[Bear] Agility vs. stam? No, that's not right

This got inspired by a comment I made on the wow forums.

Most bears these days don't gear exclusively for stamina like they used to - and that's the right choice. Stamina has always been a big win back in the day when the following was true:

• All that mattered was that a tank could take big, crushing hits one after the other but then get healed up almost immediately after a certain point
• Tanks were getting routinely smashed by nonpredictable damage (such as crushing blows)
• Bears got 25% more health from stamina (or more) compared to other tanks, making it a major gain for them
• Healer mana wasn't an issue

In Cataclysm virtually none of that is true. Sure, a tank needs to be able to survive the Giant Damage of Doom here and there, but after that stamina doesn't do much. It can increase your vengeance damage (and thus savage defense shields are better) but not nearly as much or as reliably as simply having more AP and more crit. Healers aren't going to heal you to full most of the time and certainly aren't going to be able to do it in one GCD or two at most. And bears (sniff) don't have a stupid OP amount of extra health compared to other tanks.

So it's clear that the strategy should be go for stamina until you have enough, then go for agility. Right? Good, so we can move on and...

Um....

Wait.

This may shock you, but there are more choices to make than just agility vs stamina.

In particular, the advantages of armor and resistance continue to be massively understated for bears (and tanks in general).

Now I've talked about some of the secret advantages armor had over stamina, but that was just talking about effective health. Armor's primary advantage is shared with agility or any other avoidance - a reduced attack does less damage and thus requires less healing. This is a Big Deal in an age where mana matters for healers and tanks are left at partial deficits for longer periods of time. But now, I have some easy math to showcase this.

Thanks to Tangedyn's spreadsheet over at Inconspicuous Bear, I have an example of this. Namely, me. While I'm not remotely geared to the gills or anything of the sort, the changes should not be significant between me and a very well-geared bear - especially as far as armor is concerned. I'll play with it later with a more geared tank at some point in the future. And if you look at that spreadsheet, 1 point of bonus armor is worth .18 points of agility.

So clearly agility wins out, right? Well, that's where it gets tricky. Things like Bedrock Talisman have a veritable ton of armor - 1285 to be precise. That's equivalent to 231 agility on its own - but it also has a large chunk of avoidance that could be useful at various points and would cause a big reduction in damage too. Many of the other agility trinkets like Essence of the Cyclone have a ton of agility but nothing particularly useful for anything else.

But the big thing that wins here is that armor is predictable. While avoidance is nice - good even - being able to consistently mitigate damage from every single physical hit is very nice. Being able to plan on that incoming damage on a regular basis is great.

So how does this compare to the two best agility trinkets out there - Tia's Grace and Fluid Death?We'll assume reforging to dodge.

Tia's grace: 340 agility effectively + 171 mastery + 114 dodge.

Fluid Death: 380 agility effectively + 193 hit + 128 dodge

According to the spreadsheet, mastery is worth .2782 agi, dodge .9110 agi, hit .0838. So we get a total value of:

Tia's Grace: 491.42

Fluid Death: 512

Okay, but what's the value of the proc on Bedrock? In a perfect world you'd get 963 dodge for 1/3rd of the time (which is unlikely), meaning you get 321 dodge.

Bedrock Talisman: 1285 armor *.1808 + 321 dodge *.9110 = 524

Huh. So that means that in a perfect setting where you get procs all the time, Bedrock Talisman is actually better for time to live and dtps than Fluid Death or Tia's Grace. (at least for me).

How about someone more geared? Well, while it's not perfect let's go ahead and use Sejta from Paragon. (it's not perfect because while they're more geared they go for mastery and stamina over agility and dodge primarily)For them, bonus armor is only worth .1632 and dodge .8322 agi. Mastery is worth more (.323) as well, so for them the values of Bedrock are a bit lower - Bedrock, even in the best case, is still not as good as Fluid Death for Sejta. (And I'm sure that breaks his heart).

Still, the value of armor's predictability combined with the value of the mitigation is quite nice and something to consider. Especially if the pattern of damage would give you that high avoidance in spikes. Heck, even something trivial like Heart of Thunder can be good if the cooldown is more useful than avoidance would be (for instance, on something where you take predictable chunks of large magical damage.

[General]The dirty secret about armor

This is somewhat based on a post I made on tankspot a while back and references common tanking terms like Effective Health and Time to Live. If you don't know what these mean - read Aggathon's excellent treatise on these things over at Tankspot: Why we do what we do. There's nothing new there for many tanks familiar with these concepts, but it's a well-done document.

But, there's something it doesn't cover - and that's the advantages armor has over stamina. Or at least it doesn't cover it hugely. Similarly, it doesn't cover the advantages that resistance has over stamina in some circumstances.

Effective health is simply how much total incoming damage you could take at once. It is normally referring to physical damage (noted as PEH, or physical effective health) and is simply the following:

health / (1-armor reduction)

So if you have a 50% armor reduction and 50,000 health, you have a PEH of 100,000 - meaning you can take 100,000 physical damage (before armor reduction) before you die. Now, other things like general resistance to all damage (such as protector of the pack) fall in here too, but ultimately it doesn't matter; the important thing to consider is effective health combines the reduction in damage with the amount of health you have.

Similarly, you can look at magical effective health (MEH) as:

health / (1-reduction)

which factors in general resistances and specific ones. Note that for the purposes of effective health, you can't take into account chance; if something could happen that's beneficial (like a block or dodge or SD proc), effective health assumes that it won't happen. Thus for resistance purposes you can take only the minimum resisted value.

So that tells you how effective health works. And you can combine the two values depending on the % of magical damage and physical damage you're expected to take at a given time, and optimize based on that. Now most folks will tell you - often rightly - that the best way to optimize for this is to always go for stamina, even over more armor - because health is in both physical and magical EH and benefits both. And that's true - but only for the calculation of how much damage you could ever take.

Where it gets interesting is in the notion of partial health. And this is where the dirty secret of armor comes in. While effective health is awesome, stamina only helps how much damage you can take at a given time; armor magnifies both how much damage you can take AND how valuable healing can be.

Let's take a very simple example that should be at least somewhat realistic - two tanks with precisely the same physical effective health. One tank has 50k health and 50% armor reduction and no other sources of reduction (or for our purposes they're the same as each other, so they go away) - so using the formula above they have 100,000 EH. The second tank has 40k health and 60% armor reduction, giving them also 100,000 EH (40000/ (1-.6)).

Now, we'll hit both of them with a hit that takes half their EH - a 50k hit. The first tank's health is now at 25k. The second tank's health is at 20k (50k *.4 = 20k). Still the same EH, right?

Now, let's heal them. We'll heal both of them identically for 10k health. This is where it gets interesting.

The first tank goes from 25k to 35k - and their EH is 70k.

The second tank goes from 20k to 30k. Their EH is now 75k. That's a 7% lead in EH over the first tank.

Let's give them another 10k heal:

The first tank goes from 35k to 45k. Their EH is 90k.

The second tank goes from 30k to 40k. Their EH is 100k - up to full. At this point the second tank has a 10% lead in EH over the first!

And that's the dirty secret of armor - and why armor is good. Because it improves the value of healing, partial healing on a tank, it increases the EH of the tank after they've taken damage but before they've been healed to full. That it also makes it more likely they can be healed to full is a nice side effect too. This seems somewhat obvious - since armor reduces damage taken, of course it reduces the amount of health needed to go to full - but the EH model doesn't often talk about partial healing or what happens when your tank is somewhat healed but not entirely. And the bigger the deficit and the larger the amount of heals it takes to get there, the more this becomes obvious.

Yet we don't often have the case where a tank takes damage and then sits there with no heals until they get all the heals at once. Many tank deaths happen because of a combination of lack of enough healing with a set of hits; this was what killed people on Algalon, as an example.

