Bear playing at kitty (helm dilemna)

[Bigslick]

So my main raiding role is as a bear, but on single-tank fights I'm trading paws for claws and doing my best to let it rip... Most of my kitty set is my bear gear with a few pieces I've been fortunate enough to get duplicates to itemize for kitty, but to date no 2nd Tsanga's Helm

My question is which of these helms would be better for my kitty set:

Tsanga's Helm with the tanking glyph, stam/2% armor meta, stam gem, and crit reforged to dodge,
or...
Membrane of C'Thun with the dps glyph, agi/3% crit meta, agi/mastery gem, and expertise reforged to mastery (just picked this up tonight).

(Armory for reference, logged off in my 'kitty' gear)

[Deleted]

Membrane, any day.

[Bigslick]

Membrane, any day.

That's what my intuition tells me from picking up the extra agi and from the meta effect, though it picking up two of our least valuable secondary stats (haste/exp) and giving up so much of our two best (crit/mastery) made me think it would be worth getting the opinions of those of y'all more knowledgeable in the realm of kitty theorycrafting (I possess an amazing amount of expertise in how to unsuccessfully model gear performance via mew/rawr/tossk/etc).

[Deleted]

So my main raiding role is as a bear, but on single-tank fights I'm trading paws for claws and doing my best to let it rip... Most of my kitty set is my bear gear with a few pieces I've been fortunate enough to get duplicates to itemize for kitty, but to date no 2nd Tsanga's Helm

My question is which of these helms would be better for my kitty set:

Tsanga's Helm with the tanking glyph, stam/2% armor meta, stam gem, and crit reforged to dodge,
or...
Membrane of C'Thun with the dps glyph, agi/3% crit meta, agi/mastery gem, and expertise reforged to mastery (just picked this up tonight).

(Armory for reference, logged off in my 'kitty' gear)

Get membrame as your tanking helm and Tsanga as your dps helm. Done, there we go. in my opinion, membrame is far better itemized for tanking than Tsanga because as a bear tank you want expertise whilst as a kitty, you don't. Whilst bosses don't have parry haste anymore, you don't want your attacks being dodged because it is wasted rage, while kitties get their energy refunded if an attack doesn't successfully hit. Besides, more dodge/parried attacks = less TPS.
It might cost you a bit of money to swap around the gems, but It will be worth the investment.

Also, a tip, slap a Agi/hit gem in Tsanga if you're going to use it for dps, whilst kitties don't need hit, you're better of grabbing the socket bonus on this one.

Tsanga's is currently BiS before heroic raiding I believe for a cat due it's itemization, and it won't require any reforging on your part (People, note that haste only starts to overtake crit in ilvl 372 gear.)

[Bigslick]

Get membrame as your tanking helm and Tsanga as your dps helm. Done, there we go. in my opinion, membrame is far better itemized for tanking than Tsanga because as a bear tank you want expertise whilst as a kitty, you don't. Whilst bosses don't have parry haste anymore, you don't want your attacks being dodged because it is wasted rage, while kitties get their energy refunded if an attack doesn't successfully hit. Besides, more dodge/parried attacks = less TPS.
It might cost you a bit of money to swap around the gems, but It will be worth the investment.

Also, a tip, slap a Agi/hit gem in Tsanga if you're going to use it for dps, whilst kitties don't need hit, you're better of grabbing the socket bonus on this one.

Tsanga's is currently BiS before heroic raiding I believe for a cat due it's itemization, and it won't require any reforging on your part (People, note that haste only starts to overtake crit in ilvl 372 gear.)

Cost of gemming, etc is not a concern. But for tanking, Tsanga's is by far the better option. Haste is nigh worthless for bears. for whom mastery/crit are the best secondary stats as well (dodge is better, but not native on any agi gear). Rage is in plentiful supply when tanking anything that matters, so 'wasting' it on a missed attack isn't squandering resources. As to expertise, the main value of it for a bear is in threat generation from landing more attacks (secondary benefit to more landed blows being increased SD uptime), but again, threat is a total non-issue as it stands with my running virtually no expertise/hit in my tanking gear.

