- Author: Shadostruct
- Date: May 21, 2024
- Updated: May 21, 2024
- Expansion: Cataclysm
Stat Priority
- Stamina
- Agility
- Expertise
- Hit
- Dodge
- Crit
- Mastery
- Haste
Stamina is not only something that’s desirable for tanks to increase our health pool, but for bear tanks in particular we have extra scaling from it with our Bear Form. There are also amplifications like Heart of the Wild and Mark of the Wild that further compound the gains we get from Stamina. Since bears don’t get a shield, they often rely on massive health pools, avoidance like Dodge, and damage reduction for their survivability.
Agility is your second most important primary stat by a mile. It not only offers us fantastic damage stats, it also gives a not-paltry amount of dodge on top! For damage Agility will give us Attack Power as well as Critical Strike. Our abilities scale extremely well from AP, and our rage generation and new mastery, Savage Defense, have synergies with critting.
Expertise determines your target’s ability to dodge or parry your attacks. Since, as a tank, you’re likely going to have the boss facing you this means that both dodge and parry are going to be something you’ll have to contend with. You’ll want to prioritize this over Hit up to 26 Expertise, or 6.5%, which is the soft cap at which boss-level mobs can no longer dodge your attacks. Since you’ll get benefits from the reduced chance to have your attacks both dodged and parried, it has more value than Hit till that 6.5% soft cap. To hit the hard cap of 56 Expertise for parry would be too costly, and so it’s not recommended.
Hit is going to determine your chance to miss with auto-attacks or spells. After hitting the Expertise soft-cap you’ll want to invest in some Hit for further DPS gains up to 8%, which is the soft cap at which your auto-attacks are guaranteed to not miss.
Dodge is pretty self-explanatory in that it’ll increase your chance to dodge incoming attacks. Since our bears aren’t anthropomorphic, they’re sadly not able to equip a shield! Making Dodge pretty important as a avoidance stat to avoid damage. This is going to be a difficult stat to come across on leather gear, so you’ll likely need to reforge into it if you need more survivability.
Critical Strike Chance is going to increases our chances of landing a crit. Ok, now that that’s out of the way – this is actually a valuable stat for us as we have Savage Defense and Primal Fury which benefit from landing crits. Nevermind that critting will also be a DPS gain in and of itself.
Mastery is a new statline introduced in Cataclysm that, for bear tanks, is going to be solely focused upon survivability. Mastery will feed into the strength of the Savage Defense buff – giving it more shield. As gear quality goes up, and survivability becomes more of a pressing concern, Mastery will become more and more important.
Haste affects the rate of attack speed for autos, and in Cat Form will help with the speed of energy generation. It’s currently going to be the least useful stat and should be reforged off any gear you might collect with it.
Reforging
This is an interesting mechanic introduced in Cataclysm so that you can take 40% of a secondary stat on a piece of gear and transform it into another secondary stat that is not already present on the piece of gear naturally. This will not work for primary stats like Agility or Stamina. This is going to be an extremely important tool to tailor gear for us that isn’t 100% optimal out of the box.
Reforging for a bear tank if you’re interested in DPS is going to be about hitting our Expertise, then Hit caps first and foremost. After that Critical Strike is likely going to be your best bet.
If survivability is a concern, then Dodge Rating should be your primary stat for reforging. This strategy applies until you acquire better gear, in which case Mastery begins to gain value as a defensive stat due to the way Savage Defense works.
Â
About the Author