Now the side part of this is that since armor doesn't help with magical damage, this is obviously not as great for things with massive magical burst; in the above example the 40k tank has 40k MEH, and the 50k tank has 50k MEH, which is a big disadvantage. The neat thing though is that resistance math works exactly the same here as armor does - with similar advantages in partial damage and healability. And that means that resistance at certain steps becomes far more valuable than health due to how much damage you can reduce. We've seen this before with Sarth3D and with heroic 25-man Anub'arak, and it's been used nicely sometimes for Sindragosa as well. And resistance also gets a boost from simply being way better at increasing EH than health does; while you can get 110 stamina from a wrist enchant, you can also get about 5% resistance (or 50% of the way to 10% resistance), which is a much bigger boost to MEH than that 1300 health would be normally.

Anyway, hopefully this will give you some intuition as to why things like Unidentifiable Organ is good regardless of whether the stack wears off, or why Petrified Twilight Scale is awesome even with the proc being somewhat meh. It should also give you an idea of why bears were so ridiculous before this as far as being healable, especially back in the day of TBC.

[Druid] The threat value of arpen

UPDATED: thanks to Ciopo I went and redid a bit of the math here; sunder and FF stack multiplicatively, the armor for a boss was reduced (from 13083 to 10643, per experimentation) and the math was redone. Turns out arpen is even better than I originally calculated. And thanks to Ramenchef at EJ, I've updated again.

In an earlier post I mentioned the value of threat for every 100 points of itemization for a bear...and kind of glossed over one specific value, that of armor penetration. Here's what I said about it back in the day:

Now, this definitely doesn't do a good job of modeling armor pen, and I didn't want to go into the insanity of that; it's quite complex. It does do a decent job of it given that in general, bears aren't going to have a ton of armor pen.

That's all true, but it doesn't really help a lot. The real trick though is that bears are going to be likely swimming in armor pen by the time they're geared out to the gills; every single tier piece has it, all the offtier pieces have it (at least from icecrown directly), and even some of the weapons have it.

So what's the actual value of arpen on threat? How good is it? The TL:DR version: Armor Penetration is the best threat stat for bears after hit and expertise.

First, we have to go back and revise some of our assumptions. We'll start with the boss base armor: that's 10643 (corrected from 13083), from experimental testing. That's kind of the assumed number. It might be off; anecdotally people have indicated that (as an example) the Mimiron tank and Vezax both had higher armor than this, but we'll go with that since its' the accepted value.

We'll assume sunder and faerie fire are both up on the target. Before anything else, these take off 24% of the armor since they multiply. (this doesn't stack the way you'd think with armor pen). So that's 10643 *.8*.95 = 8088.68.

Next we get into an odd thing, which is that armor pen can only affect some of the armor on the target. There's a lengthy explanation over at wowwiki about this from ghostcrawler and an even lengthier conversation from EJ about how he's slightly wrong, but the long and short of it is that the formula for determining the affectable armor by armor pen by a lvl 80 mob (it was thought to be towards a level 83 mob, but it's attacker level that matters) is:

(935/6)*80 + armor/3 - (44335/6)

Which ends up being the magical number of 7773.727 for a boss. That's the maximum armor that armor pen could remove, and the percentage that it goes against. So for example: if you had 700 armor pen, you would have 'removes up to 50% of armor'. The target's armor after sunder and faerie fire is 8088.68. You can remove half of the minimum of (8088,7773.727) which is 7773.727.

(7773.727*.5) = 3886.8635. This is the total armor that can be removed, leaving 4201.8165 left.

Now to figure out what that actually does, we go to the armor formula, which tells you the damage reduction by armor. That is:

(armor / (armor +(467.5*80 - 22167.5))) for a level 80 attacker and a level 83 mob.

For 4201.8165 armor, that ends up giving 21.6% damage reduction. Not bad, given that before this the armor reduction was almost 35%.

Okay, okay - enough about the math. Let's see what the threat values are. Again, this is a mangle/ff/lacerate/swipe rotation, assumes lacerates don't fall off, and doesn't take into account any T10 bonuses.

We'll start with the basic idea that you're expertise soft capped on dodge (132 expertise) and have 100 hit. You have 10k AP and a 40% crit rate. For a 3 mangle/3lacerate/3 swipe/3 FF rotation, your base TPS is 5131.187 with 0 armor pen. And here's how we scale with 100 armor pen:

armor pen	TPS	difference
0	5412
100	5517	105
200	5626	109
300	5741	115
400	5863	122
500	5992	129
600	6128	136
700	6272	144
800	6425	153
900	6588	163
1000	6762	174
1100	6948	186
1200	7146	198
1300	7360	214
1400	7586	226

Yep, that's right - at the highest level of arpen arpen gives 226 total threat per 100 points of it, which is huge! Before you look back at that prior article note that this is relative; at that same level of arpen expertise is worth 220 TPS per 100 rating, and hit is worth 240. All the stats go up in value as arpen improves. And this is with some fairly vanilla stats (no haste for instance); numbers will change some.

Still, even at lower levels it's worth a lot more than I had anticipated. It's certainly worth more than 100 haste or 200 AP, as an example.

Why is that? Well, part of it is simply that bears have big, meaty attacks that do a lot of damage. Maul and Mangle are good, and swipe is up there too. Only FF and the lacerate bleed don't benefit from it. Also, the benefit is fairly high on a per-point basis. I'm a bit more surprised that the static threat values from maul don't overwhelm this, but apparently not.

And part of it is the scaling nature itself.

Now, what level of arpen are we looking at? Just based on my prior list for 264 gear, you have something like this:

Frostbitten Fur Boots - 64 arpen

Sanctified Lasherweave Handgrips - 80 arpen

Sanctified Lasherweave Headguard - 92 arpen

Sanctified Lasherweave Legguards - 108 arpen

Sanctified Lasherweave Shoulderpads - 72 arpen

Ikfirus's Sack of Wonder - 0 arpen

Vengeful Noose - 80 arpen

Toskk's Maximized Wristguards - 60 arpen

For a total of 496 arpen! Yikes. At that level, here are the values of stats per 100 rating (assuming 100 hit and 132 expertise):

hit: 185 TPS

expertise: 168

arpen: 129

haste: 86

AP: 76

crit: 69

In this situation, arpen becomes the next best threat stat after hit and expertise, and it's almost competitive. At higher rates it does become competitive with expertise - but hopefully as a bear you're not quite at the point where you're trying to reach the hard cap of armor pen.

I'll go back and amend the previous values. I may end up changing the weighings for itemization, but I suspect it won't matter that much one way or another.

ETA: you can check my spreadsheet out over at google. It's a bit messy, but it does have the various numbers and formulae.

[Druid] So...how good is Glyph of Indomitability?

Reader and blogger Darksend (of I'm not feral I'm a bear and various Tankspot videos) had a question for me:

now one thing that we have discussed in the past is that the rings, trinkets, and necks on that list are using the armor value of armor that gets modified by bear form etc. How good really is that trinket. I want to try switching but I really just cannot bring myself to do it. hell I vendored defenders code the day the armor nerf went live. I still am one of the largest armor whores I know, hell up until a month ago i still used origin of nightmares but with dps in full 25 man hard mode dps gear I just could not put off anymore i needed the extra threat armor be damned. But even still 162 stam for 1800 unmodified armor... I really don't know.

The list he's referring to is the bear itemization weighings at wowhead, which does use the value of armor for both leather and nonleather. For the most part it ends up working well anyway, mostly because items with armor have a lot of it, and items without it don't (and the stats they do have in place of it aren't that valuable). Which, if you looked at the bear gear guide for ToC...doesn't actually use that weighing. It uses Rawr's. But it doesn't really matter, because all that matters is this:

How good is armor?

