Post by Aadramelekh
You are doing just fine for a Tier 7 tank. Don't worry. Tier 8 content gear will bring a huge improvement in stats, especially in agility and stamina - from gear alone.
Your aim is to maintain that ~40% dodge self buffed with MotW. In a raid environment you will benefit from a lot of buffs that will bring your avoidance to the same levels as other tanks and your health to much higher levels.
For instance, sometimes I help some guild mates with 10 man hard modes - I am mostly tanking. The group has a prot paladin and a prot warrior as choices for secondary tank. Both of them are sitting at around 40000 HP raid buffed, I am sitting at 47000. Which is a huge difference. All of the raid mates have noticed how much easier was to do
'I love the smell of Saronite in the morning' with a bear tank who could simply stay put and soak all that huge damage.
On the other hand, the druid is at a slight disadvantage compared to other tanks in terms of avoidance when not buffed. My dodge self buffed is around 41%. Miss chance is about 6%. So I have basically around 47% avoidance. Tier 8 geared warriors / paladins can reach ~50-51% unbuffed. Frost Death Knights can reach ~3% higher avoidance. However, their avoidance comes from defense / dodge / parry rating. Agility is
pretty useless as avoidance stat for such tanks - for instance, I have a DK tank with
Black Ice; I have noticed that, after all DR effects, all that agility (108!) only adds ~1% more dodge. Compared to 42 agility required for 1% dodge for bear tanks (before DR), other tanks require more than twice the amount of agility to get a perceptible result. And anyway no warrior / paladin / death knight ever uses agility as a tanking stat from 'standard tanking gear'.
But with a
Blackened Dragonfin + Blessing of Kings + Strength of Earth (improved for +178 str and agi), my dodge reaches almost 46%, raising my total avoidance to ~52%. Now the situation is slightly better than other tanks. Trinkets like
Darkmoon Card: Greatness and
Figurine - Monarch Crab provide an excellent avoidance boost: the DMC offers almost 360 agility on proc raid buffed (about 5.5% dodge at that DR level) and the Monarch Crab offers another 4.5% dodge on demand (at that DR level). Also the Mongoose enchant on my weapon offers a nice ~2% dodge boost on proc.
The great power of a bear tank is that the class scales extremely well with raid buffs, especially with PW: Fortitude, Blessing of Kings and Strength of Earth Totem (or Horn of Winter in case totem is not available).
All things considered, you should be able to maintain over 6% hit and 9-10% expertise from gear alone, and focus your gems on agility/stamina (over 40% dodge self buffed stamina is strongly recommended).
Check my gear as well for some guidelines (armory link in my signature) - I have about 2260 stamina, 1155 agility, a little over 8% hit and 11.5% expertise in that gear. In Bear form I get ~30000 armor, ~37000 HP, ~42% dodge, ~5000 AP and ~36% critical strike chance.