PvE Feral Druid Tank Stat Priority – WoW Classic

Nevermore Nevermore • Updated June 7, 2025

Here you can find the best stats and stat priority for Feral Druid Tanks. The stats are listed in terms of importance, with each stat being explained in-depth, including any possible stat caps.

Compared to the other Tanking specializations, Feral Druids have a different stat priority, favoring a mix of high offensive and defensive stats such as Critical Strike Chance, Agility, Strength, Armor, Dodge Chance, and Stamina over traditional tanking stats. Since Feral Druids can’t block or parry, Parry Chance and Block Chance are completely useless for them, with Armor, Defense, Dodge Chance, and Stamina being the favored stats.

In addition, the itemization process for Feral Druid Tanks should be viewed as a mix of Stat Weighs, meaning that balancing out the amount of stats that you acquire to maximize the overall performance is ideal. The best example is that 2 Stamina is often better than 1 Agility while 2 Agility is better than 1 stamina. The stats are divided between Threat Generation stats and Mitigation stats. As an example, Strength is considered a Threat Generation stat, and Armor is considered a pure Mitigation stat. Agility fits in between both categories as it provides both Threat Generation and Mitigation.

Stat Priority

  1. Hit Chance
  2. Stamina
  3. Armor
  4. Defense
  5. Critical Strike Chance
  6. Strength
  7. Agility
  8. Haste (Attack Speed)
  9. Feral Attack Power
  10. Dodge Chance
  11. Attack Power

Hit Chance is one of the most important stat for any Tanking specialization, ensuring that your character can land hits against level 63 targets. Feral Druid Tanks require Hit Chance to ensure that they keep their Threat Generation up. The cap for Hit Chance is 9%, however, it is impossible to achieve the cap in the first phases, especially since Feral Druid has no Hit Chance talents. Feral Druid Tanks manage to get a higher Hit Chance in the later phases, reaching the cap around Ahn’Qiraj and Naxxramas.

Stamina is among the most important stats for Feral Druid Tanks, increasing their overall Health Pool and adding to their EHP (Effective Health Pool). Feral Druids are well-known as EHP tanks, having the highest amount of HP among all the Tanking specializations, meaning that you will want to stack as much Stamina as possible without dampening the rest of your Mitigation and Offensive stats.

Armor is yet another one of the important Mitigation stats for Feral Druids, especially since it scales so much with Dire Bear Form and contributes directly to their EHP. Armor reduces the overall Physical Damage received by players, directly contributing to EHP. This stat should be stacked as much as possible without dampening the rest of the stats, ideally aiming to reach as much armor as possible by also benefitting from special Healer effects such as Improved Lay on Hands, Ancestral Healing, and Inspiration. In addition, this stat can be further enhanced by using the Thick Hide talent, even if the large majority of the community considers it to be a bad talent.

Defense is a Mitigation stat that prevents players from being afflicted by Crushing Blows while also granting raw Dodge Chance and increasing the chance that any attack received is missed. The cap for Defense in WoW Classic is 440 to avoid Crushing Blows completely, after which, every additional Defense increases the overall Damage Mitigation received by the stat.

Critical Strike Chance is a stat that allows players to land critical hits, resulting in double damage. Feral Druid Tanks benefit from Critical Strike Chance from 2 points of view: Increased Threat Generation and Rage Generation. The first part is directly related to the higher overall Damage Output while the second is directly granted tied to the Primal Fury talent. As a Feral Druid, you also gain increased Critical Strike Chance from Agility, meaning that you will stack a considerable amount, especially through the later phases of WoW Classic.

Strength is a stat that directly increases Attack Power for Feral Druids, granting them 2 Attack Power per point of Strength. Since Agility doesn’t increase Attack Power for them, Feral Druids will want to stack a considerable amount of Strength to ensure that their overall Threat Generation is considerably high.

Agility is a stat that increases Armor, Critical Strike Chance, and Dodge Chance for Feral Druids. This stat should be stacked alongside other stats such as Strength, finding itself on almost every gear piece, especially since it grants both Threat Generation and Mitigation for Feral Druids. You should stack as much Agility as possible without dampening the rest of the stats.

Haste (Attack Speed) is a stat that increases the frequency of your attacks! This stat is very good on Feral Druids, although, it comes in very specific forms, being extremely rare in WoW Classic. The best and most well-known way to acquire this stat is through the Manual Crowd Pummeler item, although the buff gets lost if you weapon swap. Other ways such as specific enchants or engineering gadgets can be used to gain Haste, although not in such high amounts.

