still makes changes based on optimal choices if they can anyway. Balancing a cat's DPS potential between a raid setting and PvP will be quite tricky, currently we get beaten by enhancement shaman and the raid buffs they bring far surpass LotP.

A couple of things confuse me with their push for specialising between cat and bear.
We have already chosen to specialise as a feral, I can understand separating PvE from PvP but PvE feral should mean just that. Other old druids will remember the mess that our original trees were and they had separate talents for cat and bear, the merging of the talents is one of things which made feral a decent choice in Burning Crusade.

The other thing is their statement about adding another tanking class as groups have trouble finding tanks.
This statement contradicts splitting feral as it will cause some of the current ferals to be cats which will reduce the number of tanks. I expect there will be many of us choosing cat as it will most likely make leveling and solo questing quicker.
Having said that most of us on this forum will understand that a cat specced bear should be fine for tanking five mans and probably even heroics but the general WoW player looking for PuG's?
I would be surprised and again the old druids will remember being quizzed about spec before getting group invites in vanilla, "Do you have Innervate?", was all too common.

To me relying on Strength is very much like the current reliance on Resilience. Blizz would be making a big mistake forcing us to seek out a stat and having to stack it on a few items. Does that not strike you guys as counter to their stated intentions? The solutions to quite a bit of gear consolidation and issues have been to tweak talents, skills, and abilities. So it seems reasonable that will also be the solution to the removal of bonus armor, or at least the optimist in me hopes so.

I think adding 5% total damage reduction per point into the PT or IW (the 3 pt talents) would be great. that would set us on par with warriors in terms of magical reduction. (if i got it right)

adding another low threat move that "blocks" casts (like shield reflect but without the damage reflection component) and reduces damage taken by a static coefficient of our strength (maybe 1 str = 1dr @ 80) would be great too. that would fix that we have no gimmicks and thus could not fullfill some very important main tank jobs in TBC (but could in WOTLK). it would allow us to go more for threat or more for damage reduction.

i still like parry by strength so. I do not think we should profit from block rating/value, wear mail or shields.

Beta forums are slow as hell for me at the moment, so if someone else with access wants to post this suggestion there, be my guest: The obvious answer for Bears to have some sort of activated damage reduction on a not-too-long-but-still-not-spammed cooldown, and to increase our overall mitigation a bit, is to just allow Barkskin in forms. It's an old suggestion, but a good one, and now more appropriate than ever, I think.

I'd like to request one of the beta testers that reads this forum to start a topic on the druid forum with the simple question: what is the Bear tank niche? That would help a lot for determining what talents, skills, itemization and other issues need to be addressed.

I'm very happy to hear that the notion of convenience is going to be removed as a good factor, but at the same time I still do not have a good idea of what they want a Bear tank to do or where they should be. Since it sounds like they're removing or otherwise balancing out the mitigation side according to that post, we know that bears are not going to be the hard-hitting physical tanks ala Gruul. Personally I'd be fine with bears being the mitigation kings for physical damage; all the other tanking classes have more than enough niches to fill. It would be good to know that this is their intention, however.

The feral swiftness change is really excellent. I'm a bit surprised given that it might cause some odd balance issues in pvp, but I doubt they care for optimizing BGs.

...

Rogues currently get 1AP per Str. There is a suggestion that they get 2AP per Str in WotLK. And no, replacing every 2AP on an item with 1Str does not give the exact same stats. Many talents/abilities work only on stats, the most notable being Kings.

Im not a fan of converting strenth to parry, just adds another avoidance, which would scale badly. Converting it to a mitigation such as block or absorb might be good though. Eg, 100 strength = 1% chance and 1% value type situation.

Converting strength to be 2ap for rogues would have too many follow-on issues. Since they're getting both AP and Crit from agility, alot of their stuff would need to be rebalanced or reitemised. It's not worth patching one problem up with another.

I think what alot of people havent taken into consideration is tier sets. For all we know, they might have tons of armor/stam/agility/expertise on them and we're worrying over nothing. Be interesting to see if they want to implement a bear tier set and a cat tier set. They currently already have affliction/destro warlock pvp sets, so isn't too far of a stretch.

Not sure if anyones mentioned it already, but heart of the wild talent (currently, amongst other things) increases intellect by 20%. If we're sharing rogue gear, wont this be a little redundant?

2 AP = 1 Str = 1 Agi in terms of item budget.
Im fully aware that Rogues currently get 1 AP from 1 Str which was one reason there were a lot of complaints about T3.

Doomhide Gauntlets were so good because they had Agi/AP instead of Agi/Str like most items back in their time which wasted the potential power of the item due to lost budget.

14 Agi + 42 AP (57~ AP total) vs 14 Agi and 21 Str (39~ AP total)


There would be deviance through talents fair enough and kings would give a slight edge, but AP supplanted Str for no reason except that for classes who didn't get 2 AP from 1 Str it was better (thus most items had to use AP else they became niche for the few Str classes).
This could all of been easily avoided if everyone just gained 2 AP from 1 Str and AP was never implemented or solely used as an augmentative stat to release ilvl budget for a more powerful item.

Before you comment about how overpowered it would be if Hunters, Rogues etc would get 2 AP from 1 Str just convert all their gear with AP into 1/2 value of Str and then compare how amazingly 'overpowered' the item becomes with the conversion done (0 AP on the item, just Str / Agi).

I'd still like to see them just give rogues 2 ap per strength, but I don't see that happening at this stage of the development cycle.

Given that blue post I think it's reasonable to say that tier gear will not have extra armor on it either. If their intention is to not overload feral druids with armor, it'd be silly to only put it on tier gear; at that point ferals are essentially in the same boat they are in T6 (only tier drops matter), which the devs have said they do not want. And having 4 different tier sets for druids is a bit over the top. For starters, it means druids would have to collect two sets of tier gear in order to be competitive in either facet, and I don't think that's what they want.

Also, the 20% int buff will not only not be redundant, it will be somewhat pointless. That's fine; ferals in PvE don't tend to need a lot of int as it stands, but unless the tier gear has int in abundance chances are we won't see int on any gear.

Thanks, Astrylian, for adding the niche question to the forums.

Giving rogues 2ap per str, and replacing all AP on rogue gear with half as much str would be a huge buff to rogues. Not saying it's not a good idea, just pointing out that it's not insignificant.