@kalbear: why would you put agi+crit gem to tank gear? Last time i checked rawr, defense + stamina was worth using for yellow gems with agi / stam bonuses.

First, choose good glyphs for Bear. Mangle is not a good glyph for bear in any circumstances. Glyph SI, and choose between FR, maul and growl on a per-fight basis.

You're in your tank gear now, and a mixture of mostly Naxx and some Ulduar gear isn't going to cut it for ToGC-- bears aren't that overpowered. Especially without stacking stam trinkets. Go farm up [The Black Heart] and even an [Essence of Gossamer] would be better than your trinkets. Don't try to tank ToGC until you've got ToC gear in a bunch of slots already.

this is in addition to Allev - I have recently become the MT for my guild so that i may get some BIS gear before ice crown comes. during 10 man raids i have minimum 48k hp (usually a little over 50k) with 31k armor and 42% dodge. the hp overall for me is ok for tanking togc however still low for a bear. Also while being fully raid buffed at 54k hp the other MT's have as much hp as i do (warrior, pally). Don't even bother attempting togc until you reach the same or greater hp than this. Togc is no joke, there's a reason only a select few can do it.

I wouldn't. The prior poster had recommended this as a choice for yellow sockets, presumably.

I've used agi/crit gems in yellow slots where I have to share that piece of gear with my Cat set and the socket bonus makes sense. You're not giving much up and gaining threat/savage defense proc chance.

Btw - Anub heroic down - yeah baby! Most rewarding fight for me I think since maybe Sarth3D or even Illidan, though our add tanks hate it :P
I have the feeling though its going to be one of "those" bosses where we can just as easily 1-shot it as wipe 15 times until we outgear it.

It's fairly repeatable actually. You might occasionally die to a DC/random add killing add tank, but the hard part is very mechanical, which is the PC healing. Once you have that down well enough to kill him, you shouldn't be wiping on him all that much.

For shared gear it's acceptable to use an agi/crit gem (though agi/haste would be more beneficial to both bears and cats). But don't dress it up as a useful gem for bears. The crit/haste is very poor for bears, and it's not ideal for cats either. Unless it's a seriously good socket bonus chances are you'd be better with pure agi or expertise in both specs.

You can do what you like, of course, but it's certainly not optimal for tanking, and the value of crit for SD procs is fairly marginal.

For a single slot, a [Nightmare Tear] would be pretty reasonable, no? Otherwise than that, a [Delicate Cardinal Ruby] might also work for shared pieces, since you get a small amount of armor (when not stunned or otherwise incapacitated) as well as dodge.

[Nightmare Tear] is by far the best yellow gem for bears that you can do, and it's pretty great for cats - though it's best for cats in blue slots. The primary reason to use it for cats is so that you can meet your meta requirement with one gem and meet some socket bonus as well.

Agi gems are usually my choice for shared pieces, as they're optimal or close to it for cats and not horrible for bears.

I find the nightmare tear more than reasonable. especially if you are using the piece for both your cat and bear specs.

generally for my guild a druid tank needs to have over 41k unbuffed hp to tank togc10 so if you only had that buffed then they shouldn't have even attempted it. let alone tried to 2 heal the instance. in my experience no matter how good the healers are it always goes smoother to have 3 healers instead of 2 healing a 10 man

Has anyone calculated how much worth a point of armor will have compared to stamina in ICC? For physical damage ofc.

Satrina's Evil Empire Guide on AC and Stamina.

There is no absolute value nor anything significant about ICC to make those calculations any different.

The formula as presented in Satrina's guide and adapted to a lvl 80 bear vs a lvl 83 raid boss would be:

1 stamina is worth

16.34 * (16635 + YourArmor) / YourHealth

points of armor.

To use this for raids, remember to take into account the armor from Devotion Aura and Stoneskin Totem. If you check your armor and health values while fully raid buffed, make sure you have the aura and totem up to get accurate numbers.

As an example using this formula, a bear with 35k armor and 50k hp raid buffed would have a stam : armor relative value of 1 : 16.87.

Hello fellow bears!

I've been reading Elitist Jerks forums quite a while, around two years, and it's been a huge help - in many ways.
However, this thread seems to be quieting down, which is not going to happen if it depends on me! And quite frankly, I'm in a need of help right now... *ehhheh*

I just begun bear tanking and kinda dumped the restoration as it's boring the heck out of me. Tree used to be my mainspec for five long years and I think the new era is about to begin.

Sorry about the futile startoff, but I had to break the ice somehow...


