[T13] Feral Tank 2pc

[Iracor]

It all really depends on what your healers prefer healing. Mastery causes you to take more consistent damage whereas dodge causes you to take random damage spikes at times.

The whole argument of dodge RNG versus savage defense RNG is fairly moot considering the times you don't have a mastery shield for multiple hits is quite low in comparison to the number of times you'll take multiple hits in a row.

As for diminishing returns, how it works is that the more dodge you have the less effective dodge you actually get per additional point. Your character sheet actually lies to you about how much dodge you really have against a boss mob. Because mitigation in general scales exponentially these diminishing returns are mostly canceled out, but you still experience a slight loss in damage reduction per additional point of dodge.

[kangamooster]

Dodge is mathematically better for damage reduction vs raid bosses (i.e. harder hitting content) than Mastery is.

However, if you frequently go Cat (tank swap fights, or if it's your offspec for 1 tank fights) going for Mastery rather than Dodge will not make a huge damage difference when you're tanking, and you definitely should.


TL;DR - Always a tank? Dodge. Sometimes go Cat for DPS? Mastery.

If all you do is 5 mans, go for Mastery.

[tangedyn]

If all you do is 5 mans, go for Mastery.

Negative. 5 man should be all about Crit, Exp and Hit.
Then laugh at the DPS being all below you on the meters.

[arel00]

Negative. 5 man should be all about Crit, Exp and Hit.
Then laugh at the DPS being all below you on the meters.

You're above them even blindly stacking mastery in your average LFD. Of course there are good dpsers too. But we all know how common they are :P

[earthwormjim]

"Personally, I go for soft exp cap and mastery then crit w/ t13 as it helps me get higher uptime"

Sry if i wasn't clear

I was really directing my post at the original poster. Your post makes perfect sense. One thing to keep in mind, you automatically reach the expertise soft cap with T13 gear. Expertise is truly a great stat, it double dips into two separate attack rolls.




Dodge is still a better stat than mastery if you are the main tank and never have to dps in cat form. Dodge scales with hard hitting and faster hitting bosses; mastery does not. In fact, mastery does worse against faster hitting bosses, while dodge does better. That's not to say mastery is a worthless stat, it's still our second best secondary stat.

Diminishing returns on dodge only applies to dodge rating from gear, and extra agility above our base agility; it does NOT apply to the dodge we get from talents, base agility and base dodge.

Since 1/3 or more of our dodge is not affected by diminishing returns at all, diminishing returns on dodge is really a non-issue.

With the DR in place, If your dodge rating is at 44.20% it will get lower as 30.32% after the first dodge which means dodge isnt the most optional stat to stack. Savage defense tho, Is a buff you gain with almost 100% uptime, and stacking mastery gives you incrased absorb of that buff. Also i've stalked DREAM Paragon's Main Feral Tank the whole expansion and he have gemmed stamina and reforged everything to mastery which didnt have mastery and those items who had mastery already, he had reforged to dodge.

Each hit a boss does on you is an independent event, I have no idea where you even came up with those numbers. The fact that you previously dodged a hit has absolutely no bearing whatsoever on whether or not you will dodge the next hit. That is not what diminishing returns are.

Diminishing returns simply limit the contributions to dodge chance that is gained from agility and dodge rating as you get more and more dodge from those two stats. Dodge becomes better and better the more of it you have, diminishing returns is blizzard's way of normalizing this fact. They do not like it when a stat gets better and better the more of it you have. E.G. a 1% dodge increase at 40% dodge is BETTER than a 1% dodge increase at 20% dodge.

Savage defense does not have 100% up time (never seen a parse where a bear attained 100% up time), it is completely dependent on your set bonus, crit chance, hit chance, expertise, and get ready for this, your avoidance % (dodge and miss). The more dodge you have, the better our savage defense becomes (up until we just dodge everything), it is more likely to be up when we take a melee hit.


If you are a full time tank, you want dodge!!

[rated]

And you cant explain to me how it works? It's like me saying the world is flat without having any source or evidence... You're probably from some middle-east country where you accuse a woman for cheating and if the woman can't proof that she isn't cheating she will get rocked to death.