Armor's a lot tougher to evaluate than stamina is. Stamina never changes, so we know exactly how much we're getting. For each point of stamina on gear, bears get about 15 health after all raid buffs are factored in. But armor? Armor depends on the level of the attacker, how much you have beforehand, how much you're going to have, how hard the attack is...it's really nebulous.

And most people don't work well with nebulous.



Okay, I'm here today to tell you: armor is AWESOME. Armor is the only stat that improves both effective health (how much total damage you can take) and mitigation (how much damage you take per hit). Armor does have its flaws though, and I'll show you some of them. I can do some graphs and show you how its diminishing returns don't matter since the time to live for armor is a linear function, but that doesn't tell you anything.



So instead, I'll point out to you how much damage you can take and how much armor helps in each specific case. I'll be comparing two trinkets: Glyph of Indomitability and Juggernaut's Vitality. (The awesome version, in case you were wondering).

Glyph is essentially Defender's Code's bigger brother. On a side note, I want you to think about how insane Glyph would have been if the armor change hadn't happened early on. That's right - over 8000 armor from it alone. Yeesh. It gives 1792 armor that isn't multiplied by anything other than the metagem.

Juggernaut's Vitality is 216 stamina, which translates to the absurd 3200 health. Yep, all by itself.

3200 health is a lot. So is 1792 armor. Which is better?

Ultimately you have to think about it. Having tools handy is good, but there's no one set that will be optimal for all situations. When you've got a nail, use a hammer. When you've got a screw, use a screwdriver.



Okay, case study one: Algalon-25. Algalon isn't the best fight for a bear relative to almost any other class, since he attacks so often. With higher avoidance DKs can get more reasonable streaks. With block, paladins and warriors can mitigate more damage. But you still may be called to do this fight, so let's see how you can do. We're going to start with the base armor of 32000 - a nice, round number after buffs and whatnot. Algalon can do a 35,000 damage quantum strike, a 10,000 phase punch (not apparently physical), and more importantly can do a 60,000 main hand and a 35,000 offhand hit.

Those main hand and offhand? Can happen in a second. In the same second.

How does armor help with them?

In the 32,000 armor case, here's what it does. I'm assuming full raid buffs on the bear, meaning PotP is up, inspiration is up and grace is up. The total mitigation would be .741 in this case, meaning you only take 25.9% of all damage. (1*armor mod*potp mod*grace mod * inspiration mod)
MH: 15561 damage average
OH: 9077 damage average
Quantum: 9077 damage average

With Glyph:
MH: 15004 damage
OH: 8752
Quantum: 8752

Difference:
MH: 556
OH: 324
Quantum:324

Assuming you get hit by both a MH and OH, you will have stopped 880 extra damage using glyph over juggernaut. However - and here's the important thing - in order for this to make you actually live when you wouldn't have, you would need to take 4 MH+OH in a row to mitigate the same amount of damage that Juggernaut can stop.

Also reasonably, you need to survive MH+OH twice, which is just below 50k health. Any more than that and it's nice but not essential. Any less and you're playing with fire. With the glyph though, that maximum only is 47.5k.

That doesn't take into account another factor: endurance. The theory of effective health assumes infinite mana and assumes healers will always heal you to full, but the problem is that...it's not true. Tank death often happens because a tank hasn't been topped off and is sitting at a low state until the tank gets lucky with avoidance or a healer blows a big heal. In those situations, armor is far more useful than stamina; it means you don't get in those situations as often (because you've taken less damage) and you don't need as much health to survive (because you'll mitigate it).

Which do you think is better for Algalon? I used Defender's code for a while along with elixirs of armor and pots of indestructibility. And it was okay, and worked better for me than the pure stamina situation. In the stamina situation I survived at 2k once, but I also died more often due to the healers simply getting unlucky and not being able to catch up. Armor helped a lot more in that regard. It turned out, sadly, that avoidance trumped both of these considerations, and bears just don't have the avoidance that other tanks do.

How about something a bit more up a bear's alley: Heroic Beasts. Or more importantly, Gormok. Gormok, as the fight continues, hits for absurd amounts of damage. Really absurd. The normal attack can be as high as 100,000 damage, and impales can be as high as 120,000. Then there's the bleed stacks the impales put up and the stomp, which is another 40k hit. How does armor deal with this:

32k armor:
25935 normal, 31122 impale, 10374 stomp
Glyph armor:
25007 normal, 30009 impale, 10003 stomp
Differences: 927 normal, 1113 impale, 371 stomp

Those are kinda huge.

And yet they still might not make up for the worst case scenario - where a normal hit + an impale at the highest amount of damage is just too much to take - and that worst case is an impale + a normal attack within a second. In that case, you need to have 57k health to survive the worst situation and 55k health to survive with a glyph. Even if you're well-geared, those are hard to meet; the best bet there is another cooldown use and prayer.

Again - armor here helps tremendously with healers being able to catch up. Over time you'll take significantly less overall damage and if you're down, are more likely to survive. But that worst case scenario is likely better dealt with via stamina, especially given the amount of bleed damage you'll be taking. My personal strategy was to go with Defender's Code and Heart of Iron, so that I could use both trinkets for another mini-cooldown early on to help out. There was at least one wipe that was caused by me taking just over enough damage to die this way, though, so I'll be going to double stamina trinkets - especially since I just got the awesome version of Juggernaut's vitality.

So in two cases where there is heavy physical damage, stamina still is competitive and/or wins out and the Glyph doesn't. Why do I have it ranked so highly?

Well, part of it is Rawr's ranking system. Rawr ranks based on average damage taken and survivability/time to live, and honestly it's somewhat flawed for these kinds of fights. You don't often care about average time to live; you're not sitting there for multiple seconds while your healers get their thumbs out of their asses and remember that you're tanking. It's more often the case that you care about the worst case scenario in a short period of time and whether you can survive it at all. That's not average damage, that's burst damage. Fortunately, Rawr is coming up with a solution to that.

Rawr likes Glyph (and DM:G) because they average to less damage and gives avoidance which will over time reduce average damage. That might not be that useful to you, depending.

That isn't to say avoidance doesn't have its place; like I said above, avoidance was much better overall for our attempts at Algalon due to his speed of attacking; it meant our healers weren't put into horrible positions and if a healer had to move because of smash, it wouldn't be the end. But it does mean that it also isn't useful everywhere.

So...okay, you say. Armor isn't the best thing ever, and you get that - but is there ever a time where it is awesome and way more awesome than health?

Yep. Heroic Anub'arak. On this, health is a detriment as it heals the boss while doing more damage to you as a percentage. That Juggernaut's Vitality heals Anub'arak by itself for 600 health every second, while dealing you 600 damage a second (before resists, of course). Meanwhile he hits like a truck, and he can hit you with a stun and then normal attacks that hit even harder. The only thing you can do here is use armor. Armor does not improve leeching, it does work when stunned, and does not rely on any RNG components. In this situation, Glyph is absolutely the best trinket you can get; reducing (on average) 800-900 damage a hit is much better than having a 3k buffer that also heals the boss for 600 and does you 600 more damage.

So it's really, really awesome there. But I don't know if it's worth spending 50 emblems on it over a T9 piece.

The really long and short of it is this: get health when you need to make sure you can survive the absolute worst case situation, as health scales far more quickly for a druid than armor does any more. If you know you can survive the worst case situation reasonably, health is much less useful and you should either go for more avoidance (which will help overall damage intake on average) or more armor (which will also help damage intake, but more reliably) depending on what the encounter is like. Finally, stamina does something that armor and avoidance do not: it helps with magical soaking. If the fight has a lot of magic damage (twin valks, Jaraxxus, Mimiron) stamina is going to be better than armor.

Again, ultimately you have to think about it. Having tools handy is good, but there's no one set that will be optimal for all situations. When you've got a nail, use a hammer. When you've got a screw, use a screwdriver.

