Druids Unite!

oh yea, and watch THIS!!!!!! lol!!!!

Here are the stats that I would expect a feral druid to have self-buffed in bear form and cat form for beginning in Karazhan as an offtank.

Bear: HP ~ 14,000; Defense/Resilience 415/123 or a total of 2.6% Crit reduction between the two. (3/3 in Survival of the Fittest is necessary or you will not hit the uncrit mark); Dodge: 25-30%

Cat: HP ~ 7500; AP2000, Crit 25%(20% before Leader of the Pack)

These stats are extremely easy to obtain and should carry you well up to the Curator mark.

For Boomkin I will have to do some research but I imagine based off of what my stats were b4 I respecced that the stats would be something like
Spell Damage: ~600; Spell Crit: ~20-22%; Spell Hit: ~90

I'm going to have to do some more research to come up with anything nearly as impressive as Mc just did for feral druids, but math is not my strongest suit and I can't add my way out of a paper bag. BUT I would definitely recommend that for Kara resto druids should look to buffing two stats over others. I'd say that having a bonus healing over 950 is crucial to being effective in Kara unless you're going in with 2 other healers that are really very well geared to make up for your deficit. In addition, mana over 5 seconds is really important, which goes hand in hand with having high spirit. Druid healing is all about duration. With lifebloom we can go on doing a LOT of healing over a long period of time. If you add spirit and MP5 to your gear you can only enhance your strongest qualities as a healer. Int is less important in my book. It does give you a larger mana pool to start with, but once that is drained, it is gone. On the other hand, the higher your spirit andplus mana over five, the longer your mana pool will go on replenishing itself, which turns out to offer you more mana over all than a large starting pool with less regeneration. There's my 2 cents on that... I know, I know. Mc's was so much more impressive. Go read his again. ::sigh:: I'll hit the books and try to be more eloquent next time I chime in.

Just realized I didn't post armor for Bear... In Bear self-buffed you will need at least 20k armor preferably up towards 24k if you are lookign to tank more than one trash mob at a time. Definitely if you want to tank a boss past Huntsman.

Thanks Syll, but your's is the exact type of insight we need to find here in the forums. Ill be posting a brief synopsis of stats to look for in bear cat and doomkin here ina bit; just got to get some checks written for my boss so it doesnt look like im playing on the internet...hmm.

Syll posted above the stats she sees as most important for stacking for our leafy brethren, and I suppose I should do the same for ferals as they can be highly misconstrued, not only by warriors and rogues but by druids too. For bear we need to be looking at increasing mitigation(armor/stamina) and avoidance(dodge/parry/block) while maintaining high threat output/rage regeneration(crit/ap). The number one thing as a bear tank is to realize that you are going to take ALOT LOT LOT LOT LOT more damage than a warrior tank is. Alot. We don't have shields and we don't have weapons thus we can't block or parry. This means we are well within the crushable range of bosses... OW, and we are going to be hit more often as we have less methods of avoidance. So we have to stack defense rating up to the 415 cap assuming 3/3 in Survival of the Fittest for the purposes of uncrit which will at least reduce the spike damage that we will take. What we do have to our advantage though is extremely high armor, extremely high HP, and extremely high solo target, i.e. BOSS, threat/second. Most of our threat can come from an efficient tanking rotation and a pre-planned kill order being followed, but to stay ahead of those trigger-happy rogues and be able to pick stuff up off the healers we need some extra rage here and there. With all that said.. what stats are we looking at? Stamina, Dodge, Armor, Ap, Crit are all necessary but in what order. Well looking at it another way we can get Dodge, Attack Power, Crit%, and a little Armor all from one single stat - AGILITY. Side note - druids have the highest changeover rate between agi and dodge in the game.. coincidence? Ok so that means that Stamina and Agi solve the majority of our issues but we will still need some extra armor to throw us up to the ungodly marks and that is where items with green armor numbers come into play. Any ring/trinket/necklace/weapon you can find w/armor will help too. Side note - druids get more armor from items than any other tank; something along the lines of 5.5 x armor of the item is the amount of armor in bear form if you are specced properly. So keeping in mind the totals needed for tanking in Kara we can have a basic stat prioritization after you have obtained crit immunity of Agi > Stamina > Armor > Dodge.
Ok so now for the feline perspective.... cats are not rogues, period. We never will be, end of story. Our dps can be increased by efficient energy use, Mangle x 1, Shred x 3 or 4, and then Rip. Mangle will apply the 30% xtra shred and bleed damage. This is my opinion as to the stat prioritization, feel free to comment. Agi > Str > AP. Agi will give us AP, Crit, and some armor and dodge should we need to bearshift. Druids get 2 AP per str which is more than rogues. AP procs off itself in catform because of our Heart of the Wild talent giving us an additional 10% of our AP. Hit rating and Expertise are necessary too just like any other melee class. The caps for druid are 92 expertise and 142 hit rating I believe. Our white damage and bleed damage over time are imo the majority of our dps.

Hit rating for cats should be about 60-70 starting out; our dps isnt much and we'll mostly be in bear.

Here's a link to the most exceptional discussion I've seen so far on Tree of Life Druid Raiding heals. Really REALLY good stuff here.
http://elitistjerks.com/f31/t17783-druid_raiding_tree/

Holy Crapolies, did I find a cool program for druids to download! Check out this discussion of RAWR: http://www.unbearably.net/2008/03/13/rawr/
It's a program that loads up your toon from the armory and evaluates your effectiveness based upon what you have equipped and helps you sort what trinkets and gear would be most effective for a given situation. Can't WAIT to go home and download this to check it out!

Yeah, I've heard of rawr b4 as well as emmerrald's loot lists, and I would just say that they are helpful as a tool for guaging you effectiveness. Theyre gonna be more effective with the knowledge as to what stats you personally have and what youre trying to stack. They can take into account certain lvls of specific stats that they have prioritized, but that does not mean that the people using it always do. That is where the misinformation as to what gear a 70 druid should be wearing comes into play, because too many people use them too seriously and then neglect hitting thier caps properly.

good info, Mc. absolutely true. These things are all tools to be used by the thinking druid.

Exactly Syll, I did not mean to imply that you wouldn't know what you were doing with it. Quite the opposite. I meant that I don't want any druids to join our guild, hear about these things, and then believe that they are the end-all be-all of druid gear.

sure thing, jelly bean =)