WARNING: This gear list is designed for the serious raid-level tank. It makes assumptions with that premise in mind.

I've compiled a list of bear tanking gear using my current gear on the PTR for base stats, and rated several feral pieces for each slot.

Here is the current version of the spreadsheet I made: http://files.filefront.com/BearStats.xls/;7576254;/fileinfo.html

I'll start with the list and then post an explanation of how the rating was determined in the next post:

The list is not really important anymore now that you have access to the spreadsheet you can set the conditions that you want and get more applicable ratings.

Helms:

Thunderheart Cover      2141

Nordrassil Headdress    1975

Deathblow X11 Goggles   1773

Stag-Helm of Malorne    1752

Cowl of Beastly Rage    1489

Stylin' Purple Hat      1452

Gladiator's Dragonhide  1421

Mask of the Deceiver    1379

Neck:

Necklace of the Juggernaut   697

Barbed Choker of Discipline  618

Saber Claw Talisman          579

Tanzanite Pendent of Monkey  572

Strength of the Untamed      520

Frayed Tether of the Drowned 489

Shoulders:

Thunderheart Pauldrons        1772

Nordrassil Feral-Mantle       1672

Mantle of Malorne             1450

Shoulderpads of the Stranger  1333

Gladiator's Dragonhide        1227

Shoulderpads of Assassination 1131

High Warlord's Dragonhide     1039

Back:

Gilded Thorium Cloak          958

Thoriumweave Cloak            837

Thallasian Wildercloak        830

Resolute Cape                 740

Bogstrok Scale Cloak          602

Chest:

Thunderheart Chestguard       2448

Nordrassil Chestplate         2212

Breastplate of Malorne        2125

Gladiator's Dragonhide Tunic  1758

Heavy Clefthoof Vest          1563

Warden's Hauberk              1531

Wastewalker Tunic             1477

Wrist:

Vambraces of Ending             936

Forestheart Bracers             842

General's Leather Bracers       832

General's Dragonhide Bracers    797

Umberhowl's Collar              742

Hands:

Thunderheart Gauntlets            1681

Nordrassil Handgrips              1498

Gloves of Dexterous Manipulation  1285

Wastewalker Gloves                1248

Gloves of the Unbound             1073

Verdant Gloves                    1011

Gladiator's Dragonhide Gloves      971

Gauntlets of Malorne               914 (1255 if they were "fixed")

Waist:

Belt of One-Hundred Deaths   1298

Tree-Mender's Belt           1206

Girdle of Treachery          1132

General's Leather Belt       1048

General's Dragonhide Belt    1016

Dunewind Sash                 967

Manimal's Cinch               890

Legs:

Thunderheart Leggings             2233

Nordrassil Feral-Kilt             2099

Shady Dealer's Pantaloons         1833

Greaves of Malorne                1761

Forestwalker Kilt                 1608

Heavy Clefthoof Leggings          1521

Wastewalker Leggings              1406

Gladiator's Dragonhide Legguards  1395

Ash Tempered Legguards            1196

Feet:

Treads of the Den Mother      1478

Boots of Effortless Striking  1394

Zierhut's Lost Treads         1277

Nimble-foot Treads            1265

Edgewalker Longboots          1264

Barkchip Boots                1177

Heavy Clefthoof Boots         1162

General's Leather Boots       1120

General's Draginhide Boots    1088

Supple Leather Boots           880

Finger:

Violet Signet             985

A'dal's Signet of Defense 932

Ring of Unyielding Force  815

Delicate Eternium Ring    688

Shermanar Great-Ring      667

Trinket:

Shadowmoon Insignia    593

Badge of Tenacity      456

Moroes' Pocket Watch   412

Mark of Tyranny        400

Alchemist's Stone      352

Gnomish Poultryizer    325

Spyglass               288

Scarab of Displacement 287

Argussian Compass      260

Smoking Heart          225

Weapons:

Wildfury Greatstaff    1797

Feral Staff of Lashing 1263

Earthwarden            1216

Braxxis' Staff         1106

Gems:

Relentless Earthstorm 195

Delicate Living Ruby  130

Powerful Earthstorm   130

Shifting Nightseye    108

Solid Star of Elune    87

Enduring Talasite      71

Set Bonuses:

1400 Armor (Malorne)  382

Emmerald's Bear list was a great service to the community as a whole and helped us all find the gear we wanted when BC was first released. He did a great job and did us all a favor in compiling that list.