[General] The future of block part 2 - short term fixes

Part one is here and establishes some of the rules and goals.

Let's first go with the short term fix for paladins and warriors gaining some traction. This is similar in thinking to Savage Defense; we know that an overhaul is in order and things aren't working right, but we assume they're not going to radically change two specs, multiple stat weighings, gear choices, mechanics, etc all in a content patch. Savage Defense is on the level of the kind of change we can expect: a minor mechanic change combined with an alteration of existing talents and skills to balance it out.

Here's the list again of the issues:

1. Block as a static mitigation fails against hard-hitting mobs. We knew that already.
2. Block as a scaling mitigation fails against soft-hitting mobs. Savage Defense was a great tool for upcoming druid tanks in heroics precisely because it mitigates so much more damage against heroic-level attacks. Expect this to stay fairly similar to what it is now, because most tanks don't go to raids right off; they tank in normal and heroic content first.
3. HP on the steady tanks should be lower than HP on the spiky tanks. This right now is a big deal and is very problematic. Druids are arguably the least spiky tank thanks to the higher armor and SD, and they also have the most HP of any tank. Clearly the less spiky tanks should have less HP, which would put paladins and warriors as the high HP tanks and druids as the low HP tank. That may be unacceptable flavor wise for druids.
4. Magic mitigation on the high-HP tanks needs to be less than the low-HP tanks. Because if you can't block at all and armor doesn't help, everyone takes the same damage - which means raw HP is key. We saw this with druids in Sarth3D. I don't think they want this again.
   
5. SD is in an odd state. I don't know what they'll do with SD. It has a high uptime but is similarly ineffective against hard hits as block. I expect two things to happen: SD to be dramatically improved and the HP of a druid to scale dramatically worse. The alternative is a reversion of SD and making druids and DKs the 'nonshield' tanks and paladins and warriors the 'shield' tanks. I'd actually like this, even though I like SD; it would mean that (similar to healers) tanks would have something of niches again. It would necessitate actually having some ability that scaled with DPS gear.
   
6. Avoidance on all tanks should be roughly similar. This is already largely the case (within a few % depending on build) so I don't see it as an issue. And avoidance stacking is not nearly the problem it was in TBC.
   
7. Blocking tanks must not be able to get 100% block uptime. This represents another drastic change to basically every single tank. Now why is this necessary? Because if you balance around the idea that half of the time, another class will take 10% more and half of the time they'll take 10% less, if you can skew that so that 100% of the time they'll take 10% less...that won't be balanced. Paladins mechanics will be completely changed (and likely to something near the warrior model with shield block). This means gear with block rating needs to be carefully looked at. It may mean that block% will have to have diminishing returns like avoidance does.
8. Block value must be completely redone. This seems obvious. At the same time, you can't have this scale too amazingly well. You might not want it at all or want it to be gamed at all; being able to dramatically influence your scaling mitigation is a pretty powerful ability. You run the risk of block value being like a TBC druid's armor stat, where anything without it is essentially pointless. And then there's the scaling BV with strength.
9. Threat stats will have to be looked at as well. Both paladins and warriors scale their threat with strength and block value, and have many mechanics built around these two values and how they interact. If they are changed dramatically, these things will have to be revised as well.

So what could they do? Let's take a look at a current protection warrior - Xav of Premonition. He's on the well-geared side currently, which is why I wanted to look at him since this change will likely affect people going forward from 3.2 at the earliest. He currently has 29k armor but has geared away from block - 12% block chance and 1400 block value after buffs. That's going to be on the low end, but it's not unreasonable anyway. Even if you have a warrior who stacks block, they're going to be on the order of 2000-2500 BV anyway.

By comparison, I personally have 33k armor. And that's all the time. Plus I have savage defense, which (when it goes off) blocks for more on a hit than the warrior, though the warrior has shield block and critical block to play with.

Remember, our goal is to get the warrior to the point where when they block, they take less damage than the DK or in theory a druid (I'll get to that point in a bit). But when they don't block, they take more damage. How to accomplish that?

Well, for starters as it stands now without any modifications they'll take more damage when not blocking anyway. Let's stick with that. That's easy.

So when they block, how about something like this:

Whenever you block an attack the attack's damage is reduced by your block value. In addition, your armor is increased by twice the amount of your block value for that attack.

That's it. Not very difficult, is it?


Now, Xav would have 32k armor, roughly, from any blocks he made. That's not good enough - but he's gone as far away as possible from getting any block rating or value. Plus, he has critical blocks that he can use, and he has shield block which gives him essentially 35k armor and 3k absorbsion for a 10-second duration. It's not quite barkskin, but it's getting much closer; he's increased his armor by almost 25%.

If this didn't prove to be good enough, having a 3x multiplier would likely be fine. Heck, a 4k multiplier might not be too horrible.

Of course, they'd still be the spiky tanks, so a warrior would need to get more HP. Blizzard is fond of giving 10% boosts. We'll go with that.

How does this fare with the 9 rules from before? It fixes 1,2,and 3 outright. 9 isn't an issue since BV isn't changing, nor is 8. 7 isn't that much of a concern since it's effectively impossible to get perfect uptime as it stands now. 4,5,and 6 don't apply.

Okay, that takes care of warriors. What about paladins? Paladins would require something of a nerf and a homogenization, possibly. The easiest solution is to turn holy shield into almost precisely the same thing as shield block.

But that's really inelegant. It also takes away from the very well-established ability of a paladin to deal nicely with many, many mobs via holy shield charges. Let's use one of our guild tanks - Vyre. A bit less geared than Xav, but still pretty decent overall. He has 28k armor and 1600 block value.

What I'd propose is making paladins the other 'steady' tank to complement DKs, and make druids the spiky tank. (again, I'll get to that in a bit). How do we do that? Well, we assume that they're going to have 100% uptime on their shield thanks to holy shield. If we need to, we can guarantee this by giving it even more charges. We only add their BV to their shield once, giving in this case around 30k armor. That sounds a bit low, and it might be - but it's something to balance out in the end. They'd not need any real changing; their armor would stay consistent around 30-32k, and their health is 'balanced'.

To go with the rules again, this is fine with 1,2 and 3, 7, 8, and 9. Magic mitigation might need to be addressed.

So above I said that I'd like to see druids be the other 'spiky' tank. And this isn't that hard to accomplish either, though it might be hard to do with all the other things that we'd like to fix floating around. The reason I'd like them to be spiky is simple: their HP. They already have huge HP multipliers, and HP has traditionally been a druid strength. Armor has as well, but you can't have both huge armor and huge HP in a world without crushing blows to counterbalance; something has to give. And I'm choosing to make it armor for now.

So the way to make a druid 'more' spiky is to reduce their armor yet again. In fact, let's just remove the sotf bonus completely. Insane! But that drops a druid to 26k armor. Yes, that's right - I want super spiky. Now they're the lowest-armor tank of the lot.

Then we supercharge SD. SD will get the following changes:

1. 1. Can stack to 3 charges
2. Increases armor by 100% of AP when active
   

So when SD is up, the armor (say on me) would go from 26k to 33k. And it would be up a fair amount of the time too. And here's the neat thing - polar gear and pvp gear becomes way less useful. With the huge armor multiplier reduced ilvl isn't as special. With the big bonus from AP going to armor, polar gear loses almost 500 armor by itself (and that ignores agility).

And if that's not enough, make it even mightier - 200% of AP. 39k armor when it's active! Suck on that! That's probably a bit high, but it's adjustable. It's another level to move. And with SD's relatively high uptime on single boss fights, it might be fine at 100% AP simply because it should be working so often.

This might require that druids get a health boost, but I doubt it. They're already doing pretty well on that end. It also might require something of an avoidance boost. Nothing drastic, but something close to a 5% improvement overall.