As to gemming a yellow slot for kitty dps, it has been my understanding that for a decent socket bonus (I'd consider 30 haste decent for kitty -- though pretty much worthless for bear) we're better off gemming agi/mastery than agi/hit due to the much greater value of mastery relative to hit.

[Gootgot]

Get membrame as your tanking helm and Tsanga as your dps helm. Done, there we go. in my opinion, membrame is far better itemized for tanking than Tsanga because as a bear tank you want expertise whilst as a kitty, you don't. Whilst bosses don't have parry haste anymore, you don't want your attacks being dodged because it is wasted rage, while kitties get their energy refunded if an attack doesn't successfully hit. Besides, more dodge/parried attacks = less TPS.
It might cost you a bit of money to swap around the gems, but It will be worth the investment.

Also, a tip, slap a Agi/hit gem in Tsanga if you're going to use it for dps, whilst kitties don't need hit, you're better of grabbing the socket bonus on this one.

Tsanga's is currently BiS before heroic raiding I believe for a cat due it's itemization, and it won't require any reforging on your part (People, note that haste only starts to overtake crit in ilvl 372 gear.)

Please stop posting if you have no clue what you are talking about.


Answer is this: You are a bear MS, you play bear on almost every fight.
Tsanga is better for both specs.
Use tsanga for bear.
Membrane for cat.

Fights that require you to go cat aren't even hard. You want to have gear for stuff like cho'gall and nefarian(tank) , not valiona (cat).

[Bigslick]

Fights that require you to go cat aren't even hard. You want to have gear for stuff like cho'gall and nefarian(tank) , not valiona (cat).

Yeah, I'm only going kitty for T&V and Magmaw at the moment, and I perform pretty well in those as it stands -- and they're pretty much jokes for us at this point. But we're just getting into working on heroic content (yay for Malevolence on our first H Halfus kill (take THAT, huntard! (now would you EVER drop the damn boots??))) and I want to ensure I'm delivering the best performance I can as I'm sure every bit will help while those fights challenge us in heroic mode (though I don't know if Magmaw is typically dual-tanked in heroic). I'm just hoping it doesn't turn into such a challenge that I need to reforge etc to completely optimize dps while we're learning the fights...

[teddabear]

Tsangas is the better DPS helm by a huge margin. However if your main spec is Bear don't worry about it. Cat DPS is is extremely gimpy anyway right now. No reason to spend thousands of gold trying to eek out 1% more DPS when Blizzard is letting Cats languish 13-20% behind other specs.

[tangedyn]

You could do what I did, buy a second Tsanga's Helm. I have a Membrane sitting in my bank, I've highly considered putting cat gems/reforges on the Membrane so that I can put the 2% spell resist gem on the 2nd Tsanga's Helm for tanking Nefarian.... but nah. Guess I'll shard the Membrane soon.

[OnlineSamantha]

Use Tsanga's for your main spec, at least untill you get another one. It's better for both, but it'll help more for your main spec.

[Andaja]

Tbh it's best to get 4p bonus for heroic content, that would meantsangas for dps.
But you need to use calculators like rawr or mew to deceided which is best tbh. And i think the results migt show that best you can get blue will be better then membrane (just s strong hunch).

[Djuntas]

Id get 2 of the helms if you can. Im lucky to have a bit of gold lying around so I was able to buy 2. Try buy one on hord/ally side depending wich one is cheaper if you got ratio problems. My 2nd only costed 9.5k

[Frostphoxx]

Your better off as you are now.. as you stated above me you don't end up kitty much.. if another Tsanga's Helm happens to drop try to get it.. but other than that your gonna be ok... there's no need for (Assuming your one of the main tanks) you to have to be emptying their pockets to fund a class they use for two fights.