Or you could read every post in this thread and realized I posted a link that explains exactly what you're asking for.

Infact me and someone else did, although the 2nd time was after your ridiculous post.

http://theincbear.com/dodge-diminishing-returns

[Williee]

sad face
i cannot get my t13 legs still
its filled wit the massively high amount of expertise i need which wud allow me to stop reforging for exp hehe
ya i wish i was mt :[ i wana try out having full reforged dodge

but ty for the heads up about agility gained dodge... didnt know it isn't affected by DR (@earthwormjim)

[earthwormjim]

sad face
i cannot get my t13 legs still
its filled wit the massively high amount of expertise i need which wud allow me to stop reforging for exp hehe
ya i wish i was mt :[ i wana try out having full reforged dodge

but ty for the heads up about agility gained dodge... didnt know it isn't affected by DR (@earthwormjim)

No it is affected by diminishing returns. The only agility that isn't is base agility, that we get naturally from being druids. It's a very small amount equal to .09% dodge.

I think I was too vague in my explanation on what I meant by base agility. Base agility is 85 I believe.

Any additional agility above 85 is subject to diminishing returns. I have ~7000 agility, 6915 of it is subject to dodge diminishing returns, while 85 of it is not.

[tangedyn]

85 for Tauren, 91 for Troll/Worgen, 93 for Night Elf

[Williee]

Ah ty for clarifying
YES .09% dodge not affected by DR!

[Rédempteur]

Ah ty for clarifying
YES .09% dodge not affected by DR!

Only that %tage of dodge gained from AGI is not, but as the link on the previous page says :

This isn’t the full picture though. Not all source of Dodge% has Diminishing Returns applied to them. In particular the ones that are exempted from Diminishing Return are:
4% Dodge from Feral Swiftness
6% Dodge from Natural Reaction
4.951% Base Dodge for druids
Base Agility for our race/class (varies by race) which is not very significant

For a round 15% dodge unaffected by DRs.

[Jebhardt]

Hey guys, first time posting on this forum so please be patient with me. I'm a 394 Feral Tank that is the main for my guild.

Toon name: Mórdecái -- feel free to armory me.

I generally agree with most of this thread other than one thing. DS loot is almost completely itemized for cat and rogues (with only a couple exceptions). Since mastery doesn't come on most items, you may need to reforge to mastery because you still need SOME.

Only 1 out of my 16 pieces come with mastery on it and its because druid tanks don't have any other choice in DS. I find myself reforging mostly to mastery with some dodge and i dont have any problems with squishiness(lol).

PS dont rip apart my shoulders, i just got them late last night so i didnt reforge yet.

EDIT: I'm also using the 390 agil trinket, not the Veil of lies as it shows.

[rated]

The only problem I see here Jebhardt, is your gear choices. You can view what is in imo the official bis gear list here: http://theincbear.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=449

Just to be sure I got the right person: http://us.battle.net/wow/en/characte...3%a1i/advanced is you right ?

The neck piece you're using isnt that great. The 403 PvP one with mastery is better
Your cloak is not that great, the 403 pvp piece is better. Actually the heroic cloak from rhyo is even better (nice job bliz)
Your bracers although slightly better due to the extra 60 agility has shitty secondary stats. The VP bracesr win in that regard.
Your belt is not that great, the VP belt with haste/mastery is (this would change with heroic gear though)
If you're able to get tier gloves at some point you're also better off getting the VP helm with expertise/mastery.

That's a lot of mastery you're missing right there due to non optimal gear choices.

[tangedyn]

You seem to be half reforged to mastery and half to dodge, you generally should go one way or the other. Seeing as you have some stamina stuff my guess is you're a primary tank, so you should reforge all to dodge.

[Jebhardt]

Wow i wrote a long detailed post and accidentally deleted it -___-

Rated - Yes you are correct, that is me.