How does this meet the rules? 1,2, and 3 are still okay. 4 isn't addressed. 5 is the dramatic improvement. 6 might need to be improved. 7 through nine are fine.

Finally, DKs. DKs are the baseline model to work off of, since they have no shield mechanic. The only thing they would need to be balanced, I think, is a slight nerf to their HP. Since they're taking the least spiky damage of any of the tanks, they need less HP to counterbalance that.

I'll answer folks questions and comments here shortly.

[Druid] Armor as sacred cow?

I've been reading and posting on the main tanking forums more, especially now that there's news of a new mechanic in 3.1. There's quite a few good posters and good players there, and it's nice to be able to talk with other tanks in a sort of free flow of information that isn't quite so moderated as EJ.

At the same time, there are a ton of druids that are irrationally afraid of what's in store. And one of the things I keep seeing is this basic idea:

"Don't nerf our armor, you've already nerfed our armor twice already!"
or
"Predictable mitigation is ALWAYS better than RNG mitigation or avoidance!"

I don't want to talk about the incorrectness of the latter; the math has been demonstrated, and it's clear from simple examples that this is going to depend on a lot of things. What struck me as odd is how the identity of the druid tank really seemed to be wedded to having high armor. It didn't matter that things like crushing blows were removed or that bears were given protector of the pack. It doesn't matter that right now, druids are the least spiky they've ever been in the history of WoW (better magic mitigation, usable barkskin in forms, no crushes, PotP, and use of consumables in forms all attribute to this).

All that seemed to matter is that they have huge armor.

I guess I can see that; armor was a huge deal in TBC after all, though avoidance became a lot more important when we could stack 80% of it. But I never really thought of it as my identity. Though to be fair I don't tend to think of myself as a druid or a bear anyway; that's just the toon I play on WoW. But when I think about druids and druid tanking, the thing that I think of first is something I've mentioned before.

Versatility.

To me, playing a feral meant being able to tank in some places and DPS in others. It meant being able to pull using ranged aoe spells and build extra aggro via healing myself. It wasn't in the bosses that I could tank or fights I was more advantaged on, and it certainly wasn't about my gear or the specific values on that gear. Honestly, it's tough for me to imagine any druid identifying with much in the way of gear since itemization was so ass for such a long time; should you identify with the Pillar of Lol? How about that awesome Badge of Tenacity?

No, to me it was about experimentation. About thinking about approaching things differently, figuring out ways to work around disadvantages (like pvp gear or intervenes on shears), to take certain problems (not using potions in bear) and making them advantages (getting 40% more health with a pot drinking macro). For me, that's basically morphed into figuring out what gear and spec I can use to be a great tank and a good DPS at the same time, or how I can tank Sarth without using anyone else's cooldowns.

Nothing intrinsic to feral playing has really changed thematically. Only the specific problems to be solved have. That's a good thing too; I like solving new problems. I like having to figure out new ways to do gear and specs and encounters. That's where I get a lot of pleasure from WoW.

I think that if they made ferals ridiculously rigid - akin to prot/other specs in the other tanking classes - that would make me seriously consider another class. If they made it so that the stats that bears use for tanking and DPSing were hugely different (which is close to what TBC was like) and the spec was hugely different - so much that you could not do decent DPS as a cat while bear-specced - would make me want to switch.

I'm curious though - what do you all think about this? Is being the high-armor, big physical hit tank what being a feral means to you? If you lost all your extra armor and had exactly the same armor that you do in cat but nothing else changed, would that bother you? If you were forced to spec into cat or bear so that you really couldn't do much in the way of damage when bear-specced, would you care?

What's your concept of a feral druid? And what would make you not want to play a feral any more? What's your sacred cow?

[Druid] The bear T7 list - pre and post 3.0.4, part 2.

The link to the first part of this guide - leather, leather, leather.

Welcome back to the second part of the bear gear guide for T7.

Unlike the leather gear, the non-leather gear has weights that are very different between classes. I tried to keep the agility/stamina/armor/dodge ratios the same from leather, but it didn't always work well that way (specifically for trinkets and weapons). In general, it's consistent with the other system. Note that the numbers in parenthesis are the values as if the armor change in 3.0.4 has not happened, so that you can choose good gear now and good gear for later. And unlike leather ,this significantly changes the ordering of gear, though oddly not at the top spots.

This is the list that I suspect will get the most feedback on, as a lot of it is more subjective and not perfect, mathematically.

Tomorrow I'll post a priority list of gear and what you should do to get it based on this. That's the sort of thing I do for myself when trying to gear up via dkp; hopefully it'll help you as well.

Weapon (weight used post-3.0.4; weight used pre-3.0.4)

1. Origin of Nightmares - 72.25 (120.65). Heroic Grobbulus.
2. Staff of the Plague Beast - 64.52 (107.20). Normal Heigan.
3. The Undeath Carrier - 62.16 (63.42). Heroic Heigan.
   
4. Enraged Feral Staff - 58.41 (105.56). Heroic Utgarde Keep
5. Staff of the Plaguehound - 56.82 (58.45). Normal Kel'Thuzad.
6. Staff of Trickery - 55.04 (56.15). Heroic Violet Hold
7. Inevitable Defeat - 54.51 (0).Heroic Naxxramas trash
   
8. Journey's End - 50.58 (53.36). Heroic Kel'Thuzad.
9. Witch Doctor's Wildstaff - 48.76 (48.89). Normal Gundrak.
10. Lightning Giant Staff - 41.04 (42.47). Heroic Halls of Lightning.
11. Stave of Shrouded Mysteries - 40.24 (62.85). Revered with Kirin Tor.
    
12. Wildfury Greatstaff - 34.01 (67.81). Serpentshrine Cavern
    
13. Pillar of Ferocity - 27.29 (65.09). Mount Hyjal
14. Bloodwood Greatstaff (63.76)- 14.97 BoE

- Note: this assumes that ghostcrawler misspoke the first time when saying that armor would be removed from staves and that armor would exist on them, we just wouldn't get a bonus from them. This also includes the FAP changes. The staves with armor still win out, but the undeath carrier comes a lot closer to Staff of the Plague Beast.

Idol

1. Idol of Terror - Badges
2. Idol of the Plainstalker - Quest in Borean Tundra
   
3. Idol of Perspicacious Attacks - Grizzly Hills vendor
4. Idol of the Wastes - Quest in dragonblight

- There exists no epic tanking idol in Wrath. None. It sucks hard. Idol of Terror and Plainstalker at least provides some mitigation. Everything else is pure threat.

Really poor choice, Bliz.

Ring (weight used post 3.0.4; weight used pre-3.0.4)

1. Keystone Great-Ring - 32.78 (65.31). Heroic Drak'tharon keep
2. Gatekeeper - 32.26 (60.20). Heroic Sapphiron.
   
3. Titanium Earthguard Ring - 29.81 (27.81). Jewelcrafting BoE.
4. Signet of the Impenetrable Fortress - 28.77 (26.83). 25 emblems of valor.
   
5. Deflection Band - 28.16 (26.16). Normal Anub'Rekhan.
   
6. Hemmoraging Circle - 27.91 (26.04). Heroic Gundrak
7. Strong-Handed Ring - 27.43 (25.59). Heroic Anub'Rekhan, Patchwerk, Noth, Faerlina, Razuvious
   
8. Sand-Worn Band - 27.25 (25.42). Heroic Patchwerk, Anub'Rekhan, Razuvious, Faerlina, Noth
   
9. Signet of Edward the Odd - 26.43 (24.65). World drop BoE
   
10. Titanium Impact Band - 25.82 (24.09). Jewelcrafting BoE
    
11. Band of Torture - 24.41 (50.05). Heroic Oculus
12. Greatring of Collision - 24.32 (22.69). Normal Sartharion + 2 adds.
    
