The PvP buff is actually the stacking bloom.

With my PvE gear, my lifeblooms are blooming for around 3.6k. A full 3 stack lifebloom getting purged/falling off will bloom for just over 10k. It becomes that much more of an anti-purge measure.

About Cat Glyphs. Since the choices are between Mangle/Shred/SR/Rip, would the obvious choice not be Mangle, Shred, and Savage Roar?

I understand that the 4 seconds on Rip is great, and that without our 2 piece T7 bonus it is a low timer, but perhaps this would be best for now. Maybe down when druids are geared with T8 and we no longer have that Rip set bonus, maybe then Rip/Mangle/Savage Roar would be better.

Also, a couple of questions for any kitties on the PTR if they wanna test it out.

1. With Glyph of Shred, will the time ever exceed the max duration of the Rip buff itself? IE: No Rip Glyph or T7 2 Piece, will it ever go beyond 12 seconds by using Shred right after?

2. Does the Rip have to actually wear off (by running out of time) for the maximum Rip time the Shred Glyph can add? By this I mean, can I shred 3 times and add 6 seconds to Rip, then reapply Rip, and add 3 seconds once more without messing up my rotation?

Any help with these answers?

Sure, I guess if you're going to put in something as "hard" to heal as Brutallus with Sunwell Radiance to offset a lot of avoidance, or M'uru because you just won't have the luxury of 5 people spamming the tank, put together with healer mana abundance nowadays, stamina reduces fatal blows by increasing the error margin.

But if there is a high error tolerance, does it really matter at all which is "better" for tanking anymore? I can argue about 500 stamina being useless because i never drop below 5k hp, and I can argue the same about avoidance if I can't reach 30% when it says 50% in my paper doll, but there will be times where high hp can save you by allowing you to live with 200 hp when a heal comes in, or avoidance can save you by allowing you to dodge several impending dooms.

Just personal preference at this point, I guess. (I think stacking either is dumb, but people's preference for balancing point will definitely be different)

You can check this and other threads for the how and why, but currently Rip Shred and SR glyph are likely the best combination, as the combination allows for more FB's.

Hey guys, I'm new to posting around here, so forgive me if I'm not 100% on point.

You bring up a fair point about the set bonuses for T8. Without knowing them, we can't say with the utmost certaintly what will be best. We can only venture a guess based on current information.

I am only assuming here as I haven't logged into my druid on the PTR yet, but the glyph seems to be modeled after the Starfire glyph. If that's the case then the answers to your questions would be:
1) Yes
2) Most likely not. Unless things have changed, however, you would not be able to refresh a Rip with a new Rip if the first Rip was buffed somehow (trinket proc, etc). It's also generally going to be your best bet to let your rip run its full course and refresh immediately after it falls off.

I'll post back after I have actual confirmation on current status on the PTR, but it's most likely as aforementioned.

I believe Blizzard's stated intention is to make healing less spammy and more interactive. This is coupled with their nerfs to OO5 regen, as a sort of paired necessity. You can't design fights that need specific timing if you allow near-infinite mana generation, but once you nerf mana regen you have to make fights more timing-sensitive. In any case, it's very possible that, with these changes (and hopefully others to other classes), another healer taking care of things before your LB blooms is not guaranteed, and that healers have to pay attention to each other in order to not waste mana.

I'm cool with that. I was just using a 1% difference as an example, not as a point at a this-is-why mechanic. What happens when the crit rating on your gear goes up by 8%?

From another perspective-- why doesn't crit have the same effect? I.e., if you crit with an attack, doesn't that effectively save you a GCD, along with all the energy saved from needing another attack? So shouldn't more crit produce the same effects (but better because of more energy), if this is what's going on? (Yes, I know you have to throw out CP generation from crits that only produce 4 points.)

I'm more concerned about the delta between Live sim results and PTR sim results than between it and Rawr/Toskk, because I'd think the longer rips should more than compensate for missing Rip uptime. And how the rule changes about SR/FB usage seem to throw current practice out the window. Specifically, it looks like your sim's rule changes seem to favor sacrificing SR uptime for Rip uptime, which I'm fine with; I'm less fine about sacrificing SR uptime for FB, especially since the SR changes should make SR relatively better, rather than worse. Note that your priority changes were essentially increasing Rip uptime by reducing SR uptime, rather than lowering FB frequency.