However, I disagree with a few primary assumptions he made. He focused his list to the casual tank who had not reached the crit reductiion cap, used fairly low base stats of armor/hp/dodge, and was not raid-buffed. Because of this, the rating system he comes up with is flawed. It overvalues resilience, defense, and stamina, and undervalues armor and agility. (raid buffs help your hp pool a lot more than your mitigation).

I made my own spreadsheet which allows you to enter your current gear and then will accurately tell you your in game stats (armor, dodge, hp, etc). Currently it's off by around 8 hp and 20 armor on PTR for me after all the gear changes. I feel thats an acceptable margin of error. It allows me to turn on or off buffs (like commanding shout, blood pact, fortitude, grace of air), and has a flag for the crit reduction cap.

Anyway, with all the changes to gear on the PTR I felt it might be useful to release my gear ratings to the public. For base stats I used my current gear on the PTR:

Helm: Malorne
Neck: Juggernaut
Shoulders: Malorne (with Aldor enchant)
Back: Gilded Thorium
Chest: Malorne
Wrists: Forestheart (with 12 defense enchant)
Hands: Dextrous Gloves
Waist: Tree-Mender's
Legs: Malorne
Feet: Zierhut's Lost Treads
Finger: Violet Signet
Finger: Unyielding Force
Trinket: Mart of Tyr
Trinket: Moroes' Pocket Watch

I feel it is important to use relatively high-end gear for base stats, or else gear ratings will point you towards the wrong, long-term upgrades.

Here are a few things to be careful of:

1) This list assumes you've already reached the crit reduction cap.

That assumption relies on 3/3 SoTF which I assume every druid who is looking at this list will have. Because of this assumption resilience is given no value for tankpoints and defense is only given value for the miss and dodge it provides. I've found a configuration that puts me exactly at 415 defense on the PTR simply by swaping the bracer enchant to 12 defense instead of 12 stamina. This has changed the base stats slightly from the original post.

2) This list assumes full raid buffs.

This means you have fortitude, commanding shout, mark of the wild, and blood pact (all improved),. In addition it assumes grace of air, blessing of kings, 30 stam food, elixir of major defense and elixir of major agility (but NOT a flask of foritfication since these don't stack with elixirs on PTR). I have not included devotion aura because in my particular circumstances I find myself tanking without it a lot. I also chose not to include scorpid sting.

For 5man tanking where you do not have full hp buffs, stamina is more important than this list reflects. For example, the solid star of elune is significantly better than a delicate living ruby if you were unbuffed(while the list shows the ruby ahead). Personally, I use Shifting Nightseyes as a nice compromise between the two, thought I have debated going to swapping to more rubies. All sockets in gear have been filled in with shifting nightseyes unless a yellow socket was needed for a worthwhile socket bonus, in which case the socket was filled with an enduring talasite.

3) I use a modified tankpoints.

Tankpoints is a great measure of tank gear as it tries to combine survivability and mitigation into one score. It is however somewhat flawed and undervalues armor. It is possible for a very high armor item (manimal's cinch) to score higher in both mitigation and survivability than another item (girdle of treachery) and yet score lower in tankpoints.

In order to counter this phenomenon a person could weight armor double and things would come out "right". However, this would only work when dealing with 100% physical damage, and when there are zero debuffs to dodge. In fights where you take some magic damage, or want to dodge a debuff (like mortal strike, or a knockback), weighting armor double would be overkill. As a compromise I weighted armor as 50% stronger than the pure tankpoints formula suggests. If that paragraph is confusing to you just realize I use a modified tankpoints that I feel more accurately reflects bear itemization than the tankpoints used by warriors (and Emmerald).

Here are the values I end up using:

Armor: 32365
HP: 19940
Dodge: 53.05%
Miss: +2.6% (or 7.60% total)
Defense: 415

Which provides the following point system when evaluating the benefit of 1 additional point of each of these stats:

1 Armor = 1.50 (static value, everything else is scaled to it)
1 Agility = 16.23
1 Stamina = 7.21
1 Defense Rating = 6.83
1 Dodge Rating = 10.85


A nightelf in the same gear would have 18968 hp and 54.90% dodge. That would create the following rating system:

1 Armor = 1.5
1 Agility = 17.02
1 Stamina = 7.22
1 Defense = 7.17
1 Dodge = 11.39

4) This list assumes you're me.

Hey, I made it for myself! What do you expect? :) That means it assumes Tauren base stats, 5% hp bonus, and an aldor enchant is used on the shoulders.

5) The score ignores threat.