I agree with most of your gear choices, though being this early in 4.3, VP is hard to come by still. I primarily have used VP to replace 378/384 gear that i knew wouldn't be replaced in DS alone. I dont see the point in upgrading a 397 item with the same ilevel if there are far worse items that need to be replaced.

At what point does the added primary stats of a higher ilevel make up for the secondary stats? cant i just gem agil/mastery to make up for it? this would allow me to reforge to dodge.

Isn't using PVP items in PVE frowned upon?


Tangedyn - I am the primary tank.

That being said, my best healer is also a druid. I figured i would want consistent dmg vs spike dmg because of his HoTs. Since i'm still in regular DS (i know, tell me about it) i thought i could get away with a little less dodge.

The reason im split on the reforges, even though i usually follow my own intuition, rawr and askmrrobot both told me too -- so i tried it. I saw a MASSIVE decrease in my squishiness with this setup. judging by your reforge choices tangedyn, you must have a similar idea.

---------- Post added 2011-12-28 at 10:57 AM ----------

Unless you are secondary tank... didnt think of that. Mastery would greatly help with cat damage.

[rated]

Isn't using PVP items in PVE frowned upon?

If we're talking about those people who just go and farm 390 pvp pieces and call it tank gear, yes. For this patch though the pvp neck & cloak are better optimized for druid tanks (more so due to lack of any good choices for pve items this tier) and dont have as many useless secondary stats as the pve pieces you're currently wearing.

The neck pieces has more agility, stam and only one useless secondary stat while your current pve piece has less agi/stam and 2 useless secondary stats.

The cloak has more stam (slightly less agility), more armor and mastery on it instead of haste. The only thing your cloak has on the 403 pvp piece is crit which obviously is good for us, but id rather have more armor and mastery imo, most of us are probably reaching 45% crit or higher already.

I'd only use pvp neck/cloak pvp pieces and only the 403 versions...thats unless you happen to have/get heroic neck/cloak from rhyo and rag which is easier said than done.


Also do not trust askmrrobot for druid tank advice, go to the site I linked you to and ask a real person instead (or this forum ). Dont get me wrong I like that site too and I use it to help optimize 2 of my DPS toons and its worked out great. WHen it comes to druid tanks though its completely clueless and gives bad information imo.

[Jebhardt]

Cool, thanks for the reply.

What do you think about stacking stamina for a main tank? it seams most REALLY high end druid tanks do (obviously i am not at this point and probably never will be -- just wondering)

Survivability VS Mitigation?

[rated]

Define high end though ? There's agility stacking tanks making good progression in DS and stamina stacking tanks doing just the same. There's also horrible baddie druid tanks (who still think theres a dodge cap) getting carried through raids.

The agility vs stamina debate has been raging on all expansion and most experience druid tanks in this community are tired of discussing it. No offense to you of course. I'm just going to copy + paste what I said in a previous thread on this topic.

Telling someone to blindly stack stam is bad advice.

Telling someone to blindly stack agility is not so good advice.

Aside from getting enough stam to avoid being gibbed, what may work for the random's in this thread may not work for your raid composition.

Agility is still a druid tanks best stat, this has never changed & there is no arguing this. All expansion it's always been best to get enough stam to tank the content your tanking and/or what your healers feel comfortable with. This EH threshold may be different from druid tank to druid tank, raid to raid, but that's something you gotta use your brain for and look at whats hitting you and TALKING WITH YOUR HEALERS. <-- most important part imo.


http://theincbear.com/ best source for bear tanking imo


This is a recording. BEEP.

[Jebhardt]

By "High end" i mean most tanks that have attempted or downed heroic Deathwing. I appreciate the response even though it has been discussed several times before.

Again this may have been discussed:

Beside from what your healers prefer(and talking to them), is there an unwritten standard for the amount of health recommended for DS? like, if you have less then 215k(buffed) there is a prob? please assume my healers are horrible.

[Deleted]

By "High end" i mean most tanks that have attempted or downed heroic Deathwing. I appreciate the response even though it has been discussed several times before.

The difference is that they are going for world firsts, so they don't have time to farm gear from the other bosses and to compensate that they gem pure stamina.