?? about WoTLK feral tank gearFollow

Sorry if this was asked earlier, but Im at work and couldn't look back very far.

I missed out on the mad rush to 80 the first week of the xpac due to my wifes pc crashing(she didnt want me to lvl without her). So im just now starting to see some of the mid70 to 80 gear and so far i havent seen any leather items with defense rating on it. Do we no longer need it and instead rely on agi and stam and dodge? Im still new to end game tanking, and trying to learn as much as i can before i get to 80. I hit 70 2 weeks before the xpac launched. Any help or info is greatly appreciated by myself and my healers. Thanks in advance

To answer one specific aspect of your post, we no longer "need" defense rating necessarily.

The reason: our talent, Survival of the Fittest, was redesigned by Blizzard in Patch 3.0 to make us naturally uncrittable when fully talented at 3 of 3. A total of 6% crit hit chance reduction without one single point put into Defense, something warriors and paladins don't have in their respective talent trees. If anything this was simply done to balance us out in light of the change to all our feral tanking armor which used to have green (higher value) armor but almost no Defense Rating on any pieces save the occasional ring, trinket or Heavy Clefthoof set of gear.

I have been told stacking Defense will still help even after a feral tank is regarded as uncrittable. Supposedly it helps in our total dodge % value but I don't recall seeing that in the tooltip. I'll have to check once I get home. If it does help with our dodge then I would advise enchanting your gear with it because even though you'd end up being way over the uncrittable cap every little bit of dodge one can squeeze out could very well mean one second more of survival which can be the difference between an awesome boss kill or a messy wipe.

Thanks for the info. Cleared up a lot of misunderstanding for me. I will stop wasting my time looking for defense rating and instead look for agi and stam. When i do finally hit 80 what should my stats look like(i.e. stam agi dodge and hit)? I want to hit heroics and raids as fast as possible, so i want to keep my gear upgraded as best as i can while lvling. Again sorry for sounding like a noob, but I lvled as resto and switched to feral tank at 68 for post nerf kara. So far i have been told im a decent tank, but with all these new changes everything i had learned earlier doesnt seem to apply anymore.

I'm curious as to where you saw that SotF will include an armor buff. I haven't seen that before, and I hope it's true. Can you provide the source? Right now armor is my biggest concern for my tanking set. I have around 18k right now (at 78) and I don't think thats going to cut it for Heroics. Like the OP I too was wondering what kind of stat values I should shoot for.

Woops, I completely forgot about that.



You might find some answers in this thread.

Survival of the Fittest will (if things don't change) give you a 66% increase in the armor from all your slots except rings, trinkets & necks. The rings, trinkets & necks armor will no longer be affectef by the bear form multiplier, so our nett armor should rise a little - unless you have all high armor trinkets & rings, in which casw it will be a bit of a nerf (but then you are currently OP compared to the rest of us who don't have them).

Sorry for asking this if it's posted elsewhere; I'm on the road on some motel's internet connection, and it is sloooooowwwwwww.....

It sounds like we feral tanks should gem our Heavy Clefthoof for AGI, AGI, and more AGI now, with maybe some STA, rather than DEF and STA as we did before the changes (at least until we get better armor...). Am I reading this right?

Get rid of clefthoof.

WHile agility is still a decent mitigation/threat stat, it also got significantly LESS powerful for ferals in the expansion. You need over 70 agility to get 1% crit at 80. The AP conversion is still lackluster. Strength gives 2.2 AP per point, I believe; agility is like 1 or 1.1 or something.

If you're tanking, gem for STA. If your threat generation is getting low or you have over, say 40k buffed hp, then you can go for other stats. Until then, stamina rocks (pre-raid speaking, of course).

Is this possible? I mean, I know right now in raids we can get close... but the next patch will kill our armor value if you're near capped levels, because you're relying on weapons/neck/finger/trinket armor to get there and all of that will get nerfed.

I've personally been shying away from spending emblems and gold on +armor non-multiplier pieces precisely because the next patch will make them terribad for us.

So how do you aim for armor if you can't get the use out of those?