13. Nerubian Shield Ring - 23.50 (52.97). Heroic Ahn'katet.
14. Mobius Band - 22.91 (21.37). Heroic CoT Stratholme
15. Ring of Earthen Might - 22.59 (44.60). Jewelcrafting BoE
16. Signet of the Accord - 22.37 (20.87). Normal Sartharion.
17. Surge Needle Ring - 21.47 (20.03). Normal Malygos
    
18. Ring of the Stalwart Protector - 20.78 (45.73). badges
19. Band of the Kirin Tor - 20.75 (19.36). 8000g in Dalaran
20. Sealing Ring of Grobbulus - 20.09 (18.74). Normal Grobbulus.
21. Ring of Invincibility - 19.97 (18.63). 25 emblems of valor.
    
22. Iceforged battle-ring - 18.23 (48.99). quest in storm peaks
23. Violet Signet of the Great Protector - 16.67 (40.76). Karazhan
    

-Keystone Great Ring remains the best druid tanking ring, and Gatekeeper remains #2. Titanium Earthguard ring is a very good avoidance ring, and Signet of the Impregnable fortress should be a very good threat ring. And the nice thing is that they're all fairly close. Still - expect to either run Drak'Tharon keep a lot or buy a ring or two.

Amulet (weight used post-3.0.4; weight used pre-3.0.4)

1. Boundless Ambition - 34.39(54.66) - Heroic Kel'Thuzad.
2. Heritage - 31.80 (29.66 ) - Heroic Faerlina, Patchwerk, Noth, Razuvious, Anub'Rekhan
3. Favor of the Dragon Queen - 31.09 ( 29.01) . Heroic Malygos (from quest turnin)
   
4. Amulet of Autopsy - 30.69 (52.15) - Normal Heigan, Gluth.
5. Nexus War Champion Beads - 29.28 (27.31 ) Heroic Malygos (from quest turnin)
   
6. Titanium Earthguard Chain - 29.19 (50.75). Jewelcrafting BoE
7. Chained Military Gorget - 28.23 (26.33 ). 25 emblems of heroism.
8. Pendant of the Dragonsworn - 28.21 (26.32). Normal Malygos (from quest turnin)
9. Titanium Impact Choker - 25.82 (24.09). Jewelcrafting BoE
10. Pendant of the Outcast Hero - 24.55 (22.90). 40 emblems of heroism.
11. Drakescale Collar - 24.28 (22.65). Normal Malygos (from quest turnin)
12. Icy Blast Amulet - 24.21 (22.58). Heroic Sapphrion.
13. Shadowseeker's Pendant - 24.04(22.42). Heroic Ahn'kahet.
14. Fool's Trial - 23.14 (21.59). Heroic Noth, Patchwerk, Razuvious, Faerlina, Anub'Rekhan
    
15. Amulet of Wills - 21.34 (42.49). Normal Halls of Stone
16. Gem of Imprisoned Vassals - 21.24(19.81). Normal Kel'Thuzad.
17. Necklace of the Deep - 20.84 (19.44). Jewelcrafting BoE.
18. Necklace of the Chrono-Lord - 20.72 (19.33). Normal CoT Strat.
19. Medallion of the Disgraced - 20.19 (18.83). Normal Naxx trash drop
    
20. Collar of Dissolution - 19.67 ( 18.35). Normal Anub'Rekhan.
    
21. Torta's Oversized Choker - 18.80 (37.30) . BoE drop
    

- My, how the mighty have not fallen. Boundless ambition is definitely the best regardless of anything like an armor nerf due to the high stamina, avoidance and some armor thrown in. Note how close Amulet of Autopsy is to Heritage or Favor of the Dragon Queen. If you can't get any of these, I'd recommend saving for the Chained Military Gorget. Don't bother with the Titanium Earthguard Chain any more. It'll be too expensive for too minimal of a gain.

Trinket (weight used post-3.0.4; weight used pre-3.0.4)

1. Darkmoon Card: Greatness - 27.12 (24.94). Darkmoon Nobles Deck
2. Defender's Code - 18.63 (85.64). Heroic Heigan, Grobbulus, Maexxna, Gothik.
   
3. Valor Medal of the First War - 20.71 (19.04). 40 emblems of heroism
   
4. Essence of Gossamer - 21.19 (19.57). Heroic Azjol-Nerub.
   
5. Offering of Sacrifice - 12.05 (55.42).Heroic Gundrak
6. Repelling Charge - 14.96 (13.75). Normal Thaddius
   
7. Badge of Tenacity - 6.75 (31.03). BC BoE drop

- There just aren't that many good tanking trinkets for druids, at least not ones that are non-jewelcrafting. JC gets Monarch Crab, which would rank between the code and Gossamer. The Indestructable Alchemist Stone is the second-best trinket in the game when 3.0.4 comes out at 26.71. The values are the weights, but the ranking ignores this as weights cannot reasonably factor in the values you get from on-use. If you have any doubt why the armor nerf in 3.0.4 was done, look at the pre and post scores for defenders code. Darkmoon Card: Greatness is by far the best tanking trinket for druids, giving about 190 agility on average. Defender's Code is still strong for both the pure mitigation and the on-use. As always, you should have a collection of trinkets. For normal use I would go with Greatness and Gossamer, but have those, Valor Medal, Defender's Code and Offering of Sacrifice if you can.

Cloak (weight used post-3.0.4; weight used pre 3.0.4)

1. Cloak of the Shadowed Sun - 40.79 (67.35 ). Heroic Grobbulus, Gothik, Heigan and Maexxna
   
2. Gale-Proof Cloak - 35.39. (42.17) Normal Sartharion
3. Platinum Mesh Cloak - 35.31. (42.33) 25 emblems of valor.
4. Durable Nerubhide Cape - 30.25. (37.33) BoE Leatherworking.
5. Cloak of the Gushing Wound - 29.63. (36.45) Heroic Violet Hold
6. Drape of the Deadly Foe - 29.39. (36.94) Heroic Kel'Thuzad.
7. Cloak of Mastery - 28.74. (35.91) Normal Sartharion.
8. Cloak of Armed Strife - 27.98 (55.07). Normal Maexxna.
   
9. Aged Winter Cloak - 26.86. (34.38). Heroic Gothik, Heigan, Grobbulus and Maexxna.
   
10. Cloak of Holy Extermination - 26.86. (33.55) Honored with Argent Crusade
11. Ice Striker's Cloak - 25.97 (33.31). BoE leatherworking
    
12. Shroud of Reverberation - 25.92. (32.96) Heroic Halls of Lightning
13. Hammerhead Sharkskin Cloak - 24.52 (32.18). 25 emblems of valor.
14. Flowing Cloak of Command - 24.15. (52.53) Heroic CoT Strat
15. Slikk's Cloak of Placation - 23.64. (42.70) 35 badges
16. Cloak of Darkening - 23.34 (30.83) Normal Razuvious
    
17. Shadow of the Ghoul - 21.78 (29.60) Heroic Naxx trash drop
    
18. Cloak of Tormented Skies - 21.76 (40.40). Leatherworking BoE

- This is a bit tougher to gauge, as no rating system out there rates both armor and additional armor separately. Still, this is what I'd be going for. The best cloak pre-3.0.4 is the best cloak post 3.0.4. The extra armor makes up for the lack of avoidance, and given the slightly greater stamina it goes ahead. Interestingly enough with this change, DPS cloaks show up here. Agility is simply that much better than dodge.

[Druid] The bear T7 list - pre and post 3.0.4, part 1.

The link to the second part of the gear list - jewelry, idols and weapons.

Here's the first installment of the gear list for bears. It's very large, so I decided to break it up into leather and non-leather items. This is all about the leather. I'll provide a link back when I do the non leather later today.

