As the commenter a little earlier suggested, its worth having an enormous stamina set and the polar gear is still the best way to do it. I generally have an optimized avoidance set with "enough" stam, the same for threat and then my dedicated stam pieces. Since we don't have to worry about defense cap I'll often be wearing some mix that isn't a predefined set but instead that evolves from fight to fight (its as much about the boss I'm tanking as how my healers and raid are performing on a given night).

Isambaard's advice is pretty good. I prioritize my new gear for my avoidance set and the gear it replaces gets shifted to the sta set if applicable since most the time you need sta, avoidance/mitigation doesn't really matter(magic damage). "Enough" sta in your avoidance set is basically you have enough HP to survive X number of boss hits without healing, X being a whole number.

Hodir and Mimiron, I'll go full sta. Steelbreaker and Vezax, I'll put some sta on to survive their harder hits.

I'd slightly disagree with this; that list nightcrowler provided somewhat devalues armor on jewelry, and I think that right now, armor on jewelry is at an all-time high for usefulness. Losing 400 armor from Gatekeeper is a pretty big hit when you're talking about 80-100k attacks before mitigation.

It all depends on the boss. The armor is wasted on Kologarn (-% armor), Razorscale (-% armor), Hodir (mostly frost damage), Mimiron (laughable physical dmg output), Steelbreaker (56k single hit nature dmg when P3 starts, and only grows stronger).
I try to bring 2 different tank sets anyway. Loop of the Agile would fit well in my avoidance/threat set.

I have a question Might be a stupid questionbut i still want an answer.

I use Heart Of Iron & Darkmoon Card: Greatness (90 agi one) as tanking trinkets atm and wonder if i should replace the Greatness trinket with the one from Vezax? The General's Heart.

Why does a percent armor reduction mean more armor is wasted? If anything, it's better. We've seen this on things like Brutallus, where having a 50% reduction meant you wanted to stack more armor, not less, to survive.

I would never personally replace DM:G with the general's heart; 190 agility over time is more valuable than a small protective shield and 107 dodge due to the extra armor and the higher avoidance. Depends on the proc rate for General's heart.

Brutallus was a pretty messed up boss anyway. Mostly because feral druids could go beyond the armor cap with ease. Bonus armor these days is not nearly as good.
An item like [Defender's Code] is only worth about 500 health with -50% armor reduction. Now the ring is a different deal because it has high stamina, too (and I do bring it to tank for example Thorim). I really want the loop for a threat set however (I'm way above the hit cap in bear form, so the Gatekeeper is very poor for me in that regard).

I use a similar castsequence, with a 1.5 reset so that it resets itself quickly if I switch to manually using abilities. Regarding having "easily accessible" keys to Mangle during Berserk... that really boils down to your UI. I don't remove any of the abilities in the macro from my bar or anything; they are still on my mashable 2, 3, F1, and F2 buttons. (The castsequence is bound to the mouse wheel).

With regards to the remark that macroing a threat cycle is akin to "AFK tanking"--I don't feel that's the case at all. The druid threat cycle is sequential enough that having a castsequence can actually increase my "real" threat output. Furthermore, it greatly improves my situational awareness and ability to respond quickly. It frees up my attention to quickly taunt a loose add, or pop a cooldown at precisely the right moment without a significant drop in threat generation. (Besides, it reduces the muscle and tendon strain on my keyboard hand!)

I still trigger individual attacks manually when appropriate (if Lacerate misses and is in danger of dropping; if I'm AOE tanking; If I have Berserk up; whatever). Tanking is about a lot more than threat generation on a single mob, and a castsequence is another tool in the toolbox.

Working on it
While the data is still not perfect (I have a few situations where hp > maxhp, just by a little, which means I'm not processing the combat log 100% right), I'm now able to draw that kind of graph from a WoW log (another problem is that the log doesn't contain the max health value, so I had to go by memory for this test and used 46k, which may be slightly low).
This is what happened to me yesterday evening, it shows that the simple modeling done by the simulator, both for healing and incoming damage is not realistic. While the 1st "big step" is there, due to the fact that I was either sitting at max hp and dodging (or the other tank was tanking), the rest of the curve is a lot smoother. I'll try to do the same on a boss which is constantly tanked, since here there were basically two phases: boss tanking and just taking raid damage. BTW looking at the values one explanation is that while damage comes in big hits, healing comes in smaller chunks (hots, quick heals), so the "staircase" effect disappears (almost, you can see two steps corresponding to the low AoE damage around 41k and the boss swing around 35k).
Next step would be to compute the correlation function between incoming damage and incoming heals to see if it's possible to do some better modeling than the perfect reactive healing I'm using in the sims. Any experts in signal processing on non-uniformly sampled data series around? Searching around the internet I could only locate one book which is not in the local library....

