Toskk's DPS calculator is a nice quick way to check as well - put in your stats, fill out your current talent loadout minus the DPS talents points you have yet to spend, and then play around with adding those talent points while watching how much they add to DPS.

Yeah... guess I've been away from playing for so long I've forgotten how Blizzard words things so loosely. I was thinking the +70% Healing from AGI would increase the healing done by Frenzied Regeneration and LoTP procs, since they're counted as Healing effects. But just tested it, and isn't doing anything so I guess I'll switch those over to either KoTJ or SA.

Just out of curiosity in case I want to play around with things, any idea exactly how much 5/5 Feral Aggression will boost overall mitigation? I have no idea how much AP bosses have.

Double posted due to website timeout

I think it really depends on what you mean by competitive. You can have shredding attacks, PI, KotJ and/or NS/MS. About the only thing that you lose is NS/MS, which while important isn't as critical as the other abilities if you so choose. If you'll look at my current spec it swaps PI for IW, but that's hardly necessary and could easily be swapped back. Alternately you can swap imp lotp and a point in FA for PI.

4% crit is very good, I admit. But it's not the difference between good dps and poor dps, at least not by itself.

Really, the requirements for a good bear spec are small enough and overlap enough with the requirements for a cat spec that hybridity is fairly reasonable. The main question I'd have is why, but if you wanted to do bear/cat on one spec and moonkin/resto on the other, I suppose that would be a good answer.

There's some more detail in the general class mechanics forum, but basically 1% off a boss's white melee damage for each 1 point in imp demo shout or demo roar, and all 5 points are required to reduce boss AP to zero. Boss special attacks can follow different rules depending on the fight, but generally they aren't affected by boss AP.

I would say that SA and KotJ are of no value when Main Tanking Ulduar, Bosses hit sufficiently hard that Rage won't be an issue and you don't want to tax your healers by lowering your Armor more. In terms of maximizing Tanking with some DPS (not DPS with some Tanking) 2/3 KotJ and 3/3 Imp Mangle come out to be the best place for those leftover 5 points. If threat is of no issue, 2/2 SA and 3/3 KotJ are the best. It's possible this is going to vary with gear, but the % differences are significant enough that I doubt it.

Honestly, you shouldnt even try -if the raid needs you to dps on a regular basis, dualspec a decent cat spec for your second talent set. one critical note here- unless you very reliably have a warrior doing fully talented demoralising shout, you really should max out feral agression to 5/5. It is a fairly strong mitigation talent.

Pretty much universally the faster the attacks, the better avoidance is relative to stamina. If you look at an extreme: a boss hitting 20 times a second for 1k, there's not really a big chance for a bad avoidance streak averaged over that many attacks. Sure, its mathematically possible to still not dodge any of 50 attacks in 2.5 seconds and fall over dead, but chances are you're going to take at most like 30 of those 50 and be very much alive. Basically the faster the attacks, the larger the sample size, so the more you can rely upon your avoidance. Mitigation like armor is just always good as long as its physical damage killing you.

You're going off of Rawr, correct? Rawr has a bug about how valuable shredding attacks is, and it's much better than mangle is. Saving 18 points on shreds is a much better bargain than saving 6 points on mangle, especially given that it's only 2 points.

if thats for kitty yes, u dont want SA for tank...and geting IMP mangle will help threat since it reduces the cooldown by 1.5 secs

I am a huge fan of IlotP. Both soloing, pvp, and raiding, it saves lives, not nearly as much as JoL or having decent healers, but it's there and it only costs 2 points which if spent elsewhere will only slightly increase TPS.

Blood Draining works off of a similar principle as iLotP, but in theory, provides a (slightly) bigger heal right when you need it most, instead of at random. It is absolutely terrible. It often takes longer to build up to 4 stacks (approximately the same value of an iLotP heal on a Low MaxHP Bear) than it does to proc iLotP twice. It also means you can't be using Mongoose. 2% Dodge (after kings, imotw, sotf) and 2% Haste with an absurdly high uptime (60% I think) is going to prevent far more damage on any fight where Burst Deaths are actually a threat. Certainly Mongoose can't remove the possibility of getting 2-shot, but neither can Blood Draining.

As the saying goes, An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.