Anyway, I'd have some questions concerning Rawr v.2.2.27 and the way it's trying to make me use Stalwart Ametrine (10 agility, 10 defense) gems on yellow sockets and f.ex. making me to utilise 4 agility socket bonuses via these gems.
Rawr is also telling me to gem Delicate Cardinal Ruby's (20 agility) over Solid Majestic Zircon (30 stamina) on every socket slot, if the socket bonuses "aren't worth it". This being while fully raidbuffed; ~52k HP, 34k armor and around 48% of dodge.
However, the situation seems to be quite different as I'm unbuffed. While unbuffed, Rawr tells me to fully load my sockets with stamina.

As I see it, the only thing I'm interested in, as a raid bear, is how do I perform in a raid situation - the unbuffed stats, nor gemming isn't my cup of tea, right?
Has my Survival Points just reached the landmark in which it's not worth gemming for stamina anymore? And should I follow the advice given by Rawr, aiming for agility socket bonuses and force them with such gems as Stalwart Ametrine's?

I tried searching the forums a bit with the search tool, but my efforts didn't show much of a result.


Most likely that's it for now! Thanks in advance.

Well, we've just had a discussion on gems over the last few posts.

Rawr only shows you figures, not what you need in the real world. It much better for calculating Cat gear to optimize dps because dps is pretty similar no matter what you're killing. Tanking however depends a lot on the encounter and what stats you need to (a) survive (b) improve survivability and give healers an easier time.


Yellow Gems
You shouldn't go out of your way to gain a socket bonus. If it makes sense in terms of your overall gear then feel free. Don't forget you can use a Nightmare Tear for yellow also. As I mentioned earlier, I have one set of gloves for tanking and dps . In that case I chose a yellow gem that benefits both and activates the socket.

Stam vs Agi
You rule of thumb should always be to have enough HP to survive a worst-case string of attacks by a boss. After this it's down to personal preference.
Some people put stamina in every slot on the principle that it eases stress on healing. I don't see it myself as 2 Paladins with beacon and Druid HoTs can keep a tank alive against anything this game can throw at him at present.
I gem stamina, sta/agi and agi gems as I see fit making sure that I always have sufficient HP that I'm not goign to die to a string of boss attacks. I have to say it's rare that I gem a 20agi gem for tanking though.


All this may change in Icecrown of course, with the radiance debuff and new encounters, it could be that stam/armor are the way to go for Bears, similar to early Sunwell. Later Sunwell paid to gear for dodge as the improvement per point was proportionately greater, but this was only possible once you had the HP pool required to survive the boss damage. It wouldnt surprise me to see Icecrown follow the same pattern.

As Zaiats said Rawr uses pre-set custom numbers for it's Survival and Target Damage numbers. Currently they are set to ABOUT T8.10 level numbers. If your geared in ToC 25 gear, the program will think you are over-geared for survivability and will say it's better to use agility gems for mitigation and avoidance. However if you set the survivability and target damage levels to ToC 25 and even ToC 25 Heroic in the options panel, then you will see the program will start saying to gem for Agility/stam and straight stam gems.

Just as an FYI, I've put in a patch that adds in support for Bear T10 2-piece. Currently the program does not support the Enrage ability and I've put in a ticket about that. If that gets settled, then T10 4-piece MAY get modeled as well.

Additionally, those preset survival numbers are tunable on the "Options" tab. There are numbers for each raid tier we have available right now, as well as a Custom option. If you select a raid tier, it will gray out the box that shows the number, but you'll still be able to see it and recognize if your numbers are close to it or not. The difference between tiers is definitely noticeable, so you will want to select the right option.

As far as the correct yellow gem, what I generally do (and this is more a rough guide) is go look at the gem page in the charts. The Bear module comes with preset gemming templates, and the Agi/Crit gem is an option there in some of the templates. Most often, I find the Enduring Eye of Zul (Stam/Def) to be my best bet, but I'm also still working on my gear for ToGC 10. I probably need to check my numbers again anyway.

You'll definitely want to do your gear with the expected raid buffs. Don't just toggle everything on, instead, only turn on what you can rely on having 90-95%+ of the time. That said, everyone should at least have the drums/scrolls buffs, since those are available to anymore at any time.

I was wondering if anyone could tell me the exact "max" hit should be to not miss as a bear. Rather hit + expertise.

Yes I know it's a mainly useless stat and you'll hit the max without even trying. I'm just curious what the number actually is. I went through and search this thread but couldn't find an exact hard number.

edit: nm, found a stat thread
Feral Druid Numbers (updated for 3.2.2)

Maybe Druids need 3 sub forums with one overall forum.. or something. Pallies and Death Knights and Warriors might need the same.