The flashy graphics:



(BTW the area beyond 45k or so is the time while SI was up, raising the max hp to around 67k, in case you wonder the lowest data point is below 1k... a close call).

I'd really like to see something like that for Thorim (P2 only of course), Hard mode if you guys are doing it, if not I could send you a couple logs. I expect a lot more time spent lower, and I'm curious to see just how much time is spent under 35%.

We're not even at Thorim-25 easy mode..... so some logs I can play with are welcome. BTW in addition to the log I need the max health value (I assume that the tank is at max health at the beginning of the fight). If it's big files you can zip them, put them on some free web space somewhere and pm me the link.
I'm also trying to understand why at times I get more heal than the max health. It clearly indicates that I'm missing some "damage" events, but I can't see which ones. I'll revise my code (I saw I need to rewrite a couple of parts) and distribute it as soon as it's usable (= doesn't need C++ knowledge + an external program do to the plotting). I also want to add the "incoming heal" analysis, but since I haven't yet decided exactly what kind of analysis to do I'll postpone it until the rest is done.
If you can think if any "nice feature" it should have let me know. I don't plan to reproduce the kind of analysis offered by WWS/worldoflogs or similar websites, since it's already available there, but I may be forced to i order to compute the correlations I want to find.

Edit: I made some "cleaning" and found where the errors come from: it's stuff like blood pact or commanding shout which change your max health, but (as SI) are only reported as aura_applied/aura_removed and I wasn't processing them.

One subject I never really hear talked about is that of Kitty DPS during fights that don't require you to be tanking. Obviously, dual speccing for Kitty is one option, but I'm sure there are tons of people out there like myself who offspec Tree or Owl.

In those cases, when you're trying to maximize your tanking talents, but also keeping enough to ensure you do decent DPS if needed, are certain talents more worthwhile than others?

For example, in my tanking spec I generally have 3 points leftover (I don't like Improved Mangle). I have a few options as to where to put them...

3/5 Feral Aggression for the extra benefit to Demoralizing Roar, which in turns increases my mitigation
Or 2/2 into Shredding Attacks for the reduced cost of Shred, and thus extra DPS when in Kitty
And of course the second route leaves one point leftover, which can be put into Feral Aggression, King of the Jungle, Predatory Instincts... etc, either slightly boosting mitigation or DPS.

Has the math ever been done to determine where those points would best be spent? Is the mitigation from Feral Aggression equal to, less than, or greater to the DPS increase from Shredding Attacks in terms of overall benefit to the raid? My instinct tells me 3/5 Feral Aggression simply because no matter how small of a mitigation boost it gives me, the time it will be utilized far outweighs the time I toss on Kitty gear and DPS. On the other hand, it seems like my Kitty DPS would be terrible without the energy discount to Shred.

Rawr can tell you a good idea of where those points should be spent. My experience was that the single biggest upgrade was easily shredding attacks.

For the record, Rawr ranks Predatory Instincts higher than shredding attacks overall, but shredding attacks is better point for point than PI is. Personally I go with a pseudo-hybrid cat/bear build as standard (60/11), which takes KotJ and Shredding attacks and doesn't take imp mangle.

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.

@Treetard: It's really not possible to have competitive Cat DPS with any bear spec (as defined by taking PotP, Thick Hide, and NR). If you are the primary Mangle provider for the raid, not taking Improved Mangle in a cat+bear spec is a terrible thing, it's one of the better TPS talents and DPS talents combined.

Actually, your current spec, aside from 2/2 NI (doesn't work in Bear), is pretty good for what you want, I'd probably go with 2/3 KotJ.

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.

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.

It's more of a... I'm generally MTing/OTing, but on the rare fights such as Maly or some of the Naxx bosses where a single tank is required, I'd like to be able to put out decent damage, while maintaining the ability to switch to bear and pick up the boss, or in cases like KT where a second tank is only required later in the fight, do decent DPS until I need to start tanking. I have no intention of ever joining a raid as DPS, but for the times where I can jump into kitty with my tanking gear on, I want to try and maximize that output. So... no 7k DPS, but with my current spec I seem to do about the same DPS in Bear as I do in Cat.

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.

Sorry if this will sound like a stupid question. We're currently at Algalon-10 right now. I can't browse my log file atm, but Algalon is a fast-hitting boss, duel-wielding, main-hand hits me around 14k and off-hand around 9k. Sometimes with bad luck and timing, I find myself getting almost insta-gibbed under 2-2.5 secs.

Against that type of boss, which seems to be better stats? Avoidance vs. Stam vs. Mitigation (armor)?