They could always change Nurturing Instinct to 100% agility = spell power. I never did understand the nerf to 70%, and this talent always seemed to be left behind in the healing to spell power conversion. It's always made me cry seeing the other melee hybrids (and DKs) actually be able to do non-trivial damage and healing at range on fights like Malygos and Heigan.

Thiss: Just from using the known gearing items and putting them into the latest Beta for Rawr I'm gaining quite a bit of Avoidance going from my entry Ulduar25 set to current "BiS" pieces. However the progression of my gear is not a simple increase in the priority of stats I chose to build up. Currently on Live, my MT set is a heavily stacked Agility/Dodge set that pretty much sacrifices everything for additional Avoidance. The reason being that the baseline health we can get from simply wearing 213 or better gear is enough to survive all encounters save Sarth3D more than adequately. Couple that with our high threat relative to the DPS and you really don't need to worry about anything. I have a separate set that stacks for the other direction, Threat, that meets the same requirements.

My current sets though don't have heavy Stamina, something that is going to really hurt me going into Ulduar25. I have already gathered most of the gems and enchants I need for when 3.1 hits but I will be gaining a TON of health from Live (39k raid buffed) to 3.1 (46k raid buffed). Now if we for the moment accept the preset values for the survival soft cap and incoming damage per swing for Ulduar25 on Rawr, then by the time I'm in full Nightsong with some other assorted pieces, I've swapped back to heavier Agility from my almost exclusive Stamina setup I began Ulduar25. My health actually drops a bit but my Armor, Avoidance, and Threat all jump up quite a bit, and the loot tables are far from finished.

I don't feel that Druids are going to fall behind in the slightest and we'll continue to see big gains and be effective tanks provided we balance our stats accordingly.

Does this change make Brambles worth taking over other DPS talents?

Looking at how druids will gain avoidance doesn't really address the issue that having fewer separately diminishing avoidance stats is inherently worse. The counter to that would be more along the lines of that druids scale better with stamina than other tanks, allowing them to gem and gear more heavily favoring avoidance to make up for it scaling worse, while maintaining the same health as a warrior or paladin. With the nerf to our stamina scaling though, that is less true than it was. If in current BiS gear a druid gems to match another tank in overall damage reduction, then without superior stamina scaling, with time the tank with the least loss of avoidance due to DR will take less damage with a matching health pool. Obviously everyone will gain a combination of either survival or mitigation with more gear, but will the mitigation from savage defense combined with a slower scaling avoidance, match other tanks assuming comparable effective health.

Ideally, you'd run some sort of model of tank damage taken and healing received to give tanks true survivability, but there would be so many variables it would be hard to really determine a fair standard. In the absence of that, about the best thing you can do is make 2 tanks match on effective health, and compare their total damage reduction. I've been debating building a sim that would basically have programmed heal bots that followed some specific logic to determine what they cast. Then a given tank could put in their stats from rawr or their character sheet, buffed of course, along with some info on the boss's damage pattern. With that, and a few hundred runs of "did I die" seem like they would be a far better measure of tanking theory craft than attempting to guess what HP and avoidance might be best. Sort of the same idea as the premonition tanking tests that everyone was all "but they didn't do a billion tests" as if there was some way they were going to spend 100s of hours on the PTR doing sample fights. I'd be very curious how tanks would stack up in that case. Prior to deathknights you could probably have done it without any input from the tank, assuming that tank cooldowns were something of a tie breaker where if the warrior was close to the druid or paladin in true survival, his cooldowns meant he was actually better. However, as DKs are actually reliant on cooldowns as part of their overall damage reduction, something like "any time you're below 50% hit IBF" would have to be added. Actually, as I've been very bored lately, I may begin work on that sort of sim.

Fasc, out of curiosity what increase in agil dodge rating and defense are you seeing now and and what is your increase next patch.

After looking at Rarws latest beta, with the gear they have there, i go up to 40.2217963% dodge a greater increase then i anticipated, i did switch from gemming for exp and stam to agi and stam. But the other stats are less then what i was hoping for. Below my stat changes show that while my dodge goes from, 36.33% to 40.22% a increase of 3.89%, the other stats do not increase that much. Least important to me is the less then 2k change in stam and more importantly the lack of increase in armor and loss of hast and exp.

Currently my other stats(not involved in dodge) with 3.1 nerfs included.
hp 35217
armor 27699
ap 4832
127 hit
253 exp
99 haste

After itemization with Ulduar gear
hp 37097
armor 28529
ap 5331
247 hit
188 exp
83 haste

a swing of
+1880 hp
+830 armor
+499 ap
+120 hit
-65 exp
-16 haste

"Will of the Necropolis now cannot be triggered by damage which deals less than 5% of your health."

Hopefully SD will receive similar treatment?

My point was that in a 25 man Raid situation where you knew a Lock was going to be present. Earth and Moon would not be needed as its buff is weaker than Curse of Elements in 3.1. Thus maybe using those same points for Brambles as an alternative for increased dps through the tanks.

COE will be 13% increased damage across all but holy schools I believe and also a 165 deduction in resists of those same schools on a target for 5 mins. Too me that is a better debuff to use than E&M. However there is a personal loss of 3% damage from not taking E&M. I was simply looking to see if it was a viable alternative for dps.

Here I'll assume that thorns you cast on others will benefit from Brambles, E&M, and MSS. These assumptions will need to be confirmed.

Each point of Brambles will add 2% of your spellpower (SP at the time you cast Thorns) to Thorns damage. (2% = 6.6% * 1.03 * 1.04 * 1.13 * 25%). Each point of Brambles will also add 5% to your treant damage total.

Look at a WWS for a fight that interests you:

PW
Druid did 870k damage.
30k was treants.
Retribution aura procced 135 times. I assume that all of these can proc Thorns also.
Assume Druid can get to 3k spellpower during buffs (using on-use trinket).

Each point of Brambles would add
3000*.02*135 = 8100 thorns damage.
30000*.05 = 1500 treant damage.
Total = 9600 damage

That is a boost of about 1.1%. That is a pretty decent DPS talent (almost certainly better than IIS). It is also threat-free (in-fact most of it is extra tank threat) and mana-free during the fight.

On the selfish side, most of that damage will not be attributed to you in WWS.

For a single, slow boss that hits a single target, it would be much less valuable. I see VoA parses where thorns procced only about once every 6s. For that boss the thorns-contribution of a single talent point would be only about 10 dps.

I have to agree with Ranghar here, E&M is vastly superior to COE, mainly because it passively occurs as we dps a target while a lock would have to loose a GCD to cast it. Add in that the lock could be casting a dps curse and it is a no brainer. Now compare E&M to Ebon Plague and you come out about even. Both are passive, EB also increase disease damage which effects pretty much just the DKs. Like Ran said, E&M comes with 3% extra personal damage and i'll be taking 3/3 no matter what. I can't image where else you could spend your points better.

I seriously hope not. It would make the skill useless in tanking anything but bosses or heavy hitting trash mobs. How often do you tank something that hits both weak and hard at once?

I'll take the incredible ease of soloing old content over the imaginary scenario in which a weak blow will pose a serious threat to my survival by stealing the SD absorption before a large hit lands.

Are we sure thorns generates threat? I thought I read it was threat-neutral at some point. Can someone confirm it does generate full threat?