Need help from BT / Hyjal Feral Tanking druids. Stam or Agi?Follow

I am not actually in Hyjal yet but expect to be very soon, as we're finishing up SSC & TK with all but Vashj & Kael'thas on farm status. Still I think I can offer some useful responses.

One factual point: against bosses, the armor cap is more like 37k, not 32k.

Keep in mind that agility shows increasing marginal returns, while stamina has linear returns on effective health. You may be familiar with how the damage reduction given by increasing armor value rises at a decreasing rate, because each additional equal bit of base damage reduced is of more value than the previous such bit. The dodge chance given by increasing agillity does not scale logarithmically like that. Hence, the same amount of agility that gets you from 30% dodge to 31% also gets you from 50% to 51%. The more agility you have, the more valuable additional agility is relative to stamina purely in terms of effective health, though variance of damage rate is a concern as well.

Also, I currently can reach over 22k health with raid buffs, even without stacking stamina gems & enchantments. So far, this has proven to be plenty for anything I've encountered. Yes, healers spam me and overheal a lot in certain situations. But I doubt they'd be spamming significantly less if I had 25k health.

Conclusion: I stack agility gems and enchantments. I match colors for socket bonuses and use 8 agi red, 4 agi + 4 hit yellow, 4 agi + 6 sta blue.

Also, I have some hit rating (but still not a lot) in my tanking gear and will consider ways to include expertise when that arrives. I don't generally have threat problems (few druids do), but it can't be ignored entirely, especially on fights like Leotheras where grabbing aggro quickly after each transition is essential.

For reference, I'm around 33k armor and 42% unbuffed dodge (about 52%, I think, with Grace of Air & Kings).

One enchantment point to remember: even if you prefer stacking stamina and your raid conditions warrant it, if you think agility is worth including at all, then get it in your enchantments. 6 all stats to chest, 15 agi to gloves, 12 agi to feet rather than 12 sta, as you only get 2/3 the amount when substituting gems. (The minor speed enchantments for feet are also excellent choices.)

Heh - the oldest debate in history about armor - is it better to not be hit at all or to simply be able to suck up the blow without blinking?

Considering that you're talking mobs that hit for upwards of 10k damage, a few hundred extra hitpoints aren't going to help half as much as a few extra percent dodge.

Damage reduction from armor depends on the level of the creature dealing the damage. According to wowwiki, it comes out to 35880 armor to reach 75% reduction against level 73. The reduction shown in the tooltip on your character sheet assumes a same-level opponent. Against level 70, 75% reduction comes with 31673 armor. When fighting level 70 opponents, it's true that more armor than that is wasted, but against raid bosses going from 31673 armor to 35880 results in ~91% as much damage taken per physical hit, which is significant.

For ease of healing, it's true that minimizing the rate of damage taken can be less important than minimizing variance in that rate. Druids minimize that variance well through our very high armor, which lowers damage per hit that lands.

More stamina does not actually make damage taken any less spiky; it just lowers the chance that any given spike will result in death. But in situations when you don't have 5 healers spamming big heals on you, avoidance can also significantly lower the risk of death. One hit landing while the other is dodged is less spiky than 2 landing back to back. When I'm sitting at lowered health for a while because I'm one of many tanks and healers have died or have their attention elsewhere, or they're getting bounced around and unable to cast for a few seconds, the only way to survive until they can return to healing me is by avoiding a lot of hits.

Knowing how much stamina is enough in a given situation can be tough. If you're tanking a boss and can cross the threshold from, say, 4 landed hits killing you to 5, take that extra health.

One detail from mattzz's post: You mentioned dodge gems. Maybe you didn't mean precisely that, but in case you did, be aware that druids get more dodge chance from agility than from dodge rating (in addition to the crit chance and, in cat form, the AP). Dodge rating and agility have the same itemization cost per point, as other classes get more dodge chance from the dodge rating.