One note to the post above ... [Chain Gang Legguards] can be fished from the pool outside of VH with some patience. Took me 3 keys, or about 45 mins, to get them. Also had the added benefit of leveling my fishing some.

Based on the post by Kalbear regarding swipe TPS in Feral questions? I took a look at the increase that [Idol of Perspicacious Attacks] provides.

Using Felhoofs values of 4735AP and 30% crit:

-No idol-
DPS = 352.48
TPS = 1095.21

-IoPA-
DPS = 373.30
TPS = 1159.90

For Kalbear the IoPA would provide a 5.9% increase in swipe threat - 64.69 TPS, roughly the equivilant of an additional 381 AP.

At lower gear levels, it'll do better than that.

Nothing amazing, but more than what the crit increase that the ancient IoT could provide, since uptime issues may arise under heavy swipe spam. The avoidance provided by IoT could be worthwhile for multimob tanking, but that's a situational call easily enough made.

Anyways, I think that the extra threat for AoE pulls makes it worth having in your bags, and in this list.


Note: I did some testing to verify that the 24 damage is applied before modifiers, and seems to match my numbers. My sample size wasn't exceptionally large, and I could be mistaken.

[Chain Gang Legguards] rather. Not terribly hard to figure out that in order to make a mouseover link in your post, you'd need the actual webpage link instead of just putting square brackets around a word or two.

That said, thank you very much for the addition, this has not been very widely publicized and should be of great service to any druids leveling up fishing.

You don't have to be a fisherman, either. At least on my (high population) server they are pretty darn cheap at the AH. Very nice starting bear legs and not terrible for cat.

I'm so glad we were warned of them being "hilariously overbudget" here. Saved me a 20 agi enchant.
Took 'em long enough to notice really.

Any sign of a decent epic helm that isn't in Naxx or so? DKs have had some items added and the blacksmithing helms had sockets added...

The Hateful Gladiator's helm of triumph that you can get for 40 wintergrasp tokens is almost exactly the same as the Hateful Glad Dragonhide save the ArPen over Crit rating. It's a very good piece and pretty cheap. Nothing in terms of craftables, and chances are there won't be.

Using RAWR and sorting Rings by Cat-DPS value, [Hemorrhaging Circle] comes out very high on the list and there's nothing iffy about it. If you're speaking from a bear standpoint, its a great starting point. Try H-Drak'Tharon for [Keystone Great-Ring] for a great bear ring.

I would just like to add that the epic pvp pieces are very good for entry level raids. Very high stam and decent agi and armor even with the "wasted" points in resilience. [Hateful Gladiator's Armwraps of Triumph] are top 4 in slot right now only to [Sinner's Bindings], [Deadly Gladiator's Armwraps of Triumph] and [Thrusting Bands]. The same is true for the boots and belt. Also the [Savage Gladiator's Dragonhide Helm] one of the easiest helms to get with a meta.

One last thing, on the ptrs [Titan-Forged Leather Helm of Triumph] is available for 40 wintergrasp marks. A very sexy helm indeed.

Edit: I just listed the "offset" pvp pieces from honor. The Deadly and Hateful set lend themselves well to filling in gaps in your feral gear too.

Edit x2: added [Thrusting Bands]. Thanks cards dont know how i missed them.

Despite (or supporting, depending how you look at it) what Ghostcrawler said about PvP items being inferior for PvE tanking, all the stuff you can get through Arena are amazing for survivability. I'm pretty sure Resilience still does reduce PvE DOT damage (Not like there's much going around, but yeah).

The big monkey wrench is the amount of threat stats that you lose. For pre-raid tank gear, it's more than enough to hold aggro and because of that, they're excellent choices; but when DPS starts gearing up you'll want to stay ahead.

OK, I'm trying to wrap my head around this. I'm currently running a DK tank as my raid toon, but am turbo-leveling my feral druid to 80 to play around with bear tanking. I see all these posts about the PvP gear or the LW-craftable "Eviscerator's" set being a good starting point for a bear tank...but if I'm already pushing crits off the table thanks to SotF, why would I waste itemization points stacking resilience? I understand the PvP/resilience stuff typically piggybacks a crap-ton of Stam along with it, which is always nice, but is that it?

The resilience isn't the point of the pvp gear anymore. The reason for what you're hearing about the pvp gear being good is that pvp gear, by design, has high stam and armor. These are 2 extremely valuable stats for a druid tank, and a lot of the pvp gear is worth taking just for those stats alone, regardless of what else is on the item.

[Thrusting Bands] is better than any of those three.

Can Maeltne edit his post and put the consolidated list on there from page 4 so its on the front? Just might make it easier to find. I just came back to wow and want to thank you guys for the great work.

[Thrusting Bands] drops from Naxx-25 though. I thought that the whole point of the thread was to point out non-raid gear?

To be fair so are [Sinner's Bindings], but point well-taken.

Just a quick question over the relic slot for us ferals, I have skim read this post and cant find any reference to what idols people are using for tanking. At lvl 70 the best was [Idol of Terror] and I have been using this at level 80. Looking on wow head I found nothing really interesting on a PVE basis to get, yes there is the shred one with beadges, but was looking for a better tanking one. Last night was bored and just messing around when I came across [Idol of Perspicacious Attacks] wondering what others were using and what people think is still best to use.

YesI can see which is better was just wondering if all were using still the idol of terror, mainly wanted some discussion on the fact that we are lacking a improved lvl 80 tanking relic.

It's an established issue that bears don't have a new tanking relic. Since nothing was added in patch 3.0.8 to deal with this, we won't see anything until (at least) 3.1. Until then, [Idol of Terror] will have to suffice.

I use the Idol of Terror for boss fights since mitigation is priority 1 there. My Idol of Perspicacious Attacks gets used for trash clearing since it's mostly AoE'd down nowadays.

[Titansteel Destroyer] is rated fairly high on the list for Cat DPS on Emmerald's beta site for feral gear, but rates very low on the Bear Mitigation list. Given that weapon armor is not going to be as useful as it used to be for bears, would this be a decent pre-raid weapon for bears? Post patch, it will give ~1800 FAP.

There's no dodge or agility so I'd say no, it's just a threat stick really with a lot of stamina on it.

It'll be decent, but there are a lot better options out there. Still, it's the only weapon that's craftable. I'd probably rather have the [Stave of Shrouded Mysteries] from Revered Kirin Tor, but if it's what you can get, it's what you can get.