As you might have noticed from recent posts, I've been favoring agility over stamina stacking. Why? Because while stamina does help time to live and does give your healers a buffer for healing you, after a certain point it simply isn't useful. If you never dip below 30% health, that 30% health is basically wasted itemization. Sure, it looks great when you do LFG and it's nice to impress the n00bs with that 55k survival instincts/defender's code proc. But it doesn't really help with, ya know, tanking.

Agility, however, is always good no matter what. While dodge is subject to diminishing returns, each point of agility provides the same survivability no matter what. This is the same principle as armor; while armor doesn't give the same value for each point in terms of percentage reduction, each point gives a linear reduction of damage from the next. If you think of it that way, you can see why stacking agility makes sense. Agility also provides the most avoidance per point (raid buffed or not), crit, and a bit of armor. It is the only stat that gives mitigation, avoidance, and threat for a druid.

So here's the deal: you should have a good amount of health. That good amount is entirely based on your raid setup. I can't tell you how much you need. But here are some benchmarks to consider:
Patchwerk-25 hits the offtank for about 22k if you're a heroic-geared druid. 20k if you're naxx-geared.
Malygos-25 has a breath attack that can do 30k, plus a quick melee attack that does another 4k.
Sartharion-25 + 3 adds can (depending on the debuffs) hit for 35-39k.

Personally, I'm aiming for 42k raid buffed. That's enough to eat two hateful strikes with only HoTs rolling - and in practice that will not happen due to the other tank having more health at that point. It's enough to take on all other bosses. But again, this is entirely depending on what your situation is. And I won't cry all that much if I end up with only 40k.

Because of this change in philosophy, I've changed the rankings to favor agility heavily over stamina. This does alter the pre-naxx list, which is why I've kept these separate. I still think the pre-naxx gear list is correct because gearing up for naxx, you do want stamina aplenty. However, once you start collecting pieces that goes a bit lower in priority.

Threat and damage is still not a consideration in this list. I can understand why it might be - and if there's enough interest, I'll go back and revisit what I think the best threat stats are for a bear and how to optimize for it - but for normal tanking, at least right now, threat is simply not important.

The rating system I use is based on wowhead, and this is the weight:
Agility 110
Dodge 75
Stam 70
Defense 65
Armor 50
Expertise 22

That's for the leather pieces only. The nonleather pieces will have their own separate ranking system.

A big, special note here: this will be applicable and weighted for 3.0.4 changes. When there is a significant difference, I will list the values pre and post-nerf. Note that this only really affects jewelry and to a lesser extent a couple of leather pieces (the 226 ilvl pieces vs the 187 blues, if you're wondering) In general, there are very few pieces with no armor that also have good druid stats. In any case, the pre-3.0.4 change will be blisted in parenthesis.

A quick look into this reveals that if you're going to keep T6 gear for some reason (threat, perhaps?), the best pieces to keep are the bracers and belt. The worst are the legs and head.

Onto the rankings.



Chest

1. Valorous Dreamwalker Rainments - 127.02 Heroic Gluth, Heroic 4 Horsemen, Archavon the Stone Reaper
2. Deadly Gladiator's Dragonhide Robes -126.81. Arena rating, arena points.
3. Chestpiece of Suspicion - 122.32. Heroic Instructor Razuvius, Heroic Gluth.
4. Tunic of Dislocation - 119.92. Normal Gothik the Harvester, normal Gluth.
5. Hateful Gladiator's Dragonhide Robes - 119.80. Arena rating, arena points
6. Heroes' Dreamwalker Rainments - 119.72. 80 emblems of heroism, normal Gluth, normal 4 horsemen
   
7. Tunic of Indulgence - 119.64. Normal Grobbulus, Normal Gluth
8. Chestguard of the Recluse - 119.35. Heroic Malygos
9. Polar Vest - 117.37. *Leatherworking BoE.
   
10. Blade-Scarred Tunic - 113.47. Normal Sartharion.
11. Savage Gladiator's Dragonhide Robes - 111.97. honor
12. Harness of Carnal Instinct - 109.59. Sunwell Plateau
13. Darkheart Chestguard - 108.60. Exalted with Knights of the Ebon Blade
14. Crystal-Infused Tunic - 104.80. Heroic Nexus
15. Exotic Leather Tunic - 101.55. quest in Utgarde Pinnacle
16. Eviscerator's Chestguard - 98.90. Leatherworking BoE.
    
17. Thunderheart Chestguard -94.31. Black Temple

-The Valorous gear wins! Just barely. The Polar Vest is included because, honestly, it's not that bad and would be a good starting piece if you didn't have T6 or a quest reward. I'd still take the Exotic Leather over it for starting due to the expertise and AP, but I can see a reasonable disagreement - especially if you used it for stamina here. Still, it will quickly become outpaced by anything in Naxx. Also note how close things are to each other here - upgrades aren't big until you get to the top few.

Feet

1. Footwraps of Vile Deceit - 89.31. Heroic Loatheb, Heroic Gluth.
2. Deadly Gladiator's Boots of Triumph - 89.23. Arena rating, arena points.
   
3. Hateful Gladiator's Boots of Triumph - 83.83. Arena rating, honor points
4. Polar Boots* - 82.78. Leatherworking BoE.
5. Boots of the Worshipper - 76.76. Normal Faerlina, normal Gluth.
   
6. Slag Footguards - 76.38. Heroic Halls of Lightning
7. Boots of Captain Ellis - 76.33. 40 emblems of valor.
8. Dawnwalkers - 74.97. Heroic Anub'Rekhan, Heroic Gluth.
9. Boots of the Whirling Mist - 74.29. Heroic Halls of Stone.
   
10. Boots of the Neverending Path - 72.55. Exalted with Argent Crusade.
    
11. Gorloc Muddy Footwraps - 72.47. Heroic Gundrak
12. Jormscale Footpads - 70.25. Leatherworking BoE
13. Thunderheart Treads - 67.82. Sunwell Plateau
14. Rhino Hide Kneeboots - 64.59. Quest in Gundrak
15. Shadowmaster's Boots - 63.09. Black Temple
    

- The boot slot has so little, it's not funny. The Polar boots are actually pretty good largely because of how little there is and the ratio between agility and stamina compared to the next best thing; if you must get one polar piece, this is the best one to get. The difference between the three heroic drops is very small, so don't kill yourself to get one if you've already gotten another.

Gloves

1. Deadly Gladiator's Dragonhide Gloves - 84.64. Arena rating, arena points.
   
2. Handwraps of Preserved History - 81.68. Quest in CoT Strat
3. Valorous Dreamwalker Handgrips - 80.61. Heroic Archavon, Heroic Sartharion
4. Gloves of Fast Reactions - 80.61. Heroic Sapphrion
5. Hateful Gladiator's Dragonhide Gloves - 79.36. Arena Rating, arena points
6. Rapid Attack Gloves - 77.82. Normal Razuvious, normal Gluth.
7. Dislocating Handguards - 77.13. Heroic Faerlina.
8. Frosted Adroit Handgrips - 75.33. Heroic Malygos.
   
9. Heroes' Dreamwalker Handgrips - 75.33. 60 emblems of heroism.
   
10. Savage Gladiator's Dragonhide Gloves - 73.80. honor
11. Gloves of the Forest Drifter - 66.35. Sunwell Plateau
12. Eviscerator's Gauntlets - 65.38. Leatherworking BoE.
13. Seafoam Gauntlets - 65.15. Leatherworking BoE
14. Gloves of Immortal Dusk - 63.09. Leatherworking BoE (requires sunmotes)
    
15. Discarded Slaughterhouse Gloves - 57.83. Quest in icecrown
16. Thunderheart Gauntlets - 58.65. Mount Hyjal

-Even with a higher weight on base armor, even with the agility changes, the Handwraps of Preserved History remain the best PvE bear tanking gloves. The gap is pretty small between this and the Valorous, so I'd recommend the Valorous to get the 4-piece bonus.

