Well druids only get dodge for avoidance, and I logged off so I can't see exactly how much I have in bear form, but I want to say it's either 36 or 39% dodge. One of those numbers with curves, can't remember which one

And about 45k armor fwiw

Armory, I logged off in bear gear. Replacing Fluid Death as soon as I'm comfortable enough with all the new abilities to tank heroics

Stam stacking is gone the way of the birds, but you have an opportunity with a bear spec to be more creative. Since I use 1 feral spec to dps and tank and don't want to muck around with regemming and reenchanting every day I just stack agility and mastery/hit and use my trinkets to cover the stamina gap. I only have a separate helm for meta purposes.

So I guess what you're saying is I could use at least some agility/stam gems instead of pure agility? Would that be something I would want in every socket (except 2 yellows for the meta) or just certain ones, maybe just to hit the agility socket bonuses?

If I replace all of my 40 agility gems with 20 agi/30 stam, that would give me about 210 more stam for a little over 2k health. Not sure if 2k health would be worth losing 140 agility.

Just checked, 36.94% dodge.

36.88% now though since I just replaced 2 delicate infernos with 20agi/30stam

No, exactly the opposite, actually.

Question: how do you know feral tank gear?

Answer: it has crit and mastery.

That's the fast and dirty way to tell bear tank gear. Anything with hit/exp/mastery/crit are good for bear tanks. Haste blows, obviously, and reforging haste to mastery, exp, hit is a good idea whenever possible.

I'm not a huge fan of reforging to dodge, especially if you have the alchemist stone (never reforge mastery to dodge, ever!), but if you feel you must, go for it.

The deal with mastery vs dodge is that dodge has diminishing returns, so the more you reforge to dodge, the less valuable all that dodge is. Mastery, on the other hand, is still the totally kick-ass stat that you can pool and it always is worth it. (Yes, bear mastery, like a DK, only works against physical dmg, but so does dodge)

Were I you, I would gem for pure agility, with 2 mastery/stam gems (Puissant) to get decent socket bonuses/activate your meta (IF you really want a bear only spec, otherwise consider a Glinting Demonseye). If the socket bonus isn't 20-30 agility, or some really easy crit or mastery, just go straight agility. Sark of the Unwatched is a decent example of a time where doing 2 delicates vs 1 delicate and 1 adept (20 agi/20 mastery) is a fairly close call. 2 delicates might be preferred, but since mastery is such a good stat for bears I think it can be excused this once. For your belt, though, I would probably just go dual delicates.

The reason I brought up trinkets was to point out that you can use two high stam trinkets and just stack agility elsewhere without worrying about stam. For tanking, I use Moonwell Phial and Scales of Life. I do this because I don't get any extra stam from anywhere else, save for puissant gem in my helm for a 30 agility bonus/meta activation.

Uhhh, absolutely everything I have read says to reforge the least-wanted secondary stat to dodge. If I don't reforge to dodge, I lose a little over 6% dodge. The only thing I've read that doesn't say to reforge to dodge is for hybrids, and then you would want to reforge to crit or mastery when possible, which I guess is the viewpoint you're coming from, but at least at the moment I just want this to be a bear spec.

I have looked around and seen the armory for some bears that are progressed pretty far in heroic FL that don't reforge everything to dodge, but the vast majority still is dodge.

I look at it from the point of view of utility. It's not completely unlikely that some fight you'll want to pop into kitty form to dps for a while or have a kitty form to dps a fight but need to pop bear form to tank if the MT dies. (Both of these happen on a semi-regular basis for me in t11 content/Occu'thar)

If you do just want a totally pure tank spec, I think you're pretty much reforging correctly. I would never suggest to reforge mastery to dodge, though, as you should always look to keep as much mastery as possible and give up other useful stats over it & replace them via gems. (20agi/20hit for example)

It looks like some tanks still stack stamina, fwiw. Maybe it's much more worth it at such high levels of mastery/stamina.

For comparison, you have 0.5% *more* dodge than the bear tank who got the world first heroic rag kill. (though less than half the mastery)

He seems to use the idea that you reforge to mastery if it isn't present, else reforge to dodge.

Hmm, I thought I read at some point (basically heroic progression) stam stacking would come back, but it's interesting to see he actually has less dodge than me. He does have 4 more expertise, double my mastery, and about 2k more armor which probably works out to about 4-6k in bear form.

As far as reforging out of mastery goes, the only piece of gear it would ever happen on is a trinket, since there's always going to be a less desirable secondary stat on every other gear slot. So that won't be a problem

I think his point is that you can never have too much mastery, so even on a trinket, you never ever want to reforge it.

Finally got round to making my offspec a tank. Tanked a few normal and heroic dungeons, the only time I have trouble is when someone occasionally steals aggro in trash and I have to panic to look for the right button to press. I'm sure that will go away with time.

I think that since dodge and parry offer diminishing returns after a while, mastery is better.

as a Pali tank Mastery is now better then stam until you reach the magic avoidance number ( with out HS up)
pali's were actually reach full avoidance towards the end of t11/11.5 and thus making mastery a "useless" stat. Per blizz, they always want mastery stacking be relevant

I assume at some point blizz will find a way to nerf their new love-child, 'mastery', and make it have DR or something.

Can you rename the thread so it somewhat matches the dps and healing threads? Right now it sticks out like a sore thumb.

How about "Tanking - Give me two goddam seconds to get threat!"