Post by scaramoush
I believe stamina/armour stacking is the way to go, but I'll let one of the actual bears give you a real answer.
In the mean time, this post may help you
http://wowthinktank.blogspot.com/2009/10/general-druid-icewell-radiance-bears.html
Post by Aadramelekh
I suggest effective health as well. Armor / Stamina. Dodge will naturally come from better gear. And druids have the highest health and armor of all tanks. Using pieces like
this cloak will be the best choice, especially for progression tanking. Having a cloak, an amulet, two rings and two trinkets with bonus armor (like the
Unidentifiable Organ) will grant some additional ~5500 armor. On top of the 30K+ that lvl 245 geared bear tanks have without such pieces and counting raid buffs, 37-38K passive armor is certainly a possibility. For magic damage heavy fights, stamina trinkets will be better.
Post by xJackelx
While I'm no Feral expert, I'm pretty sure that because
Armor has no diminishing returns, as long as it's physical damage you are taking, you can never have "enough" or "to much". I can promise you that I know very little about Bear stats, so I did a lot of reading on Armor
here.I'm sure you are looking for a first hand account of someone's setup to see their results, but I thought that wiki page might be worth a read for you.
Post by hashmel
There is indeed an armor cap at which point you reduce physical damage by 75% but it varies depending on the attacker's level, your armor debuffs, and attacker's armor penetration.
With no armor reduction debuffs and the attacker having no armor penetration you need the following values to reduce a physical attack by the maximum of 75%
lvl 80 attacker = 45697
lvl 83 attacker = 49905
For an opponent with armor penetration effects you'd calculate your armor cap like so
A / = D
where
A = the base armor cap vs said attacker
B = the amount of armor reduction from debuffs (Sunder Armor, Faerie Fire, etc.)
C = the amount of armor penetration the attacker has (Grim Toll, Mjolnir's Runestone, etc.)
D = armor cap vs said attacker with said amount of armor penetration effects
Now let's put this into practice.
An 80 vs an 80 requires 45697 to reduce physical damage by 75%, this is value A (45697)
Say it's a rogue and you've still got Fairie Fire on you from a random druid, this is value B (1 -
0.2 -
0.05)
Now let's say this rogue only has 10% armor penetration, this is value C (1 - 0.1)
Now let's find out what value D would be.
45697 / = D
D = 67,699.2593 now round up and D = 67,700
Post by Aadramelekh
Each additional armor point is just as valuable as any previous armor point in terms of time to live when properly correlated to the value of incoming damage. The diminishing return effect is related to the absolute damage reduction provided by armor. To give an example:
With 30K armor, you (level 80) have 64.3% DR against a raid boss (lvl 83). Let's say that the boss swings for 10K base damage per second and you have 40K HP. He will hit you for 3570 per swing. Let's also assume you do not have any avoidance. This means that the boss will kill you in 12 hits (42840 damage). In this case your time to live is 11.2 seconds to be precise.
Now if you increase your armor by 5K, to 35K, you'll have 67.8% DR (a 5.4% increase from the previous value). So the boss will hit you for 3220. This time it will take
13 hits to kill you (41860 damage). So you prolonged your time to live from 11.2 seconds to 12.42 seconds (a 10.9% increase in TTL, or a 9.9% decrease in damage received from 3570 to 3220).
Now you increase your armor further to 40K. You will have 70.6% DR (a 4.1% increase from the previous value, and the apparent trend of diminishing return). The boss will hit you for 2940 this time. It will take not 13, but
14 hits to kill you (41160 damage). You increased your TTL from 12.4 seconds to 13.6 seconds (a 9.5% increase in TTL, or a 8.7% decrease in damage received).
As we can see, it is indeed a trend of diminishing returns. BUT in our case it is practically a linear increasing trend in survivability. Each additional 5K armor increased the TTL by 1 effective hit.
But this is all to be taken with a grain of salt. Bosses in ICC will hit for much higher than this. If we assume that a boss there hits for 70K base damage (which I bet they do, although tomorrow I will see for myself when the raid is scheduled), things go a bit more serious.
Boss does 70K base damage, 2 sec swing timer, and we have a 60K HP & 30K armor bear tank. 24990 damage per swing. That means our tank gets instagibbed in 3 hits. He has 4.8 seconds TTL with zero avoidance. Going to 35K armor means our bear takes 22540 damage per swing. Still instagibbed in 3 seconds (5.32 sec TTL). At 40K armor (full armored jewelry + potion I reckon), he will take 20580 damage per swing. Guess what, still instagibbed in 3 hits, but pretty damn close to the threshold (5.83 sec TTL).
Let's now look at the problem from a more balanced point of view. Adding so much bonus armor is going to be harder and harder. But adding more HP is much easier for a bear tank (16.33 HP per stamina point with BoK for a fully talented bear). At 30K armor, our bear needs at least 75K HP to survive 3 hits. Pretty much not feasible for the moment I reckon. Going to 35K armor isn't that hard at all. This time our bear would need at least ~68K HP to survive the hits. Pretty much achievable if you ask me. At 40K armor, this bear would need ~62K HP.
Even if this armor value would be easily reached raid buffed, there is the OTHER problem. Magic damage. In this case I think I'd personally go with the 'middle path' so to speak. 68K HP is definitely better than 62K HP and definitely achievable compared to the 75K HP in our first situation.
THIS basic gear selection offers 4001 armor. Multiplied by talents and meta gem, it gives 28061 armor in bear form. Using all bonus armored rings + amulet + cloak + trinkets can bring an additional 6000 armor to the table. Factor in the fact that a bear at this level will have ~1700 agility raid buffed and we add another 3400 armor. MotW and Devotion aura bring another 2500 armor into the fray.
SO 28K + 6K + 3.4K + 2.5K = 39900 armor. At this level our bear has 70.6% physical DR from armor alone. Bur remember Protector of the Pack. This talent effectively brings physical DR to a value of 74.1%. Factor in Blessing of Sanctuary and you get 75%. This is equivalent to having 49900 armor (armor hard cap against bosses). And a bear with 2x
THIS BABY (normal + heroic) will also have a ton of additional stamina for most of the time (thinking that 2 x full stack = 8800 HP in bear form with kings makes me dizzy).
So yeah in the end I LOL'ed. FCUK the middle path! Go for full armor stacking and you'll be the most bada
ss tank in ICC. Period.
Wall of text crits you for
13382. You die x_x