My that is a gorgeous weapon… and the polearm isn’t bad either!

Section One: Gear Choices for an OT/DPS Feral Druid

Unfortunately when one is looking at filling both an off-tanking and a damage dealing role in many of the same pieces of gear, there are going to be some trade-offs that have to be made. First, to be completely clear, without having a complete DPS-designed set of gear one will not be a top damage dealer in any raid unless the other people are doing something wrong (or much lower geared). However, as an OT/DPS raid member, one should not be focused on the damage meters anyway.

As an off-tank there is a lot more leniency in trying to gear more toward the dps side of the fence than a main tank. It is still very, very highly recommended that two sets of gear be maintained either way, but a hybrid set can work when not the main tank.

Now that I’ve emphasized that thought multiple times, let’s look at some things to keep in mind when gearing.

Stamina and Agility are major from a tanking perspective, with Dodge being very, very close. Generally speaking, maintaining 30,000+ armor, consistently hitting 32,000 to 35,000 health, and keeping dodge rating over 30 percent will be more than sufficient for off-tanking current 10-man content easily (I do not have the experience in 25-mans to compare, but it should be sufficient there as well provided your healers are decently geared).

Keeping those stats in mind, using some gear choices geared more toward damage (items with higher crit rating, strength, and attack power all fit the bill nicely) when not sacrificing huge amounts of stamina or armor will really impact overall damage. For example, using the Staff of Trickery instead of the Staff of the Plague Beast (or, with gear levels high enough elsewhere, even getting that gorgeous Wraith Spear pictured above) will easily lead to a very noticeable increase in damage on those fights where you are spending most of your time in cat form.

As a general rule, I look at Strength > Agility > Stamina > Dodge > Attack Power > Hit Rating when choosing what pieces to use, but while still maintaining the baseline numbers I mentioned above. Agility is a very important stat, primarily due to its effect on armor, crit, attack power, and dodge.

I’m not going to get into the details on how these all operate together, or on specific gear recommendations. Too many other, excellent guides already exist on such topics. Karthis has many articles detailing these mechanics and his recommendations on gear from a pure DPS perspective (and some excellent tanking information as well) that are well worth the read.

Section Two: Talent Choices

This will pretty much be your base build: Wowhead Link

In all honesty, there is not much room for playing with different talents, because you will have to have all of the core tanking talents and the core damage-dealing talents in order to fulfill the OT/DPS role. There really are only a couple of reasons not to go with this exact build, or to manipulate a couple of talent points: Wowhead Link

Again, I’m going to skip detailed analysis on talents because the information is so freely available. Most of what I really wanted to get to is contained in the next two sections.

Section Three: Measuring Success

Remember that statement about not paying attention to the damage meters in an OT/DPS role? Well, now we’re going to look at them briefly. The easiest way to see if you are contributing nicely to the amount of damage done when not off-tanking is to look at the numbers for each individual fight. Open recount and change it to display the current fight. After each mob take a look at where everyone stands. If you are doing a respectable amount of damage compared to the rest of the raid, then you’re doing fine. If you’re below the healers…

When attempting to measure your success as a tank of any type it is a little trickier. The first thing to find out is how easy or difficult the healers are having keeping you alive. If they are struggling, and they are decently geared, it is time to reevaluate gear, talent choices, skills used, and whether or not something should be changed on how the mob is being tanked. This is not an easy process by any means, and can be significantly impacted by the ability of the healers just as much as the ability of the tank.

Success is going to be defined differently by different people as well, further complicating things. As a general rule the baseline measurement for being successful should be a combination of the number of people who survive the fight and its correlation to how stressed the healers are after said fight. For example, if the job of the OT was to pick up adds, but the healers had to really be almost perfect to keep everyone alive because the adds were not picked up efficiently, that is not success.

Section Four: Assorted Tips, Tricks, Observations, Musings, and Ramblings

• Piece together two sets, one for tanking and one for DPS. Seriously. One set will work if done properly, but it is so much better to have two specific sets.
• Being in the OT/DPS role means, aside from a couple of fights, you can almost look exclusively at DPS maximization as long as you have a couple of tanking pieces to help make up the disparity.
• Cat form is very, very fun.
• In a hybrid tanking/dps set you can still pull off very respectable damage done.
• Wraith Spear is a gorgeous weapon.