Help with gearing a bear tank please...

[Meshuggenah]

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.