And when we hit 75% mitigation again (at least on trash and/or with inspiration procs?) how do we continue to scale like the other tanks? We would be limited to looking for gear with agi + sta (and maybe dodge and expertise?). And no other class wants those stats, so I wouldn't expect to find much of it?

All of that said, they said bear form is by no means done. And the crushing change will help. And if the armor necklace isn't a fluke, that helps us more than anyone else. And theoretically we could dump our (level 70) 65 defense stats into all agi or sta given the right gear. I'll wait until the changes before I worry more. Hopefully they implement the fixes in a way that:
a) Doesn't make us more powerful than other tanks early level 80.
b) Doesn't make level 70 and/or pvp gear better for tanking than our pve gear.
c) Allows us to scale well in the end game.
d) Allows bears to have more than just tier gear / badge gear to look forward to.

Another minor concern I have is the dps available on rogue gear. If they tweak bears so that they have more survivability from rogue gear, will bears put out too much dps? I still think they went too far with the big TBC nerfs. But the damage portion of the nerf was probably called for. I used to end up #1 to #2 on dps tanking zones like shattered halls because our damage was so high swipe-spamming. If our tanking leather looks like: base armor, high agi and then huge +ap, crit and hit, will we hear the 'bears do way too muc damage!' whines again?

As for specializing bear/cat. I can't see them doing more than giving us 2 different talents that would be very difficult to take both. Something like rend and tear replaced with 2 different 5 point talents: 1 for bears (something like the survivability talent we already had?) and 1 for dps.

I think we already have to make somewhat of a bear / cat choice just from glyphs. I'm assuming we can't change glyphs as easily / cheaply as we change forms. So, we'll have to choose to be slightly better tanks (4 target swipe, better taunt chance, etc) vs. better dps (18 second mangle, increased rip time, etc).

I don't think we can discuss about armor values until we see the first new tier. Till now we just have blue gear that requires lvl78 and people can't even equip. Also what we see now can change (remember the zero stamina in the new t6 gear). What we have until now is the Berserk and Frenzied Regeneration (if the glyph remains) which i think cover our need to have something to save ourselves when things go bad. What we miss is spell damage mitigation.

Maybe Spell damage mitigation is the mechanism they are waiting to implement (to diversify the tree into two seperate specialties) when they are ready to test out the tanks and figure out exactly where everyone is at TPS/DPS/Mitigation wise.

[Guardian's Leather Belt] vs [Guardian's Dragonhide Belt]
[Slayer's Handguards] vs [Thunderheart Gauntlets]
[Slayer's Chestguard] vs [Thunderheart Chestguard]
[Slayer's Legguards] vs [Thunderheart Leggings]

You were saying ?
Rogue gear continuously has more Stamina and more Agility than the corresponding Bear gear.

No need to get your panties in a twist. A lot is changing in LK, all that is needed is for them to implement either a talent that allows us to turn AP into more armor for ourselves, or for us to get more use out of XYZ stat and all will be right with the feral world again. They keep mentioning how easy it is for them to turn "knobs" and adjust them. Hopefully once beta starts drilling the 80 content we will see them turn a couple.

Only because the Druid gear has Strength, Intellect, and extra armor, none of which is found on the Rogue gear. They do get AP and crit, but I think it's easy to say that if you removed the STR/INT from the Druid gear you'd have plenty of itemization to spend on enough AGI/STA to put them ahead of the Rogue pieces. I have no idea if that's ideal since I'm not a Feral Druid, but saying that Rogue gear has more STA/AGI than Druid gear is, while true in those examples, missing the point a bit.

Comparing rogue gear with some imaginary druid gear that doesn't exist is missing the point a lot.
If you're worried about stamina on WOTLK leather, just check wowhead or wowdb. There's a lot of stuff with amazing amount of stamina.

The claim that rogue gear doesn't typically have enough stamina for tanking is pretty baseless looking at top-end rogue gear from TBC and current rogue gear in the WLK beta.

Obviously gear that is *completely optimized* for a bear is going to be different than the same kind of gear for a rogue, both at 70 and at 80. The point of the discussion is that it seems like Blizzard is trying to get away from designing multiple sets of gear outside the tiered sets. I personally would enjoy being able to just wear the same leather/rings/neck/whatever as rogues do and have it work for tanking. It would sure make life easier and save me from searching for that über-awesome-quest-green because nothing else is any good. (Remember Ash-Tempered Legguards?)

I'm fine with using rogue gear, I really am. But something needs to change. I don't currently *WANT* to. I look at the gear, and what various stats give me, and say 'I'd rather have XYZ'.

The picture as we have made is that we will use Rogue gear in leather slots, and DK/WAR armor/str/def items in off slots. this schizophrenic gearing is a product of Ferals not being completed yet by blizzard, and an effort on our part to stick to what we know instead of the direction Blizzard seems to be taking us. However I feel we are justified in this as Blizzard has shown themselves to be dreadfully ignorant of what Ferals want in their current form, let alone in some completely different form.

