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After having spent the last couple of months gearing my boomkins and just basically having fun in BG's, I was thinking of taking them into heroics like I used to with my DK+Shamans. I'm reasonably sure my boomkin PVP gear is going to be useless for tanking :).
I'd appreciate what your thoughts are on beginning bear tanking gear, gemming, hit cap%, etc and while we're at it, what's the min hit cap for PVE for a boom? somewhere around 80 or so?
Thanks as always.
Focus on stamina and agility, with a bias towards stamina.
Hit and Expertise are nice threat generation stats, but certainly not a 'requirement'. Even while raiding. My bear tank is sitting on around 240-ish(?) hit rating (just passive bonus' from some tier pieces and other gear) and way, way below the expertise cap. I think I only have around 80-ish expertise. I still pull well over 6,000 TPS raid buffed, with spikes over 9k when I pop 'zerk or get a good run of crits. More importantly, I'm sitting on 60%, avoidance, 50something crit and 52k HP raid buffed.
HP, armor and dodge are your primary concerns as a bear tank. Mining/JC are great trades to take, since you gain passive +60 stam from mining and access to 51 stam gems from JC.
For some fairly easily obtainable pieces to look into -
- The epic PvP pants from WG (the +hit rating ones).
- The black heart trinket from normal ToC. Awesome bear trinket.
- Any of the Furious Glad off-set pieces with +Hit or+Crit available via honor.
- Darkmoon Card Greatness (Agility). Absolutely amazing trinket.
- Ulduar crafts. If you dont have a leatherworker, buy the arctic fur and other mats and farm conquest badges to buy runed orbs. Offer a LW 50G to craft them with your mats. Not sure what prices are like on your server, but when I was gearing up my bear, I paid for under 300G worth of mats for an i226 level epic that would sell for 2,000G+ on AH.
Also, don't forget to hold onto any decent balance pieces you get while farming. If you plan on raiding at all, a Boomkin plus Shamans is what I play for raiding, and it works brilliantly.
I like http://www.emmerald.net/ as a guide to Feral gearing.
I hate to say this, but ....
go to the official wow boards (I know, it's scary and silly and retarded there)
Go to the druid forums, and click on the feral tanking guide by thatgrimguy. It's actually pretty good, and his gear list there is pretty easily achievable. You can single run stuff with your tank for a bit if you need to, to gear up.
Also, since....
BEARS DONT NEED NO STINKING DEFENSE
You can actually just buy all of the feral pve equipment, and it makes a MORE than fine starter set for a bear tank. Some of the pieces are actually very sexy. Especially the legs and hands. So yeah, you can keep pvping for your gear no problem.
And remember: gem agility and sta only. Anything else is a mistake for a druid tank. We never gem dodge - it's worse than agility 99.9% of the time (and that .1% is when you are ridiculously well geared and your numbers are crazy)
My bear tank started 80 with the Eviscerator set, which helped him to not die instantly but still didn't get me very far into heroics (not just one toon's gear's fault of course). Now I'm running him with my heroic-geared warlocks and priest through normal ToC, getting the roguey pieces from there. Even the ones with armor penetration are huge upgrades in +agi and +sta. Each run contains a wipe or two when I remember that Growl != Hand of Reckoning and Swipe != Consecrate, but it'll be worth it for the Black Knight's tanking trinket and whatever else I haven't grabbed yet.