Hit, Expertise, Dodge

Great article on the Big Bear blog on hit, expertise and dodge.

Stats for Tanking

A reader asked about stats for druid tanks, so here is my answer.

Back in the day, your main focus was to make sure your tank was uncrittable in melee. This was achieved through either a high defense rating or a high resilience rating. With Wrath, you get the 6% crit reduction by putting 3 points in the Survival of the Fittest talent. So of course, this talent would be your first requirement.

Armor
You want to try and get gear with high armor values as this probably provides the most mitigation for a druid tank. Once again, things have changed. As of Tuesday, the armor multiplier for bear form (this is what makes tanking possible) only affects leather or cloth armor.  So high armor value rings and trinkets are no longer all that important. So focus on getting the basics, a good chest, leg, shoulder, and helm. When starting out at 80, there are two good options.  Check out the Eviscerator items made through leatherworking. They are usually reasonably priced and are good blue starter items if you have been unable to find anything better at 80. The other good options for tanks is the Savage Gladiator's Sactuary PVP set. This can be obtained through arena or battlegrounds only. Very good armor, agility, and stamina values on all this gear.

Before patch 3.0.8 my armor value was coming in around 22k to 25k depending on the gear I had on. After the patch, my armor is value in bear form is 30k.

Stamina

This stat goes hand in hand with armor. Usually high stamina gear has high armor and vice versa. High stamina protects you against bosses that use a lot of magic. Basically it gives your healers a buffer against those high damage attacks. In Wrath I'm guessing a well geared druid tank will have around 30k health with just Mark of the Wild in bear form.  Right now my health is at 27k in bear form with just Mark.

Agility

This is the next most important stat. It increases your dodge rating which of course increases your mitigation as any damage not taken is mitigated 100%. It also increases your chance to crit which increases your DPS. The more damage you can do, the better you can hold aggro against mobs. On most feral druid gear, you are gonna see high stamina and high agility values.

Dodge Rating

Sometimes instead of agility you will see dodge on gear. Since druids can't block or parry, dodging is the only way for us to avoid damage. I wouldn't say it is better than agility gear. But if an item has no agility but does have dodge, it may be very useful for a druid tank. 

Attack Power (AP)

Attack power is one of the main determining factors in DPS. Generally, if gear has the other stats mentioned, it will also have attack power.  When considering an item, AP should be secondary to damage mitigation.

Haste

Still looking into this. Probably more useful for cat druids. Will post on this as I learn more about it for druids.

 

Gear in General

The best gear for non hard core raiders can be attained by running heroics. Do your homework on what drops where and run those instances.  Remember the PVP set is another option to get you started if you like PVP. Either method should get you ready for 10 man runs and the tiered raid gear.