Parry capping is not that useful, given that very few of the mobs in ICC (and to my knowledge only Sindragosa) get parry haste. It's good for threat, but whether or not that's meaningful is only really answerable by you; chances are threat is not that important for you to improve on.

If the armor reduces one melee swing by more than the amount of health you give up for it you might consider it. The only piece where i sacrifice some stamina for armor on lich king is using 245 twin valkyr ring instead of 277 ashen tank ring.

Depends on your strategy. If you will be swapping tanks for soul reaper in phase 2 and beyond, armor will likely be more beneficial. However, if you are mainly just solo tanking LK and depending on personal cooldowns and external cooldowns to survive soul reaper stam stacking is the way to go.

The only time it's really an issue of soul reapers in P2 is when the raging spirit is still up and the other tank happens to get silenced.

SI+Barkskin, but there goes SI for another "oh shit" cooldown for the phase.

In 25 mans I've simply being using Barkskin for 1, Enrage for the next and rotating like that. SI and externals come when our only Holy Pally gets picked up/harvested. Not suffered tank deaths due to it yet. Running with Heroic Organ + Normal Sindra.

I have been tanking in ICC 10 + 25 mans normal lately (been healing until recently), and I noticed that various DPS are creeping up on the threat meter(tricks/misdirects cannot be relied upon as the raid group is not that stable).
This got me thinking, perhaps the armsman enchant with it's +2% threat could be better than 15 expertize rating on gloves.

I'm at a loss as to how to better calculate this (RAWR bear doesn't have this enchant available), and no bear tanking spreadsheets are to be found.

Speaking from a threat point of view, it's +2% threat on all the moves vs -0.457% chance to be parried, a very gross (and probably inaccurate) calculation:

Un-parried theoretical threat output: 8.2k TPS.

Mauls/minute = 60 secs/2.5 swing speed = 24 mauls/minute
Other attacks = assuming global cooldown cap => 40 attacks, out of which Faerie Fire (Feral) shouldn't get parried, so we deduct that = 30 attacks/minute. Overall parry-able attacks/minute = 30+24= 54. Total attacks = 64

Assuming dodge caped, hit capped and a 10.45% chance to be parried:
Total "parry-able" attacks=54. 10.45% of these do get parried, so = 54*(100-10.45)/100 = 48.357 attacks that land.Threat/attack = (8200*60)/64= 7687 Threat/attack. Averaging [(7687)*(48.357+10)]/60=7348 TPS. Armsman will increase this by 7447*0.02=147 TPS, or ~8818 threat/minute


Decreasing "to be parried" chance by 0.45% by swapping armsman enchant to expertise, over 54 attacks/minute => 54*{[100-(10)]/100}=48.6 attacks, a that is of 48.6-48.357= 0.243 of one parryable attack to be "extra" hit. That is 7687*0.243 =1867 threat/minute lost due to missing 15 expertise rating.

So it seems that armsman should give, more threat than +15 expertise rating (by 4.7 times more threat). Also armsman will have extra threat benefits on fights with adds (assuming lvl 82 adds where expertise will be less valuable).

The only inaccuracy n the above is that lacerate stacks don't count on the parryable attack part of the threat but do get improved by armsman - making armsman even more superior. Armsmen is definitely the better threat enchant no matter what, if that's what you're looking for. The only reason for the expertise other than shared gear is that you might want to minimize parries on LDW and Sindragosa to minimize parry haste.

The only reason to use Blood Draining in current progression is if you are progressing on LK 25 Heroic and are solo tanking phase 2 (i.e. Soul Reapers).

I believe it is unnecessary on a fight like Festergut where you could use an armor set and take noticeably less damage.

Sindragosa (ideally) calls for a Frost Resist Set preferably above 510 after Frost Resistance Aura; An Armor Trinket like Unidentifiable Organ combined with Sindragosa's Flawless Fang is great for this. Armor will be your best friend as she hits like a truck and has parry-haste.

Blood Draining also scales with Hellscream's Warsong/Strength of Wrynn.

Lich king is the only hard fight so people gear for it.

Most typically bears use +18 stamina on both chest and hands. As for gloves, +240 armor seems to be an alternative if you feel you have enough hp, I wouldn't go agi in any case. Not familiar with anyone using +10 stats on chest, but it's not like it's a gamebreaker.

That being said, I'm going with +18 stamina in both slots, sitting at around 82k raid buffed.

This is true, but it's still a bad change to make in my opinion. Having talked to a number of tanks, it seems the consensus is that even against 25HM LK, blood draining ends up being pretty shit. I got logs from one pally tank showing a total of 7000 healing from blood draining for a LK fight; I can't think of many times 7k is going to be what saves you. And hell, I'd argue mongoose would have mitigated more than 7k during the fight in either case.

And then, if you look at the tanks from Ensidia (Kungen, Mackzter and Tun) they all use Mongoose. Same thing with Felyndiia from For the Horde. I'm too lazy to actually put effort into this, but I'd wager you'll find mongoose on plenty of top level tanks.

The 7k heals from blood draining was a total for the full LK25HM fight, btw.