This has been mentioned by Ghostcrawler, with a suggestion that we may see something that boosts the usefulness of Defense further, in the future. In a discussion of DK tanking:
If bears get something that adds extra avoidance or mitigation via Defense, that would help with these itemization issues.

What have you guys gemmed your polar sets with? I'm on the fence about going full stam gems and just making it my stam set, or adding some hit and agi and keeping it more well rounded.

On (2) I'm quietly praying for a new idol or two when Death Knights gets some much needed new sigils. I'm not sure how [Libram of Obstruction] measures up for Paladins, but it seems like all non-warrior tanks are staring at the massive tank gun that is available, and while I know Blizzard is going in other directions with relics, it really feels like that slot is getting shafted. Blizzard has even acknowledged that Death Knights have a hard time reaching the defense cap since they are pretty much expected to tank with a DPS two-hander, and still they get no defense oriented sigil.

I haven't seen it addressed or brought up really on the tank role boards, but I'm still hoping (being in the EU I've somewhat given up posting stuff there as it for the most part drowns in avalanches of pure stupidity).

In general it seems that bear itemization is a little bit in limbo right now as we await the armor (and possible defense) changes. With the old armor model there is be a fair number of pieces that looks well enough suited (armor/sta/def/dodge) for bears, but how they pan out (relative to other choices) we'll just have to see once the numbers gets fiddled with on the PTR.

I slotted my polar set full stam and locked it away in my vault after a single use. There isn't anything in the game that remotely requires resists at the expense of other tanking stats. I used it once to tank Heroic Sapphiron a week after release and shelved it the next week when I tanked Heroic Sapphiron in full cat gear after having our Warrior MT die.

Your gear is leaps and bounds better than average though, my guild is full of slow levelers and we are just starting naxx 10. So I'd be using the polar set to tank heroics and stuff, yeah the FrR is wasted 99% of the time , but the peices have pretty great stam and decent armor. I was thinking of socketing them with agi and just tanking in them normally till I get some naxx loot.

That seems really unnecessary. Trollwoven belt will do you better than the Polar and the quest reward chest out of UP is great too. I just can't see you lacking stam enough to justify using the polar set. It seems that many druids at this point are trying to find ways to cut back on their stam to get more of just about anything else. I would say look through the pre raid gear thread and find the easy to get stuff and get those things. You don't want to be at a point where your dmg taken is higher than your healer's HPS and if you're all stam, that's very possible.

There's 1 thing, namely Heroic Sartharion with 3 drakes up. 25% hp reduction aura combined with a number of fire damage multipliers favors pure stamina gear heavily.

Keep hold of your polar set for this - it really is over powered for 3 drake Sartharion tanking.

I socketed mine mainly Stamina - except for chest (it think). With decent food, stam enchants and a [Recipe: Flask of Chromatic Wonder] i was just shy of 47k HP before the pull and didn't really have a problem tanking his breaths even with Tenebron dead and Vespron adds up.

It was a bit weird tanking a fire dragon with 400 frost resistance tho!

Just found a blue answer to this on the German Druid Board

Translation:

Maybe this is a silly question, but I'm wondering about the T7 and 7.5 set bonuses. I know that normally, you can have more than 1 set bonus at a time, but the bonuses listed are the same for both T7 sets. If you had 2 pieces of T7 and 2 pieces of 7.5, do you get 6 additional seconds to rip?

No, if you have 2 pieces of T7.10 and 2 pieces of T7.25 you get the 4piece set bonus, it counts as the same set.

The reason to get the polar set isn't the Frost resistance; it's that it has the most stamina of any leather piece in that slot by huge margins and is a high-ilvl set. It could have spellpower instead of FrR and be just as good.

You don't need that much stamina after just a few drops, but it's a good starting set and has a couple of specialized uses down the road. Also, thanks to the total lack of good boots the Polar Boots end up being pretty good anyway.

I'm in full 25 man Tank gear, minus blue boots, after going over the boots I'm wearing and then comparing my findings with what Rawr tells me based on my current gear. I fully plan on using Polar boots for tanking at all times, untill something better arises. Namely PvP boots.

They have a ridiculous amount of stamina with 2 gem slots which im putting stam gems in and a stam enchant. Obviously they lack any tanking stats besides the stam, but threat is not a problem and my current avoidance is good enough to leave be.

The stam is also very important as fights like Sartharion + 3 drakes are frequently a problem for me if i have to tank Sartharion and am liable of getting 1 shot by a flame breath, short of poping a cooldown or relying on somenoe elses. For this specifig situation, the only stat that matters is stam.

I've ran the numbers and have frequently revisited the possible use of the boots and keep coming to the same conclusion, that they are worth using.

With the recent change to swipe (swipe does 50% more threat), I believe that swipe now beats lacerate at all levels of damage given reasonable AP and crit levels. Is that correct?