Feral Attack Power is a stat that directly improves the Attack Power of Feral Druids while they are shapeshifted. The stat is amazing for increasing overall Threat Generation and can mainly be obtained from weapons. However, in many cases, it is not required since Haste (Attack Speed) is often better, especially since it is mainly gained from weapons such as the well-known Manual Crowd Pummeler.

Dodge Chance is a stat that is a bit conflictual for Feral Druids in WoW Classic. The stat itself is theoretically amazing, however, in practice, it performs poorly when compared to raw EHP generated by Armor/Stamina. You will automatically gain Dodge Chance from Defense and Agility as a Feral Druid, meaning that you don’t have to specifically pick the raw Dodge Chance stat.

Attack Power in itself is not a stat that Feral Druids should seek to gain in its raw state, with them mainly wanting it from Strength items and Feral Attack Power. You should avoid items that have raw Attack Power as they genuinely give lesser stats than items that give Strength or Feral Attack Power.

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PvE Feral Druid Tank Stat Priority

Oxykitten Oxykitten • Updated June 7, 2025

Knowing which stats provide value to your class is an important part of understanding the class you play. It also allows you to make gearing decisions independently of gear lists, which is useful to assess whether an item you’ve received is an upgrade (even if it may not be best in slot!).

However, keep in mind that stat priorities do not mean that you should completely stack one stat over another; all the listed stats provide some value to Ferals, so an optimal set will provide a balance of these stats for the most overall value. For example, while 1 Stamina may provide more value than 1 Agility, 2 Agility will provide more value than 1 Stamina. Therefore, it is important not only to know which stats are the most valuable, but how each stat objectively compares to the others.

To compare the relative value of stats to one another, we use simulation tools which calculate how different stats change your risk of death during an encounter. There are other metrics that can be used for tanking, but the Classic/WotLK community tends to stick to this as tank deaths tend to be disastrous, and damage intake profiles in Classic expansions are not always consistent.

Of course, this simulation will only evaluate defensive stats. Separate simulations for threat generation can assess the value of offensive stats, and then we make arbitrary judgements on our survivability to threat balance. Because threat generation is relatively trivial and not heavily affected by gearing in WotLK, I prioritise survivability heavily and rate offensive stats separately.

Stat Priority

The tables below show the stat priorities for defensive and offensive stats, respectively. You should generally prioritise all defensive stats over offensive stats.

Because the exact contribution to survivability can be quite variable, I have compared the different defensive stats with “simplified equivalency points,” which approximate the relative value of each stat to each other to make comparing items easier. For example, 1 Stamina is three times more valuable than 1 Dodge rating, and 1.5 times more valuable than 1 Agility.

The actual values calculated from survival simulations are quite close; if you want to be exact, simulating your own character and gear set will always be more accurate.

Simplified equivalency points (normalised to Defense rating)Defensive stat priority
3Stamina
2Agility
2Armor (on armor pieces)
1Dodge rating
1Defense rating
0.3Bonus armor (on rings, weapons, buffs)
Approximate equivalency points (normalised to Attack power)Offensive stat priority
6.4Expertise rating (before soft cap of 132 rating)
3.2Hit rating (before cap of 263 rating / 230 rating with heroicpresence)
3.2Expertise rating (after soft cap, before hard cap of 377 rating)
2.4Strength
2.3Haste rating
2.2Armor penetration
1.5Critical strike rating
1.2Feral attack power
1.0Attack power

Stat Explanation

Stamina provides health and is the core stat for Feral tanks in Wrath. Through stamina-enhancing effects like bearform and hotw, bears gain a lot of health per point of stamina (1 stamina ≈ 16.4 HP).

Although stamina does not affect the amount of incoming damage, as long as healers can keep up with your damage taken then a large health pool is great for your survivability as a tank.

Agility both increases a tank’s dodge chance (reducing the amount of incoming damage) and critical strike chance (reducing pull variance and increasing threat output). This makes it a well-balanced stat for Ferals who cannot parry or block and therefore rely on their dodge for mitigation. Agility also increases armor by 2 per point, though this is very minor.

Aditionally, Agility is the best DPS stat for Ferals in cat form, making it a versatile stat if you fill a hybrid role.

Armor is massively important for druids’ survivability as it reduces all incoming physical damage. Through bearform, thickhide, and sotf, bears have an insane ~6.9x modifier for armor. However, in Wrath this scaling is changed to only apply to Leather and Cloth items (meaning it does not apply to rings, trinkets, or weapons). Furthermore, there are no longer any leather items with increased armor budget to make use of this scaling — armor is now simply a function of item level.