Druid threat generation is quite good even when ignoring it on gear. I therefore assume aggro to be a given. For certain fights, +hit could be beneficial but it is ignored for the purposes of this list. At the moment the best way to get some +hit from your gear is by putting on a second piece of wastewalker (pants or chest) in addition to the gloves.

Anyway, feel free to post questions, items you think I missed, or hatemail. Whatever floats your boat.

forestheart? isn't that the "epic" moonglade-ish non-set with +to all stats and healing?

are they getting mega-buffed or something?

also, first in what will surely be an epic thread. many thanks and much love for sharing your wisdom with the rest of us, hoss. :p

Thanks for the post, Hoss. It's nice to see another rating system other than Emmerald's. For rings, I'd put the Shermanar Great-Ring in third.

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Q u o t e:
Thanks for the post, Hoss. It's nice to see another rating system other than Emmerald's. For rings, I'd put the Shermanar Great-Ring in third.

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Yes, but do you know the new stats? I remember a guildie read them to me and I determined it was still third but didn't take the time to care because the other two rings are so easily accessable to the serious raid tank.

reported for stucky.

Hoss, have you considered uploading the spreadsheet to Filefront or somewhere similar so folks can DL & see how the buffs affect the rankings?

I can imagine that some Alliance Druids, and perhaps sometimes even Horde Druids, don't always have access to GoA totems, especially in 10-man situations, which combined with the lost 5% HP might be enough to swap the position of some items.

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Q u o t e:


Yes, but do you know the new stats? I remember a guildie read them to me and I determined it was still third but didn't take the time to care because the other two rings are so easily accessable to the serious raid tank.

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Shermanar Great-Ring
Binds when picked up
Unique
Finger
195 Armor
+33 Stamina
Requires Level 70
Equip: Increases defense rating by 20.

Definitely still third, but pretty good.

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Q u o t e:
Shermanar Great-Ring
Binds when picked up
Unique
Finger
195 Armor
+33 Stamina
Requires Level 70
Equip: Increases defense rating by 20.

Definitely still third, but pretty good.

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Man, if I was still going to be playing when the patch hit I'd probably use one of those as a Moonkin in PvP. That's a lot of stam/AC.

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Q u o t e:
Hoss, have you considered uploading the spreadsheet to Filefront or somewhere similar so folks can DL & see how the buffs affect the rankings?

I can imagine that some Alliance Druids, and perhaps sometimes even Horde Druids, don't always have access to GoA totems, especially in 10-man situations, which combined with the lost 5% HP might be enough to swap the position of some items.

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You're so demanding!

But yes I've been working to spruce up the spreadsheet so it could be used by anyone.

When I first got it working correctly it was pretty ugly and had values all over the place that no one would really want to look at. It's not quite ready for public consumption however, I'll try to get it out by patch day.

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Q u o t e:


Shermanar Great-Ring
Binds when picked up
Unique
Finger
195 Armor
+33 Stamina
Requires Level 70
Equip: Increases defense rating by 20.

Definitely still third, but pretty good.

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Ok I added it. Feel free to post other items I've left out that might be good for people to see their relative value.

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Q u o t e:
You're so demanding!

But yes I've been working to spruce up the spreadsheet so it could be used by anyone.

When I first got it working correctly it was pretty ugly and had values all over the place that no one would really want to look at. It's not quite ready for public consumption however, I'll try to get it out by patch day.

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Hey, I know EXACTLY how you feel. But, I also know that the interest of the community at large is what motivates people to do these sorts of things, and that that interest has to be voiced to be most effective.

Bump for sticky. Nice work. Thanks, Hoss. :)

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Q u o t e:
Bump for sticky. Nice work. Thanks, Hoss. :)

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Appreciate the support, but this really isn't worthy of a sticky. It's just a simple post to put my opinion out there in number form.

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Q u o t e:


Appreciate the support, but this really isn't worthy of a sticky. It's just a simple post to put my opinion out there in number form.

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And the post where, when your spreadsheet is finished, it will be posted.

And what is most likely the best current list of tankgear for the new patch.

Simon sez: Sticky. :o

Great list Hoss,

I appreciate this for sure. Alot of that gear I already have ready come for the patch and just hope I can reach some of those dodge stats and hp. We'll see though.

-G

KA BUUMP

I was actually coming on here for a new list of tanking gear for when the PTR goes live as I'm to lazy to look myself.

Great stuff, looks like I'll need to run some shattered halls for the bracers, I've gotten all the other heroic drops without even realizing they were being upgraded.

Nice, thanks for the hard work.

/bump for justice. :)

Glad to see more post being focused on true end-game now.

<3 the Hoss and Dark Iron.