I decided yesterday to respeck my feral to tree and to roll a protadin xD

we've had a similar problem - some of our feral druids are ignoring rogue leather drops now in favor of resto gear because resto druids compete so much better than kitty druids. our feral OT has gear comparable to many of our other DPSers, but he rarely even makes it into the top 10 against rogues, mages, warlocks, and ret paladins.

our feral druids claim that there are theorycrafting reasons behind the issue - i can't comment on them, but building a resto set might be a good direction to go.

Hmm... i need to update my healy gear (I'm shadow, keep a healing set for kicks)... what did you use as subs for PMC?

If you can collect yourself the Badge Reward Robes + Belt of the Long Road + T5 Shoulders you'll pretty much say good bye to your PMC set. You'll find that you do lose out a little on cMP5 unbuffed, but raid buffed the huge spirit gains make up the difference.

Besides if you're looking to replace PMC you're probably moving into T5/6 content and these items give a really nice stamina/intellect buff which you're going to need if you want to tackle Naj'entus (8.5k raid wide aoe attacks) etc.

My main raiding character is a 23/38/0 priest and I never even acquired the Whitemend or Primal Mooncoth sets. They're great for unadulterated healing, but lack stats that I consider integral for a raiding priest (including Stamina and I'd love to see more Spirit). So while they're great for Karazhan, Gruul, and maybe even Magtheridon, I usually recommend to my fellow healing priests that they look for other pieces of gear as soon as humanly possible. They're also something that you can save for maybe your +Bonus Healing set when other things don't matter as much.

Every time I see a priest raiding Hyjal or Black Temple with them, I wanna gouge out their eyes or something. Especially when I know that they have what I would consider to be better loot. Drives me bonkers. It almost ranks as high on my list of pet peeves as priests who just Flash Heal thoughout a fight.

You better hope you've got an extraordinarily good healer, then. I mean, you'll have a fair amount of armor provided you've got all leather healing gear (no guarantees there, even), but you're gonna be majorly hurting for stamina and dodge. Not to mention defense/resilience.

To be fair, though. Switching to feral tank is one of the more painless respecs. Most of the starter gear is crafted or quested and the new reputation PvP gear is handy to fill in some of rougher spots if you need some extra resilience to get crit-immune.

As a druid with a solid feral and heal set, I can say that you sir have no idea what you are talking about. I've played healer a couple times where I suddenly needed to try to tank something to prevent a wipe. Once I died but did manage to last just long enough that we beat the boss anyhow. All other times have been completely in vain. With no real armor to speak of, we get pummeled like a naked mage. Well, maybe not quite *that* bad but you get the idea.

I always found Sanctity the better aura for tanking as Retribution; a nearly 10% threat boost and +2% damage for the party always seemed to beat a flat 30ish threat every time they bothered to hurt me. And, of course, not putting points in Imp. Ret. Aura meant not putting points places I'd never use them when solo.

i second the shield recommendation - the Petrified Lichen Guard is fantastic for 5-mans where you're not blocking crushing blows (something a bit heavier is definitely better for raids) but you've got to hold aggro against dps that may not be so good at letting you get threat ahead of them.

it's not a BAD shield for raids, though... i off-tanked one of moroes' caster adds with it on my 68 warrior the other night. it's worth considering as a freebie starter shield until you can get something better to tank karazhan with.

Boobah, Sanctity Aura (and Imp. Sanctity Aura) isn't a straight boost to the party. Sanctity Aura increases Holy damage done by party members within 30 yds by 10%, i.e., if they are not doing holy damage via one of their own attacks, they get no bonus. Improved Sanctity Aura just ups the bonus by 1 and 2% for each point. So if you have, say, a rogue that has no holy attacks, you aren't helping him. Sanctity Aura is great in a party of paladins, but I've never found it useful for a general group.

That said, I don't know if SA scales damage to threat, so I can't say that a 10% dmg bonus for yourself = a 10% threat increase, but that's what Righteous Fury is for. As you can see by my build, I do take a point in sanctity aura because I do use it when I am soloing and doing straight DPS most of the time. I just don't put the 2 points in improving it because I personally think Ret Aura is better for when I want to tank/grind multiple mobs vs. the 2% dmg increase Imp. SA gives you.

-p-

I guess you clearly don't understand how it works.

Sanctity Aura, yes, increases your holy damage by 10%, which would only help you and a smite priest
But improved sanctity aura increases the damage of all party members effected by the aura by 2%, holy damage or not. It's just a flat two percent.

And it's way better for tanking than ret aura could ever be, and will provide more damage and threat, and you don't ever have to worry about whether or not the mob will land a blow on you. I wish I had it on my tankadin.
A paladin's threat is reliant on spell damage, so 10% holy damage increase pretty much translates to that.

Wow. I stand corrected. Thanks for the info.

-p-