With the most recent Beta patch, it has become possible for other people to begin data-mining the loot from Naxxramas (mmo-champion). As a feral concerned about how the gear will be itemized, I looked at the sets for all four of the tank sets to see how they compare.

At this time, I am greatly concerned with the benefit of the Naxx 10-man sets for druids in comparison to the other classes. For each of the following sections, I am trying to focus on a particular element of survival for each of the tank classes to compare them in turn.

Unless specifically stated otherwise, I am ignoring the base values of the stats. I am ignoring the bonuses from talents or skills that has no bearing on the classes gains from gear. This is trying to look purely at the gains that each tanking class is seeing from gear.


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ARMOR

Assumed equipment: Full item level 200 epic gear. This means the filled slots are the Eight Armor Slots, Cloak, and Shield. (Shield is only for filled for warrior and paladin.)

Druid: 18667
DeathKnight: 21739
Warrior: 22623
Paladin: 22623

Druid is assumed to be in Dire Bear Form (base skill) with Thick Hide (Tier 2 Feral Talent).
Deathknight is assumed to be in Frost Presence (base skill) with Toughness (Tier 1 Frost Talent).
Warrior is considered to have Toughness (Tier 3 Protection Talent).
Paladin is considered to have Toughness (Tier 3 Protection Talent).


Druids being the lowest, by a significant amount, is an issue. (I would expect Deathknights to be the lowest for physical mitigation as their niche is mage-tanking.)

- But druids can get extra armor from their jewelry or weapon!
Currently, any armor on the jewelry or weapon costs itemization points. This results in those pieces having less stats for other areas. This results in a (mostly) unseen penalty to druid tanks.

- So how do we resolve this?
I don't know.

Leather with Cloak gives an armor total of 3394.
Plate with Cloak (no shield) gives an armor total of 13037.
Plate with Cloak and Shield gives an armor total of 20567.
The plate armor gives roughly 384% the armor of leather (no shield) or 605% the armor of leather (with shield).

Dire Bear currently gives a +400% armor modifier. This places the druid above the base armor from plate-wearer without a shield (or other armor modifiers like frost presence), but easily falls short of the armor of a plate-wearer with a shield.

Possible solutions to make bear armor roughly equal to plate w/shield armor would seem to be:
1. Increase the base armor of leather by 21%. (This will give a 20% armor boost to rogues and non-feral druids. This would likely be seen as an undesired buff to the non-ferals, from tank balancing.)
2. Increase the base armor modifier of Dire Bear Form to 505%. (This will allow for higher armor on arena restoration druids who are using bear form to soak up damage while their heal over time spells tick. Potentially undesired buff.)
3. Increase the armor modifier of Thick Hide to 33%. (Easily accessible talent to non-ferals thus still allowing a potential buff to arena restoration druids.)
4. Place or alter a deep feral talent to include a 21% armor boost. (Best place would be to replace the +60% dire bear AP bonus from Mother Bear, Tier 8 Feral talent, as it only gives a mere 72 AP with a second armor boosting talent.)

The fourth listed option would place further emphasis between a bear and cat spec for a druid, as Mother Bear gives no benefit to a cat druid. Also, please note that the listed percentages above are what are needed for them to equal the armor mitigation of a warrior or paladin. If it is desired for them to have higher base armor mitigation (due to a lack of block), the listed percentages would need to be increased.


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BLOCKING

Assumed gear is 5 pieces of the 10-man Naxxramus tanking set for each class. The shield is considered to have a block value of 211 (epic item level 200 shield).

Increased Chance to Block:
Paladin: 7.37%
Warrior: 5.58%

Increased Block Value (with shield):
Warrior: 335 (609)
Paladin: 515 (789)

*Warrior is assumed to have Shield Mastery (Tier 6 Protection Talent) and Vitality (Tier 8 Protection Talent).
*Paladin is assumed to have Shield Specialization (Tier 3 Protection Talent) and Divine Strength (Tier 1 Protection Talent).

Druids and Deathknights can not block, therefore can not gain any benefit here. This simply pushes the warriors and paladins further in the lead for physical mitigation. The block amounts of 600-800 with only 5 pieces of gear shows the amounts to be significant.


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AVOIDANCE

Assumed gear is 5 pieces of the 10-man Naxxramus tanking set for each class. Base avoidance values are not taken into account.