Therefore, as long as you wear leather instead of cloth, and high item level gear, the only armor you need to worry about in terms of stat priorities is bonus (non-scaling) armor on accessory/weapon slots, which is not nearly as impactful.

Dodge rating increases your dodge chance, which reduces your average damage received. Because bears cannot parry or block, dodge is an important source of mitigation. The amount of dodge chance each point of dodge rating gives depends on the amount of dodge rating the player already has, as Wrath of the Lich King introduced diminishing returns on avoidance to prevent druids from dodging every attack. Generally, however, each point of dodge rating provides less dodge chance than each point of agility, and of course provides no critical strike chance. This is why dodge rating features considerably lower on this list.

Defense rating slightly increases your dodge chance and your chance to be missed by physical attacks. Generally, most of its value comes from critical strike suppression (reducing the chance that the player gets critically struck by a physical attack), however Ferals are immune to critical strikes with talents alone and therefore do not gain this benefit. This makes defense rating relatively weak for Druids, though it still provides some mitigation value.

Expertise reduces your chance to be dodged or parried by 0.25% per 1 Expertise (~8.2 expertise rating). Tanks hit bosses from the front, meaning they get parried — this makes expertise a very powerful threat stat as it reduces dodge and parry chance at the same time. This effectively makes it twice as powerful as hit rating.

However, bosses only have a 6.5% dodge chance, and a 14% parry chance. This means that there is a limit to how much expertise can benefit your threat. The expertise ‘soft cap,’ at which point a boss can no longer dodge your attacks, is 26 Expertise. As Ferals receive 10 expertise from the talent primalprec, 16 expertise (132 rating) will bring you to the soft cap.

Above the soft cap, expertise only reduces parry chance, making it half as valuable until the hard cap of 56 expertise (459 rating / 377 with primalprec). After this, it has no value.

Hit rating reduces your chance to miss attacks and abilities by 1% per ~32.8 hit rating. This makes it quite a strong threat stat, and reduces the likelihood of missing your first hits on a target (which is usually where threat can get iffy). Players have a base miss chance of 8% against bosses, meaning that hit rating has a hard cap at which it no longer provides any value. This cap is at 8% (263 rating) — you do not need to reach this cap, but you should definitely not exceed it.

Alliance players with Draenei in their groups benefit from heroicpresence, bringing the hit cap down to 7% (230 rating).

After you have reached the soft-cap as explained in the previous Expertise section, the stat loses some of its value, as it now only reduces the chance for your attacks to get parried, rather than dodged AND parried.

As a result, it is effectively the same as hit rating. While its exact threat contribution is slightly lower because parried attacks generate rage, whereas misses do not (making misses more punishing than parries, and therefore hit rating stronger than expertise past soft cap), expertise also has a very minute defensive value due to reducing parry haste. Overall, they have roughly the same value.

Each point of strength provides 2 attack power. However, kings, sotf, and impgotw all increase your strength but not your attack power, making each point of strength as valuable as ~2.38 attack power. Overall, it’s a decent stat for your average threat.

Haste rating is a decent threat stat which reduces your chance of unlucky openers as it lets your next swing come sooner, and helps with rage generation. It’s nothing to specifically aim for, but it’s not a bad stat.

Armor penetration increases the damage of your physical attacks. Like strength or attack power, it’s a decent stat for average threat, but isn’t anything special or that needs to be focused on for a tank.

Critical strike rating is a decent threat stat which reduces your chance of unlucky openers, as a critical strike in your first few hits helps with your initial threat. Additionally, critical strikes actually provide some mitigation value through savagedefense — this is relatively minor, but worth a mention.

Attack power is the basic threat stat. It boosts the damage of all your attacks, therefore increasing your threat generation. There’s nothing wrong with attack power, but point-for-point it provides less value than other listed stats.

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Oxykitten
Oxykitten
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2 years ago

Hey! Thanks for pointing that out. We tend to focus more on the gear guides and can miss some details on the other pages which don’t need updating every phase. I’ll make sure to edit that out and change any outdated info!

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Oxykitten
Oxykitten
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Reply to  Oxykitten
1 year ago

All updated now :)

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PvE Feral Druid Tank Stat Priority

Oxykitten Oxykitten • Updated June 2, 2025

Intro

Welcome to our stat priority guide for Feral tanks in WoW: Burning Crusade Classic! This guide will explain how to make good gearing choices, and how valuable each stat is.