Head

1. Hood of the Exodus - 116.40. Heroic Gothik or Gluth.
   
2. Deadly Gladiator's Dragonhide Helm - 114.44. Arena rating, arena points
   
3. Hateful Gladiator's Dragonhide Helm - 107.68. Arena rating, arena points
4. Valorous Dreamwalker Headguard - 107.07. Heroic Kel'Thuzad.
   
5. Weakness Spectralizers - 105.36. Engineering BoE (requires engineering rating)
6. Helm of the Vast Legions - 103.49. Normal Sapphiron.
7. Heroes Dreamwalker Headguard - 101.71. Normal Kel'Thuzad.
8. Savage Gladiator's Dragonhide Helm - 100.36. honor
9. Mask of the Watcher - 92.25. Heroic Oculus
10. Shroud of Darkness - 90.92. Heroic Violet Hold
11. Mask of the Fury Hunter - 86.43. Sunwell Plateau
12. Thunderheart Cover - 79.90. Mount Hyjal
13. Cover of Silence* - 95.79. Heroic Thadius or Gluth.
    
14. Headguard of Retaliation* - 87.35. quest in Utgarde Pinnacle
15. Eviscerator's Facemask *- 86.28. leatherworking BoE

- Hood of the Exodus is a superb bear piece, and better than the T7. This should likely be the thing you go for over KT's head if at all possible. Note that the pieces with *s do not have metagems, and this ranking does not quite do the metagem system correctly. You should always, always have the Austere Earthsiege Diamond. Always.

Legs

1. Valorous Dreamwalker Legguards - 117.94. Heroic Archavon, 75 emblems of valor, Heroic Thaddius.
2. Deadly Gladiator's Dragonhide Legguards - 117.63. Arena points, arena honor, heroic Archavon.
3. Leggings of the Honored - 116.25. Heroic Sartharion + 2 adds.
   
4. Hateful Gladiator's Dragonhide Legs - 110.87. Arena rating, arena points
5. Heroes' Dreamwalker Legguards - 110.62. Normal Thaddius
6. Leggings of Fleeting Moments - 110.46. Heroic Gothik.
   
7. Gored Hide Legguards - 105.13. Heroic Gundrak.
8. Savage Gladiator's Dragonhide Legs - 103.29. honor
9. Leggings of Discord - 103.20. Normal Maexxna.
   
10. Mind-expanding Leggings - 102.66. Revered with Kirin Tor
11. Infectious Skitterer Leggings - 101.68. Heroic Maexxna.
    
12. Ravenous Leggings of the Furbolg - 101.15. heroic utgarde pinnacle
13. Chain Gang Legguards - 97.17. BoE from Violet Hold
    
14. Leggings of the Immortal Beast - 93.78. Sunwell Plateau
15. Eviscerator's Legguards - 90.48. Leatherworking BoE.
16. Constellation Leggings - 90.28. Normal Halls of Stone.
17. Tameless Breeches - 80.38. Badges.
    
18. Tattooed Deerskin Leggings - 80.00. Quest in Violet Hold
19. Thunderheart Leggings - 78.98. Black Temple
    

- Leggings of the Honored may deserve to be #1 here - they have a ton of stamina and a lot of armor due to their being level 226. They just don't have the agility that the Valorous or Deadly legs do, and if you're going for your 4-piece it's not worth it to remove this and have to get your T7 head. Per commenter Tygrathel, the Gored Hide leggings are really strong going into Naxx, and are better than a few options from there (thanks Tygrathel!) though I'd still recommend something with more stam when starting out.

Shoulders

1. Valorous Dreamwalker Shoulderpads - 93.83. Heroic Loatheb, 60 emblems of valor.
   
2. Deadly Gladiator's Dragonhide Spaulders - 93.83. Arena rating, arena points
3. Trollwoven shoulders - 89.84. Leatherworking BoE
4. Heroes' Dreamwalker Shoulderpads - 88.29. Normal Loatheb.
   
5. Hateful Gladiator's Dragonhide Spaulders - 88.29. arena rating, arena points
6. Concealment Shoulderpads - 87.23. Heroic Sartharion.
   
7. Spaulders of the Careless Thief - 83.83. Heroic Nexus
8. Spaulders of Egotism - 82.78. Heroic Razuvious.
   
9. Savage Gladiator's Dragonhide Spaulders - 82.47. honor
10. Spaulders of Resumed Battle - 79.75. Normal Noth.
    
11. Sprinting Shoulderpads - 79.32. Heroic Ahn'kahet
12. Demontooth Shoulderpads - 74.13. Sunwell Plateau
13. Eviscerator's Shoulderpads - 73.80. Leatherworking BoE.
    
14. Thunderheart Pauldrons - 70.15. Black Temple

- The trollwoven shoulders remain very strong and should be a high priority pre-Naxx. Note how small an upgrade the T7 are over the Trollwoven; these should be a low priority to get until other gear has been achieved, and should be one of the later emblem purchases.

Belt

1. Deadly Gladiator's Belt of Triumph - 79.92. Arena rating, honor
   
2. Hateful Gladiator's Belt of Triumph - 74.77. arena rating, honor
3. Trollwoven Girdle - 73.94. Leatherworking BoE
4. Polar Cord* - 73.47. Leatherworking BoE.
   
5. Sharp-Barbed Leather belt - 73.36. heroic utgarde keep
6. Stalk-skin Belt - 71.13. Heroic Heigan.
   
7. Belt of the Tortured - 69.72. Heroic Patchwerk.
   
8. Jorach's Crocolisk Skin Belt - 69.17. Emblems of Heroism
9. Blistered Belt of Decay - 69.13. Normal Grobbulus.
   
10. Ley-whelphide belt - 65.94. normal and Oculus
11. Glitterscale Wrap - 62.78. Revered with Oracles
12. Eviscerator's Waistguard - 61.17. Leatherworking BoE.
13. Thunderheart Waistguard - 56.30. Sunwell Plateau
    
14. Don Alejandro's Money Belt - 55.48. Mount Hyjal
15. Waistguard of the Great Beast - 52.40. 60 Badges.
16. Belt of Natural Power - 52.30. Leatherworking BoE

- The belt availability for bears is horrible. Just atrocious. At least that makes it easy. If you get lucky and get the belt from UK, go with that. Otherwise, make a trollwoven girdle and be done. The deadly belt is a big upgrade and is likely worth grinding honor for, whenever it comes out.

Wrist

1. Thrusting Bands - 60.30. Heroic Noth.
   
2. Deadly Gladiator's Armwraps of Triumph - 59.77. Arena rating, honor
   
3. Sinner's Bindings - 57.25. Heroic Maexxna.
   
4. Hateful Gladiator's Armwraps of Triumph - 55.71. arena rating, honor
5. Wristwraps of the Cutthroat - 52.76. BoE, 60 emblems of valor.
   
6. Bindings of the Tunneler - 52.55. Heroic Utgarde Keep
7. Dragonfriend Bracers - 52.04. Exalted with Wyrmrest Accord
8. Cuffs of Dark Shadows - 50.92. Heroic Heigan.
   
9. Drake-champion's Bracers - 50.05. Heroic Oculus
10. Thunderheart Wristguards - 46.23. Sunwell Plateau
11. Eviscerator's Bindings - 47.07. Leatherworking BoE
12. Njorndar Furywraps - 46.45. Quest in Icecrown
13. Vindicator's Dragonhide Bindings - 45.94. BC PvP honor
    
14. Band of the Swift Paw - 38.78. badges

- The thrusting bands, thanks to their balance of stam, agi, and expertise come out very strong here, just barely edging out the PvP bracers. The badge wristwraps are an okay alternative, but I would spend this after you've gotten basically everything else you might want, as heroics and pvp and vendor items are close to it, and 60 emblems is quite a bit.