Have you tried explicitly only FBing in situations where you would before, discounting shred glyph? I.e., push the threshold to 16 seconds (and increments in between)? Does the math still work out to FB being worth sacrificing 4 seconds of Rip uptime even though Rip damage got buffed? How about 4pt bites in crunched cycles, rather than losing SR uptime? (They're still more energy efficient than shred.)

Way to pick a worst-case scenario.

The GCD issue doesn't play favorites-- while it might push off a Rip or FB in certain circumstances, it has a chance to push off rake, mangle, shred, or nothing at all, too. If you have DPS breaks, you have extra energy pooled which should be plenty of extra buffer to loosen the cycle and get your hits in on a 30-second window, and a fresh TF cooldown or two. There are fights like Maexxna, which have a 40 second timer, which doesn't match up with the cycle. As I'm sure I don't have to tell you, each scenario has differences that are fundamentally different from an infinite-time cycle. What FBing as Malygos takes off is actually less DPS than saving your CP till the landing to SR, so you can get Rip back up faster?

Anyway-- lots of questions, do with them what you will.

Here is more 3.1 changes from a blue post from WoWEU forums:
World of Warcraft (en) Forums -> [Updated] 3.1.0 PTR Patch Notes

Sad day for feral tanks, nerfing the only thing that made us worthwhile tanks

Estimates put the health lost to around 2000-2500. That looks more like a longterm balancing change to me than anything. Druids are still the kings of highest health if they so choose.

But that is the whole point. You want to be able to tank the hard encounters so you should care about that - which I assume you do since you are on a theorycrafting board. Tanks need to hit the EH minimums first, then they can care about avoidance and threat. Druids have such big multipliers that they meet EH criterias way too easily which is one reason the bonus got changed from 20% to 10%.

In any case, MMO-Champion says Hodir hits a Warrior tank for 25k (I haven't done the fight, just going by the numbers listed there) which means a Warrior will never be able to survive two hits in a row, but a Druid can. That is quite a big advantage for the Druid right there even if you have 10% avoidance less.

And my point is that Stamina stacking has never been the most successful way of tanking things, but it is very hard to quantitatively analyze things from a tanking perspective, let me break it down case by case. I only mentioned things being easy so that you cannot analyze things very successfully. Are you going to view it by damage taken? healing taken? overhealing taken?

The related note here is that if they are concerned with our scaling with stamina, the nerf is fine. However, we as the druid community are also concerned with our scaling in other stats such as the lack of block and the loss of armor (so now we have less than Death Knights). Savage Defense really isn't a block because it somewhat made up for the loss in armor. We also have the weakest O-crap button with Barkskin at a fixed number of 20% (of course, being able to use it while stunned is definitely a plus). I'll deal with it if nothing else gets changed, but I still feel concerned.

-Stamina tolerates more errors from healers (pro)
-Stamina is not nearly as valuable, when there is a portion of your hp that bosses simply don't touch (con)
-Avoidance will save you from boss killing you　（save for trivial content, 0% avoidance will kill you unless a CD of some sort comes into place) (pro)
-Avoidance is not failsafe

Boss numbers are also very arbitrary. If a warrior has 40.1k and Druid has 50.1k, and Hodir can hit for 25k. Sure, druids can maybe take one more hit. But if a boss hits for 20k, then they can both take two hits.

While EH is a good way to gauge gear, it is not the end all. There are bosses that do magic damage, and there are bosses that do physical damage. There are fights that are better for avoidance, and there are fights that are better for stamina. I personally adjust a lot of gear from encounter to encounter at least in progression based contents.

What I'm trying to say is I simply don't see Stamina s the best stat to stack, which seems to be commonly accepted just because healers have the ability to spam you.

Edit: This will be last post for me on this issue in this thread just because it has been derailing from 3.1 exclusive changes. If the participants want to we should take it over to tank thread.

The LB change seems to be a bit of a nerf to raid healing more than anything else, but it also seems quite a bad tank healing nerf, since your reliant on the bloom portion of it to do most of the healing. I'm not sure if its the same for everyone, but with even one or two paladins in your raid it's safe to assume the tank is getting HLs slammed onto him/her pretty much continuously. So I can see the overhealing on this spell going way up, and it being less efficient to do as i'm doing now, which is to just roll them on the tank similar to how it was in TBC.

It seems we're going to be pushed into a reactive healing role, instead of our usual proactive healing role. Could mean a huge change potentially for druid healing.