I'd say Agi vs Sta is dependant on your role and the encounter, not some arbitrary avoidance level.

You're the MT for a fight like Gormok or Icehowl with massive unavoidable burst damage? Stamina all the way.

A fight like Algalon with very heavy but steady melee damage? Extra avoidance / mitigation from Agility is great.

You regularly switch between DPS and tanking? Agility is the obvious choice.

Since Ulduar, there's generally been more of the "zomg massive burst" type fights than there have been fights which encourage avoidance stacking, and that's why so many bears (all tanks, for that matter) just stack stamina like mad. Avoidance doesn't really help if the boss can instagib you in 0.5s; you're just praying to the RNG gods that it won't happen.

I'd have to say it depends on several factors such as what content your raiding and what your stats are already like, each char is differant. Personaly i found the natural point was to start stacking stam at around 40% dodge unbuffed when going into content such as toc25 hard mode.

i would have to say that a quick rule of thumb for what stats you should have for certain content should go something like this.

---Unbuffed---
heroics: 30% dodge, +25k hp
tier 7: 30% dodge, +30k hp
tier 8: 35% dodge, +35k hp
teir 9: 40% dodge, +40k hp
and just speculating for ICC
tier 10: 45-50% dodge, +45k hp

Clearly it isn't as completly linear as that and their are always exceptions that prove the rule, but you get the idea.

In almost no circumstances, do you approach the problem from a "get avoidance, then worry about stamina" perspective. You absolutely look at stamina first to survive short-term burst, and then decide whether avoidance, resistance, armor, or more stamina will be more appropriate for any given fight.

Avoidance-- when you're worried about many fast hits killing you. This isn't a frequent occurrence for ferals, although it may have been relevant against Algalon. Alternately, valuable for reducing the total amount of healing you take, when your healers are mana-limited, like Vezax.

Resistance-- when an important component of either overall damage or burst damage is magic. Fire resistance on Sarth3D, frost resistance on Hodir, and Nature Resistance on Anub are good references.

Armor-- useful in almost all cases where physical damage is the vast majority of what might kill you.

Stamina-- despite the above, more stamina is still better than any of these in most raid situations. Because of guaranteed healing from druid HoTs/pally beacons, you're going to get healed from that last hit you took, except in really odd places.

Hello fellows druids, I want to talk about the Armor cap for Bears.

As I could see the 50k armor (49905 armor to have the 75% damage reduction) value, that is the armor cap for ToGC, it's pretty impossible to reach after the Blizzard's nerf on it. In addition, as We haven't the +30% armor bonus for items in rings, trinkets, neck and weapon slots, we must avoid to stack armor on those slots and focus on other stats as stamina, agility and dodge.
I'm raiding ToC and ToGC since 3.2 and I have collect nice gear from there, by the way the max amount of armor I can reach is 32k full buffed (in guild we lack only for the improved Stoneskin Totem that provide +230 armor more than the untalented one). Are We able to reach that legendary 50k armor or it is only a mirage?
On a side note I got 53k health and I am over 50% Dodge (full buffed and in Dire Bear form) so I think my gear it's ok for the heroic mode.

Answers are welcome.
Thanks for reading this and sorry for my bad english.

Yes it is posable to reach the 75% armor cap.

I have regularly been hitting the armour cap, in a balanced raid with the required raid buffs and using [Indestructible Potion]. Along with trinkets such as [Glyph of Indomitability] and [The Black Heart].

In my experiance however actualy trying for the armor cap is only really viable on Anub 25hm where you have to drop stamina anyway due to leeching swarm. it's something i've toyed with on gormock due to already having an more HP than required to avoid RNG (without trinkets) but in all honisty it doesn't make that much of a differance, your getting spam healed anyway and all does is create an small amount of extra overheal.

In ICC i think the armour cap will be more atainable for everyone and bears may have to deside to go for armor cap or dodge as a more valuable stat.

This is a sad fact. Tanks think that stam stacking eases the stress on healing when in fact it is a healer's nightmare. Yes, if you can't live through the fight without the extra HP, you have several problems one of which is stam. However, if you stack stamina over avoidance as a rule, you put incredible stress on your healer. Think of it this way, now not only the big hits hit you harder, but every little hit hits you harder too. So the healer is working like crazy to keep you topped off to make sure you're ready for a big hit. Then when the big hit DOES come, you just got clobbered for 10K more than a tank with more avoidance which means your healer has to pump that much more healing into you. If the healer has to heal you that much, it means they're going to have mana problems and need to stack regen - which means slower, less powerful heals. It is a trade-off. Just because you have more stam doesn't mean you're going to survive that hit.