*IF* blizzard is truly serious about unifying gear, then this needs to be followed through to it's conclusion. We need to *WANT* (not just have it shoved down our throat) rogue gear on *ALL* our slots, not just the leather ones. If order for this to happen AGI needs to be our GOD stat, much more so than it is now. All the following need to occur:

1) We need to generate threat off of Agility. The easiest solution would be to add, and/or tinker with AGI->AP/Crit conversion in bear form.
2) We need to generate avoidance off of Agility. The easiest solution would be to tinker with the AGI->Dodge conversion as needed.
3) We need to generate mitigation off of Agility. The easiest solution would be to tinker with the AGI->Armor conversion as needed, AND make this armor affected by Bear form.
4) Our anti-crit talent needs to also grant daze resistance as per the defence that other tank classes require.

To wrap this up in some neat little packages:
Survival of the Fittest Rank 1/2/3
Increases all attributes by 2/4/6%
Reduces the chance you'll be critically hit by melee attacks by 2/4/6%
Reduces the change that you'll be dazed by 10/20/30%

Note: chance to daze of an even level mob is 20%, maximum chance to daze is 40%.

Thick Hide Rank 1/2/3
Increases your Armor contribution from items by 4/7/10%.
Increases your Armor by X/Y/Z% of your Agility.

Note: Alternatively the % increase could just be raised

The other effect would need to be behind the scenes changes.

Shamans just got 1AGI = 1AP to go alongside their existing 1STR = 1AP. I don't see a problem with us getting similar, hopefully Blizzard will realize the same thing soon.

edit: corrected.

Just to provide the reference for that: WoW Forums -> AP from Agility?

Hmm, notice the absence of feral druids in that list :P.

1 agi = 1 ap
1str = 1ap
1 int = 1ap(from talent)
For shamans in wotlk beta now.
Don't post bullshit

D'oh, thanks for the correction.

Given that we'll have a lot of agi, agi should be very important to bears. But if they make it a god stats, druids will stack unbelievable amounts of agi. Then we will either:
a) Come very close to unhittable like rogues do today via agi + dodge items leading to 'nerf druids!' posts.
b) Face some new dodge + miss cap they will implement, making agi suddenly bad and forcing us to look for sta.


I disagree that we should tank in a full set of rogue gear. I think, for balance sake, we should want some tanking pieces in our non-leather slot. I think we can agree that any gear rogues want will have agi and maybe sta but definitely ap, crit and then maybe haste, hit, expertise, armor pen, etc. If we tank with +ap and crit on every piece of gear while other tanks tank in mostly armor/sta/defense/ (ok, some str in there) gear, the difference between our dps while tanking and other tanks will increase. I'd rather not live with the constant 'druids can dps WHILE tanking' whines.

It also means that we'll have 3 roles as we do today: full tank, offtank in tank gear switching to cat for decent damage and full cat mode with good damage and little survivability. If we tank in the same gear we dps in, we have no downside to tanking sometimes and dps'ing others.

I'm hoping they make our survivability come from a wider variety of the stats present on the gear we're wearing, not less.

Actually strength has again become the druid stat for DPS

Accoding to Toskk

Totally makes sense (lower crit:agi ratings). Even with str on tanking gear, though, I bet we'd still do more tanking damage in cat rings/cloak/trinket/neck than the tanking ones. If we want to tank in rogue dps off-pieces, wouldn't you expect bears to put out even more damage compared to prot war / tankadin than we do now?

Another possibility - and one we've seen so far in other tanking classes - is using other offensive and generic stats as boosts for mitigation. Considering that all rogue gear is threat gear, I would not be surprised to see a stam->armor, AP->dodge or haste->armor type of conversion.

If they wanted to do something fairly elegant, they could have a talent that converted these stats in both cat and bear form and actually converted, not added, the stat. In this way they would have their talent that made you either a good bear and a meh cat or a good cat and a meh bear, while having the ability to use rogue gear as needed. I don't know whether Blizzard will do something like this; a lot depends on the itemization. But I wouldn't be surprised if they went this direction.

With the changes of agi:crit ratio and the shift back to str as our main dps stat, my concern is that Nurturing Instinct will then be greatly reduced in power. The devs have acknowledged this before by changing it from str->healing to agi->healing, but now with the 2 stats being closer in power, we will have lower numbers on both (rather than the very high numbers due to agi stacking at the moment). Perhaps changing it to a 15-20% conversion of AP instead. In my current pvp gear, I have around 3400AP giving 510 healing at 15% which is roughly the same as it currently gives (535 agi in pvp gear)

Man the people in that thread are some bona fide retarded. They obviously don't have any idea how the DPS calculation or the Str vs. Agi comparison actually works.

It's fairly natural for Str. to be better than Agi at the beginning of an expansion when overall AP values are low, and to then decrease in relative value as overall AP scales up much faster -- thanks to weapon upgrades -- than overall crit percentages. Toskk didn't give a character level or an AP/crit value for the AEP's that his calculator spit out so I can't be sure what kind of stats he was using, but I think it's safe to assume that Agi will scale better than Str as it always has since there is simply less crit available than raw attack power.

I was wondering...if someone with access to the Beta forums would mind suggesting they fix daze to work with chance to be crit (non-crit), versus defense. Especially since we aren't going to be using any defense at all in the expac, we're going to be dazed even more by any sort of AOE tanking fight we're used in.

Every other tank has to use defense to reach non-crit, meaning they also get the benefit of no daze.

Done.

... Where?