I guess Blizzard wants to avoid another "rogue" tank like in end-BC, where a rogue could stack avoidance to become unhittable. I thought the diminishing return of dodge took care of that.

But since we have dodge rating only on back, neck, ring& trinket slots, I believe this will be a loss in avoidance. Lets wait until we have some numbers about druids and other tank classes.

I can't imagine, that Blizz wants druids to stack stamina again. And gemming dodge? We'll see...

Argh, red again...

I thought, dodge rating on items would go up to compensate for this, while agi would stay at the same value. Hm, decreasing the only avoidance stat by 15%? Sounds like a lot

From going on the PTR, dodge% appeared to drop anywhere from 1.7 to 2.5% depending on the gear of the druid. Raidbuffed it went up to maybe 3%.

It's not a large nerf, but it is a nerf.

I believe they're trying to rein in avoidance ratings slightly while buffing DKs slightly and nerfing druids slightly. They still don't seem to understand that as long as things hit for 30k+, healers must ignore avoidance.

Looking at Set Bonuses for tanking:
2t7: 5% More Lacerate Damage. I guess it increases your tank DPS, which is non-trivial now, the threat from Lacerate comes from a Static value and the damage has little to do with it.
4t7: +3 Seconds Barkskin Duration. Pretty awesome actually, considering fights like Sarth and various Enrage events.
2t8: Clearcasting off Bleeds. Honestly terrible for a tank, with 5 Rage on Crit, 3 Rage on Dodge, and Bosses that hit for 10k+, the last thing a tank needs is something that makes our abilities cost not rage.
4t8: +8 Seconds Survival Instincts Duration. Really not that good. Increased Health isn't that strong a cooldown when tanking because it just makes more for Healers to have to fill up. I can't think of a place where +8 sec is going to help you get past a particular damage phase.

If you're in Ulduar doing Hard Modes, the various items from those are going to be better in general (except gloves). Higher iLvL means higher armor guaranteed, and usually more Stamina, Agility, Sockets, and AP. Until 4t9, none of our Set bonuses are better than simply just having better stats.

I'm also vaguely disgusted that Dodge is getting nerfed and Parry buffed. Feral is already generally considered the weakest of the tanking classes by the majority, and DK's are generally considered the strongest. Obviously there's still Bears, otherwise this thread wouldn't exist, but I'm very curious how many of you can still be called the Primary Tank in guilds with Pallies, Warriors, and especially DKs.

The only thing I can think is they are worried they'd have to put in an Icecrown Radiance type effect to counter high feral Dodge values. I played around with an all agility set in current BiS and I think it came out at about 63% dodge, but had less than 40k hp raid buffed which is obviously suicide.

As for gear they say the non-set pieces are better but I just picked up the T8 as it is much easier to get. I wanted to let stuff like [Legguards of Cunning Deception] and [Shoulderpads of the Intruder] slide to a few rogues first before taking them but they've actually never dropped yet for us. [Embrace of the Gladiator] I got one for DPS, nobody seems to want it though so I'll probably take it for tanking next time.

For the 4xt8 I've found it really useful for stuff like Algalon and Council. Nobody seems to agree with me though 2xt8 is pretty nice in 5 mans too where you're typically a bit rage starved. Not really here or there for this discussion but there you go.

The 4xT9 bonus is awesome though, 48 sec cd on barkskin with 12 sec uptime means you'll have it on for over 25% of the fight.

I have done some calculations on the tank boni in general some time ago on the eu-forums.

First of all I did ignore threat boosting boni like more damage to lacterate or the clearcast, as I was more intereseted in my ability to take some punches.

Now first of all I totally agree with Boevis that the T8 boni are all terrible.
I consider SI a tool against burst damage. As such a longer duration of this tool is pretty pointless as burst has little to do with duration. Like surviving that super mega killer punch of a boss. Wich is enough, but it adds little to no gain to me having those extra HP that saved me a couple of seconds more. It does not hurt either, but I found the bonus pretty much useless in every situation except maybe on Thorim in hardmode, wich I personally have not tanked yet.
But since I am missing out quite some pve content on my druid, I may not have found the value of that bonus yet.


Now considering Barkskin.
Barkskin has a very short CD, but does not mitigate a lot of damage.
As such I have found it to be a great addition to other abilites in terms of taking huge amounts of incoming damage (like the sarth breaths), but never enough to be standing on it's own against them.

I found my self in quite a couple of fights using Barkskin simply on CD (like in Patchwork back then in Naxxramas pre Nerfs).