Druid: 8.36% (8.36% Dodge)
Death Knight: 14.28% (1.72% Miss, 6.4% Parry, 6.16% Dodge)
Warrior: 10.33% (1.74% Miss, 3.45% Parry, 5.15% Dodge)
Paladin: 7.55% (1.63% Miss, 2.35% Parry, 3.57% Dodge)

Druid assumes Survival of the Fittest Talent (Tier 6 Feral Talent).
Death Knight, Warrior, and Paladin have no relevant talents.

Paladin has the lowest avoidance, but they also have the highest blocking chance from gear. Due to their reactionary damage with holy shield and retribution aura, this seems unsurprising.

Druids are the second lowest, yet they don't (currently) have higher armor or blocking to bail them out.

So how can we resolve the low avoidance issue? (As the difference would simply increase as we extend into higher item levels, the 2% difference between druids and warriors from 5 pieces of gear would likely continue to increase.)

1. Change the itemization to better favor avoidance stats. (Druid feral set is trying to be a dps set and a tank set at the same time. Moving the itemization around to favor tanking would hinder the druid dps, unless druid dps was shifted to better resolve around the tank-style itemization.)
2. Change the druid agility-to-dodge ratio. (To get the talented druid avoidance in line with the warrior avoidance, you would need to reduce the Agility-to-Dodge ratio from ~40.4 : 1 to 32.7 : 1. If you extrapolate the current live dodge ratio to level 80 based on the degredation of the ratio, you would get ~30.5 : 1. This may be closer to the old values than might be liked.)
3. Give the druid some AP to defensive stat ability. (Warriors and Paladins get strength to shield block as a base ability. Death Knights get strength to parry rating as a base ability. Druids are the only tank class that is not getting some fashion of damage reduction through their Strength/AP. It would only need a 306 AP : 1% avoidance ratio to bring the druid talented avoidance up to warriors for avoidance.)


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HEALTH

Assumed gear is 5 pieces of the 10-man Naxxramus tanking set for each class. Base health is not taken into account.

Druid: 7123
Death Knight: 5220
Warrior: 5575
Paladin: 5981

Druid assumes Dire Bear Form with Heart of the Wild (Tier 6 Talent), Survival of the Fittest (Tier 6 Talent).
Death Knight has no modifying talents. (Unholy and Blood both have small 2-3% stamina boosts, but frost seems like it'd be the raid tank tree.)
Warrior is assumed to have Vitality (Tier 8 Prot Talent).
Paladin is assumed to have Sacred Duty (Tier 6 Prot Talent) and Combat Expertise (Tier 8 Talent).

I'm surprised that warrior is next to last for health. I had thought that they had more stamina boosting talents than paladins had. Interestingly, I seem to be wrong.

Health is druids strong point and the tier set seems to keep that. The druid tanking gear only has ~80% the stamina of the three plate wearing sets, but a larger stamina modifier which should keep this in the druids favor as item levels increase.


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OTHER NOTES:

- Can we please get the AP on the druid-only sets changed to strength? This would allow our gear to better synergize with Survival of the Fittest. (I'm fine with non-set items being AP, but can we at least get our set items to have Strength as it's a better stat for us.)

- Can we please get Mother Bear to no longer worry about party member amount and give the full bonus regardless? The only times when this would normally matter would be solo-questing (which seems silly to penalize) and for 2v2/3v3 arena (where ferals have yet to be strong players). The talent is deep enough in feral that the arena restoration druids will not pick it up, so arena doesn't seem a valid reason to restrict it.

This leaves solo-questing and undermanned-instance running as the only reasons where (and why) the party member amount for the mitigation amount would matter... neither of which seem sensible reasons/places to restrict druid tank survivability. (And as a talent that only boosts bears, it is very much a druid tank talent.)

Also... currently, we don't know if the druid is counted as a party member. Nor do we know if there is any range requirement (bad for spread out fights like how some guilds do Karathress), if mind-controls make the person not count (The Maker, Kael'thas, and more), deaths make a person not count (Gorefiend, Azgalor), disconnects make a person not count (power outages or simple random net issues), or could simply force an unbalanced group setup which could be bad for usage of group heals (8-man achievement for Kel'thuzad). Hence, many questions about this NYI talent.


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IN CONCLUSION:

With the currently low mitigation and avoidance, druids seem to be on the road to be the OOM tanks. While we do have the largest health pool from gear, it simply means that our healers have longer to heal us. As we have no means of increasing the healing done on us in bear form (we do for cat), this simply means a larger drain on our healers.

If nothing is changed, the notable gap that we can already see in the first

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Make the classes equal.
Let our skill make us shine.

Awesome thread. Keep it going!