Stat Priorities

In the past, many guides would list “stat priorities” for different classes, suggesting to stack X stat before Y stat and so on. In reality, optimising your character is far more about balancing the values of different stats to come up with the best overall gear set possible. For example, while 1 Agility is better for a Feral tank than 1 Stamina, 2 Stamina is better than 1 Agility. So, while your stat priority could be Agility > Stamina, that wouldn’t help you accurately decide between two pieces of gear. Luckily, I’ve done all the work for you; I have published a detailed gearing guide for tanks. You can follow that and not need to know how the decisions are made behind the scenes, so this guide serves as ‘extra reading’ if you’re interested!

Still, it is valuable to have an understanding of why some pieces of gear are better than others, so I will give some example stat weights, general gearing principles, and information on how stat weights are calculated. Venture in if you’re keen!

Gearing Principles

  • Critical Strike Immunity:
    Like players, enemies have a chance to Critically Strike their melee attacks, doing twice their normal damage. This can lead to massive damage spikes and tank deaths. Luckily, tanks are able to eliminate the possibility of being critically struck by wearing Defense and Resilience, as well as through the talent Survival of the Fittest, to reach 5.6% critical strike chance reduction. The stat weights I include here will not value the critical strike suppression value of Defense and Resilience, as reaching this threshold should be a basic requirement of all reasonable tank sets for a raid environment.
  • Hit cap:
    Players have a 9% chance to miss against level 73/boss enemies. This means that wearing 9% hit (or 6% with improved faerie fire) stops you from missing. However, you will continue to get your hits dodged and parried, so there is no intrinsic value to reaching this cap. In fact, hit cap is a limit, as hit rating past the cap no longer provides any value; this can limit your gear choices as the hit rating on certain powerful items cannot always be utilised. So, don’t worry about “reaching hit cap,” just make sure you don’t go above the cap.

Finding DPS/threat stat weights

To make stat weights, we compare how valuable 1 of each stat is compared to a common stat – typically, we use Attack Power as the baseline. 1 Strength gives 2 Attack Power in Bear Form (2.266 with Blessing of Kings and Survival of the Fittest), so we give 1 Strength the stat weight of 2.266.

For stats that increase damage but do not directly increase attack power (such as Agility), we instead use maths to determine how much DPS 1 stat increases, and compare that to how much DPS 1 Attack Power increases. So, if 1 Critical Strike rating increases our DPS by 2, and 1 Attack Power increases our DPS by 1, we give 1 Critical Strike rating the stat weight of 2. This is done through simulation tools and spreadsheets; the Feral Tank tools are developed by Nerdegghead and Mobmentality and are freely available on the Druid Classic discord server.

Finding tank stat weights

Similarly, we weigh tank stats by comparing them to each other (usually using Stamina as the baseline). In doing this, we also divide mitigation stats (which reduce the average damage taken per second) and effective health pool stats (which increase the total unhealed amount of unmitigated damage a tank can take without dying).

Mixing stats together

To mix threat stat weights and tank stat weights, we first decide our ratio of mitigation tank weights to EHP tank weights. We tend to favour EHP as this reduces our chance of death more than reducing average damage taken. We then decide our ratio of tank weights to threat weights. Most commonly, ratios of 0.5 mit : 1 EHP / 1 tankiness : 1 threat are used. There is no real need to make more threat-focused sets than this, as these sets will still produce enough threat in a raid setting to hold aggro against DPS players. These sets also provide a high level of survivability, suitable for all boss encounters in Black Temple and Mount Hyjal.

For the most accurate stat weights, you should use the simulation tools yourself to model your character, with your raid’s buffs and debuffs. However, this will have very little impact on the gear you actually wear, so don’t worry if you can’t be bothered!

These weights were attained using Nerdegghead’s v1.5 Bear Spreadsheet.

Attack Power: 1
Strength: 2.266
Agility: 5.29
Stamina: 3.39
Hit Rating: 4.2
Expertise Rating: 8.85
Critical Strike Rating: 1.9
Haste Rating: 1.67
Armor Penetration: 0.36
Armor: 0.63
Bonus Armor (does not scale with Dire Bear Form): 0.115
Dodge Rating: 2.14
Defense Rating (provides value from avoidance, separate to critical strike suppression): 1.37

These weights can also be imported to the useful gear planning website seventyupgrades.com with this link and used to compare all gear options available to you. This is the best way to make gearing decisions for yourself if not using BiS guides.

Thank you for taking the time to read our Feral Tank Stat Priority Guide for TBC. I hope it was helpful, and if you have any questions or suggestions please feel free to leave a comment below, or find me as Oxy on the Druid Classic Discord.

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