I calculated the gain of Barkskin-spam, taking in consideration the set boni of our tier sets:
I assume a 10 minutes fight:

Barkskin has one minute CD and 12 seconds duration baseline.
I could use it 10 times in a regular 10 minutes fight with the ability unmodified.
With four pieces T9 Barkskin has 12 seconds less CD. That would be 48 seconds then.
That would be 12,5 times Barkskin with four pieces T9 on a ten minutes fight. In an average 10 minutes fight that would be a gain of two additional Barkskin applications. Two times 12 seconds 20% less damage.
T7 four pieces makes Barkskin last three seconds longer. Every one of those 10 times I use Barkskin my damage would be reduced by 20% for 15 seconds.

This would lead to:
No Sets: 10 x Bakskin // 120 seconds Uptime
4 T9: 12 x Barkskin // 144 seconds Uptime
4 T7: 10 x Barkskin // 150 seconds Uptime


The item stats have such a large difference that T9 will be superior to T7 without a doubt.
I found it a little disturbing that I would have gotten more protection from Barkskin in four T7 than in four T9 in terms of set boni.

In real raid environement one might not want to use Barkskin on every CD, where a shorter CD would make the ability more flexible and more avaiable.

Before we get to see how the new Raid encounters really work out it is a little hard to say how useful the four T9 bonus will be.

On a side note I hope the shorter CD of Barkskin in four T9 is not calcuated into our ability to mitigate damage as a justification of nerfing our avoidance in terms of a Barkskin-held-on-CD-assumption.

Don't know about DKs, but our feral tank has tanked Thorim hard mode 100% to 0% without any swaps, is the last (3.) tank on Steelbreaker, can easily tank Vezzax hard and is preferable to warriors/paladins on Algalon (10 man only). These may be just isolated anecdotes, but calling ferals the weakest tanks of them all seems to be quite an exaggeration.

I'd have to agree suicuique...

The dodge nerf is unfortunate as it shifts some preference to DKs again, but we are well on our way to Sunwell Radiance again.

However, I am the main tank in my guild for anything that hits really hard basically. We use a prot paladin for XT, due to high threat and ability to also tank sparks, and while we haven't put IC hard down yet, usually its me and our DK swapping in P3. Thorim is all me, I tank 100%-0% and have lived the last 3 kills now, the 4pc t8 is crucial for this and IMO its invaluable for IC also as you can have it up your entire tanking rotation.

As far as Algalon goes, both our main DK tank and myself get punished just as badly by Algalon, I've been leaning more towards my avoidance set for Algalon and it helps, but we both get blown up just as quickly.

One really good spot for this is Thorim, where SI will last for the entire duration of an Unbalancing cycle (and a 2-second overlap). Having 80k+ health for one of the later Thorim phases is very nice. Similarly, it lasts for almost an entire cycle on Steelbreaker Overwhelming, which can also be helpful.

It's not the best, and it's certainly not as good as the odd-numbered tiers, but it's not useless. The 2pT8 is, however.

As to the idea that druids are the weakest tanks...that doesn't seem to be shared by GC, by most guilds I've talked to or by the general math that's coming out. Right now druids still take less overall damage than any other tank ignoring cooldowns, and are only behind DKs when you factor them. After 3.2, they'll be better than any other tank unless AD is being triggered all the time, in which case they'll be behind paladins. Simply put, having the highest health by a good margin, having the highest base mitigation via armor both win when it comes to dealing with large amounts of physical damage.

One thing to consider in that example is that the first overheal is from the Living Seed which appears to have proc'd from the Nourish. The Seed is used entirely when the target takes any amount of damage, so taking say 20 damage from an angry Sea Bass would pop the entire Seed, and the extra "heal" (the unused portion of the Seed that is effectively a shield) will count as overheal. I think you're just seeing the mechanic of the spell at work. Would be similar to prayer of mending jumping due to minimal damage on an otherwise fully healed target, you would have overheal there as well.

The second entry certainly appears to be some bit of lag as it's counting the effective healing of the Nourish twice, and without knowing how lag is handled it would appear that the Seed is from the Nourish. But if that's the case, it's interesting that the critical effect of the heal not only is calculated first but that the talent proc would occur on the target prior to the related heal. It's all server side, so you don't know what the processing is at that end, with tcp/ip packets don't have to arrive in order so maybe they are fed to the client in a way that allows this tiny anomoly?

I've read about various health update tools that try to provide a faster refresh than the default UI provides, and I wonder if what you're seeing is part of the issue and Blizz errs on the side of caution when updating health, which has made it a little slower in the past.

I have a question about threat. I have recently been told by the group that I run Uld25 with that my long term threat is satisfactory but my 'front-loaded' threat could use some improvement. Apparently they are looking to see some kind of instant snap jump in threat on pulls. Have other bears received similar criticisms and does anyone have suggestions/experience with this so called 'front-loaded' threat?

I do run with a threat set when I feel it is necessary. Personally, I'm a little skeptical of this particular criticism.

If I'm not mistaken, Growl does nothing if the mob is already targeting you.