Upcoming Feral Tank mechanic changes and gear

[Arcdelad]

From the sneak peak:

[blizzard]Savage Defense – this is a new passive ability. When a druid in Dire Bear form deals a melee critical strike, the druid gains a damage shield equal to 25% of their attack power. The next hit completely removes the shield regardless of how much damage was done.

Survival of the Fittest has had its bonus armor reduced to compensate for the above increase in damage mitigation.[/blizzard]

So...what does this mean? Lets break it down.

• This is a PASSIVE ability. You will not need to spec for it, and theoretically any druid of any spec will get this. Think of this as another OOC like ability, except you dont have to dump talent points to get it.
• This activates through you critting a target. Since bears stack AGI for DODGE anyway, and since we are using gear meant for cats, bears, and rogues that already has +CRIT on it, this means most bears are already sitting at 30-40% crit self buffed. If this ALSO applies to a glyphed maul (that hits 2 targets), swipe (that hits as many targets as possible), or Mangle+Berserk (that hits 3 targets), then you are pretty much guaranteed a crit on every attack, which means this shield could theoretically almost always be up. Even on a single target our high crit means this shield is going to be up a LOT.
• ALSO becuase of the rogue/cat gear we are using to tank in, feral tanks have a high amount of AP - self buffed I want to say im around 5-6k AP in bear form. If the shield is worth 25% of our AP, then that means each shield will roughly absorb around 1250 to 1500 per application.
• Since the shield goes away regardless of the size of the hit, it means that smaller scale mobs could become negligible given huge amounts of AP (say if you start stacking AP over everything else)...bosses will always put up big numbers, and the strength of the shield SHOULD scale well with boss damage in later content provided leather gear and druid weapons keep adding relevant amounts of AP to us. Theoretically if you can STILL hit the armor cap, thus reducing incoming damage numbers, you could make some boss fights inconsequential by first mitigating their damage, then just slicing off 1500 or so more off of it.
• Bear bonus armor will be reduced...seems fair - well see how much armor they think this shield is worth lol

What does this mean in terms of gear choices?

The major bear stats have traditionally been STA, AGI, ARMOR, +DODGE (in terms of mitigation...threat gen comes naturally and you dont need to work for it IMO)...

NOW, though, AP and CRIT become major stats for us to look at. The higher we can get our AP up, the more that shield will absorb, and the more crit we can stack, the more often that shield will be up. It means that right now [item]Origin of Nightmares[/item] is the best tanking staff in the game, but post change [item]The Undeath Carrier[/item] would arguably be better (depending on the changes).

Questions

Will rage still be generated through the shield? They talked about changing warrior rage generation through shields, so im thinking yes...
Will there be any kind of internal cooldown?
Will it stack if I crit twice in a row before a mob hits me?
If you dodge an attack with the shield up, will it go away, or will it absorb before dodge?

[dharq]

Everything I've been able to find on rage generation through PW:S for warriors is sounding an awful lot like this is going to be a non-issue for feral tanks as well. Also, there's a new PW:Barrier talent going in discipline that's going to shield a whole group at a time--that makes me think even moreso that they're going to globally remove the rage gen penalty for shielded tanks.

[Arcdelad]

yeah...i feel confident that rage gen will be fine....one of my other concerns, though, is how this is going to jive with other shields like PW:shield and sacred shield - will these get used up FIRST, and THEN the druid bubble gets used? vice versa?

[Geos]

Looks like baers are getting shield block now basically!

[Air]

But... its for all incoming damage if I understand correctly, so melee and spell damage.  Frost death knight's will be getting something similar with unbreakable armor.

I'm getting distinct impression that Ulduar is gonna have alot of spell damage based bosses.