I hadn't considered the cat/bear shifting idea. It might work, although the mana cost makes it unsustainable for long I suspect.

As far as the armor changes go, I really can't see how people see it as a nerf. It gives us a heck of a lot more gear options, and whatever minor decrease people see in armor is made up for by the extra avoidance and stam you can stack in those slots now. I mean really, people complaining about losing 400 armor or something if you have otherwise crappy high armor stuff in every slot? That's less than 1% extra physical mitigation. You'll easily pick up a couple of percent dodge and a couple of thousand HP if you replace those items. Not a difficult tradeoff to make.

As I recall unless you have iLotP you get no way to mana regen at all in forms now, so it's pretty much required if you want to do the shift between the two idea for bursts on a long fight. I agree that taking primal tenacity is purely for PvP.

However you could also argue that if you're talking about doing short bursts, then just saving 100 energy and using tiger's fury during that burst is probably plenty. That should allow you to get 5 cat swipes off in 6.5 seconds. By the time you're done sitting in bear for 10 seconds to regen 100 energy after that is anything much going to even be alive?

Well, as I wrote, I never entered Naxx 10/25, only heroic 5man instances, and I am sitting on something like 34k armor unbuffed. I used RAWR to check the armor change and changed the cloak manually, so perhaps I made an error there. But I learned to trust RAWR, when it comes to numbers.

You can see my current heroic setup under The World of Warcraft Armory ... for me it will be a major armor nerf and I don´t have Defenders Code. And please no comment about missing enchants, I have several problems with my time/priority management in WoW. ;-) But even with the above mentioned starting tank set I cannot imagine that this patch will be a buff ... and don´t forget, in 2 or 3 month from now on, many bears will consider Naxx10 something like an enlarged UBRS / Karazhan: random groups running through in 3-4 hours. Which means the armor change will hit a lot of bears in some month from now on.

And to be honest: I regard my setup as a possible base setup for every bear who runs several heroic instances and who wants to tank Naxx and more and nothing "special", "time consuming" or even "top of the line".

Because it is a nerf. It's a good thing in the long term because it doesn't make us as reliant on specific drops, but you cannot possibly say this is not a nerf. We're not "gaining" anything back, and that 1% physical migitation you're talking about is infact a 4% damage taken increase, going from 27% of all physical damage taken * PotP reduction = 23.76% damage taken, instead of that I'll be taking 29% of all physical damage taken + PotP reduction = 25.52% damage taken, that's a 7% damage taken increase. You're out of your mind if you think I'll "get that back" by being able to use non-armor gear, because if that were the case we'd already be using that now.

Now again, this will work out in our favour in the long run just because of the RNG drop system, but don't try to sugarcoat it as a buff.

And of course you don´t have really that much options

1) more stamina, but currently many bears are already the tanks with the most HP, and you give armor up
2) more dodge, but for that you give armor up
3) you can now roll on pieces with block/parry *eg*

If you change your rings/necks/weapons/trinkets from armor, you will loose an additional 1k to 3k points of armor, and gain some % dodge and 1k to 2k life.

I'd say the bear armor changes have been discussed about sufficiently. For some gearing levels it comes down to a slight nerf (arguably a justified one) while at others it will come to a slight buff even. Whether this is a nerf or a buff depends mostly on the availability of bonus armor items at that particular gearing level (and luck with getting those and the availability of options as well).

You can go ahead and keep pretending that the highest hit point pool of all 4 tank classes and 34k armor unbuffed before stepping into Naxxramas is in any shape or form balanced.

Go on.

Rawr currently doesn't do base cloak armor right. So it'll overestimate how good cloaks are. But it's not that big of a deal.

The fact is that it is a nerf for higher-geared bears. Whether or not it is a nerf that particularly restricts bear tanking remains to be seen.

and forget about block and total miss/parry/dodge vs miss/dodge.

Last I checked, across all gear levels mitigation * avoidance on druids was superior to mitigation * avoidance of other tank classes, on top of being smoother and having a larger health pool.

The counterpoint to the fact that block is linear is that for anything hitting for over 10k (Enraged Maexxna, enraged faerlina, Sartharion with 3 stacks of Twilight Revenge - all pretty trivial in terms of numbers anyway, but there you have it) druid mitigation still came out better. For stuff slightly under, to about 7k a hit, blocked hits take the average damage per swing to below what a druid takes, at the expense of less-smooth damage-taken profiles. For anything under 4-5k a hit, block (especially prot paladin) wins out hands down.

Magic damage fights are a little harder to profile at the moment - the only two encounters available at the moment which would come to mind are Malygos at lower gear levels where an Arcane Breath and swing has a chance of 1-rounding, or Sarth+3, where you can take up to 30k breaths post-25% hp penalty aura. In both cases, a gigantic HP pool covers the situation. Death Knights hands down make the best magic mitigation tanks (as designed, despite 'tank equality') but the other three tanking classes are somewhat interchangable.

What my beef is, is that every time the three ridiculously scaling stats druids have (namely, Armor and Stam, pre-WotLK Agility) come under the spotlight, hordes of idiots come out of the woodwork crying about nerfs, without any empirical or at least theoretical data to support the claims. (No, gear lists and patch-induced armor nerfs aren't the focus of this - TTL vs other tanks, taking encounters into account is) This does -not- add anything to the thread or open up any avenues of discussion.

I've got Defenders Code, the Naxxramas +armor tanking staff and cloak, and Heroic DtK tanking ring. The patch will drop my armor by a cartload, but only because I managed to RNG all those drops. The bottom line, as has been mentioned in the thread, is relying on chance to get a specific number of drops is hardly good design.

I don't know about you guys complaining about sub-optimal rogue gear and +strength/defense jewelry, but I've had a lot of a better time so far in WotLK looking through gear lists and comparing items by slot to find optimum tanking gear, compared to... tier gear and badge loot and the occasional trash drop in TBC. The fact that its 'suboptimal' doesn't matter. Even pre-WotLK you could have designed tanking gear better than what was in-game, and... have druids scale through the roof.

The final outcome and how said gear stacks up vs other tanks, for the encounters in the game, is what matters. Opening up more itemization choices is nothing if not healthy for the game.