Tanking, is Thick Hide a must?Follow

Hi there, well I am not up at raid level yet, however I have done a bit of research on Thick Hide and here are the results.

I did a quick search for gear sets and I took the Nordrassil Harness set just as an example as it has the highest armor for a pure set. Now IF you can get the complete set then you have 1750 armor. Thick Hide only increases your item armor and at max it's 10% which means you get an extra 175 armor. Now admittedly this also means that in Direbear form you have to multiply that by 4.5 (450% armor) but that still means you are only getting an extra 787.5 armor. So with this set, forgetting other bonuses becuase Thick Hide is only applicable to base armor you get:

With Thick Hide: 8662.5
Without Thick Hide: 7875

Considering the fact that if you didn't have Thick Hide you still have with this armor set 7875 in Direbear form, I personally dont think that you can justify 3 points for that small an increase. These figures could be a bit out as Thick Hide does your item armor so if you have armor enchants or bonuses then I think they will also count towards this, but I still think the difference is too small. Also your armor would actually be alot higher than this as I haven't included things like your base armor, agility bonus, enchants, etc, but this is just the principle and Thick Hide doesn't count for many of those extras.

With regards to the +hit chance I am not sure on that although from seeing other threads I THINK that +hit stuff doesnt actually count in a feralform, in much the same way as the crusader enchant doesn't apply to feral form attacks. I don't know if there's any gear out there that offers a specific +feralhit but if you are planning to tank then I would focus completely on improving your AP, Stam, Defense Rating, and then I would personally choose Agility for the dodge and crit bonuses. The other obvious one of course is resistances as your Armor only counts towards physical attacks.

Hope that helps and I am sure that someone will correct any mistakes I have made. :-) Best of luck.

Thick hide, while not strictly necessary, is a very good skill. I have 2/3 in it and if I could find another point, i'd fill it out. If you have 25k armor, then you pick up over 2k bonus from it - that is a big gain. Really, you have to compare it to the talents you would have to drop to pick it up.

+hit does work in feral forms and is reasonably important as a secondary stat. In kitty, missing regularly can be a massive drain on your DPS. In tank, it can be critical, but usually your DPS should be waiting until they see a mangle & a few lacerates on the target, so any early misses, in theory shouldn't be too drastic.

Feral Combat rating is like a nice version of +hit that also affects your chance to crit (as well as reducing the chance that your opponent will dodge, parry or block your attack). Keep in mind though, that it only works against mobs of a higher level than you. If you are against a same level mob, then it has absolutely no effect (unlike +hit). Against bosses however, it is much better than +hit)

Some good reading can be found on this page on wowwiki.

Thick Hide, IMO, is something decent/good to get if all you'll do is end-game tanking because otherwise you don't need the armor increase. Most of the Feral builds I make don't have it because none of them is made for end-game tanking yet.

Hawkeye, it's nice that you've done a bit of research but remember that armor has been nerfed on Bear. It's 400% now, not 450%.

Anyway, I tried to do simple maths in the other thread with Thick Hide so take a look and tell me if I did something wrong.

As for the second thing:
+Hit is one thing.
+Feral Combat skill is another.

You know what +Hit does, so no need for me to explain. On the other hand, +Feral Combat skill is exactly like +Sword or +Axe. Feral forms always have an invisible "weapon skill" maxed out and this is the new way Blizz has found for us to increase it. As such, it will increase you chance to land a successful hit and score a critical hit. (So it combines +Hit and +Crit)

Whichever you wanna get is up to you. As a tank, missing a few times isn't a huge deal according to some much more experienced tanks than me. If you can get +2-3% more chance to hit it should be fine. If you feel like maxing it out, not at the cost of more useful stuff though, then more power to you.

EDIT: For the heck of it, I tried to make an end-game tanking build. Do you really need anything different than that? Anything you could want as a tank is right there. I suppose Kitty wouldn't be as powerful but it's the kind of sacrifice one has to make to MT end-game raids. Now if you wanna OT it's a whole different story...

Edited, May 9th 2007 11:53am by Selverein

Hell, my Druid has only respec'd two or three times within the last year so I'll give it a shot. I can always undo it.


Well, perfect for me and whatever I had in mind anyways.

Perhaps I'll respec to this. Ditching Feral Aggression completely to max out Primal Tenacity (anti-fear/stun), Thick Hide and to get Nature's Grasp.

I must support Scholar RPZip in this one you can't very well go wrong with this.

thick hide aint bad. more armor is more armor. and as we all (should) know armor gain is more or less linear, meaning 10% more armor increases your life expectancy vs X level of dps by 10%.

Hi, are you sure about that? I did some calcs on my char and I can't make it work with 400%. Where can I find out about implemented nerfs?

Cheers.

Sometimes it feels like people live the WoW in theory only.
Open WoW and hover your mouse pointer over the Dire Bear Form button and read the tooltip. Or go to http://www.thottbot.com/?c=Druid which is more or less up to date, unlike allakhazam's druid skill list.
Finally, for a list of changes, visit http://worldofwarcraft.com/patchnotes/ .

Oh and...

Ehm... no. http://www.wowwiki.com/Armor
It much worse than linear.

Edited, May 10th 2007 6:11am by XanNerull

Check this out.
It should've been sticked or maybe we should put the link in the Druid 101, but the calculations there show that, while more armor gives less and less damage reduction, it still ups you life expectancy in a rather linear fashion.

The only thing that makes Thick Hide not exactly like 10% more life expectancy is the fact that it only multiplies armor on items and not of buffs, base armor, etc. So it's maybe like 9% or 9.5% more.

Edited, May 10th 2007 8:33am by Selverein

That's what I meant, though it looked to me like the scale was 8% or so.
Also, we have to keep in mind that TH refers to item armor bonus only, so "meaning 10% more armor increases your life expectancy vs X level of dps by 10%." is not really our situation, as the 10% refers to a portion of our defense.