I’m a Balance guy. I’m currently 66, with 12 in Feral, and the rest in balance. (I lub Feral Swiftness)

And of course I’m looking at improving so I can be the Tank in instances. (usually I end up healing, but I end up tanking prolly 20% of the time)

Currently I’m at 9.3K armor, and 7.5K hp in bear, with 15% dodge, and around 600 AP. A few of my other skills help out. My Thorns are 37 damage a pop, and my spec into the feral tree gives me +1 second on my stuns, and +15% agro.

When I have a multiple pull, Start with a Starfire on one target, pop the treants for extra damage, switch into bear, enrage, and demo roar soon as possible. After that I try to use lacerate, bash and growl a lot. I don’t have that much trouble with agro on most fights.

But its getting harder. Especially on Boss fights. They hit to hard, and they are getting a lot tougher.

What do you guys experience who are resto and balance? What are you seeing?

What you need more than anything is more AC and more HP. I'm even feeling the hurt at 18k AC and 13k HP.

You need to work up a tanking set, basically the highest AC +armor gear you can get and trinkets, necks and rings to help with some AP and some dodge.

More feral talents will help with your HP ( heart of the wild ) but that will get you away from your enjoyment of you balance side. You could try adding some points into thick hide, that will help you out some too.

Well to give you some data to compare:

I am currently 69, and with my default tank set I have:
- 13k health
- 16k armour
- 31% dodge
- 1100 ap
- 28% crit
- 20 resilience
(all stats only buffed with motw)

I can push health to about 14,5k or armour to 18k if needed.

Add some talents too far down in the feral tree for non-ferals to reach (crit reduction, mangle, heart of the wild, ...) and you can see where your problems come from.

I think even as fully feral-specced bear tank you will have trouble in some bossfights, especially against the ones with magic damage.

These are self-buffed stats in bear form.

- Heavy Tank Gear -
25k armor
10k hp
1500 ap
27% dodge
26% crit

- DPS Gear -
16k armor
11k hp
1900 ap
29% dodge
28% crit

I use ItemRack to maintain my armor sets for quick switching between fights. Like in Arcatraz when you have voidwalkers doing shadow damage on one pull and physical damage on the next. I switch to my dps gear on magic mobs because I have more stamina on that gear for some reason.

I wear the heavy tank gear only against difficult foes and bosses that do physical damage. Magic bosses, I still wear the dps gear. I can't see a non-feral holding aggro in the end game instances. Especially the heroic versions. You might serve as an off-tank if aggro's getting tossed around on a bad pull, but as main tank... I dunno.

I'm getting my furry butt kicked around by some of the end game instance mobs like I was a lvl 1 nub in Darnassus.

Not holding agro is not all the tanks fault. Druids can main tank heroic instances, many in beta did. The dps just needs to be smart about their agro.

I find myself flashing back to the old days before we could have our cake and eat it too. What I mean by that is, in my opinion, stamina is king for us again. Particularly with the advent of weapons contributing 500+ attack power and ac. I roll with approximately 16k hp and 16k ac. I feel like my AC is really low, but I make sacrifices for some +feral skill and +dodge gear. One area I've seen that offers vast improvements for druid tanks is +dodge. I'm not seeing a lot of high AC high stam gear with +dodge. Having once had over 33% dodge and now being reduced to 25%, I find myself wishing more and more often that I could locate some good dodge gear.

Suffice it to say my gems for tanking are mostly agi or stam.