PvE Feral Druid Tank Stat Priority

Author: Oxykitten
Date: April 28, 2022
Updated: April 28, 2022
Expansion: TBC Classic

Feral Druid Tank Guide

Stat Priority

Talents & Builds

Pre-Raid & Best In Slot (BiS)

Gems, Enchants, & Consumables

Rotation, Cooldowns, & Abilities

Intro

Welcome to our stat priority guide for Feral tanks in WoW: Burning Crusade Classic! This guide will explain how to make good gearing choices, and how valuable each stat is.

Stat Priorities

In the past, many guides would list “stat priorities” for different classes, suggesting to stack X stat before Y stat and so on. In reality, optimising your character is far more about balancing the values of different stats to come up with the best overall gear set possible. For example, while 1 Agility is better for a Feral tank than 1 Stamina, 2 Stamina is better than 1 Agility. So, while your stat priority could be Agility > Stamina, that wouldn’t help you accurately decide between two pieces of gear. Luckily, I’ve done all the work for you; I have published a detailed gearing guide for tanks. You can follow that and not need to know how the decisions are made behind the scenes, so this guide serves as ‘extra reading’ if you’re interested!

Still, it is valuable to have an understanding of why some pieces of gear are better than others, so I will give some example stat weights, general gearing principles, and information on how stat weights are calculated. Venture in if you’re keen!

Gearing Principles

Critical Strike Immunity:
Like players, enemies have a chance to Critically Strike their melee attacks, doing twice their normal damage. This can lead to massive damage spikes and tank deaths. Luckily, tanks are able to eliminate the possibility of being critically struck by wearing Defense and Resilience, as well as through the talent Survival of the Fittest, to reach 5.6% critical strike chance reduction. The stat weights I include here will not value the critical strike suppression value of Defense and Resilience, as reaching this threshold should be a basic requirement of all reasonable tank sets for a raid environment.

Hit cap:
Players have a 9% chance to miss against level 73/boss enemies. This means that wearing 9% hit (or 6% with improved faerie fire) stops you from missing. However, you will continue to get your hits dodged and parried, so there is no intrinsic value to reaching this cap. In fact, hit cap is a limit, as hit rating past the cap no longer provides any value; this can limit your gear choices as the hit rating on certain powerful items cannot always be utilised. So, don’t worry about “reaching hit cap,” just make sure you don’t go above the cap.

Finding DPS/threat stat weights

To make stat weights, we compare how valuable 1 of each stat is compared to a common stat – typically, we use Attack Power as the baseline. 1 Strength gives 2 Attack Power in Bear Form (2.266 with Blessing of Kings and Survival of the Fittest), so we give 1 Strength the stat weight of 2.266.

For stats that increase damage but do not directly increase attack power (such as Agility), we instead use maths to determine how much DPS 1 stat increases, and compare that to how much DPS 1 Attack Power increases. So, if 1 Critical Strike rating increases our DPS by 2, and 1 Attack Power increases our DPS by 1, we give 1 Critical Strike rating the stat weight of 2. This is done through simulation tools and spreadsheets; the Feral Tank tools are developed by Nerdegghead and Mobmentality and are freely available on the Druid Classic discord server.

Finding tank stat weights

Similarly, we weigh tank stats by comparing them to each other (usually using Stamina as the baseline). In doing this, we also divide mitigation stats (which reduce the average damage taken per second) and effective health pool stats (which increase the total unhealed amount of unmitigated damage a tank can take without dying).

Mixing stats together

To mix threat stat weights and tank stat weights, we first decide our ratio of mitigation tank weights to EHP tank weights. We tend to favour EHP as this reduces our chance of death more than reducing average damage taken. We then decide our ratio of tank weights to threat weights. Most commonly, ratios of 0.5 mit : 1 EHP / 1 tankiness : 1 threat are used. There is no real need to make more threat-focused sets than this, as these sets will still produce enough threat in a raid setting to hold aggro against DPS players. These sets also provide a high level of survivability, suitable for all boss encounters in Black Temple and Mount Hyjal.

For the most accurate stat weights, you should use the simulation tools yourself to model your character, with your raid’s buffs and debuffs. However, this will have very little impact on the gear you actually wear, so don’t worry if you can’t be bothered!

These weights were attained using Nerdegghead’s v1.5 Bear Spreadsheet.

Attack Power: 1
Strength: 2.266
Agility: 5.29
Stamina: 3.39
Hit Rating: 4.2
Expertise Rating: 8.85
Critical Strike Rating: 1.9
Haste Rating: 1.67
Armor Penetration: 0.36
Armor: 0.63
Bonus Armor (does not scale with Dire Bear Form): 0.115
Dodge Rating: 2.14
Defense Rating (provides value from avoidance, separate to critical strike suppression): 1.37

These weights can also be imported to the useful gear planning website seventyupgrades.com with this link and used to compare all gear options available to you. This is the best way to make gearing decisions for yourself if not using BiS guides.

Thank you for taking the time to read our Feral Tank Stat Priority Guide for TBC. I hope it was helpful, and if you have any questions or suggestions please feel free to leave a comment below, or find me as Oxy on the Druid Classic Discord.

About the Author

Oxykitten

I've been an avid WoW player since Vanilla. At 6 years old, I was slowly progressing through Blackfathom Deeps and levelling up with my brothers. Since Classic Wow launched, I've found a new way to enjoy the game; participating in Feral Druid theorycrafting communities and performing well in an underdog class has been a fun challenge. I hope to be able to share all I've learned with anyone who shares that interest!