Welcome back to The Queue, WoW Insider's daily Q&A column where the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft.

Good news, everyone! We have a guest star today on The Queue! Yes, that's right, a very special guest! Well, sort of. I guess she's not that special after all, but our resident Feral Druid guru chimed in to answer a Bear question yesterday, and she answered it better than I ever could. Our first question of the day is hers to handle, then it's back to me. Because you all love me, right?

thon asked...

I've had a lot of heated debate on the current def cap of Druid Bear Tanks. Is there one if specced into Survival of the Fittest? Is it lower than a normal tank class? I'd love to be able to tell them for certain to pipe down!

Allison Robert replied...

With 3/3 Survival of the Fittest, you do not need any +defense whatsoever as a bear tank. Your chance to be crit by the highest-level raid mob (83) is 5.6%, and 3/3 SotF will reduce your chance to be crit by a flat 6%.

What's more, SotF also "scales" in the sense that any mob 3 levels higher than you will always have a 5.6% chance to crit you, so even in the next expansion you are crit-immune through the next 3 levels of mobs, no matter what level you are.

So as a bear tank you don't need a lick of +defense to be crit immune, which is both a huge advantage and also a giant relief after the hell of staying crit-immune in BC. For the record, the +dodge you get from +defense scales better than your agility to dodge conversion past 50% dodge, so it's not like +defense is entirely useless, but now you don't have to go looking for it in order to tank.

Tricia asked...

Awhile back there was a report on the bug concerning Toughness level 3. I was wondering if there was any report on this being fixed yet or not?

As of last night, it was not fixed. However, today is patch 3.0.8 and it will be fixed in that patch. By the time you read this, the fix will probably have been rolled out already.

Bazuzu asked...

Has there been any news on whether tailors will gain any buffs similar to what other classes have? These cloak embroideries just aren't doing it for me.

What Tailors have is what Tailors have. I wouldn't be surprised if additional embroideries and items were added in content patches (such as patch 3.1, the Ulduar patch) but as far as we know, the available embroideries is all you have.

Pickypants asked...

With epics seemingly easier to get in Wrath, does the reputation grind really net you anything other than high level recipes for JC and the like? As a tank, I remember grinding CoT rep for the legs, Aldor rep for the shield. Those items were replaced in raiding soon enough, but I needed the stats in order to tank said raids.

Generally, the reputations aren't as important as they were before, but they can still be useful. With the Championing system, you can pick specific items you might want and work on those alongside chasing drops. For example, I used a Wyrmrest Accord tabard first. My ultimate goal was the Red Drake, but Sandals of Crimson Fury were on the way there and I figured whichever Cloth boots came to me first, I'd wear. If it was a drop, fantastic. If I had to go all the way to Exalted with Wyrmrest, well, I was running the Heroics already. Why not get the rep?

The other benefit to reputation is all of them have 'extra' items at high rep levels, like the Red Drake I mentioned. There's plenty of fun, vanity items to get your hands on. There's also factions like the Sons of Hodir which you can't Champion, but are still very important.

So grinding rep is still worthwhile, but not as urgent as it was in The Burning Crusade. You can do it, it helps to do it, but you don't have to do it.

Aigarius said...

The mage that ports you to Wintersgarsp during the battle also says taht you can use the portal at any time when your faction controls the Wintergrasp between battles, but... there is no portal. Is that a know bug? Are they gonna fix that?

It's a known bug, but I don't actually know if it's being fixed or not. We'll find out when the realms come up this afternoon, I'm sure!

Tags: allison-robert, bear, bear-tank, championing, defense, defense-cap, dodge, embroidery, featured, feral, feral-druid, patch-3.0.8, patch-3.1, q-and-a, reins-of-the-red-drake, rep, rep-gear, rep-grind, reputation, reputation-gear, reputation-grind, sandals-of-crimson-fury, sons-of-hodir, survival-of-the-fittest, tailoring, tanking, the-queue, ulduar, wyrmrest-accord

Filed under: Druid, Patches, Analysis / Opinion, Bugs, Wrath of the Lich King, The Queue