How good is [Fury of the Five Flights] for ferals? I assume it's pretty darn good, but I don't know if I should use it at this point. I currently have Mirror and Sphere of Red Dragon's Blood, not hit capped. For some reason I can't find this trinket in rawr.

EDIT: I manually entered the trinket as 320AP in Rawr and it rates higher than both other two trinkets I have. Still not sure why it's not in Rawr to begin with.

Here's the math to answer my own question.

Swipe damage: (AP * .063 + 108) * Naturalist bonus * feral instinct bonus * armor penalty * (1 + crit chance) * 4pT6 bonus
lacerate damage: (AP*.01+88)*Naturalist bonus * armor penalty * (1 + crit chance) * 2pt7 bonus
lacerate DOT damage: (AP*.01+64)*stack size * naturalist * mangle * 2pt7 bonus

Swipe DPS: swipe damage /1.5
lacerate DPS: lacerate damage / 1.5
lacerate DOT DPS: lacerate dot damage / 3.0

swipe TPS: swipe DPS * 29/14 * 1.5
lacerate TPS: 29/14*(lacerage damage+1031)/ (2* 1.5)
lacerate DOT TPS: lacerate DOT DPS * 29/14 / 2

Based on a 70% armor reduction from bosses, here are the results:

For AP 4735, crit 30%, no T6 and 2pT7 I get the following:
swipe TPS: 1095.2
lacerate TPS: 786.1
lacerate DOT TPS: 282.5
total lacerate TPS: 1076.045

swipe TPS - lacerate TPS: 307.7

So at least at my level of gear it is better to simply swipe every time and not bother with lacerate. At least I believe; it's harder to model the value of keeping a stack up but losing threat via multiple lacerates compared to multiple swipes. For this it appears that the TPS for lacerate's ticks is not as good as a single swipe relative to a single lacerate, TPS wise. Still, every time you lacerate you lose more TPS than a DOT of lacerate will tick for. That alone makes it pretty significant.

Not necessarily. The only thing that R&T needs is a bleed going, not a lacerate. As long as you have another class providing a bleed of some kind lacerate will be suboptimal. Naturally you'll need to do a lacerate if you don't have that.

Single target threat being as inconsequential as it is in the current raid game (aside from perhaps Bloodlusted Mages popping cooldowns in 2-3 spark Malygos, you'd probably lose the stack on Vortex anyway, so this fight is clearly Lacerate unfriendly), a Lacerate stack is well worth keeping up purely for its DPS. A Lacerate in place of a Swipe every ~10-12 seconds once the stack is up isn't a massive loss in TPS.

Your formulas look right, but you're missing some important factors. First of all, this is only comparing Swipe spam against Lacerate spam. Second of all, you're not counting avoided attacks. Additionally, boss armor rates have gone up. If you don't have a warrior sundering (very possible if druid is tanking) it will be as high as 44% armor without or 34% with. The bleed from lacerate is more valuable in all of these cases (assuming you're not letting it fall off ever). As already mentioned, the bleed for RnT needs to be considered if not provided by someone else. Those stats also look quite low and I'm hoping are unbuffed totals.

This does make Swipe spam much closer to Lacerate spam. After factoring in miss rates I think Lacerate spam comes out slightly ahead still. However, just using Lacerate to keep the stack up and Swiping otherwise was already best single target TPS. This change just makes it better.

You're likely right. The DPS for a swipe is 352. The DPS for a lacerate is 72. The DPS for a Lacerate DOT 5-stack is 278. The total DPS for lacerate + DOTs is 351; the total dps for swipe is 352. I think you have to get into a bit harder modeling than I have time for to determine whether keeping the stack up is reasonable for DPS at that time though. According to Rawr you'd lose about 200 DPS which sounds about right, but I'd like to look into it further.

The stats are mine and based on my character with typical Naxx-25 raid buffs. They are low; that is sort of the point. At higher levels of gear you will see swipe greatly overtake lacerate; at 6000 AP and 40% crit, for example, you'll see swipe with almost a 300 TPS advantage. Without an armor debuff, the bonus does favor lacerate again at my gear levels, this is true - but without any armor debuff you'll see a lot of classes suffer greatly, so it's somewhat of a good assumption that it exists. Avoidance doesn't effectively factor into this all that much. The bleed debuff does not cause that much threat relative to the swipe or the lacerate attack directly.

More interesting is that my estimates show Swipe threat can now pass up Faerie Fire threat. That threshold is roughly 6k AP and 40% crit (not too hard with raid buffs) with Sunders up. Without Sunders it would be closer to a 7500 AP and 45% crit region.

Couldn't find much information about my question: Which two pieces of T7 are best to maximize cat DPS. You obviously don't want the four piece bonus. I was thinking it would be shoulders and helm because of the hands from 25 man malygos, the pants from 25 man sartharion, and the chest from 25 man malygos. I could be wrong so I was just wondering what yall thought.